Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Jamie Metzl,
00:00:02 author specializing in topics of genetic engineering,
00:00:05 biotechnology, and geopolitics.
00:00:09 In the past two years, he has been outspoken
00:00:12 about the need to investigate and keep an open mind
00:00:15 about the origins of COVID 19.
00:00:18 In particular, he has been keeping an extensive
00:00:20 up to date collection of circumstantial evidence
00:00:23 in support of what is colloquially known
00:00:25 as lab leak hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked in 2019
00:00:30 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:00:33 In part, I wanted to explore the idea
00:00:35 in response to the thoughtful criticism
00:00:37 to parts of the Francis Collins episode.
00:00:40 I will have more and more difficult conversations like this
00:00:43 with people from all walks of life
00:00:45 and with all kinds of ideas.
00:00:47 I promise to do my best to keep an open mind
00:00:50 and yet to ask hard questions
00:00:52 while together searching for the beautiful
00:00:54 and the inspiring in the mind of the other person.
00:00:57 It’s a hard line to walk gracefully,
00:00:59 especially for someone like me,
00:01:01 who’s a bit of an awkward introvert
00:01:03 with barely the grasp of the English language
00:01:06 or any language, except maybe Python and C++.
00:01:10 But I hope you stick around, be patient and empathetic
00:01:13 and maybe learn something new together with me.
00:01:17 This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
00:01:19 To support it, please check out our sponsors
00:01:21 in the description.
00:01:22 And now, here’s my conversation with Jamie Metzl.
00:01:27 What is the probability in your mind
00:01:29 that COVID 19 leaked from a lab?
00:01:32 In your write up, I believe you said 85%.
00:01:35 I know it’s just a percentage.
00:01:37 We can’t really be exact with these kinds of things,
00:01:39 but it gives us a sense where your mind is,
00:01:42 where your intuition is.
00:01:43 So as it stands today, what would you say is that probability?
00:01:46 I would stand by what I’ve been saying
00:01:48 since really the middle of last year.
00:01:51 It’s more likely and not, in my opinion,
00:01:55 that the pandemic stems
00:01:56 from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan.
00:01:59 Is it 90%, is it 65%, I mean, that’s kind of arbitrary.
00:02:04 But when I stack up all of the available evidence
00:02:08 and all of it on both sides is circumstantial,
00:02:11 it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin.
00:02:14 So before we dive into the specifics at a high level,
00:02:17 what types of evidence, what intuition, what ideas
00:02:22 are leading you to have that kind of estimate?
00:02:25 Is it possible to kind of condense,
00:02:28 when you look at the wall of evidence before you,
00:02:32 where’s your source, the strongest source of your intuition?
00:02:36 And I would have to say it’s just logic
00:02:39 and deductive reasoning.
00:02:40 So before I make the case for why I think
00:02:42 it’s most likely a lab incident origin,
00:02:44 let’s just say why it could be,
00:02:46 and still could be a natural origin.
00:02:49 All of this is a natural origin in the sense
00:02:51 that it’s a bat virus backbone, horseshoe bat virus backbone.
00:02:56 Okay, I’m gonna keep pausing you to define stuff.
00:03:00 So maybe it’s useful to say, what do we mean by lab leak?
00:03:04 What do we mean by natural origin?
00:03:05 What do we mean by virus backbone?
00:03:07 Okay, great questions.
00:03:09 So viruses come from somewhere.
00:03:11 Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years,
00:03:14 and they’ve been around for such a long time
00:03:17 because they are adaptive and they’re growing
00:03:20 and they’re always changing and they’re morphing.
00:03:23 And that’s why viruses are,
00:03:26 I mean, they’ve been very successful and we are our victims.
00:03:29 Sometimes we’re beneficiaries.
00:03:30 We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes,
00:03:34 but now it’s certainly in the case of COVID 19,
00:03:37 we are victims of the success of viruses.
00:03:42 And so when we talk about a backbone,
00:03:44 so the SARS CoV2 virus, it has a history
00:03:50 and these viruses don’t come out of whole cloth.
00:03:52 There are viruses that morph.
00:03:54 And so we know that at some period,
00:03:59 maybe 20 years ago or whatever,
00:04:02 the virus that is SARS CoV2 existed in horseshoe bats.
00:04:08 It was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere.
00:04:13 And there are some people who say,
00:04:15 there’s no evidence of this,
00:04:16 but it’s a plausible theory
00:04:18 based on how things have happened in the past.
00:04:21 Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat
00:04:25 through some intermediate species.
00:04:27 So it’s like, let’s say there’s a bat
00:04:29 and that it infects some other animal.
00:04:31 Let’s say it’s a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat.
00:04:36 They’re all pangolin.
00:04:37 They’re all sorts of animals that have been considered.
00:04:40 And then that virus adapts into that new host
00:04:43 and it changes and grows.
00:04:45 And then according to the quote unquote
00:04:48 natural origins hypothesis,
00:04:49 it jumps from that animal into humans.
00:04:53 And so what you could imagine
00:04:55 and some of the people who are making the case,
00:04:57 all of the people actually,
00:04:57 who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus,
00:05:00 what they’re saying is it went from bat
00:05:03 to some intermediate species.
00:05:05 And then from that intermediate species, most likely,
00:05:08 there’s some people who say it went directly bat to human,
00:05:10 but through some intermediate species.
00:05:13 And then humans interacted with that species.
00:05:16 And then it jumped from that, whatever it is to humans.
00:05:20 And that’s a very plausible theory.
00:05:21 It’s just that there’s no evidence for it.
00:05:23 And the nature of the interaction is,
00:05:25 do most people kind of suggest this at the wet markets?
00:05:29 So the interaction of the humans with the animal
00:05:32 is in the form of it’s either a live animal
00:05:35 as being sold to be eaten or a recently live animal,
00:05:39 but newly dead animal being sold to be eaten.
00:05:41 That’s certainly one very possible possibility,
00:05:46 a possible possibility, I don’t know if that’s a word.
00:05:48 But the people who believe in the wet market origin,
00:05:52 that’s what they’re saying.
00:05:52 So they had one of these animals,
00:05:55 they were cutting it up, let’s say, in a market
00:05:57 and maybe some of the blood got into somebody’s,
00:06:01 maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized
00:06:04 and so somebody breathed it.
00:06:05 And then that virus found this new host
00:06:09 and that was the human host.
00:06:11 But you could also have that happen in, let’s say, a farm.
00:06:14 So it’s happened in the past that let’s say
00:06:17 that there are farms and because of human encroachment
00:06:21 into wild spaces, we’re pushing our farms
00:06:24 and our animal farms further and further
00:06:27 into what used to be just natural habitats.
00:06:30 And so it’s happened in the past, for example,
00:06:33 that there were bats roosting over pig pens
00:06:35 and the bat droppings went into the pig pens.
00:06:38 The viruses in those droppings infected the pigs
00:06:43 and then the pigs infected the humans.
00:06:45 And that’s why it’s a plausible theory.
00:06:48 It’s just that there’s basically no evidence for it.
00:06:51 If it was the case that SARS CoV2 comes from this type
00:06:56 of interaction, as in most of the at least recent
00:07:00 past outbreaks, we’d see evidence of that.
00:07:03 Viruses are messy.
00:07:05 They’re constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution
00:07:07 and they’re changing and it’s not that they’re just ready
00:07:10 for prime time, ready to infect humans on day one.
00:07:13 Normally you can trace the viral evolution prior
00:07:18 to the time when it infects humans.
00:07:20 But for SARS CoV2, it just showed up on the scene
00:07:24 ready to infect humans.
00:07:26 And there’s no history that anybody has found so far
00:07:30 of that kind of viral evolution.
00:07:33 With the first SARS, you could track it
00:07:35 by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting.
00:07:39 And SARS CoV2 was very, very stable,
00:07:44 meaning it had already adapted to humans
00:07:47 by the time it interacted with us.
00:07:49 It’s fully adapted.
00:07:50 So with SARS, there’s a rapid evolution
00:07:55 when it first kind of hooks onto a human.
00:07:58 Yeah, because it’s trying.
00:07:59 Like a virus, its goal is to survive and replicate.
00:08:02 Yeah, no, it’s true.
00:08:03 It’s like, oh, we’re gonna try this.
00:08:04 Oh, that didn’t work.
00:08:05 We’ll try it exactly like a startup.
00:08:08 And so we don’t see that.
00:08:10 And so there are some people who say,
00:08:11 well, one hypothesis is you have a totally isolated
00:08:16 group of humans, maybe in Southern China,
00:08:18 which is more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan.
00:08:22 And maybe they’re doing their animal farming
00:08:26 right next to these areas where there are these horseshoe bats.
00:08:31 And maybe in this totally isolated place
00:08:34 that no one’s ever heard of,
00:08:35 they’re not connected to any other place,
00:08:37 one person gets infected.
00:08:40 And it doesn’t spread to anybody else
00:08:42 because they’re so isolated.
00:08:44 They’re like, I don’t know.
00:08:45 I can’t even imagine that this is the case.
00:08:48 Then somebody gets in a car and drives all night,
00:08:52 more than a thousand miles through crappy roads
00:08:55 to get to Wuhan, doesn’t stop for anything,
00:08:57 doesn’t infect anybody on the way.
00:08:59 No one else in that person’s village infects anyone.
00:09:01 And then that person goes straight
00:09:03 to the Huanan seafood market,
00:09:05 according to this, in my mind, not very credible theory,
00:09:09 and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected.
00:09:12 And they’re only delivering those animals
00:09:15 to the Wuhan market, which doesn’t even sell very many
00:09:18 of these kinds of animals
00:09:20 that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else.
00:09:23 So that’s, I mean, it’s a little bit of a straw man,
00:09:26 but on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced
00:09:29 more than 80,000 animal samples,
00:09:32 and there’s no evidence of this type of viral evolution
00:09:36 that we would otherwise expect.
00:09:37 Let’s try to, at this moment, steel man the argument
00:09:43 for the natural origin of the virus.
00:09:46 So just to clarify, so Wuhan is actually,
00:09:50 despite what it might sound like to people,
00:09:52 is a pretty big city.
00:09:53 There’s a lot of people that live in it.
00:09:55 11 million.
00:09:55 So not only is there, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:09:59 there’s other centers that do work on viruses,
00:10:03 but there’s also a giant number of markets.
00:10:06 And everything we’re talking about here
00:10:08 is pretty close together.
00:10:09 So when I kind of look at the geography of this,
00:10:13 I think when you zoom out, it’s all Wuhan,
00:10:16 but when you zoom in,
00:10:17 there’s just a lot of interesting dynamics
00:10:19 that could be happening and what the cases are popping up
00:10:21 and what’s being reported, all that kind of stuff.
00:10:24 So I think the people that argue for the natural origin,
00:10:29 and there’s a few recent papers
00:10:31 that come out arguing this,
00:10:33 it’s kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing,
00:10:35 but I think what they’re arguing
00:10:36 is that there’s this Hunan market
00:10:39 that’s one of the major markets, the wet markets in Wuhan,
00:10:45 that there’s a bunch of cases
00:10:49 that were reported from there.
00:10:52 So if I look at, for example,
00:10:54 the Michael Warby perspective that he wrote in Science,
00:10:58 he argues, he wrote this a few days ago,
00:11:01 the predominance of early COVID cases linked to Hunan market,
00:11:06 and this can’t be dismissed as ascertainment bias,
00:11:09 which I think is what people argue,
00:11:11 that you’re just kind of focusing on this region
00:11:13 because a lot of cases came,
00:11:14 but there could be a huge number of other cases.
00:11:18 So people who argue against this
00:11:19 say that this is a later stage already.
00:11:24 So he says no, he says this is the epicenter,
00:11:29 and this is a clear evidence, circumstantial evidence,
00:11:36 but evidence nevertheless
00:11:37 that this is where the jump happened to humans,
00:11:42 the big explosion, maybe not case zero,
00:11:44 I don’t know if he argues that, but the early cases.
00:11:47 So what do you make of this whole idea?
00:11:49 Can you steel man it before we talk about the alternative?
00:11:52 And my goal here isn’t to attack people on the other side,
00:11:56 and my feeling is if there is evidence that’s presented
00:12:00 that should change my view,
00:12:02 I hope that I’ll be open minded enough to change my view.
00:12:06 And certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person,
00:12:09 a respected scientist,
00:12:11 and I think this work is contributive work,
00:12:14 but I just don’t think that it’s as significant
00:12:19 as has been reported in the press.
00:12:22 And so what his argument is,
00:12:24 is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019
00:12:30 around the Huanan seafood market.
00:12:33 And even though he himself argues
00:12:36 that the original breakthrough case,
00:12:39 the original case, the index case
00:12:41 where the first person infected happened earlier,
00:12:46 happened in October or November, so not in December.
00:12:49 His argument is, well, what are the odds
00:12:52 that you would have this number, this cluster of cases
00:12:56 in the Huanan seafood market,
00:12:58 and if the origin happened someplace else,
00:13:00 wouldn’t you expect other clusters?
00:13:03 And it’s not an entirely implausible argument,
00:13:06 but there are reasons why I think
00:13:08 that this is not nearly as determinative
00:13:11 as has been reported.
00:13:12 And I certainly had a lot of,
00:13:14 I and others had tweeted a lot about this.
00:13:17 And that is first, the people who were infected
00:13:21 in this cluster, it’s not the earliest known virus
00:13:26 of the SARS CoV2, it began mutating.
00:13:28 So this is, it’s not the original SARS CoV2 there.
00:13:31 So it had to have happened someplace else.
00:13:34 Two, the people who were infected in the market
00:13:38 weren’t infected in the part of the market
00:13:41 where they had these kinds of animals
00:13:43 that are considered to be candidates
00:13:46 as an intermediary species.
00:13:49 And third, there was a bias,
00:13:51 and actually I’ll have four things.
00:13:53 Third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China
00:13:58 of what they were looking for.
00:13:59 They were asked, did you have exposure to the market?
00:14:02 Because I think in the early days
00:14:03 when people were figuring things out,
00:14:05 that was one of the questions that was asked.
00:14:08 And fourth, and probably most significantly,
00:14:11 we have so little information
00:14:14 about those early cases in China,
00:14:16 and that’s really unfortunate.
00:14:18 I know we’ll talk about this later
00:14:19 because the Chinese government is preventing access
00:14:23 to all of that information, which they have,
00:14:26 which could easily help us get to the bottom,
00:14:28 at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started.
00:14:31 And so this is, it’s like grasping at straws
00:14:36 in the dark with gloves on.
00:14:38 That’s right.
00:14:39 But to steel man the argument,
00:14:41 we have this evidence from this market,
00:14:45 and yes, the Chinese government
00:14:47 has turned off the lights essentially,
00:14:48 so we have very little data to work with,
00:14:51 but this is the data we have.
00:14:53 So who’s to say that this data
00:14:55 doesn’t represent a much bigger data set
00:14:58 that a lot of people got infected at this market
00:15:01 where even at the parts, or especially at the parts
00:15:04 where the infected meat was being sold?
00:15:09 So that could be true, and it probably is true.
00:15:13 The question is, is this the source?
00:15:16 Is this the place where this began?
00:15:18 Or was this just a place where it was amplified?
00:15:22 And I certainly think that it’s extremely likely
00:15:26 that the Huanan seafood market was a point of amplification.
00:15:31 And it’s just answering a different question.
00:15:33 Basically what you’re saying is it’s very difficult
00:15:35 to use the market as evidence for anything
00:15:38 because it’s probably not even the starting point.
00:15:42 So it’s just a good place for it to continue spreading.
00:15:45 That’s certainly my view.
00:15:47 What Michael Warby’s argument is, Marco, is that,
00:15:51 well, what are the odds of that?
00:15:53 That we’re seeing this amplification in the market.
00:15:57 And if we, let me put it this way.
00:16:00 If we had all of the information,
00:16:02 if the Chinese government hadn’t blocked access
00:16:06 to all of this, because there’s blood bank information,
00:16:08 there’s all sorts of information,
00:16:10 and based on a full and complete understanding,
00:16:14 we came to believe that all of the early cases
00:16:18 were at this market.
00:16:19 I think that would be a stronger argument
00:16:22 than what this is so far.
00:16:23 But everything leads to the fact that why is it
00:16:26 that the Chinese government,
00:16:28 which was, frankly, after a slow start,
00:16:31 the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS 1,
00:16:36 why have they apparently done so little
00:16:39 and shared so little?
00:16:41 I think it asks, it begs a lot of questions.
00:16:45 Okay, so let’s then talk about the Chinese government.
00:16:50 There’s several governments, right?
00:16:51 So one is the local government of Wuhan.
00:16:55 And not just the Chinese government.
00:16:56 Let’s talk about government.
00:16:59 No, let’s talk about human nature.
00:17:02 Let’s just keep zooming out.
00:17:03 Let’s talk about planet Earth.
00:17:04 No, so there’s the Wuhan local government.
00:17:08 There’s the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping.
00:17:13 And there’s governments in general.
00:17:16 I’m trying to empathize.
00:17:18 So my father was involved with Chernobyl.
00:17:21 I’m trying to put myself into the mind of local officials,
00:17:25 of people who are like,
00:17:27 oh shit, there’s a potential catastrophic event
00:17:32 happening here and it’s my ass
00:17:36 because there’s incompetence all over the place.
00:17:39 Yeah, human nature is such that there’s incompetence
00:17:41 all over the place and you’re always trying to cover it up.
00:17:44 And so given that context,
00:17:48 I want to lay out all the possible incompetence,
00:17:52 all the possible malevolence,
00:17:54 all the possible geopolitical tensions here.
00:18:01 All right, where in your sense did the coverup start?
00:18:06 So there’s this suspicious fact,
00:18:13 it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:18:16 had a public database of thousands
00:18:19 of sampled bad coronavirus sequences
00:18:22 and that went offline in September of 2019.
00:18:26 What’s that about?
00:18:28 So let me talk about that specific
00:18:30 and then I’ll also follow your path of zooming out
00:18:33 and it’s a really important.
00:18:34 Is that a good starting point?
00:18:35 It’s a great starting point, yeah, yeah.
00:18:37 So but there’s a bigger story
00:18:40 but let me talk about that.
00:18:42 So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:18:46 and we can go into the whole history
00:18:48 of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later
00:18:50 because I think it’s very relevant to the story
00:18:52 but let’s focus for now on this database.
00:18:55 They had a database of 22,000 viral samples
00:19:00 and sequence information about viruses
00:19:02 that they had collected.
00:19:05 Some of which, the collection of some of which
00:19:07 was supported through funding from the NIH,
00:19:10 not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance.
00:19:12 It’s a relatively small amount, $600,000 but not nothing.
00:19:18 The goal of this database
00:19:20 was so that we could understand viral evolution
00:19:24 so that exactly for this kind of moment
00:19:27 where we had an unknown virus,
00:19:29 we could say, well, is this like anything
00:19:31 that we’ve seen before?
00:19:33 And that would help us both understand what we’re facing
00:19:35 and be better able to respond.
00:19:39 So this was a password protected public access database.
00:19:45 In 2019, in September 2019,
00:19:50 it became inaccessible and then the whole,
00:19:52 a few months later, the entire database disappeared.
00:19:55 What the Chinese have said is that because there were
00:20:00 all kinds of computer attacks on this database
00:20:03 but why would that happen in September 2019
00:20:07 before the pandemic, at least as far as we know.
00:20:11 So just to clarify.
00:20:13 Yes.
00:20:14 It went down to September 2019
00:20:17 just so we get the year straight.
00:20:19 January 2020 is when the virus
00:20:22 really started getting the press.
00:20:25 So we’re talking about December 2019,
00:20:29 a lot of early infections happened.
00:20:30 September 2019 is when this database goes down.
00:20:34 Just to clarify because you said it quickly,
00:20:37 the Chinese government said
00:20:39 that their database was getting hacked.
00:20:44 Therefore, Xu Zhengli, the director of this part
00:20:48 of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.
00:20:50 Oh really, she was the one that said it?
00:20:53 She was the one who said it.
00:20:54 Oh boy, I did not even know that part.
00:20:56 Yeah.
00:20:57 Well, she’s an interesting character.
00:20:58 We’ll talk about her.
00:20:59 Yeah.
00:21:00 So the excuse is that it’s getting cyber attacked a lot
00:21:07 so we’re gonna take it down without any further explanation
00:21:10 which seems very suspicious.
00:21:12 And then this virus starts to emerge
00:21:15 in October, November, December.
00:21:17 There’s a lot of argument about that, but after.
00:21:19 Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying
00:21:21 that the first outbreak could have happened
00:21:23 as early as September.
00:21:25 I think it’s more likely it’s October, November,
00:21:27 but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak,
00:21:31 the first incident of a known outbreak,
00:21:34 at least to somebody, happened in September,
00:21:37 they make the argument, well, what if that also happened
00:21:40 in mid September of 2019?
00:21:42 I’m not prepared to go there,
00:21:43 but there are some people who make that argument.
00:21:45 But I think, again, if I were to put myself
00:21:47 in the mind of officials,
00:21:50 whether it’s officials within the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:21:53 or Wuhan local officials,
00:21:58 I think if I notice some major problem,
00:22:02 like somebody got sick,
00:22:04 some sign of, oh shit, we screwed up,
00:22:09 that’s when you kind of do the slow,
00:22:11 there’s like a Homer Simpson meme
00:22:13 where you slowly start backing out,
00:22:15 and I would probably start hiding stuff.
00:22:20 CYA, yeah.
00:22:21 Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.
00:22:25 It’s like you’re in a relationship
00:22:27 and your girlfriend wants to see your phone,
00:22:30 and you’re like, I’m sorry,
00:22:31 I’m just getting attacked by the Russians now.
00:22:33 The cyber security issue, I can’t.
00:22:35 Yeah, I wish I could.
00:22:36 I wish I could, it’s just unsafe right now.
00:22:39 So would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view
00:22:42 of the whole information space
00:22:44 and why I believe this has been so contentious?
00:22:50 If I had to give my best guess,
00:22:52 and I underline the word guess of what happened,
00:22:56 and your background, your family background with Chernobyl
00:22:59 I think is highly relevant here.
00:23:02 So after the first SARS, there was a recognition
00:23:06 that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology
00:23:09 and epidemiology around the world,
00:23:11 that people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia,
00:23:14 they were the frontline workers,
00:23:16 and they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring
00:23:20 and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.
00:23:25 And that was why there was a lot of investment
00:23:28 in all of those places in building capacity
00:23:30 and training people
00:23:31 and helping to build institutional capacity.
00:23:34 And the Chinese government,
00:23:36 they recognized that they needed to ramp things up.
00:23:40 And then the World Health Organization
00:23:43 and the World Health Assembly,
00:23:44 they had their international health regulations
00:23:47 that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.
00:23:50 So that was the goal.
00:23:52 There were a lot of investments,
00:23:54 and I know we’ll talk later
00:23:55 about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:23:56 and I won’t go into that right now.
00:23:59 So there was all of this distributed capacity.
00:24:02 And so in the early days, there’s a breakout in Wuhan.
00:24:07 We don’t know, is it September, October, November?
00:24:10 Maybe December is when the local authorities
00:24:14 start to recognize that something’s happening.
00:24:16 But at some point in late 2019,
00:24:19 local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up.
00:24:23 And exactly like in Chernobyl,
00:24:26 these guys exist within a hierarchical system,
00:24:29 and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen,
00:24:32 and they’re going to be in big trouble
00:24:34 if bad things happen under their watch.
00:24:36 So their initial instinct is to squash it.
00:24:39 And my guess is they think,
00:24:42 well, if we squash this information,
00:24:44 we can most likely beat back this outbreak,
00:24:47 because lots of outbreaks happen all the time,
00:24:49 including of SARS 1,
00:24:51 where there was multiple lab incidents
00:24:53 out of a lab in Beijing.
00:24:56 And so they start their coverup on day one.
00:24:59 They start screening social media.
00:25:02 They send nasty letters to different doctors
00:25:06 and others who are starting to speak up.
00:25:08 But then it becomes clear that there’s a bigger issue.
00:25:12 And then the national government of China,
00:25:14 again, this is just a hypothesis,
00:25:17 the national government gets involved.
00:25:19 They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.
00:25:21 They go in and they realize
00:25:24 that we have a big problem on our hands.
00:25:26 They relatively quickly know
00:25:28 that it’s spreading human to human.
00:25:30 And so the right thing for them to do then
00:25:32 is what the South African government is doing now
00:25:35 is to say, we have this outbreak.
00:25:37 We don’t know everything, but we know it’s serious.
00:25:40 We need help.
00:25:41 But that’s not the instinct of people in most governments
00:25:44 and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China.
00:25:48 And so the national government,
00:25:50 they have a choice at that point.
00:25:52 They can do option one,
00:25:55 which is what we would hear called the right thing,
00:25:57 which is total transparency.
00:25:59 They criticize the local officials for having this coverup.
00:26:03 And they say, now we’re going to be totally transparent.
00:26:05 But what does that do in a system
00:26:07 like the former Soviet Union, like China now?
00:26:10 If local officials say, wait a second,
00:26:12 I thought my job was to cover everything up,
00:26:15 to support this alternative reality
00:26:18 that authoritarian systems need in order to survive.
00:26:22 Well, now I’m gonna be held accountable
00:26:23 for if I’m not totally transparent,
00:26:26 like your whole system would collapse.
00:26:29 So the national government, they have that choice
00:26:32 and their only choice according to the logic of their system
00:26:37 is to be all in on a coverup.
00:26:39 And that’s why they block the World Health Organization
00:26:41 from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks.
00:26:45 They overtly lie to the World Health Organization
00:26:48 about human to human transmission.
00:26:51 And then they begin their coverups.
00:26:53 So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples,
00:26:56 hiding records, they start imprisoning people
00:26:59 for asking basic questions.
00:27:02 Soon after they establish a gag order,
00:27:05 preventing Chinese scientists from writing
00:27:08 or saying anything about pandemic origins
00:27:10 without prior government approval.
00:27:12 And what that does means that there isn’t a lot of data,
00:27:16 there’s not nearly enough data coming out of China.
00:27:19 And so lots of responsible scientists outside of China
00:27:22 who are data driven say, well,
00:27:25 I don’t have enough information to draw conclusions.
00:27:29 And then into that vacuum step a relatively small number
00:27:35 of largely virologists, but also others,
00:27:39 respected scientists.
00:27:40 And I know we’ll talk about the, I think,
00:27:43 infamous Peter Daszak who say,
00:27:47 well, without any real foundation in the evidence,
00:27:52 they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature
00:27:56 and anyone who’s raising the possibility
00:28:00 of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
00:28:03 So that message starts to percolate.
00:28:07 And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump
00:28:11 and he’s starting to get criticized for America’s failure
00:28:15 to respond, prepare for and respond adequately
00:28:17 to the outbreak.
00:28:19 And so he starts saying, well, I know first
00:28:22 after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying,
00:28:25 well, I know that China did it and the WHO did it
00:28:28 and he’s kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself.
00:28:33 And then we have a media here that had shifted
00:28:36 from the traditional model of he said, she said journalism,
00:28:40 so and so said X and so and so said Y
00:28:43 and then we’ll present both of those views.
00:28:45 With Donald Trump,
00:28:47 he would make outlandish starting positions.
00:28:50 So he would say, Lex is an ax murderer.
00:28:53 And then in the early days, they would say,
00:28:55 Lex is an ax murderer, Lex’s friend says
00:28:59 he’s not an ax murderer and we have a four day debate,
00:29:01 is he or isn’t he?
00:29:02 And then at day four, someone would say,
00:29:04 why are we having this debate at all?
00:29:06 Because the original point is just is baseless.
00:29:11 And so the media just got in the habit,
00:29:13 here’s what Trump said and here’s why it’s wrong.
00:29:16 It’s very complicated to figure out
00:29:20 what is the role of a politician?
00:29:21 What is the role of a leader in this kind of game
00:29:23 of politics?
00:29:25 But certainly in when there’s a tragedy,
00:29:29 when there’s a catastrophic event,
00:29:32 what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly
00:29:35 through the fog and to make big bold decisions
00:29:38 that does speak to the truth of things.
00:29:41 And even if it’s unpopular truth,
00:29:44 to listen to the people, to listen to all sides,
00:29:48 to the opinions, to the controversial ideas
00:29:51 and to see past all the bullshit,
00:29:54 all the political bullshit and just speak to the people,
00:29:59 speak to the world and make bold, big decisions.
00:30:02 That’s probably what was needed in terms of leadership.
00:30:04 And I’m not so willing to criticize whether it’s Joe Biden
00:30:09 or Donald Trump on this.
00:30:11 I think most people cannot be great leaders,
00:30:15 but that’s why when great leaders step up,
00:30:18 we write books about them.
00:30:20 And I agree.
00:30:21 And even though, I mean, I think of myself
00:30:24 as a progressive person, I certainly was a critic
00:30:27 of a lot of what President Trump did.
00:30:33 But on this particular case,
00:30:36 even though he may have said it in an uncouth way,
00:30:39 Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right.
00:30:43 I mean, when he said, hey, let’s look at this lab.
00:30:46 I mean, he said, I have evidence, I can’t tell you.
00:30:48 I don’t think he even had the evidence.
00:30:51 But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab,
00:30:55 in my view was a correct intuition.
00:30:58 And certainly I started speaking up
00:31:00 about pandemic origins early in 2019.
00:31:04 And my friends, my democratic friends were brutal with me
00:31:08 saying, what are you doing?
00:31:09 You’re supporting Trump in an election year.
00:31:11 And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying something
00:31:15 doesn’t mean that I need to oppose it.
00:31:17 If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct,
00:31:21 well, I wanna say it’s correct,
00:31:22 just as if he says something that I don’t like,
00:31:25 I’m gonna speak up about that.
00:31:26 Good, you walked through the fire.
00:31:28 So that’s, you laid out the story here.
00:31:31 And I think in many ways it’s a human story.
00:31:36 It’s a story of politics, it’s a story of human nature.
00:31:40 But let’s talk about the story of the virus.
00:31:45 And let’s talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:31:48 So maybe this is a good time to try to talk about
00:31:51 its history, about its origins,
00:31:53 about what kind of stuff it works on,
00:31:55 about biosafety levels, and about Batwoman.
00:32:00 Yeah, Xu Zhengli, yes.
00:32:02 Xu Zhengli.
00:32:03 So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:32:06 when did it start?
00:32:07 Yeah, so it’s a great question.
00:32:09 So after SARS 1, which was in the early 2000, 2003, 2004,
00:32:15 there was this effort to enhance,
00:32:20 as I mentioned before, global capacity, including in China.
00:32:23 So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:32:25 had been around for decades before then.
00:32:29 But there was an agreement between the French
00:32:32 and the Chinese governments to build the largest BSL4 lab,
00:32:37 BSL4 lab, so biosafety level four.
00:32:39 So in these what are called high containment labs,
00:32:42 there’s level four, which is the highest level.
00:32:44 And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere,
00:32:47 where you have the people in the different suits
00:32:50 and all of these protections.
00:32:51 And then there’s level three, which is still very serious,
00:32:56 but not as much as level four.
00:32:58 And then level two is just kind of goggles and some gloves
00:33:03 and maybe a face mask, much less.
00:33:05 So the French and the Chinese governments agreed
00:33:10 that France would help build the first
00:33:13 and still the largest BSL4 plus some mobile BSL3 labs.
00:33:20 And they were going to do it in Wuhan.
00:33:22 And Wuhan is kind of like China’s Chicago.
00:33:24 And I had actually been, it’s a different story.
00:33:26 I’d been in Wuhan relatively not that long
00:33:30 before the pandemic broke out.
00:33:32 And that was why I knew that Wuhan,
00:33:34 it’s not some backwater where there are a bunch of yokels
00:33:37 eating bats for dinner every night.
00:33:40 This is a really sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated
00:33:44 and cultured city.
00:33:45 And so I knew that it wasn’t like
00:33:48 that even the one on seafood market
00:33:50 wasn’t like some of these seafood markets
00:33:52 that they have in Southern China or in Cambodia,
00:33:55 where I lived for two years.
00:33:57 I mean, it was a totally different thing.
00:33:59 I’m gonna have to talk to you about some of the,
00:34:01 including the Wuhan market,
00:34:02 just some of the wild food going on here.
00:34:04 Because you’ve traveled that part of the world.
00:34:06 But let’s not get there.
00:34:07 Let’s not get distracted.
00:34:08 Good, as I was telling you, Lex, before,
00:34:11 and this is maybe an advertisement,
00:34:13 is having now listened to a number of your podcasts
00:34:18 when I’m doing long ultra training runs
00:34:20 or driving in the mountains.
00:34:22 Like the really, because in the beginning,
00:34:23 we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic.
00:34:26 But the really good stuff happens later.
00:34:28 So stay tuned. So friends,
00:34:29 you should listen to the end.
00:34:31 I have to say, as I was telling you before,
00:34:34 like when I heard your long podcast with Jérôme Lanier
00:34:37 and he talked about his mother at the very end,
00:34:41 I mean, just beautiful stuff.
00:34:42 So I don’t know whether I can match beautiful stuff,
00:34:45 but I’m gonna do my best.
00:34:47 You’re gonna have to find out.
00:34:49 Exactly, stay tuned.
00:34:52 So France had this agreement
00:34:54 that they were going to help design and help build
00:34:57 this BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
00:35:01 And it was going to be with French standards,
00:35:04 and there were going to be 50 French experts
00:35:07 who were going to work there
00:35:09 and supervise the work that happened
00:35:12 even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:35:16 in the new location started operating.
00:35:22 But then when they started building it,
00:35:24 the French contractors, the French overseers
00:35:28 were increasingly appalled
00:35:31 that they had less and less control,
00:35:33 that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things,
00:35:37 it wasn’t built up to French standards,
00:35:39 so much that at the end, when it was finally built,
00:35:44 the person who was the vice chairman of the project
00:35:47 and a leading French industrialist named Marieau
00:35:51 refused to sign off.
00:35:52 And he said, we can’t support,
00:35:55 we have no idea what this is,
00:35:58 whether it’s safe or not.
00:36:00 And when this lab opened,
00:36:02 remember it was supposed to have 50 French experts,
00:36:05 it had one French expert.
00:36:07 And so the French were really disgusted.
00:36:11 And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:36:14 and its new location opened in 2018, two things happened.
00:36:19 One, French intelligence privately approached
00:36:22 US intelligence saying, we have a lot of concerns
00:36:25 about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:36:27 about its safety, and we don’t even know
00:36:29 who’s operating there,
00:36:30 is it being used as a dual use facility?
00:36:34 And also in 2018, the US embassy in Beijing
00:36:38 sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at,
00:36:42 well, at this laboratory.
00:36:44 And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogin
00:36:48 from the Washington Post later got his hands on saying,
00:36:52 this is really unsafe,
00:36:54 they’re doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses
00:36:58 in conditions where a leak is possible.
00:37:02 And so then you mentioned Shujing Li,
00:37:05 and I’ll connect that to these virologists
00:37:08 who I was talking about.
00:37:11 So there’s a very credible thesis
00:37:14 that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen
00:37:17 in other parts of the world,
00:37:19 having partnerships with experts in those parts of the world
00:37:24 must be a foundation of our efforts.
00:37:28 We can’t just bring everything home
00:37:29 because we know that viruses don’t care about borders
00:37:32 and boundaries, and so if something happens there,
00:37:34 it’s going to come here.
00:37:36 So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships
00:37:41 with experts in these labs,
00:37:43 and Shujing Li was one of those partners.
00:37:47 And her closest relationship was with Peter Daszak,
00:37:51 who’s a British, I think now American,
00:37:53 but the president of a thing called EcoHealth Alliance,
00:37:57 which was getting money from NIH.
00:37:59 And basically, EcoHealth Alliance
00:38:01 was a pass through organization.
00:38:03 And over the years, it was only about $600,000.
00:38:06 So almost all of her funding
00:38:07 came from the Chinese government,
00:38:09 but there’s a little bit that came from the United States.
00:38:11 And so she became their kind of leading expert
00:38:15 and the point of contact
00:38:17 between the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:38:20 and certainly Peter Daszak, but also with others.
00:38:25 And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,
00:38:28 I didn’t mention that,
00:38:30 I did mention that there were these virologists
00:38:32 who had this fake certainty
00:38:34 that they knew it came from nature
00:38:36 and it didn’t come from a lab
00:38:38 and they called people like me conspiracy theorists
00:38:41 just for raising that possibility.
00:38:43 But when Peter Daszak was organizing that effort
00:38:46 in February of 2020,
00:38:50 what he said is we need to rally
00:38:52 behind our Chinese colleagues.
00:38:54 And the basic idea was
00:38:56 these international collaborations are under threat.
00:38:59 And I think it was because of that,
00:39:01 because Peter Daszak’s basically his major contribution
00:39:06 as a scientist was just tacking his name
00:39:09 on work that Shujang Li had largely done.
00:39:12 He was defending a lot,
00:39:14 certainly for himself and his organization.
00:39:16 So you think EcoHealth Alliance and Peter
00:39:20 is less about money,
00:39:21 it’s more about kind of almost like legacy
00:39:24 because you’re so attached to this work?
00:39:26 Is it just on a human level?
00:39:27 I think so.
00:39:29 I mean, I’ve been criticized for being actually,
00:39:31 I’m certainly a big critic of Peter Daszak,
00:39:34 but I’ve been criticized by some for being too lenient.
00:39:38 I mean, it’s so easy to say,
00:39:39 oh, somebody they’re like an evil ogre
00:39:43 and just trying to do evil
00:39:45 and cackling in their closet or whatever.
00:39:49 But I think for most of us,
00:39:51 even those of us who do terrible, horrible things,
00:39:55 the story that we tell ourselves
00:39:57 and we really believe is that we’re doing the thing
00:40:01 that we most believe in.
00:40:02 I mean, I did my PhD dissertation
00:40:04 on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
00:40:06 They genuinely saw themselves as idealists.
00:40:09 They thought, well, we need to make radical change
00:40:13 to build a better future.
00:40:15 And what they described as,
00:40:17 that they felt was radical change
00:40:19 was a monstrous atrocities by us.
00:40:21 So the criticism here of Peter
00:40:26 is that he was a part of an organization
00:40:31 that was kind of, well, funding an effort
00:40:36 that was an unsafe implementation
00:40:39 of a biosafety level four laboratory.
00:40:42 Well, a few things.
00:40:43 So what he thought he was doing was,
00:40:47 and then what he thought he was doing
00:40:49 is itself highly controversial
00:40:51 because there’s one there that in 2011,
00:40:56 there were, I know you’ve talked about this
00:40:57 with other guests, but in 2011,
00:41:00 there were the first published papers
00:41:04 on this now infamous gain of function research.
00:41:07 And basically what they did,
00:41:10 both in different labs and certainly in the United States,
00:41:14 in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands,
00:41:18 was they had a bird flu virus
00:41:21 that was very dangerous, but not massively transmissive.
00:41:28 And they had a gain of function process
00:41:31 through what’s called serial passage,
00:41:33 which means basically passing advice,
00:41:35 like natural selection, but forcing natural selection
00:41:39 by just passing a virus through different cell cultures
00:41:42 and then selecting for what it is that you want.
00:41:46 So relatively easily, they took this deadly,
00:41:49 but not massively transmissive virus
00:41:51 and turned it into, in a lab,
00:41:53 a deadly and transmissive virus.
00:41:57 And that showed that this is really dangerous.
00:41:59 And so there were, at that point,
00:42:01 there was a huge controversy.
00:42:03 There were some people, like Richard Ebright
00:42:07 and Mark Lipsitch at Harvard,
00:42:09 who were saying that this is really dangerous.
00:42:12 We’re in the idea that we need to create monsters
00:42:16 to study monsters.
00:42:17 I think maybe even you have said that in the past.
00:42:21 It doesn’t make sense
00:42:22 because there’s an unlimited number of monsters.
00:42:24 And so what are we gonna do?
00:42:25 Create an unlimited number of monsters.
00:42:27 And if we do that,
00:42:28 eventually the monsters are going to get out.
00:42:31 Then there was the Peter Daszak camp,
00:42:33 and he got a lot of funding,
00:42:35 particularly from the United States,
00:42:37 who said, well, and certainly Collins and Fauci
00:42:40 were supportive of this.
00:42:42 And they thought, well, there’s a safe way
00:42:44 to go out into the world
00:42:46 to collect the world’s most dangerous viruses
00:42:49 and to poke and prod them
00:42:52 to figure out how they might mutate,
00:42:54 how they might become more dangerous
00:42:56 with the goal of predicting future pandemics.
00:43:01 And that certainly never happened
00:43:03 with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments.
00:43:07 And that largely never happened,
00:43:11 but that was, so Peter Daszak kind of epitomized
00:43:14 that second approach.
00:43:18 And as you’ve talked about in the past,
00:43:20 in 2014, there was a funding moratorium
00:43:24 in the United States, and then in 2017, that was lifted.
00:43:27 It didn’t affect the funding
00:43:29 that went to the EcoHealth Alliance.
00:43:33 So when this happened in the beginning,
00:43:37 and again, coming back to Peter’s motivations,
00:43:40 I don’t think, here’s the best case scenario for Peter.
00:43:44 I’m gonna give you what I imagine he was thinking,
00:43:47 and then I’ll tell you what I actually think.
00:43:49 So I think here’s what he’s thinking.
00:43:51 This is most likely a natural origin outbreak.
00:43:56 Just like SARS one, again, in Peter’s hypothetical mind,
00:44:00 just like SARS one, this is most likely a natural outbreak.
00:44:04 We need to have an international coalition
00:44:06 in order to fight it.
00:44:08 If we allow these political attacks
00:44:11 to undermine our Chinese counterparts
00:44:14 and the trust in these relationships
00:44:16 that we’ve built over many years,
00:44:18 we’re really screwed because they have
00:44:20 the most local knowledge of these outbreaks.
00:44:23 And even though, and this guy gets a lot more complicated,
00:44:27 even though there are basic questions
00:44:30 that anybody would ask and that Shujing Li herself did ask
00:44:34 about the origins of this pandemic,
00:44:37 even though Peter Daszak, and I’ll describe this
00:44:40 in a moment, had secret information that we didn’t have,
00:44:44 that in my mind massively increases the possibility
00:44:48 of a lab incident origin, I, Peter Daszak,
00:44:52 would like to guide the public conversation
00:44:55 in the direction where I think it should go
00:44:58 and in support of the kind of international collaboration
00:45:03 that I think is necessary.
00:45:04 That’s a strong, positive discussion
00:45:06 because it’s true that there’s a lot of political BS
00:45:11 and a lot of kind of just bickering and lies
00:45:16 as we’ve talked about.
00:45:18 And so it’s very convenient to say, you know what?
00:45:21 Let’s just ignore all of these quote unquote lies
00:45:24 and my favorite word, misinformation.
00:45:27 And then because the way out from this serious pandemic
00:45:31 is for us to work together.
00:45:33 So let’s strengthen our partnerships
00:45:36 and everything else is just like noise.
00:45:38 Yeah, so let’s, and so then now I wanna do
00:45:41 my personal indictment of Peter Daszak
00:45:43 because that’s my view, but I wanted to fairly.
00:45:46 That’s nice.
00:45:47 Because I think that we all tell ourselves stories
00:45:51 and also when you’re a science communicator,
00:45:56 you can’t in your public communications
00:45:59 give every doubt that you have or every nuance,
00:46:03 you kind of have to summarize things.
00:46:05 And so I think that he was, again,
00:46:07 in this benign interpretation trying to summarize
00:46:10 in the way that he thought the conversations should go.
00:46:14 Here’s my indictment of Peter Daszak.
00:46:16 And I feel like a Brutus here,
00:46:20 but I have not come here to praise Peter Daszak
00:46:26 because while Peter Daszak was doing all of this
00:46:29 and making all of these statements about,
00:46:31 well, we pretty much know it’s a natural origin.
00:46:34 Then there was this February, 2020 Lancet letter
00:46:38 where it turns out, and we only knew this later
00:46:40 that he was highly manipulative.
00:46:42 So he was recruiting all of these people.
00:46:45 He drafted the infamous letter calling people like me,
00:46:48 conspiracy theorists.
00:46:50 He then wrote to people like Ralph Barak and Linfa Wang,
00:46:54 who are also very high profile virologists saying,
00:46:57 well, let’s not put our names on it.
00:46:59 So it doesn’t look like we’re doing it,
00:47:01 even though they were doing it.
00:47:04 He didn’t disclose a lot of information that they had.
00:47:09 It was a strategic move.
00:47:10 So just in case people are not familiar,
00:47:13 February, 2020, Lancet letter was TLDR,
00:47:20 is a lab leak hypothesis, is a conspiracy theory.
00:47:24 Essentially, yes.
00:47:26 So like with the authority of science,
00:47:29 not saying like it’s highly likely,
00:47:32 saying it’s obvious, duh, it’s natural origin.
00:47:37 Everybody else is just,
00:47:40 everything else is just misinformation.
00:47:42 And look, there’s a bunch of really smart people
00:47:44 that signed this, therefore it’s true.
00:47:46 Yeah, not only that, so there were the people
00:47:49 who, 27 people signed that letter.
00:47:51 And then after President Trump cut funding
00:47:54 to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates
00:47:58 to have a public letter criticizing that.
00:48:01 But what Peter knew then that we didn’t fully know
00:48:06 is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance,
00:48:10 in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:48:13 and others, had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA,
00:48:19 which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital
00:48:23 side of the Defense Department.
00:48:25 They’re kind of, where they do kind of big ideas.
00:48:29 By the way, as a tiny tangent,
00:48:31 I’ve gotten a lot of funding from DARPA.
00:48:33 They fund a lot of excellent robotics research.
00:48:36 And DARPA is incredible.
00:48:37 And among the things that they applied for
00:48:39 is that we, meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:48:42 is gonna go and it’s gonna collect
00:48:44 the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in Southern China.
00:48:49 And then we, as this group,
00:48:52 are going to genetically engineer these viruses
00:48:56 to insert a furin cleavage site.
00:48:59 So I think when everyone’s now seen the image
00:49:02 of the SARS CoV2 virus, it has these little spike proteins,
00:49:06 these little things that stick out,
00:49:07 which is why they call it a coronavirus.
00:49:09 Within that spike protein are these furin cleavage sites,
00:49:12 which basically help with the virus
00:49:14 getting access into our cells.
00:49:18 And they were going to genetically engineer
00:49:20 these furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses,
00:49:24 the serbicoviruses.
00:49:26 And then, and so then a year and a half later,
00:49:30 what do we see?
00:49:31 We see a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site
00:49:36 unlike anything that we’ve ever seen before
00:49:39 in that category of SARS like coronaviruses.
00:49:44 That, well, yes, I mean, the DARPA very correctly
00:49:49 didn’t support that application.
00:49:50 Well, let’s actually, let’s like pause on that.
00:49:53 So for a lot of people, that’s like the smoking gun.
00:49:56 Okay, let’s talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA.
00:50:02 So I guess who’s drafted the proposal?
00:50:04 Is it EcoHealth, but the proposal is to do research.
00:50:09 EcoHealth is technically a US funded organization.
00:50:14 Primarily.
00:50:15 And then the idea was to do work
00:50:18 at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:50:20 With, yeah, so it was.
00:50:22 With EcoHealth.
00:50:23 Yes, so EcoHealth, basically the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:50:26 was gonna go and they were gonna collect these viruses
00:50:29 and store them at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:50:31 But they’re also gonna do the actual task.
00:50:33 According, it’s a really important point.
00:50:35 According to their proposal, the actual work
00:50:38 was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barak
00:50:41 at the University of North Carolina,
00:50:43 who’s probably the world’s leading expert on coronaviruses.
00:50:47 And so we know that DARPA didn’t fund that work.
00:50:54 We know, I think quite well that Ralph Barak’s lab,
00:50:59 in part because it was not funded by DARPA,
00:51:04 they didn’t do that specific work.
00:51:06 What we don’t know is, well, what work was done
00:51:10 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:51:12 because WIV was part of this proposal.
00:51:15 They had access to all of the plans.
00:51:18 They had done, they had their own capacity
00:51:21 and they had already done a lot of work
00:51:23 in genetically altering this exact category of viruses.
00:51:28 They had created chimeric mixed viruses.
00:51:33 They had mastered pretty much all of the steps
00:51:37 in order to achieve this thing that they applied
00:51:39 for funding with EcoHealth to do.
00:51:42 And so the question is, did the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:51:47 go through with that research anyway?
00:51:50 And in my mind, that’s a very, very real possibility.
00:51:53 It would certainly explain
00:51:54 why they’re giving no information.
00:51:57 And as you know, I’ve been a member
00:51:59 of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
00:52:02 on Human Genome Editing, which Dr. Tedros created
00:52:06 in the aftermath of the announcement
00:52:07 of the world’s first CRISPR babies.
00:52:10 And it was just basically the first time
00:52:11 and it was just basically the exact same story.
00:52:14 So Ho Chiang Kui, a Chinese scientist,
00:52:16 it was not a first tier scientist,
00:52:18 but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist,
00:52:21 came to the United States, learned all of these capacities,
00:52:23 went back to China and said,
00:52:25 well, there’s a much more permissive environment.
00:52:28 I’m gonna be a world leader.
00:52:30 I’m gonna establish both myself and China.
00:52:33 So in every scientific field, we’re seeing this same thing
00:52:37 where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China.
00:52:41 So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:52:45 with this exact game plan was doing it anyway?
00:52:49 Do we, possible?
00:52:51 We have no clue what work was being done
00:52:55 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
00:52:56 It seems extremely likely
00:52:59 that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:53:02 and this is certainly the US government position,
00:53:04 there was the work that was being done in Dr. Hsu’s lab,
00:53:08 but that wasn’t the whole WIV.
00:53:10 We know, at least according to the United States government,
00:53:12 that there was the Chinese military,
00:53:14 that PLA was doing work there.
00:53:17 Were they doing this kind of work, not to create a bioweapon,
00:53:22 but in order to understand these viruses,
00:53:25 maybe to develop vaccines and treatments?
00:53:28 It seems like a very, very logical possibility.
00:53:33 And then, so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
00:53:36 had all of the skills.
00:53:37 We know that they were part of this proposal.
00:53:40 And then you have Peter Daszak, who knows all of this,
00:53:43 that at that time, in February of 2020, we didn’t know.
00:53:47 But then he comes swinging out of the gate,
00:53:49 saying anybody who’s raising this possibility
00:53:52 of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
00:53:57 I mean, it really makes him look, in my mind,
00:54:00 very, very bad.
00:54:01 And yet, not to at least be somewhat open minded on this,
00:54:04 because he knows all the details.
00:54:06 He knows that it’s not 0%.
00:54:08 I mean, there’s no way in his mind could you even argue that.
00:54:12 So it’s potential because of the bias,
00:54:14 because of your focus.
00:54:16 I mean, it could be the Anthony Fauci masks thing,
00:54:20 whereas he knows there’s some significant probability
00:54:23 that this is happening.
00:54:24 But in order to preserve good relations
00:54:28 with our Chinese colleagues,
00:54:30 we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative.
00:54:33 So it’s not really lying.
00:54:34 It’s doing the best possible action at this time
00:54:39 to help the world.
00:54:40 Not that this already happened.
00:54:42 But that’s how like…
00:54:43 I think it’s quite likely that that was the story
00:54:47 that he was telling himself.
00:54:49 But it’s that lack of transparency, in my mind,
00:54:55 is fraudulent, that we were struggling
00:54:59 to understand something that we didn’t understand.
00:55:02 And that I just think that people who possess
00:55:05 that kind of information, especially when the existence,
00:55:10 like the entire career of Peter Daszak
00:55:12 is based on US taxpayers,
00:55:14 there’s a debt that comes with that.
00:55:16 And that debt is honesty and transparency.
00:55:19 And for all of us, and you talked about
00:55:21 your girlfriend checking your phone.
00:55:22 For all of us, being honest and transparent
00:55:26 in the most difficult times is really difficult.
00:55:29 If it were easy, everybody would do it.
00:55:31 And I just feel that Peter was the opposite of transparent
00:55:37 and then went on the offensive.
00:55:39 And then had the gall of joining,
00:55:44 I know we can talk about this,
00:55:46 this highly compromised joint study process
00:55:51 with the international experts
00:55:54 and their Chinese government counterparts.
00:55:56 And used that as a way of furthering
00:55:59 this, in my mind, fraudulent narrative
00:56:05 that it almost certainly came from natural origins
00:56:09 and a lab origin was extremely unlikely.
00:56:12 Just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up,
00:56:15 because I do think, in a kind of John Stewart way,
00:56:22 if you heard that a bit yet,
00:56:25 sort of kind of like common sense way,
00:56:30 the 2018 proposal to DARPA from EcoHealth Alliance
00:56:35 and Wuhan Institute of Virology,
00:56:38 just seems like a bit of a smoking gun to me, like that.
00:56:43 So there’s this excellent book that people should read
00:56:46 called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID 19.
00:56:50 Matt Ridley and Alena Chan, I think Alena is in MIT.
00:56:54 Probably. At the Broad, yeah.
00:56:55 At Broad Institute, yeah, yeah.
00:56:57 So she, I heard her in an interview
00:57:00 give this analogy of unicorns.
00:57:04 And where basically somebody writes a proposal
00:57:09 to add horns to horses, the proposal is rejected.
00:57:14 And then a couple of years later or a year later,
00:57:17 a unicorn shows up.
00:57:19 In the place where they’re proposing to do it.
00:57:23 I mean, that’s so, I had.
00:57:24 And then everyone’s like, it’s natural origin.
00:57:26 It’s like, it’s possible it’s natural origin.
00:57:29 Like we haven’t detected a unicorn yet.
00:57:31 And this is the first time we’ve detected a unicorn.
00:57:33 Or it could be this massive organization
00:57:36 that was planning, is fully equipped,
00:57:39 has like a history of being able to do this stuff,
00:57:42 has the world experts to do it, has the funding,
00:57:45 has the motivation to add horns to horses.
00:57:48 And now a unicorn shows up and they’re saying, nope.
00:57:52 Definitely natural.
00:57:54 That connects to your first question
00:57:56 of how do I get to my 85%?
00:57:59 And here’s a summary of that answer.
00:58:03 And so it’s what I said in my 60 Minutes interview
00:58:06 a long time ago, of all the gin joints
00:58:07 and all the towns and all the world,
00:58:09 the quote from Casablanca.
00:58:11 And so of all the places in the world
00:58:14 where we have an outbreak of a SARS like bat coronavirus,
00:58:19 it’s not in the area of the natural habitat
00:58:23 of the horseshoe bats.
00:58:25 It’s the one city in China
00:58:28 with the first and largest level four virology lab,
00:58:33 which actually wasn’t even using it.
00:58:34 They were doing level three and level two for this work,
00:58:38 where they had the world’s largest collection
00:58:39 of bat coronaviruses,
00:58:41 where they were doing aggressive experiments
00:58:45 designed to make these scary viruses scarier,
00:58:49 where they had been part of an application
00:58:52 to insert a furin cleavage site,
00:58:56 able to infect human cells.
00:58:59 And when the outbreak happened,
00:59:02 we had a virus that was ready for action to infect humans.
00:59:07 And to this day, better able to infect humans
00:59:09 than any other species, including bats.
00:59:13 And then from day one, there’s this massive coverup.
00:59:17 And then on top of that,
00:59:19 in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people,
00:59:21 there’s basically no evidence
00:59:24 for the natural origin hypothesis.
00:59:27 Everything that I’ve described just now is circumstantial,
00:59:29 but there’s a certain point
00:59:31 where you add up the circumstances
00:59:34 and you see this seems pretty, pretty likely.
00:59:37 I mean, if we’re getting to 100%,
00:59:39 we are not at 100% by any means.
00:59:42 There still is a possibility of a natural origin.
00:59:45 And if we find that, great.
00:59:46 But from everything that I know,
00:59:48 that’s how I get to my 85.
00:59:50 And we’ll talk about why this matters
00:59:53 in the political sense, in the human sense,
00:59:56 in the science, in the realm of science,
00:59:59 all of those factors.
01:00:00 But first, as Nietzsche said, let us look into the abyss
01:00:04 and the games we’ll play with monsters.
01:00:06 That is colloquially called gain of function research.
01:00:12 Let me ask the kind of political sounding question,
01:00:14 which is how people usually phrase it.
01:00:16 Did Anthony Fauci fund gain of function research
01:00:24 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
01:00:26 So it depends.
01:00:27 I mean, I’ve obviously been very closely monitoring this.
01:00:31 I’ve spoken a lot about it.
01:00:32 I’ve written about it.
01:00:34 And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton,
01:00:37 but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what
01:00:39 the definition of is is.
01:00:41 And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function,
01:00:46 and by gain of function, there are lots of things
01:00:48 like gene therapies that are gain of function.
01:00:50 But here, what we mean is gain of function
01:00:52 for pathogens potentially able to create human pandemics.
01:01:00 But if you use the kind of common sense language,
01:01:04 well, then he probably did.
01:01:05 If you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH
01:01:10 document, and you read that language very narrowly,
01:01:14 I think you can make a credible argument that he did not.
01:01:19 There’s a question, though, and Francis Collins
01:01:22 talked about that in his interview with you.
01:01:25 But then there’s a question that we know from now
01:01:28 that we have the information of the reports submitted
01:01:31 by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH, and some of which
01:01:36 were late or not even delivered, that some of this research
01:01:40 was done on MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus.
01:01:45 And if that was the case, there is, I think,
01:01:49 a colorable argument that that would be considered
01:01:53 gain of function research even by the narrow language
01:01:58 of that 2017 document.
01:01:59 But I definitely think, and I’ve said this repeatedly,
01:02:02 that Rand Paul can be right, and Tony Fauci can be right.
01:02:08 And the question is, how are we defining gain of function?
01:02:12 And that’s why I’ve always said the question in my mind
01:02:14 isn’t, was it or wasn’t it gain of function,
01:02:17 as if that’s like a binary thing, if not, grade,
01:02:22 and if yes, guilty.
01:02:23 The question is just, what work was being done at the Wuhan
01:02:27 Institute of Virology?
01:02:28 What role, if any, did US government funding
01:02:33 play in supporting that work?
01:02:36 And what rights do we all have as human beings
01:02:41 and as American citizens and taxpayers
01:02:43 to get all of the relevant information about that?
01:02:47 So let’s try to kind of dissect this.
01:02:51 So who frustrates you more, Rand Paul or Anthony
01:02:55 Fauci in his discussion or the discussion itself?
01:02:57 So for example, gain of function is
01:03:00 a term that’s kind of more used just
01:03:06 to mean playing with viruses in the lab
01:03:11 to try to develop more dangerous viruses.
01:03:16 Is this kind of research a good idea?
01:03:22 Is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public,
01:03:26 in the political way that it’s been talked about?
01:03:29 Is it OK that US may have funded gain of function research
01:03:38 elsewhere?
01:03:39 I mean, it’s kind of assumed, just like with Bill Clinton,
01:03:43 there was very little discussion of, I think,
01:03:46 correct me if I’m wrong, but whether it’s
01:03:49 OK for a president, male or female,
01:03:54 to have extramarital sex or is it
01:03:58 OK for a president to have extramarital sex
01:04:04 with people on his staff or her staff?
01:04:08 It was more the discussion of lying, I think.
01:04:12 It was, did you lie about having sex or not?
01:04:16 And in this gain of function discussion,
01:04:18 what frustrates me personally is there’s not
01:04:21 a deep philosophical discussion about whether we
01:04:23 should be doing this kind of research
01:04:25 and what are the ethical lines, research on animals at all.
01:04:32 Those are fascinating questions.
01:04:33 Instead, it’s a gotcha thing.
01:04:36 Did you or did you not fund research on gain of function?
01:04:40 And did you fund, it’s almost like a bioweapon.
01:04:43 Did you give money to China to develop this bioweapon that
01:04:47 now attacked the rest of the world?
01:04:49 So I mean, all those things are pretty frustrating,
01:04:52 but is there, I think, the thing you
01:04:56 can untangle about Anthony Fauci and gain of function
01:04:59 research in the United States and the EcoHealth Alliance
01:05:01 and Wuhan Institute of Virology that’s clarifying.
01:05:07 What were the mistakes made?
01:05:08 Sure.
01:05:09 So on gain of function, there actually
01:05:11 has been a lot of debate.
01:05:14 I mentioned before in 2011, these first papers,
01:05:18 there was a big debate.
01:05:20 Mark Lipsitch, who’s formerly at Harvard now
01:05:22 with the US government working in the president’s office,
01:05:26 he led a thing called the Cambridge Group that
01:05:29 was highly critical of this work,
01:05:32 basically saying we’re creating monsters.
01:05:35 They had the funding pause in 2014.
01:05:39 They spent three years putting together a framework,
01:05:42 and then they lifted it in 2017.
01:05:45 So we had a thoughtful conversation.
01:05:47 Unfortunately, it didn’t work.
01:05:48 And I think that’s where we are now.
01:05:50 So I absolutely think that there are real issues
01:05:54 with the relationship between the United States government
01:05:58 and EcoHealth Alliance, and through that,
01:06:01 the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
01:06:05 And one issue is just essential transparency,
01:06:08 because as I see it, it’s most likely the case
01:06:10 that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things
01:06:14 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
01:06:16 And again, I’m sure that Xiaojiang Li is not herself
01:06:22 a monster.
01:06:23 I’m sure of that, even though I’ve never met her.
01:06:26 But there are just a different set of pressures
01:06:29 on people working in an authoritarian system
01:06:31 than people who are working in other systems.
01:06:33 That doesn’t mean it’s entirely different.
01:06:36 And so I absolutely think that we shouldn’t give $1
01:06:40 to an organization, and certainly a virology institute,
01:06:44 where you don’t have full access to their records,
01:06:47 to their databases.
01:06:49 We don’t know what work is happening there.
01:06:52 And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination.
01:06:57 So I understand what Dr. Fauci is doing is saying,
01:07:01 hey, what I hear Dr. Fauci saying,
01:07:03 what I hear from you, Rand Paul, is
01:07:05 you’re accusing me of starting this pandemic.
01:07:08 And you’re using gain of function as a proxy for that.
01:07:11 And we have, when there are Senate hearings,
01:07:13 every senator gets five minutes.
01:07:15 And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes
01:07:18 into a clip that’s going to run on the news.
01:07:22 And so I get that there is that kind of gotcha.
01:07:25 But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the National
01:07:31 Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH
01:07:35 should have been more transparent.
01:07:37 Because I think that in this day and age, where
01:07:41 there are a lot of people poking around
01:07:42 and this whole story of COVID origins,
01:07:45 we would not be where we are if it
01:07:47 wasn’t for a relatively small number of people.
01:07:51 And I’m part of, there are two, as I know, two groups.
01:07:54 One is these internet sleuths known as Drastic.
01:07:57 And a number of them are part of a group
01:08:00 that I’m part of called, it’s not our official name,
01:08:03 but called the Paris Group.
01:08:04 It’s about two dozen experts around the world,
01:08:08 but centered around some very high level French academics.
01:08:13 So we’ve all been digging and meeting with each other
01:08:16 regularly since last year.
01:08:19 And our governments across the board, certainly China,
01:08:22 but including the United States, haven’t
01:08:23 been as transparent as they need to be.
01:08:27 So definitely mistakes were made on all sides.
01:08:31 And that’s why for me from day one,
01:08:33 I’ve been calling for a comprehensive investigation
01:08:37 into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China,
01:08:40 but we have to look at ourselves.
01:08:41 We did not get this right.
01:08:43 So do you, I’m just gonna put Rand Paul aside here.
01:08:50 Politician playing political games, it’s very frustrating,
01:08:53 but it is what it is on all sides.
01:08:56 Anthony Fauci, you think should have been more transparent
01:08:59 and maybe more eloquent in expressing the complexity
01:09:10 of all of this, the uncertainty in all of this.
01:09:12 Yeah, and I get that it’s really hard to do that
01:09:16 because let’s say you have one, you speak a paragraph
01:09:21 and it’s got four sentences.
01:09:23 And one of those sentences is the thing
01:09:25 that’s going to be turned into Twitter.
01:09:27 All right, let me put it back.
01:09:28 I get really, so I’ll try not to be emotional about this,
01:09:32 but I’ve heard Anthony Fauci a couple of times now
01:09:39 say that he represents science.
01:09:43 I know what he means by that.
01:09:45 He means in this political bickering,
01:09:48 all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people,
01:09:52 he represents science, but words matter.
01:09:56 And this isn’t just clips.
01:09:58 I mean, maybe I’m distinctly aware of that
01:10:00 doing this podcast.
01:10:01 Yeah, I talked for hundreds of hours now,
01:10:05 maybe over a thousand hours,
01:10:07 but I’m still careful with the words.
01:10:11 I’m trying not to be an asshole
01:10:13 and I’m aware when I’m an asshole
01:10:14 and I’ll apologize for it.
01:10:17 If the words I represent science left my mouth,
01:10:21 which they very well could,
01:10:23 I would sure as hell be apologizing for it
01:10:26 and not because I got in trouble,
01:10:29 I would just feel bad about saying something like that.
01:10:31 And even that little phrase, I represent science.
01:10:36 No, Dr. Fauci, you do not represent science.
01:10:39 I love science, the millions of scientists
01:10:42 that inspired me to get into it.
01:10:45 To fall in love with the scientific method
01:10:48 in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science,
01:10:53 that Anthony Fauci does not represent.
01:10:55 He’s one, I believe, great scientist of millions.
01:10:59 He does not represent anybody.
01:11:02 He’s just one scientist.
01:11:04 And I think the greatness of a scientist
01:11:07 is best exemplified in humility
01:11:10 because the scientific method basically says,
01:11:13 you’re standing before the fog, the mystery of it all,
01:11:19 and slowly chipping away at the mystery.
01:11:22 And it’s embarrassing, it’s humiliating
01:11:27 how little you know, that’s the experience.
01:11:29 So the great scientists have to have humility to me.
01:11:33 And especially in their communication,
01:11:34 they have to have humility.
01:11:36 And I mean, I don’t know,
01:11:37 and some of it is also words matter
01:11:39 because great leaders have to have the poetry of action.
01:11:45 They have to be bold and inspire action
01:11:49 across millions of people.
01:11:52 But you also have to, through that poetry of words,
01:11:58 express the complexity of the uncertainty
01:12:02 you’re operating under.
01:12:04 Be humble in the face of not being able
01:12:06 to predict the future or understand the past,
01:12:09 or really know what’s the right thing to do,
01:12:11 but we have to do something.
01:12:13 And through that, you have to be a great leader
01:12:16 that inspires action.
01:12:17 And some of that is just words.
01:12:20 And he chose words poorly.
01:12:22 I mean, so I’m all torn about this.
01:12:25 And then there’s politicians, they’re taking those words
01:12:28 and magnifying them and playing games with them.
01:12:31 And of course, that’s a disincentive
01:12:34 for the people who do, the scientific leaders
01:12:37 that step into the limelight to say any more words.
01:12:41 So they kind of become more conservative
01:12:43 with the words they use.
01:12:45 I mean, it just becomes a giant mess.
01:12:47 But I think the solution is to ignore all of that
01:12:52 and to be transparent, to be honest, to be vulnerable.
01:12:56 And to express the full uncertainty
01:13:01 of what you’re operating under,
01:13:03 to present all the possible actions
01:13:05 and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past.
01:13:08 I mean, there’s something, even if you’re not
01:13:10 directly responsible for those mistakes,
01:13:13 taking responsibility for them is a way to win people over.
01:13:18 I don’t think leaders realize this often
01:13:20 in the modern age, in the internet age.
01:13:23 They can see through your bullshit.
01:13:24 And it’s really inspiring when you take ownership.
01:13:29 So to do the thought experiment in public,
01:13:32 do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak
01:13:35 and then lay out all the funding, the EcoHealth Alliance,
01:13:38 all the incredible science going on at the Wuhan Institute
01:13:43 of Virology and the NIH.
01:13:46 Lay out all the possible ethical problems.
01:13:48 Lay out all the possible mistakes that could have been made
01:13:53 and say like, this could have happened.
01:13:56 And if this happened, here’s the best way to respond to it
01:13:59 and to prevent it in the future.
01:14:00 And just lay all that complexity out.
01:14:02 I wish we would have seen that.
01:14:06 And I have hope that this conversation,
01:14:09 conversations like it, your work,
01:14:11 and books on this topic will inspire young people today
01:14:15 when they become in the Anthony Fauci’s role
01:14:19 to be much more transparent and much more humble
01:14:22 and all those kinds of things.
01:14:23 That this is just a relic of the past
01:14:26 when there’s a person, no offense to me,
01:14:28 in a suit that has to stand up and speak
01:14:31 with clarity and certainty.
01:14:33 I mean, that’s just a relic of the past.
01:14:34 Is my hope.
01:14:39 But…
01:14:40 Do you mind if I…
01:14:41 Yeah, please.
01:14:41 I agree with a great deal of what you said.
01:14:46 And it’s really unfortunate that our,
01:14:49 certainly the Chinese government, as I said before,
01:14:51 our government wasn’t as transparent
01:14:55 as I feel they should have been,
01:14:56 particularly in the early days of the pandemic
01:14:59 and particularly with regard to the issue
01:15:02 of pandemic origins.
01:15:03 I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls
01:15:06 with people like Christian Anderson and Scripps and others
01:15:10 in those early days, raising questions.
01:15:13 Is this an engineered virus?
01:15:15 There were a lot of questions.
01:15:17 And it’s kind of sad.
01:15:19 I mean, as I mentioned before, I’ve been one,
01:15:23 I mean, and certainly there were others,
01:15:25 but there weren’t a lot of us,
01:15:27 of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic
01:15:30 were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here.
01:15:34 And I launched my website on pandemic origins
01:15:38 in April of last year, April, 2020.
01:15:41 It got a huge amount of attention.
01:15:42 And actually my friend, Matt Pottinger,
01:15:44 who is the deputy national security advisor,
01:15:46 when he was reaching out to people in the US government
01:15:50 and in allied government saying,
01:15:51 hey, we should look into this,
01:15:54 what he was sending them was my website.
01:15:56 It wasn’t some US government information.
01:16:00 And by the way, people should still go to the website.
01:16:02 You keep updating it and it’s an incredible resource.
01:16:07 Thank you, thank you, jamiemetzel.com.
01:16:10 And it’s really unfortunate that our governments
01:16:13 and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020
01:16:18 weren’t doing their jobs of really probing this issue.
01:16:22 People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus.
01:16:26 And I’m critical of many people,
01:16:28 even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you,
01:16:32 I just felt, well, he wasn’t as balanced
01:16:35 on the issue of COVID origins.
01:16:37 Certainly Dr. Fauci could have in his conversation
01:16:41 with Rand Paul, it wasn’t even a conversation,
01:16:43 but in some process in the aftermath,
01:16:46 could have laid things out a bit better.
01:16:48 He did say, and Francis Collins did say
01:16:50 that we don’t know the origins and that was a shift
01:16:54 and we need to have an investigation.
01:16:56 So now, but having said all of that,
01:17:00 I do kind of one, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Fauci
01:17:04 for the work that he’s done on HIV AIDS.
01:17:06 I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.
01:17:10 Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story
01:17:14 of getting us these vaccines
01:17:15 that have saved millions and millions of lives.
01:17:19 And so I don’t think, I mean, there’s a lot to this story.
01:17:23 And then the second thing is it’s really hard
01:17:26 to be a public health expert
01:17:28 because you have your mission is public health.
01:17:32 And so, and you have to, if you are leading
01:17:35 with all of your uncertainty,
01:17:37 it’s a really hard way to do things.
01:17:40 And so like, even now, like if I go to CVS
01:17:43 and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation
01:17:47 of how many people will die from taking Tylenol
01:17:51 and they say, well, all right, we can live with that.
01:17:54 And that’s why we have regulation.
01:17:55 And so all of us are doing kind of summaries.
01:17:59 And then we have people in public health who are saying,
01:18:00 wow, we’ve summed it all up and you should do X.
01:18:04 You should get your kids vaccinated for measles.
01:18:09 You should not drive your car at a hundred miles an hour.
01:18:12 You should, don’t drink lighter fluid,
01:18:15 whatever these things are.
01:18:17 And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines.
01:18:20 And yet now our information world is so fragmented
01:18:25 that if you’re not being honest about something,
01:18:29 something material, someone’s going to find out
01:18:33 and it’s going to undermine your credibility.
01:18:35 And so I agree with you that there’s a greater requirement
01:18:41 for transparency now.
01:18:43 Maybe there always has been,
01:18:44 but there’s an even greater requirement for it now
01:18:48 because people want to trust that you’re speaking honestly
01:18:53 and that you’re saying, well, here’s what I know.
01:18:56 And this is based on what I know,
01:18:58 here are the conclusions that I draw.
01:19:00 But if it’s just, and again, I don’t think the words,
01:19:03 I’m science or whatever it was are the right words.
01:19:06 But if it’s just, trust me because of who I am,
01:19:10 I don’t think that flies anywhere anymore.
01:19:14 Can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview
01:19:18 that I did, if you got a chance to hear that part.
01:19:20 I think in the beginning we talk about the lab leak.
01:19:23 What are your thoughts about his response,
01:19:25 basically saying it’s worthy of an investigation,
01:19:28 but I mean, I don’t know how you would interpret it.
01:19:33 I see, it’s funny because I heard it in the moment
01:19:39 as it’s great for the head of NIH
01:19:44 to be open minded on this.
01:19:46 But then the internet and Mr. Joe Rogan
01:19:51 and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that,
01:19:55 yeah, well, that’s too late and too little.
01:19:58 Yeah, so first let me say, I’ve been on Joe’s podcast twice
01:20:03 and I love the guy, which doesn’t mean that I agree
01:20:06 with everything he does or says.
01:20:10 And on this issue, and I’m normally a pretty calm
01:20:13 and measured guy, and when you’re just out running
01:20:17 with your AirPods on and you start yelling
01:20:21 into the wind in Central Park,
01:20:23 nobody else knows why you’re yelling, but well.
01:20:27 So that you had such a moment?
01:20:28 I had a moment with Collins.
01:20:30 And again, Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously.
01:20:34 I mean, I live a big chunk of my life living in the world
01:20:38 of genetics and biotech and my book, Hacking Darwin
01:20:42 is about the future of human genetic engineering
01:20:45 and his work on the Human Genome Project
01:20:47 and so many other things have been fantastic.
01:20:49 And I’m a huge fan of the work of NIH.
01:20:53 And he was right to say that the Chinese government
01:20:56 hasn’t been forthcoming and we need to look into it.
01:20:58 But then you asked him, well, how will we know?
01:21:01 And then his answer was,
01:21:03 we need to find the intermediate host.
01:21:06 Remember I said before, and so that made it clear
01:21:09 that he thought, well, we should have an investigation,
01:21:13 but it comes from nature and we just need to find
01:21:16 that whatever it is, that intermediate animal host
01:21:20 in the wild, and that’ll tell us the story.
01:21:22 So he already had the conclusion in mind
01:21:25 and they’re just waiting for the evidence
01:21:27 to support the conclusion.
01:21:28 That was my feeling.
01:21:29 I felt like he was open in general, but he was tilting.
01:21:33 And again, your first question was where do I fall?
01:21:36 He was like, I’m 85% or whatever it is, 80, 75, 90,
01:21:42 whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident.
01:21:45 It made it feel that he was 90, 10 in the other direction,
01:21:49 which is still means that he’s open minded
01:21:52 about the possibility.
01:21:54 And that’s why, in my view, every single person
01:21:58 who talks about this issue,
01:21:59 I think the right answer in my view is,
01:22:02 we don’t know conclusively.
01:22:04 In my, then this is my personal view,
01:22:06 the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor
01:22:08 of a lab incident origin,
01:22:10 but that could immediately shift
01:22:11 with additional information.
01:22:13 We need transparency, but we should come together
01:22:18 in absolutely condemning the outrageous coverup
01:22:23 carried out by the Chinese government,
01:22:25 which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation
01:22:30 into pandemic origins.
01:22:31 We have, if you use the economist numbers,
01:22:35 15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic.
01:22:39 And I believe that the actions of the Chinese government
01:22:44 are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead.
01:22:50 They’re insulting the families and the billions of people
01:22:54 around the world who have suffered
01:22:56 from this totally avoidable pandemic.
01:23:00 And whatever the origin, the fact the criminal coverup
01:23:03 carried out by the Chinese government,
01:23:06 which continues to this day, but most intensely
01:23:09 in the first months following the outbreak,
01:23:11 that’s the reason why we have so many dead.
01:23:16 And certainly, as I was saying before,
01:23:18 I and a small number of others have been carrying this flame
01:23:22 since early last year, but it’s kind of crazy
01:23:26 that our governments haven’t been demanding it.
01:23:29 And we can talk about the World Health Organization process,
01:23:33 which was deeply compromised in the beginning.
01:23:35 Now it’s become much, much better.
01:23:38 But again, it was the pressure of outsiders
01:23:42 that played such an important role in shifting
01:23:44 our national and international institutions.
01:23:48 And while that’s better than nothing,
01:23:50 it would have been far better if our governments
01:23:53 and international organizations
01:23:55 had done the right thing from the start.
01:23:56 If I could just make a couple of comments about Joe Rogan.
01:24:04 So there’s a bunch of people in my life
01:24:08 who have inspired me, who have taught me a lot,
01:24:11 who I even look up to, many of them are alive,
01:24:17 most of them are dead.
01:24:19 I wanna say that Joe said a few critical words
01:24:22 about the conversation with Francis Collins,
01:24:24 most of it offline, with a lot of great conversations
01:24:28 about it, some he said publicly.
01:24:32 And he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions
01:24:45 in an interview is not my strong suit.
01:24:48 And I really want to kind of respond to that,
01:24:53 which I did privately as well, but publicly,
01:24:56 to say that Joe is 100% right on that.
01:25:01 But that doesn’t mean that always has to be the case.
01:25:04 And that is definitely something I wanna work on.
01:25:06 Because most of the conversations I have,
01:25:08 I wanna see the beautiful ideas in people’s minds.
01:25:13 But there’s some times where you have to ask
01:25:15 the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas.
01:25:20 And it’s hard to do.
01:25:23 It’s a skill.
01:25:24 And Joe is very good at this.
01:25:26 He says the way he put it in his criticisms,
01:25:29 and he does this in his conversations,
01:25:31 which is, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
01:25:34 There’s a kind of sense like,
01:25:36 did you just say what you said?
01:25:38 Let’s make sure we get to the bottom,
01:25:42 we’ll clarify what you mean.
01:25:44 Because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas
01:25:54 can be said as a quick aside in a sentence,
01:25:59 like it’s nothing, but it could be everything.
01:26:02 And you wanna make sure you catch that
01:26:04 and you talk about it.
01:26:06 And not as a gotcha, not as a kinda way
01:26:10 to destroy another human being,
01:26:12 but to reveal something profound.
01:26:14 And that’s definitely something I wanna work on.
01:26:16 I also want to say that, as you said,
01:26:22 you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things.
01:26:24 So for a long time, Joe was somebody
01:26:26 that I was just a fan of and listened to.
01:26:28 He’s now a good friend.
01:26:30 And I would say we disagree more than we agree.
01:26:34 And I love doing that.
01:26:38 But at the same time, I learned from that.
01:26:41 So it’s like dual, like nobody in this world
01:26:46 can tell me what to think.
01:26:48 But I think everybody has a lesson to teach me.
01:26:54 I think that’s a good way to approach it.
01:26:57 Whenever somebody has words of criticism,
01:27:00 I assume they’re right and walk around with that idea
01:27:05 to really sort of empathize with that idea
01:27:07 because there’s a lesson there.
01:27:09 And oftentimes, my understanding of a topic
01:27:18 is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced
01:27:22 or much richer for that kind of empathetic process.
01:27:27 But definitely, I do not allow anybody
01:27:31 to tell me what to think, whether it’s Joe Rogan
01:27:35 or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents
01:27:39 or the proverbial girlfriend, which I don’t actually have.
01:27:47 But she’s still busting my balls.
01:27:49 Exactly, exactly.
01:27:51 In my imagination, I have a girlfriend in Canada
01:27:55 that I have imagined, exactly, imagining conversations.
01:28:00 So I want to mention that.
01:28:01 But also, I don’t know if you’ve gotten a chance
01:28:04 to see this, but I’d love to also mention
01:28:06 this Twitter feud between two other interesting people,
01:28:12 which is Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris
01:28:15 or Sam Harris and others in general.
01:28:18 And it kind of breaks my heart that these two people
01:28:22 I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues.
01:28:25 Let’s put COVID aside because people are very emotional
01:28:29 about this topic.
01:28:30 I mean, I think they’re deeply thoughtful and intelligent,
01:28:37 whether you agree with them or not.
01:28:39 And I always learn something from their conversations.
01:28:42 And they are legitimately or have been
01:28:44 for a long time friends.
01:28:46 And it’s a little bit heartbreaking to me
01:28:49 to see that they basically don’t talk in private anymore.
01:28:53 And there’s occasional jabs on Twitter.
01:28:57 And I hope that changes.
01:29:00 I hope that changes in general for COVID,
01:29:02 that COVID brought out the, I would say,
01:29:06 the most emotional sides of people, the worst in people.
01:29:10 And I think there hasn’t been enough love
01:29:14 and empathy and compassion.
01:29:16 And to see two people from whom I’ve learned a lot,
01:29:20 whether it’s Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Sam Harris,
01:29:23 you can criticize them as much as you want,
01:29:25 their ideas as much as you want.
01:29:27 But if you’re not sufficiently open minded
01:29:31 to admit that you have a lot to learn
01:29:33 from their conversations, I think you’re not being honest.
01:29:37 And so I do hope they have those conversations.
01:29:40 And I hope we can kind of,
01:29:42 I think there’s a lot of repairing to be done post COVID
01:29:45 of relationships, of conversations.
01:29:49 And I think empathy and love can help a lot there.
01:29:53 This is also just a, I talked to Sam privately,
01:29:58 but this is also a public call out
01:30:01 to put a little bit more love in the world.
01:30:08 And for these difficult conversations to happen.
01:30:14 Because Brett Weinstein could be very wrong
01:30:19 about a bunch of topics here around COVID,
01:30:25 but he could also be right.
01:30:27 And the only way to find out
01:30:29 is to have those conversations.
01:30:31 Because there’s a lot of people listening
01:30:32 to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein.
01:30:35 And if you go into these silos
01:30:39 where you just keep telling each other
01:30:44 that you are the possessors of truth
01:30:46 and nobody else is the possessor of truth,
01:30:48 what starts happening is you both lose track
01:30:53 or the capability of arriving at the truth.
01:30:56 Because nobody’s in the possession of the truth.
01:30:58 So anyway, this is just a call out
01:30:59 that we should have a little bit more conversation,
01:31:01 a little bit more love.
01:31:02 I totally agree.
01:31:04 And both of those guys are guys who I respect.
01:31:08 And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned,
01:31:11 they’re just a handful of us,
01:31:13 who were the early people raising questions
01:31:16 about the origins of this.
01:31:17 Of this pandemic, right.
01:31:19 He was there also talking.
01:31:21 So people have heard him speak quite a bit
01:31:24 about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff.
01:31:26 But he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on.
01:31:30 Yeah, exactly.
01:31:31 And so, but I completely agree with you
01:31:33 that we don’t have to agree with everybody,
01:31:37 but it’s great to have healthy conversations.
01:31:40 That’s how we grow.
01:31:42 And absolutely, we live in a world where we’re kind of,
01:31:46 if we’re not careful,
01:31:47 pushed into these little information pockets.
01:31:49 And certainly on social media,
01:31:51 I have different parts of my life.
01:31:53 One is focusing on issues of COVID origins.
01:31:58 And then I have genetics and biotechnology.
01:32:00 And then I have, which maybe we’ll talk about later,
01:32:02 one shared world, which is about
01:32:04 how do we build a safer future?
01:32:06 And when I say critical things like the Chinese government,
01:32:10 we’d have to demand a full investigation
01:32:12 into pandemic origins.
01:32:14 This is an outreach.
01:32:15 Then it’s really popular.
01:32:16 When I say, let’s build a better future
01:32:19 for everyone in peace and love,
01:32:20 it’s like, wow, three people liked it.
01:32:22 And one was my mother.
01:32:24 And so I just feel like we need to build,
01:32:27 we used to have that connectivity just built in
01:32:32 because we had these town squares
01:32:33 and you couldn’t get away from them.
01:32:35 Now we can get away from them.
01:32:37 So engaging with people who are of a different background
01:32:41 is really essential.
01:32:42 I’m on Fox News sometimes three, four times a week.
01:32:47 And I wouldn’t, in my normal life,
01:32:49 I’m not watching that much of Fox News
01:32:53 or even television more generally.
01:32:56 But I just feel like if I just speak to people
01:32:58 who are very similar to me, maybe it’ll be comfortable.
01:33:03 But what have I contributed?
01:33:05 So I think we really have to have
01:33:07 those kinds of conversations and recognize
01:33:11 that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy.
01:33:15 They want to live in a better world.
01:33:17 They maybe have different paths to get there.
01:33:20 But if we just break into camps
01:33:22 that don’t even connect with each other,
01:33:24 that’s a much more dangerous world.
01:33:28 Let’s dive back into the difficult pool.
01:33:32 Just like you said, in the English speaking world,
01:33:36 it seems popular, almost easy to demonize China.
01:33:43 The Chinese government, I should say.
01:33:46 But even China, like there’s this kind of gray area
01:33:50 that people just fall into.
01:33:52 And I’m really uncomfortable with that.
01:33:54 Perhaps because in my mind, in my heart, in my blood
01:33:58 are echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension.
01:34:01 But it feels like we almost desire conflict.
01:34:09 So we see demons when there is none.
01:34:12 So I’m a little cautious to demonize.
01:34:15 But at the same time, you have to be honest.
01:34:18 So it’s like honest with the demons that are there
01:34:22 and honest when they’re not.
01:34:25 This is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts.
01:34:29 So let’s keep talking about China
01:34:31 a little bit from different angles.
01:34:33 So let’s return to the director of the Center
01:34:37 of Emerging Infectious Disease
01:34:39 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Xi Zhengli,
01:34:44 colloquially referred to as Batwoman.
01:34:47 So do you think she’s lying?
01:34:51 Yes.
01:34:52 Do you think she’s being forced to lie?
01:34:54 Yes.
01:34:55 I’ve known a bunch of virologists
01:34:58 in private and public conversation
01:35:00 that respect her as a human being, as a scientist.
01:35:03 I respect her as a human being.
01:35:05 Sorry, as a scientist, not a human being.
01:35:07 Because I think they don’t know the human.
01:35:08 They know the scientists.
01:35:09 And they respect her a lot as a scientist.
01:35:11 Yeah, I respect her.
01:35:12 I’ve never met her.
01:35:13 We had one exchange, which I’ll mention in a second
01:35:16 in a virtual forum.
01:35:17 But I do respect her.
01:35:18 I actually think that she is somebody
01:35:20 who has tried to do the right thing.
01:35:23 She was one of the heroes of tracking down
01:35:25 the origins of SARS 1.
01:35:27 And that was a major contribution.
01:35:31 But as we talked about earlier,
01:35:34 it’s a different thing living, being a scientist,
01:35:38 or really kind of anything.
01:35:40 It’s different being one of those people
01:35:43 in an authoritarian society
01:35:47 than it is being in a different type of society.
01:35:50 And so when Xi Zhengli said that the reason
01:35:54 the WIV database was taken offline in September 19
01:36:00 was because of computer hacks,
01:36:02 I don’t think that’s the story.
01:36:03 I don’t think she thinks that’s the story.
01:36:07 When I asked her in March of 2021, March of this year,
01:36:12 in a Rutgers online forum,
01:36:15 when I asked her whether the Chinese military
01:36:18 had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
01:36:22 in any way, and she said, absolutely not, paraphrasing,
01:36:26 I think she was lying.
01:36:27 Do I think that she had the ability to say,
01:36:30 well, either one, yes, but I can’t talk about it,
01:36:34 or I know there are a lot of things
01:36:36 that are happening at this institute
01:36:38 that I don’t know about, and that could be one.
01:36:42 Could she have said that the personnel
01:36:46 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
01:36:48 have all had to go through classification training
01:36:52 so that they can know about what can and can’t be said?
01:36:57 Like she could have said all those things,
01:36:59 but she couldn’t say all of those things.
01:37:01 And I think that’s why so many, at least in my view,
01:37:07 so many people certainly in the Western world
01:37:11 got this story wrong from the beginning,
01:37:13 because if your only prism was the science,
01:37:17 and you just assumed this is a science question
01:37:20 to be left to the scientists,
01:37:22 should Zhengli is just like any scientist
01:37:26 working in Switzerland or Norway,
01:37:29 the Chinese government isn’t interfering in any way,
01:37:33 and we can trust them, that would lead you down one path.
01:37:37 In my view, the reason why I progressed as I did
01:37:40 is I felt like I had two keys,
01:37:42 and I had one key as I live in the science world
01:37:45 through my work with WHO and my books and things like that.
01:37:50 But I also have another part of my life
01:37:52 in the world of geopolitics as an Asia quote unquote expert
01:37:57 and former National Security Council official
01:38:00 and other things.
01:38:01 And I felt for me, I needed both keys to open that door.
01:38:06 But if I only had the science key,
01:38:08 I wouldn’t have had the level of doubt and suspicion
01:38:11 that I have.
01:38:12 But if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion,
01:38:16 well, it’s coming from China,
01:38:17 it must be that the government is guilty,
01:38:20 like that wouldn’t help either.
01:38:24 I wonder what’s in her mind,
01:38:26 whether it’s fear or habit,
01:38:30 because I think a lot of people in the former Soviet Union,
01:38:35 it’s like Chernobyl, it’s not really fear,
01:38:38 it’s almost like a momentum.
01:38:40 It’s like the reason I showed up to this interview
01:38:45 wearing clothes, as opposed to being naked.
01:38:48 It’s like, all right.
01:38:51 It’s like, it’s just all of us are doing the clothes thing.
01:38:55 Although there was a startup years ago called Naked News.
01:38:59 Did you ever hear about that?
01:39:00 They just would read the exact news.
01:39:02 With naked.
01:39:03 No, after each story, they’d take something off
01:39:06 until the end, I don’t think.
01:39:08 It’s a good idea for a podcast.
01:39:09 They have an IPO.
01:39:10 Stay tuned, next time I’m with Michael Miles.
01:39:13 Yeah.
01:39:14 Okay.
01:39:16 So what do you think,
01:39:18 I mean, because the reason I asked that question is,
01:39:22 how do we kind of take steps to improve
01:39:25 without any kind of revolutionary action?
01:39:27 You could say, we need to inspire the Chinese people
01:39:32 to elect, to sort of revolutionize the system
01:39:37 from within, but like, who are we to suggest that?
01:39:42 Because we have our flaws too.
01:39:44 We should be working on our flaws as well.
01:39:47 And so, but at the individual scientist level,
01:39:51 what are the small acts of rebellion that could be done?
01:39:55 How can we improve this?
01:39:57 Well, so I don’t know about small acts of rebellion,
01:40:01 but I’ll try to answer your question
01:40:03 from a few different perspectives.
01:40:07 So right now, actually, as we speak,
01:40:10 there is a special session
01:40:12 of the World Health Assembly going on.
01:40:14 And the World Health Assembly is the governing authority
01:40:17 over the World Health Organization,
01:40:19 where it’s represented by states and territories,
01:40:22 194 of them, tragically not including Taiwan,
01:40:26 because of the Chinese government’s assistance.
01:40:29 But they’re now beginning a process
01:40:31 of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty
01:40:35 to try to have a better process
01:40:37 for responding to crises exactly like we’re in.
01:40:42 But unfortunately, for the exact same reasons
01:40:45 that we have failed, I mean, we had a similar process
01:40:48 after the first SARS, we set up what we thought
01:40:50 was the best available system,
01:40:52 and it has totally failed here.
01:40:55 And it’s failed here because of the inherent pathologies
01:41:00 of the Chinese government system.
01:41:02 We are suffering from a pandemic that exists
01:41:06 because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese state.
01:41:11 And that’s why on one hand, I totally get this impulse.
01:41:14 Well, we do it our way, they do it their way.
01:41:17 Who’s to say that one way is better?
01:41:20 And certainly right now in the United States,
01:41:23 we’re at each other’s throats.
01:41:25 We have a hard time getting anything meaningful done.
01:41:28 And I’m sure there are people who are saying,
01:41:31 well, that model looks appealing.
01:41:33 But just as people could look to the United States
01:41:37 and say, well, because the United States
01:41:39 has such a massive reach, what we do domestically
01:41:41 has huge implications for the rest of the world,
01:41:44 they become stakeholders in our politics.
01:41:48 And that’s why I think for a lot of years,
01:41:49 people have just been looking at US politics,
01:41:52 not because it’s interesting,
01:41:53 but because the decisions that we make
01:41:55 have big implications for their lives.
01:41:58 The same is true for ours.
01:41:59 You could say that the lack of civil and political rights
01:42:04 in China is, I mean, it’s up to the Chinese,
01:42:08 not even people, because they have no say,
01:42:10 but to their government.
01:42:12 And they weren’t democratically elected,
01:42:14 that they are recognized as the government.
01:42:17 But some significant percentage of the 15 million people
01:42:23 now dead from COVID are dead
01:42:26 because in the earliest days following the outbreak,
01:42:29 whatever the origin, the voices of people
01:42:33 sounding the alarm were suppressed,
01:42:35 that the Chinese government had an,
01:42:37 just like in Chernobyl, the Chinese government
01:42:39 had a greater incentive to lie
01:42:42 to the international community than to tell the truth.
01:42:46 And everybody was incentivized
01:42:49 to pretty much do the wrong thing.
01:42:51 And so that’s why I think one of the big messages
01:42:55 of this pandemic is that all of our fates
01:42:57 are tied to everybody else’s fates.
01:43:00 And so while we can say and should say,
01:43:02 well, let’s focus on our own communities and our countries,
01:43:06 we’re all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere.
01:43:09 Can I ask you a weird question?
01:43:14 So I’m gonna do a few podcast interviews
01:43:20 with interesting people in Russia, in the Russian language,
01:43:24 because I could speak Russian.
01:43:27 And a lot of those people have,
01:43:30 are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats.
01:43:36 Do you think it’s possible to interview Xi Jinping?
01:43:40 Do you think it’s possible to interview somebody like her
01:43:44 or anyone in the Chinese government?
01:43:47 I think not.
01:43:49 And I think the reason is
01:43:52 because I think they would, one,
01:43:54 be uncomfortable being in any environment
01:43:57 where really unknown questions will be asked.
01:44:02 And I actually, so as you know, on this topic,
01:44:06 the Chinese, as I mentioned earlier,
01:44:07 the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists.
01:44:10 They can’t speak without prior government approval.
01:44:13 Xu Zhengli has been able to speak.
01:44:15 And she’s spoken at a number of forums.
01:44:17 I mentioned this Rutgers event.
01:44:19 What was the nature of that forum, the Rutgers event?
01:44:23 All of them were kind of science conversations
01:44:26 about the pandemic, including the origins issue.
01:44:33 But I think that she, in her response to my question,
01:44:37 it was kind of this funny thing.
01:44:38 So they had this event organized by Rutgers.
01:44:42 And I went on, there was an online event on Zoom,
01:44:45 but I got on there and I just realized
01:44:47 it was very poorly organized.
01:44:49 Like normally the controls that you would have
01:44:51 about who gets to chat to who, who gets to ask questions,
01:44:54 none of them were set.
01:44:56 And so I kind of couldn’t believe it.
01:44:58 I was just sitting at home in my neon green fleece
01:45:02 and I just started sending chat messages to Xu Zhengli.
01:45:06 So you could, anybody could send any.
01:45:08 Anybody could, it was insane.
01:45:09 But I thought, wow, this is incredible.
01:45:11 And so then it was unclear who got to ask questions.
01:45:16 And so I was like posting questions
01:45:18 and then I was sending chats to the organizers
01:45:20 of the event saying, I really have a question.
01:45:24 And first they said, well, you can submit your questions
01:45:27 and we’ll have submitted questions.
01:45:29 And then if we have time, we’ll open up.
01:45:31 So I just, I mean, I just thought, well, what the hell?
01:45:33 I just sent messages to everybody.
01:45:34 And then the event was already done.
01:45:37 They were 15 minutes over time.
01:45:39 And then they said, all right,
01:45:40 we have time just for one question.
01:45:42 And it’s Jamie Metzl.
01:45:44 And like, as I’m sitting there in my running clothes,
01:45:47 like I wasn’t, I was like multitasking and I heard my name.
01:45:50 And so I went diving back and I asked this question
01:45:55 about, did you know all of the work that was happening
01:46:00 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not just your work?
01:46:06 And can you confirm that US intelligence has said
01:46:10 that the military played a role,
01:46:14 was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
01:46:16 Do you deny that the Chinese military was involved
01:46:19 in any way with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
01:46:21 And as I said before, she said, this is crazy.
01:46:24 Absolutely not.
01:46:26 It got, it actually got,
01:46:27 that one question got covered in the media
01:46:29 because it was like, I think an essential question.
01:46:32 But I just think that since then, to my knowledge,
01:46:35 she’s not been in any public forums,
01:46:38 but that’s why most people would be shocked
01:46:41 that to date there has been no comprehensive
01:46:43 international investigation into pandemic origins.
01:46:46 There is no whistleblower provision.
01:46:49 So if you’re, my guess is there are at least tens,
01:46:52 maybe hundreds of people in China
01:46:55 who have relevant information
01:46:56 about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified
01:47:00 and don’t dare share it.
01:47:01 And let’s just say somebody wanted
01:47:04 to get that information out, to send it somewhere.
01:47:08 There’s no official address.
01:47:10 The WHO doesn’t have that, nobody has that.
01:47:13 And so I would love, I mean, you may as well ask.
01:47:16 I don’t think it’s likely that there’ll be a yes,
01:47:21 but it could well be that there are defectors
01:47:23 who will want to speak.
01:47:25 So let me also push back on this idea.
01:47:29 So one, I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing.
01:47:33 Because I’ve talked to,
01:47:34 so I understand Russian culture, I think,
01:47:38 or not understand, this is the thing.
01:47:40 I don’t understand basically anything in this world.
01:47:45 But I mean, I hear the music that is Russian culture
01:47:50 and I enjoy it.
01:47:51 I don’t hear that music for Chinese culture.
01:47:55 It’s just not something I’ve experienced.
01:47:57 So it’s a beautiful, rich, complex culture.
01:48:00 And from my sense, it seems distant to me.
01:48:05 Like whenever I look, even like we mentioned offline Japan
01:48:10 and so on, I probably don’t even understand
01:48:13 Japanese culture.
01:48:14 I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts
01:48:16 my whole life, but even that, it’s just so distant.
01:48:20 People who’ve lived in Japan, foreigners for like 20 years
01:48:23 say the exact same thing, yeah.
01:48:25 This makes me sad.
01:48:26 It makes me sad because I will never be able
01:48:29 to fully appreciate the literature, the conversations,
01:48:34 the people, the little humor and the subtleties.
01:48:38 And those are all essential to understand
01:48:39 even this cold topics of science.
01:48:43 Because all of that is important to understand.
01:48:46 So that’s a question for me if you think
01:48:48 language barriers a thing.
01:48:49 But the other thing I just want to kind of comment on
01:48:52 is the criticism of journalism that somebody like
01:48:57 Shi Zhengli or even Shi Zhengpeng, just anybody in China,
01:49:05 very skeptical to have really conversations
01:49:08 with anybody in the western media.
01:49:11 Because it’s like what are the odds that they will try
01:49:16 to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person.
01:49:19 And honestly, this is a harsh criticism.
01:49:23 I apologize, but I kind of mean it, is the journalists
01:49:30 that have some of these high profile conversations
01:49:34 often don’t do the work.
01:49:36 They come off as not very intelligent.
01:49:39 And I know they’re intelligent people.
01:49:41 They have not done the research.
01:49:43 They have not come up and like read a bunch of books.
01:49:46 They have not even read the Wikipedia article.
01:49:48 Meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize,
01:49:52 to try to understand the culture of the people,
01:49:54 all the complexities, all the different ideas in the spaces.
01:49:58 Do all the incredible, not all,
01:50:00 but some of the incredible work that you’ve done initially.
01:50:04 Like that, you have to do that work to earn the right
01:50:07 to have a deep real conversation with some of these folks.
01:50:11 And it’s just disappointing to me
01:50:13 that journalists often don’t do that work.
01:50:15 Yeah, so on that, just first I completely agree with you.
01:50:19 I mean, there is just an incredible beauty
01:50:22 in Chinese culture and I think all cultures,
01:50:25 but certainly China has such a deep and rich history,
01:50:29 amazing literature and art and just human beings.
01:50:34 I mean, I’m a massive critic of the Chinese government.
01:50:38 I’m very vociferous about the really genocide in Xinjiang,
01:50:42 the absolute effort to destroy Tibetan culture,
01:50:46 the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong,
01:50:51 incredibly illegal efforts to seize
01:50:54 basically the entire South China Sea.
01:50:56 And I could go on and on and on.
01:50:59 But Chinese culture is fantastic.
01:51:02 And I mean, I can’t speak to every technical field,
01:51:05 but just in terms of having journalists,
01:51:09 and I’ll speak to American journalists,
01:51:10 people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time
01:51:14 to live in China, to learn the language, learn the culture.
01:51:19 Peter himself, who is maybe one of our best journalists
01:51:22 covering China from a soul level,
01:51:26 he was kicked out of China.
01:51:27 So it’s very, very difficult.
01:51:30 His stuff.
01:51:31 His stuff.
01:51:32 Yeah, it’s really, and so for me,
01:51:32 you talked about my website on pandemic origins.
01:51:36 So when I launched it, I had it,
01:51:38 I’m not a Chinese speaker,
01:51:40 but I had the entire site translated into Chinese
01:51:44 and I have it up on my website just because I felt like,
01:51:48 well, if somebody, I mean, the great firewall
01:51:51 makes it very, very difficult for people in China
01:51:53 to access that kind of information.
01:51:56 But I figured if somebody gets there
01:51:58 and they wanna have it in their own language.
01:52:02 But it’s hard because the Chinese government
01:52:04 is represented by these quote unquote wolf warriors,
01:52:08 which is, it’s like these basic ruffians.
01:52:11 And I personally was condemned by name
01:52:15 by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry
01:52:17 from the podium in Beijing.
01:52:20 And so it’s really hard because I absolutely think
01:52:25 the American people and the Chinese people,
01:52:27 I mean, maybe all people, but we have so much in common.
01:52:31 I mean, yes, China is an ancient civilization,
01:52:36 but they kind of wiped out their own civilization
01:52:38 in the great leap forward and cultural revolution.
01:52:41 They burned their scrolls, they smashed their artworks.
01:52:44 And so it’s a very young society,
01:52:47 kind of like America is a young society.
01:52:50 So we have a lot in common.
01:52:53 And if we just kind of got out of our own ways,
01:52:57 we could have a beautiful relationship,
01:52:59 but there’s a lot of things that are happening.
01:53:01 Certainly the United States feels responsible
01:53:04 to defend the post war international order
01:53:07 that past generations helped build.
01:53:09 And I’m a certain believer in that
01:53:11 and China is challenging that and the Chinese government
01:53:16 and they’ve shared that with that view
01:53:18 with the Chinese people feel
01:53:19 that they haven’t been adequately respected.
01:53:21 And now they’re building a massive nuclear arsenal
01:53:26 and all these other things to try to position themselves
01:53:29 in the world with an articulated goal
01:53:31 of being the lead country in the world.
01:53:33 And that puts them at odds with the United States.
01:53:34 So there are a lot of real reasons
01:53:37 that we need to be honest about for division.
01:53:39 But if that’s all we focus on,
01:53:42 if we don’t say that there’s another side of the story
01:53:45 that brings us together,
01:53:47 we’ll put ourselves on an inevitable glide path
01:53:51 to a terrible outcome.
01:53:53 What do you make of Xi Jinping?
01:53:57 So two questions.
01:53:57 So one in general and two more on lab leak
01:54:01 and his meeting with our president Biden
01:54:05 in discussion of lab leak.
01:54:07 So I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal
01:54:15 articulated of establishing China
01:54:17 as the lead country in the world
01:54:20 by the 100th anniversary of the founding
01:54:22 of the modern Chinese state.
01:54:26 And it’s ruthless and it’s strategic.
01:54:29 There’s a great book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi
01:54:33 who’s actually now working in the White House
01:54:36 about this goal and our pretty clearly articulated goal
01:54:41 to subvert the post war international order
01:54:45 and in China’s interest.
01:54:47 And maybe every leader wants to organize the world
01:54:50 around their interest.
01:54:51 But I feel that his vision of what that entails
01:54:56 is not one that I think is shareable
01:54:59 for the rest of the world.
01:55:00 I mean, the strength of the United States
01:55:01 with all of our flaws is particularly
01:55:04 in that post war period,
01:55:06 we put forward a model that was desirable
01:55:10 to a lot of people.
01:55:11 Certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe
01:55:13 and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea.
01:55:17 Doesn’t mean it’s perfect.
01:55:18 The United States is deeply flawed.
01:55:21 As articulated to date,
01:55:23 I don’t think most people and countries
01:55:26 would like to live in a Sinocentric world.
01:55:30 And so I certainly, as I mentioned before,
01:55:32 I’m a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing,
01:55:34 the incredible brutality in Xinjiang,
01:55:39 in Tibet and elsewhere.
01:55:42 Yeah, the censorship one gives me a lot of trouble
01:55:47 on the science realm and just in journalism
01:55:51 and just the world that prevents us
01:55:53 from having conversations with each other.
01:55:56 Do you know about the Winnie the Pooh thing?
01:55:58 Yes, I mean, it’s ridiculous.
01:56:01 So to me, that’s such a good illustration
01:56:03 of censorship being petty.
01:56:08 But censorship has to be petty
01:56:09 because the goal of censorship,
01:56:12 maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union,
01:56:14 is to get into your head.
01:56:16 Like if it’s just censorship,
01:56:17 like you say down with the state
01:56:20 and like you can’t say that,
01:56:22 but you can say all the other things up to that point,
01:56:26 eventually people will feel empowered
01:56:28 to say down with the state.
01:56:29 And so I think the goal
01:56:30 of this kind of authoritarian censorship
01:56:33 is to turn you into the censor.
01:56:36 And so the…
01:56:38 Like self censor.
01:56:39 Yeah, because they almost have to have you think,
01:56:41 well, if I’m gonna make any criticism,
01:56:44 maybe they’re gonna come and get me.
01:56:45 So it’s safer to not do it.
01:56:48 I mean, I’ve traveled through North Korea
01:56:50 pretty extensively and I’ve seen that in its ultimate form,
01:56:53 but that’s what they’re trying to do in China too.
01:56:56 Yeah, so for people who are not familiar,
01:57:00 it’s such a clear illustration
01:57:01 of just the pettiness of censorship
01:57:03 and leaders, the corrupting nature of power.
01:57:07 But there’s a meme of Xi Jinping
01:57:10 with, I guess, Barack Obama.
01:57:13 And the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh
01:57:18 in that picture.
01:57:20 And that was the President Xi Jinping
01:57:25 looks like Winnie the Pooh.
01:57:26 And I guess that became, because that got censored,
01:57:30 like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored
01:57:32 all across China.
01:57:33 Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero
01:57:38 that represents freedom of speech and so on.
01:57:41 But it’s just such a absurd…
01:57:44 Because we spend so much time in this conversation
01:57:47 talking about the censorship
01:57:49 that’s a little bit more understandable to me,
01:57:52 which is like, we messed up.
01:57:55 And it wasn’t, maybe it’s almost understandable errors
01:57:59 that happen in the progress of science.
01:58:02 I mean, you could always argue
01:58:05 that there’s a lot of mistakes along the way
01:58:09 and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake.
01:58:11 You can argue that same way for the Chernobyl.
01:58:14 But those are sort of understandable and difficult topics.
01:58:18 Like Winnie the Pooh.
01:58:19 But in your message, it shows both sides of the story.
01:58:22 I mean, one, how petty authoritarian censors have to be.
01:58:26 And that’s why the messaging from the Chinese government
01:58:29 is so consistent.
01:58:30 No matter who you are,
01:58:32 you have to be careful what you say.
01:58:33 And that’s why it’s the story of Peng Shui,
01:58:37 the tennis player.
01:58:38 She dared raise her voice in an individual way.
01:58:42 Jack Ma, the richest man in China,
01:58:46 had a minor criticism of the Chinese government.
01:58:50 He had basically disappeared from the public eye.
01:58:54 Fan Bingbing, who’s like one of the leading
01:58:57 Chinese movie stars,
01:58:59 she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished.
01:59:03 And so the message is no matter who you are,
01:59:06 no matter what level,
01:59:08 if you don’t mind everything you say,
01:59:11 you could lose everything.
01:59:12 I’m pretty hopeful, optimistic about a lot of things.
01:59:15 And so for me, if the Chinese government stays
01:59:19 with its current structure,
01:59:21 I think what I hope they start fixing
01:59:24 is the freedom of speech.
01:59:26 But they can’t.
01:59:27 I mean, the thing is if they open up freedom of speech
01:59:32 really in a meaningful way,
01:59:34 they can’t maintain their current form of government.
01:59:38 And it’s connected, as I was saying before,
01:59:40 to the origins of the pandemic.
01:59:42 I mean, if my hypothesis was right,
01:59:45 that was the big choice that the national government had.
01:59:48 Do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic?
01:59:51 Do we deliver a message that transparency is required,
01:59:55 public transparency is required from local officials?
01:59:58 If they do that, the entire system collapsed.
02:00:02 Pretty much everybody in China has a relative
02:00:06 who has died as a result of the actions
02:00:09 of the Communist Party,
02:00:10 particularly in the Great Leap Forward.
02:00:12 It’s nearly 50 million people died
02:00:15 as a result of Mao’s disastrous policies.
02:00:18 And yet why is Mao’s picture still on Tiananmen Square
02:00:21 and it’s on the money?
02:00:23 Because maintaining that fiction
02:00:26 is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state.
02:00:29 If people were allowed, just say what you want.
02:00:32 Do you really think Mao was such a great guy,
02:00:35 even though your own relatives are dead as a result?
02:00:39 Do you really buy even on this story
02:00:43 that China did nothing wrong,
02:00:45 even though in the earliest days of the pandemic,
02:00:48 these two, at least Chinese scientists themselves,
02:00:51 courageously issued a preprint paper
02:00:54 that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted,
02:00:58 saying, well, this looks like this comes
02:01:00 from one of the Wuhan labs that we’re studying.
02:01:03 Like if you opened up that window,
02:01:06 I think that the Chinese government
02:01:09 would not be able to continue in its current form.
02:01:12 And that’s why they cracked down at Tiananmen Square.
02:01:14 That’s why with Feng Shui, the tennis player,
02:01:17 if they had let her accuse somebody
02:01:21 from the Communist Party of sexual assault,
02:01:24 and they said, okay, now people,
02:01:26 you can use social media
02:01:28 and you can have your me too moment
02:01:30 and let us know who in the Chinese Communist Party
02:01:34 or your boss in a business has assaulted you.
02:01:37 Just like in every society,
02:01:38 I’m sure there’s tons of women
02:01:40 who’ve been sexually assaulted, manipulated, abused by men.
02:01:45 And so I certainly hope
02:01:48 that there can be that kind of opening.
02:01:51 But if I were an authoritarian dictator,
02:01:54 that’s the thing I would be most afraid of.
02:01:56 Yeah, dictator perhaps,
02:01:58 but I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech.
02:02:01 So I think you can maintain control over the freedom
02:02:04 of press first.
02:02:06 So control the press more,
02:02:08 but let the lower levels sort of open up YouTube, right?
02:02:13 Open up like where individual citizens can make content.
02:02:17 I mean, there’s a lot of benefits to that.
02:02:19 And then from an authoritarian perspective,
02:02:22 you can just say that’s misinformation,
02:02:25 that’s conspiracy theories, all those kinds of things.
02:02:28 But at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech
02:02:32 at the level of the individual citizen,
02:02:35 that’s good for entrepreneurship,
02:02:38 for the development of ideas,
02:02:39 of exchange of ideas, all that kind of stuff.
02:02:41 I just think that increased the GDP of the country.
02:02:44 So I think there’s a lot of benefits.
02:02:46 I feel like you can still play,
02:02:48 we’re playing some like dark thoughts here,
02:02:50 but I feel like you could still play the game of thrones,
02:02:54 still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry.
02:03:00 Like I think just like with North Korea is a good example
02:03:04 of where cracking down too much
02:03:07 can completely destroy your country.
02:03:10 Like there’s some balance you can strike in your evil mind
02:03:14 and still maintain authoritarian control over the country.
02:03:17 Obviously, it’s not obvious,
02:03:20 but I’m a big supporter of freedom of speech.
02:03:24 I mean, it seems to work really well.
02:03:26 I don’t know what the failure cases
02:03:28 for freedom of speech are.
02:03:30 Probably we’re experiencing them with Twitter
02:03:32 and like where the nature of truth
02:03:34 is being completely kind of flipped upside down.
02:03:38 But it seems like on the whole,
02:03:41 ability to defeat lies with more,
02:03:47 not through censorship, but through more conversations,
02:03:50 more information is the right way to go.
02:03:53 Can I tell you a little story, true stories
02:03:54 about North Korea?
02:03:56 So a number of years ago, I was invited
02:03:58 to be part of a small six person delegation
02:04:01 advising the government of North Korea
02:04:04 on how to establish special economic zones
02:04:07 because other countries have used these SEZs
02:04:10 as a way of building their economies.
02:04:13 And when I was invited, I thought,
02:04:15 well, maybe there’s an opening.
02:04:17 And I certainly believe in that.
02:04:19 So we flew to China across the border into North Korea.
02:04:24 And then we were met by our partners
02:04:27 from the North Korean Development Organization.
02:04:30 And then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks
02:04:33 visiting all these sites for where they were intended
02:04:38 to create these special economic zones.
02:04:39 And in each site, they had their local officials
02:04:42 and they had a map and they showed us where everything
02:04:45 that was going to be built.
02:04:47 And the other people who were like really technical experts
02:04:50 on how to set up a special economic zone,
02:04:52 they were asking questions, well, like,
02:04:53 should you put the entrance over here
02:04:55 or shouldn’t you put it over there
02:04:56 and what if there’s flooding?
02:04:58 And I kept asking just these basic questions,
02:05:00 like, what do you think you’re going to do here?
02:05:02 Why do you think you can be competitive?
02:05:05 Do you know anything about who you’re competing against?
02:05:07 Are you empowering your workers to innovate
02:05:10 because everybody else is innovating?
02:05:12 So at the end of the trip, they flew us to Pyongyang
02:05:14 and they put us in this,
02:05:15 it looked kind of like the United Nations.
02:05:17 They probably had 500 people there
02:05:20 and I gave a speech to them.
02:05:22 I obviously was in English and it was translated
02:05:26 and I figured, you know, I’ve come all this way,
02:05:29 I’m just going to be honest.
02:05:30 If they arrest me for being honest, that’s on them.
02:05:34 And I said, I’m here because I believe
02:05:38 we can never give up hope,
02:05:39 that we always have to try to connect.
02:05:41 I’m also here because I think that North Korea
02:05:45 connecting to the world economy is an important first step.
02:05:50 But having visited all of your special economic zone sites
02:05:52 and having met with all of your, or many of your officials,
02:05:56 I don’t think your plan has any chance of succeeding
02:05:59 because you’re trying to sell into a global market,
02:06:03 but you need to have market information that,
02:06:07 and I gave examples of GE and others
02:06:10 that the innovation can’t only happen at one place.
02:06:14 And if you want innovation to happen
02:06:17 from the people who are doing this,
02:06:19 you have to empower them, they have to have access,
02:06:22 they have to have voice.
02:06:23 I mean, nobody, I mean, the people after,
02:06:28 they kind of had to condemn me
02:06:30 because what I was saying was challenging.
02:06:32 So I certainly agree with you.
02:06:33 And then just one side story of then that night,
02:06:37 and it was just kind of bizarre
02:06:39 because North Korea is, it’s so desperately poor,
02:06:42 but they were trying to impress us.
02:06:44 And so we had these embarrassingly sumptuous banquets.
02:06:49 And so for our final dinner that night,
02:06:51 really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast.
02:06:54 I mean, it was like China and waiters and tuxedos,
02:06:59 and they had this beautiful dinner.
02:07:02 And then afterwards,
02:07:04 because we’d now spent two weeks
02:07:05 with our North Korean partners,
02:07:07 they brought out this karaoke machine
02:07:08 and our North Korean counterparts,
02:07:11 they sang songs to us in Korean.
02:07:15 And so I said, well, we want to reciprocate.
02:07:18 Do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine?
02:07:21 It’s North Korea, obviously they didn’t.
02:07:23 But there was, I said, well, I have an idea.
02:07:25 And so there was one of the women
02:07:27 who’d been part of the North Korean delegation.
02:07:30 She was able just to play the piano,
02:07:32 just like you could hum a tune
02:07:34 and she could play it on the piano.
02:07:36 And so I said, all right, here’s this tune,
02:07:39 which I whispered in her ear.
02:07:41 When I give you the signal,
02:07:42 just play this tune over and over.
02:07:45 And so I got these, I mean, there were the six of us
02:07:48 and maybe 20 North Koreans,
02:07:49 and we were all in a circle,
02:07:51 so everybody hold hands and then put your right,
02:07:54 just try to put your right foot in front of your left
02:07:57 and then left foot in front of the right, going sideways.
02:08:00 And I said, all right, hit it.
02:08:02 And she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila.
02:08:06 And I think it was the first
02:08:08 and only horror that they’ve ever done in North Korea.
02:08:11 That’s hilarious.
02:08:12 I survived.
02:08:13 Was this recorded or no?
02:08:14 It was not.
02:08:15 Oh, no.
02:08:15 Yeah, if they had free YouTube,
02:08:18 this would have been a big one.
02:08:19 Yeah.
02:08:21 Let’s return to the beginning
02:08:23 and just patient zero.
02:08:28 It’s kind of always incredible to think
02:08:30 that there’s one human at which it all started.
02:08:33 Yeah.
02:08:36 Who do you think was patient zero?
02:08:38 Do you think it was somebody that worked
02:08:42 at Wuhan Institute of Virology?
02:08:47 Do you think there was a leak of some other kind
02:08:52 that led to the infection?
02:08:55 What do we know?
02:08:55 Because there’s this December 8th slash December 16th case
02:08:59 of maybe you can describe what that is.
02:09:04 And then there’s like, what’s his name?
02:09:09 Michael Warobey has a nice timeline.
02:09:12 I’m sure you have a timeline.
02:09:14 But he has a nice timeline that puts the average
02:09:17 at like November something, like 18th and November 16th
02:09:22 as the average estimate for when the patient zero
02:09:27 got infected, when the first human infection happened.
02:09:30 Yeah, so just two points.
02:09:32 One is it may be that there’s infectee zero
02:09:36 and patient zero.
02:09:37 It could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic
02:09:41 because we know there’s a lot of people
02:09:42 who are asymptomatic.
02:09:44 And then there’s the question of, well, who is patient zero?
02:09:47 Meaning the first person to present themselves
02:09:51 in some kind of health facility
02:09:53 where that diagnosis could be made.
02:09:56 So can we actually linger on that definition?
02:09:58 Yeah.
02:09:59 So is that to you a good definition of patient zero?
02:10:02 Okay, there’s a bunch of stuff here
02:10:04 because this virus is weird.
02:10:06 So one is who gets infected, one who is infectious
02:10:11 or the first person infect others.
02:10:14 Yeah.
02:10:15 And who shows up to a hospital.
02:10:17 Yeah, so I think that’s why I’m calling the first person
02:10:19 to show up to a hospital who’s diagnosed with COVID 19.
02:10:22 I’m calling that person patient zero.
02:10:24 There’s also, there’s somewhere the first person
02:10:28 to be infected.
02:10:29 And that person maybe never showed up in a hospital
02:10:32 because maybe they were asymptomatic and never get sick,
02:10:36 so got sick.
02:10:37 So let me start with what I’m calling infectee zero.
02:10:40 Here are some options.
02:10:41 I talked before about some person who was a villager
02:10:46 and some remote village.
02:10:47 It’s almost impossible to imagine, but possible to imagine
02:10:51 because strange things happen.
02:10:54 And that person somehow gets to Wuhan.
02:10:57 By the way, just to still make that argument,
02:11:00 there’s not an argument, it’s a statement,
02:11:01 but strange things happen all the time.
02:11:05 No, I agree.
02:11:06 It doesn’t mean that logic doesn’t apply
02:11:09 and probabilities don’t apply, but we all,
02:11:11 I mean, in general principle, everyone, if we were honest,
02:11:16 should be agnostic about everything.
02:11:19 Like I think I’m Jamie, but is there a 0.01% chance
02:11:23 or 0.001% chance that I’m not?
02:11:27 But it could be.
02:11:28 I mean, how would I know?
02:11:29 But there’s a large number of people arguing
02:11:30 about the meaning of the word I
02:11:31 and that I’m Jamie.
02:11:33 So exactly.
02:11:33 What is consciousness?
02:11:34 Exactly, exactly.
02:11:35 So we could spend another three hours going into that one.
02:11:39 So one possibility is there’s some remote villager.
02:11:42 Another possibility is there’s somehow bizarrely,
02:11:47 there are these infected animals
02:11:49 that come from Southern China most likely.
02:11:52 They all, maybe there’s only one of them that’s infected,
02:11:55 which how could that possibly be?
02:11:58 And it’s only sent to Wuhan.
02:11:59 It’s not sent anywhere else,
02:12:02 to any of the markets there or whatever.
02:12:04 And then maybe somebody in a market is infected.
02:12:06 That’s one remote possibility, but a possibility.
02:12:10 Another is that researchers
02:12:13 from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
02:12:15 go down to Southern China.
02:12:17 We didn’t, we haven’t talked about it yet,
02:12:19 but in 2012, there were six miners were sent
02:12:22 into a copper mine in Southern China and Yunnan province.
02:12:26 All of them got very sick
02:12:28 with what now appear like COVID 19 like symptoms.
02:12:31 Half of them died.
02:12:34 Blood samples from them were taken
02:12:37 to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere.
02:12:40 And then after that, there were multiple site visits
02:12:45 to that mine, collecting viral samples
02:12:49 that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
02:12:52 included among those samples were,
02:12:55 was this now infamous RETG 13 virus,
02:12:59 which is among the genetically closest viruses
02:13:02 to SARS CoV2.
02:13:03 There were other nine other or eight other viruses
02:13:07 that were collected from that mine
02:13:08 that were presumably very similar to that.
02:13:11 And again, we have no access to the information
02:13:14 about those and many of the other,
02:13:17 most, almost all of the other viruses.
02:13:19 So could it be that one of the people
02:13:24 who was sent from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
02:13:26 or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control,
02:13:29 they went down there to collect
02:13:31 and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back?
02:13:34 Could it be that they were working on these viruses
02:13:37 in the laboratory and there was an issue
02:13:40 with waste disposal?
02:13:41 And we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem
02:13:45 with waste disposal.
02:13:46 And just before the pandemic,
02:13:48 one, they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal.
02:13:53 And in early 2019, they moved to their new site,
02:13:59 which was basically across the street
02:14:00 from the Huanan Seafood Market.
02:14:03 So could there have been issue of somebody infected
02:14:06 in the lab of waste disposal?
02:14:08 Could a laboratory animal, their experiences
02:14:10 in China, actually China just recently passed a law
02:14:13 saying it’s illegal to sell laboratory animals
02:14:17 in the market because there were scientists,
02:14:19 or one scientist who was selling laboratory animals
02:14:23 in the market and people would just come and buy.
02:14:27 It’s insane.
02:14:28 So there’s so many, there are so many scenarios,
02:14:31 but if I, again, connect it to my 85% number,
02:14:35 I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents,
02:14:39 whether it’s collection, waste,
02:14:42 something connected to the lab,
02:14:43 I think that’s the most likely,
02:14:46 but there are other credible people
02:14:49 who would say they think it’s not the most likely
02:14:52 and I welcome their views
02:14:54 and we need to have this conversation.
02:14:55 So in your write up, but what’s the URL?
02:14:59 Because I always find it by doing Jamie Metzl lab leak.
02:15:03 It’s probably the easiest, just Google that.
02:15:05 No, no, but if you just go to jamiemetzl.com,
02:15:08 J A M I E M E T Z L dot com,
02:15:11 then they’re just a thing, it’s COVID origins.
02:15:15 It’s COVID origins.
02:15:17 Or you could just Google Jamie Metzl lab leak.
02:15:21 Google search engine is such a powerful thing.
02:15:23 You mentioned in that write up that you don’t think,
02:15:27 this could be just me misreading it
02:15:29 or it’s just slightly miswritten,
02:15:31 but you don’t think that the virus
02:15:34 is from that 2012 mind, which is fascinating,
02:15:38 could be the backbone for SARS COVID too.
02:15:40 So what I mean, just the specific virus,
02:15:43 which I mentioned, RATG13,
02:15:45 and there’s a whole history of that
02:15:48 because it had a different name and it looked,
02:15:51 and Xiaojiang Li provided wrong information
02:15:54 about when it had been sequenced.
02:15:57 I mean, there was a whole issue connected to that.
02:16:01 But the genetic difference,
02:16:02 even though it’s 96.2% similar to the SARS COVID2 virus,
02:16:10 that’s actually a significant difference,
02:16:12 even though that and a virus called Banal 52
02:16:17 that was collected in Laos are the two most similar,
02:16:20 there still are differences.
02:16:22 So I’m not saying RATG13 is the backbone,
02:16:25 but is there, I believe there is a possibility
02:16:28 that other viruses that were collected
02:16:32 either in that mine in Yunnan in Southern China
02:16:36 or in Laos or Cambodia,
02:16:39 because that was with the EcoHealth Alliance
02:16:43 proposals and documents.
02:16:45 Their plan was to collect viruses
02:16:48 in Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere
02:16:51 and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
02:16:54 so that there are people.
02:16:55 As a matter of fact, just when I was sitting here
02:16:57 before this interview,
02:17:01 I got a message from somebody who was saying,
02:17:03 well, Peter Daszak is telling everybody
02:17:06 that the viral sample, the Banal 52 from Laos
02:17:10 proves that there’s not a lab incident origin
02:17:13 of the pandemic.
02:17:14 And it actually doesn’t prove that at all
02:17:17 because these viruses were being collected
02:17:20 in places like Laos and Cambodia
02:17:24 and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
02:17:28 Those are like early, early, like the prequel.
02:17:32 So these are, they’re not sufficiently similar
02:17:35 to be a, to serve as a backbone,
02:17:37 but they kind of tell a story
02:17:38 that they could have been brought to the lab
02:17:40 through several processes, including genetic modification
02:17:44 or through the natural evolution processes,
02:17:47 accelerated evolution, they could have arrived
02:17:49 to something that has the spike protein
02:17:52 and the cleavage, the foreign cleavage site
02:17:56 and all that kind of stuff.
02:17:56 So what I’m saying is the essential point
02:18:00 is if we had access, if we knew everything
02:18:03 that was being, every virus that was being held
02:18:05 at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan CDC,
02:18:09 we had full access.
02:18:10 We had full access to everybody’s lab notes.
02:18:13 And we did just the kind of forensic investigation
02:18:16 that has been so desperately required since day one.
02:18:21 We’d be able to say, well, what did you have?
02:18:24 Because if we knew, if it should come out,
02:18:26 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in its repository,
02:18:30 prior to the outbreak, either SARS CoV2
02:18:34 or a reasonable precursor to it,
02:18:36 that would prove the lab incident hypothesis.
02:18:39 In my mind, that’s almost certainly why they are preventing
02:18:42 any kind of meaningful investigation.
02:18:46 So my hypothesis is not that what RITG13 says
02:18:51 is because as I mentioned earlier,
02:18:54 the genetics of virus are constantly recombinating.
02:18:59 So that what that means is if you have,
02:19:01 you don’t have very many total outlier viruses
02:19:06 in a bat community because these viruses
02:19:08 are always mixing and matching with each other.
02:19:11 And so if you have RITG13, which is relatively similar
02:19:16 to SARS CoV2, there’s a pretty decent likelihood
02:19:19 there was other stuff that was collected
02:19:22 at this mine called Mojang Mine in Yunnan Province,
02:19:28 maybe in Laos and Cambodia.
02:19:30 And that’s why we need to have that information.
02:19:36 Do you think somebody knows who patient zero is
02:19:39 within China?
02:19:39 So do you think that is?
02:19:40 Well, there’s two things.
02:19:42 One is I think somebody and people probably know.
02:19:45 And then two, it’s been incredibly curious
02:19:47 that the best virus chasers in the world are in China.
02:19:52 And they are in Wuhan.
02:19:54 And when we can talk about this deeply compromised,
02:19:58 now vastly improved World Health Organization process.
02:20:03 But when they went there, the Chinese,
02:20:05 the local and national Chinese authorities say,
02:20:07 oh, we haven’t done, we haven’t tested the samples
02:20:10 in our blood center.
02:20:11 We haven’t done any of this tracing.
02:20:13 And these deeply compromised people
02:20:16 who were part of the international part
02:20:20 of the joint study tour, when they came out with their,
02:20:25 they had their visit earlier this year
02:20:26 and came out with their report.
02:20:28 They had in my mind, just an absurd letter
02:20:32 to the editor in nature saying,
02:20:34 well, if we don’t hurry back,
02:20:35 we’re not gonna know what happened.
02:20:37 Assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins
02:20:41 who on their own don’t know how to trace the origin
02:20:44 of a virus and the opposite is the case.
02:20:47 So I think there are people in China
02:20:50 who at least know a lot.
02:20:51 They know a lot more than they’re saying.
02:20:55 And at the best case scenario is the Chinese government
02:20:59 wants to prevent any investigation, including by them.
02:21:03 The worst case scenario is that there are people
02:21:06 who already know.
02:21:07 And that’s why, again, my point from day one has been,
02:21:10 we need a comprehensive international investigation
02:21:14 in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records,
02:21:18 samples and personnel.
02:21:19 When this, again, deeply flawed.
02:21:22 Can I give you a little history of this WHO process?
02:21:27 Okay.
02:21:28 Who are the, that’s funny.
02:21:32 Who’s on first?
02:21:33 Who’s on first?
02:21:34 I’m so funny with the jokes.
02:21:36 Look at me go.
02:21:38 Who are the WHO?
02:21:39 So what is this organization?
02:21:41 What is its purpose?
02:21:43 What role did it play in the pandemic?
02:21:45 It certainly was demonized in the realm of politics.
02:21:49 This is an institution that was supposed to save us
02:21:55 from this pandemic.
02:21:57 A lot of people believe it failed.
02:21:58 Has it failed?
02:22:00 Why did it fail?
02:22:01 And you said it’s improving.
02:22:02 How is it improving?
02:22:04 Great.
02:22:05 All right.
02:22:05 I hope you don’t mind.
02:22:06 I’m gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra time.
02:22:08 I love this.
02:22:09 I love this.
02:22:10 Good, good, good, good.
02:22:12 So the WHO is an absolutely essential organization
02:22:16 created in 1948 in that wonderful period
02:22:20 after the Second World War
02:22:22 when the United States and allied countries
02:22:24 asked the big bold questions,
02:22:27 how do we build a safer world for everyone?
02:22:30 And so that’s the WHO.
02:22:33 If we, although there are many critics of the WHO,
02:22:36 if we didn’t have it, we would need to invent it
02:22:39 because the whole nature of these big public health issues
02:22:44 and certainly for pandemics, but all sorts of things
02:22:48 is that they are transnational in nature.
02:22:50 And so we cannot just build moats.
02:22:54 We cannot build walls.
02:22:55 We’re all connected to it.
02:22:56 So that’s the idea.
02:22:59 There’s a political process because the United Nations
02:23:02 and the WHO is part of it,
02:23:06 it exists within a political context.
02:23:08 And so the current director general
02:23:11 of the World Health Organization
02:23:13 who was just reelected for his second five year term
02:23:16 is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
02:23:20 who is from Ethiopia, Tigrayan from Ethiopia.
02:23:25 And in full disclosure, I have a lot of respect for Tedros.
02:23:31 Tedros got his job.
02:23:33 He was not America’s candidate.
02:23:35 He was not Britain’s candidate.
02:23:37 Our candidate was a guy named David Nabarro
02:23:39 who I also know and have tremendous respect for.
02:23:43 China led the process of putting Tedros in this position.
02:23:50 And in the earliest days of the pandemic,
02:23:54 Tedros, in my view,
02:23:55 even though I have tremendous respect for him,
02:23:57 I think he made a mistake.
02:23:59 The WHO doesn’t have its own
02:24:02 independent surveillance network.
02:24:04 It’s not organized to have it
02:24:05 and the states have not allowed it.
02:24:07 So it’s dependent on member states
02:24:10 for providing it information.
02:24:13 And because it’s a poorly funded organization
02:24:17 dependent on its bosses who are these governments,
02:24:20 it’s natural instinct isn’t to condemn its bosses.
02:24:24 It’s to say, well, let’s quietly work with everybody.
02:24:28 Having said that,
02:24:29 the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros.
02:24:33 And Tedros, in repeating the position
02:24:36 of the Chinese government,
02:24:37 which incidentally I’ll say Donald Trump
02:24:39 also did the exact same thing.
02:24:41 Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping
02:24:43 and then repeated what Xi had told him.
02:24:48 Both of them were wrong.
02:24:51 Dr. Tedros, I think when Chinese government was lying,
02:24:55 knowingly lying,
02:24:56 saying there’s no human to human transmission,
02:25:00 Dr. Tedros said that.
02:25:01 And even though within the World Health Organization,
02:25:04 there were private critiques saying
02:25:07 China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one,
02:25:10 it’s not providing access,
02:25:11 it’s not providing information.
02:25:13 Tedros’s instinct because of his background,
02:25:16 because of his role and wrongly,
02:25:21 was to have a more collaborative relationship with China,
02:25:25 particularly by making assertions
02:25:28 based on the information that was wrong.
02:25:30 Don’t call people liars,
02:25:32 they’re not gonna be happy with you.
02:25:33 They’re not gonna be happy.
02:25:34 And the job of the WHO isn’t to condemn states,
02:25:38 it’s to do the best possible job of addressing problems.
02:25:41 And I think that the culture was,
02:25:43 well, let’s do the most that we can.
02:25:45 If we totally alienate China on day one,
02:25:49 we’re in even worse shape than if we call them out for.
02:25:52 Not exactly sure, by the way,
02:25:54 that maybe you can also steel man that argument.
02:25:58 Like it’s not completely obvious that that’s
02:26:00 a terrible decision.
02:26:02 Like if you and I were in that role,
02:26:05 we wouldn’t make that decision.
02:26:06 It’s complicated because like,
02:26:09 you want China on your side to help solve this.
02:26:11 So I would have made a different decision,
02:26:14 which is why I never would have been selected
02:26:17 as the director general.
02:26:18 There’s a selection criteria
02:26:20 that everybody kind of needs to support you.
02:26:24 And so, but let me just, this is just the beginning.
02:26:27 Can you also just elaborate or kind of restate,
02:26:30 what were the inaccuracies that you quickly mentioned?
02:26:34 So human to human transmission, what were the things?
02:26:36 So the most important, there were a few things.
02:26:41 One, China didn’t report the outbreak.
02:26:46 Two, they had the sequenced genome
02:26:49 of the SARS CoV2 virus,
02:26:51 and they didn’t share it for two critical weeks.
02:26:55 And when they did share it, it was inadvertent.
02:26:59 I mean, there was a very, very courageous scientist
02:27:01 who essentially leaked it and was later punished
02:27:04 for leaking it, even though the Chinese government
02:27:06 is now saying we were so great by releasing the sequenced.
02:27:09 Wait, I was really confused.
02:27:10 Really?
02:27:11 So I’m so clueless about this as most things.
02:27:15 Because I thought, because there was a celebration of,
02:27:19 isn’t this amazing that we got the sequence,
02:27:23 that’s amazing, and then the scientific community
02:27:27 across the world stepped up and were able to do
02:27:30 a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing.
02:27:32 Because I thought the Chinese government shared it.
02:27:34 No, no, so they sat on it for two weeks.
02:27:37 When they shared it against their will, it was incredible.
02:27:40 Moderna, 48 hours later after getting the information,
02:27:45 getting the sequenced genome, they had the formulation
02:27:48 for what’s now the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine.
02:27:51 But that’s two critical weeks.
02:27:55 In those early days, they blocked the World Health
02:27:59 Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan
02:28:03 for more than three weeks.
02:28:04 I said they lied about human to human transmission.
02:28:08 During that time, they were aggressively enacting
02:28:11 their coverup, destroying records, hiding samples,
02:28:15 imprisoning people who were asking tough questions.
02:28:19 They soon after established their gag order.
02:28:24 They fought internally in the World Health Organization
02:28:27 to prevent the declaration of a global emergency.
02:28:32 So China definitely, I mean, I couldn’t be stronger
02:28:36 in my critique of China, particularly what it did
02:28:40 in those early days, but it really, what it’s doing
02:28:42 even to today is outrageous.
02:28:44 So that was, so then there was the question of,
02:28:48 well, how do we examine what actually happened?
02:28:51 And the Prime Minister of Australia then and now,
02:28:54 Scott Morrison, was incredibly courageous.
02:28:57 And he said, we need a full investigation.
02:28:59 And because of that, the Chinese government
02:29:02 attacked him personally and imposed trade sanctions
02:29:05 on Australia to try to, not just to punish Australia,
02:29:09 but to deliver a message to every other country.
02:29:12 If you ask questions, we’re going to punish you ruthlessly.
02:29:15 And then that certainly was the message that was delivered.
02:29:21 The Australians brought that idea of a full investigation
02:29:24 to the World Health Assembly in May of 2020.
02:29:28 As I mentioned before, the WHA is the governing authority
02:29:32 above, of states above the World Health Organization.
02:29:36 And so, but instead of passing a resolution calling
02:29:40 for a full investigation, what ended up ironically
02:29:44 and tragically passing with Chinese support
02:29:48 was a mandate to have essentially
02:29:50 a Chinese controlled joint study,
02:29:54 where half of the team, a little more than half of the team
02:29:56 was Chinese experts, government affiliated Chinese experts,
02:29:59 and half were independent international experts
02:30:04 but organized by the WHO.
02:30:08 And then it took six months
02:30:10 to negotiate the terms of reference.
02:30:12 And again, while China was doing all this coverup,
02:30:14 they delayed and delayed and delayed.
02:30:16 And by the terms of reference that were negotiated,
02:30:19 China had veto power over who got to be a member
02:30:22 of the international group.
02:30:25 And that group was not entitled to access to raw data.
02:30:31 The Chinese side would give them conclusions
02:30:34 based on their own analysis of the raw data,
02:30:37 which was totally outrageous.
02:30:39 So then, and I was a big, I and others,
02:30:43 now friend of mine, although we’ve never met in person,
02:30:46 Gilles de Manouf in New Zealand,
02:30:48 he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter
02:30:51 of the terms of reference.
02:30:54 So then it took, now it’s the January of this year,
02:30:59 January, 2021, this deeply flawed,
02:31:02 deeply compromised international group is sent to Wuhan.
02:31:07 So what’s the connection between this group
02:31:09 and the joint study?
02:31:10 So the joint study, it had the Chinese side
02:31:12 and the international side.
02:31:13 So these international experts,
02:31:15 then part of their examination was going
02:31:18 for one month to Wuhan.
02:31:19 And the nature of the flaws of this international group.
02:31:23 It’s okay, really important point.
02:31:24 And I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear on that.
02:31:26 Rather, the mandate of what they were doing
02:31:31 was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
02:31:34 It was to have a joint study
02:31:37 into the zoonotic origins of the virus,
02:31:40 which means, which was interpreted to mean
02:31:43 the natural origins hypothesis.
02:31:45 They weren’t empowered for a single hypothesis,
02:31:48 not so that they weren’t empowered
02:31:51 to examine the lab incident origin.
02:31:54 They were there to look at the natural origin hypothesis.
02:31:56 To shop for some meat at some markets.
02:31:58 Yeah, so that was, so then they were there for a month.
02:32:03 Yeah.
02:32:04 So out of the makeup of the team, guess who was?
02:32:09 So the United States government proposed three experts
02:32:12 for this team.
02:32:13 People who had a lot of background.
02:32:15 This was the Trump administration.
02:32:17 People who had a lot of background,
02:32:19 including in investigating lab incidents.
02:32:23 None of those people were accepted.
02:32:24 The one American who was accepted.
02:32:27 Don’t tell me it’s Peter Daszak.
02:32:28 Peter Daszak.
02:32:29 Peter Daszak, who had this funding relationship
02:32:33 for many years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
02:32:35 whose entire basically professional reputation
02:32:39 was based on his collaboration with Shujang Li,
02:32:43 who had written the February, 2020 Lancet letter
02:32:47 saying it comes from natural origin.
02:32:49 And anybody who’s suggesting otherwise
02:32:51 is a conspiracy theorist.
02:32:53 And who, at least according to me,
02:32:55 had been at very, very least the opposite of transparent
02:33:00 and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign.
02:33:03 He is the one American who’s on this.
02:33:07 So they go there, they have one month in Wuhan.
02:33:10 Two weeks of it are spent in quarantine
02:33:14 just in their hotel rooms.
02:33:15 So then they have two weeks,
02:33:17 but really it’s just 10 working days.
02:33:20 One of the earliest, and so then they’re kind of,
02:33:22 we’ve all seen the pictures.
02:33:23 They’re traveling around Wuhan in little buses.
02:33:27 One of the first visits they have
02:33:30 is to this museum exhibition on the,
02:33:33 it’s basically a propaganda exhibition on the success,
02:33:37 Xi Jinping and the success in fighting COVID.
02:33:40 And they said, well, we had to show respect
02:33:41 to our Chinese hosts.
02:33:42 But I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is,
02:33:44 let’s just, I’m just gonna rub your noses in this.
02:33:47 You’re gonna go where we tell you.
02:33:48 You’re gonna hear what we want you to hear.
02:33:53 So they have that little short time.
02:33:54 They spend a few hours.
02:33:56 They weren’t in control of where the bus goes.
02:33:59 No, I mean, they made recommendations.
02:34:01 Many of their recommendations were accepted,
02:34:05 but like when they went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
02:34:08 and some of them did,
02:34:10 they weren’t able to do any kind of audit
02:34:13 when they asked for access to raw data.
02:34:15 They weren’t provided that.
02:34:18 They were, it was, as I said in my 60 minutes interview,
02:34:22 it was a chaperoned study tour.
02:34:24 It was not even remotely close to an investigation.
02:34:27 And the thing they were looking at
02:34:29 wasn’t the origins of the pandemic.
02:34:32 It was the single hypothesis
02:34:34 of a quote unquote natural origins.
02:34:39 Then, I mean, it was really so shocking for me.
02:34:43 On February 9 of this year in Wuhan,
02:34:46 the Chinese government sets up a joint press event
02:34:51 where it’s the Chinese side and the international side.
02:34:55 And during that press event,
02:34:58 a guy named Peter Ben Embarek,
02:34:59 and it’s a little confusing.
02:35:00 He was basically the head of this delegation
02:35:04 and he works for the WHO,
02:35:06 even though this was an independent committee,
02:35:09 it was organized by the WHO.
02:35:11 So Peter Ben Embarek gets up there and says,
02:35:16 we think it’s most likely it comes from nature.
02:35:19 Then he says, we think it’s possible
02:35:22 it comes through frozen food,
02:35:23 which is absolutely outrageous.
02:35:25 I mean, it’s basically preposterous.
02:35:27 Alena Chan calls this popsicle origins,
02:35:32 but it’s really, really unlikely.
02:35:34 But then most significantly,
02:35:36 he says that we’ve all agreed
02:35:40 that a lab incident origin is quote unquote
02:35:43 extremely unlikely and shouldn’t be investigated.
02:35:47 We later learned that the way they came up
02:35:50 with that determination was by a show of hands vote
02:35:54 of the international experts and the Chinese experts.
02:35:57 And the Chinese experts had to do their vote
02:36:00 in front of the Chinese government officials
02:36:03 who were constantly there.
02:36:05 So even if whatever they thought,
02:36:07 there was no possibility that someone raises their hand
02:36:09 and say, oh yeah, I think it’s a lab origin.
02:36:12 So that was outrageous thing number one.
02:36:15 Outrageous thing number two,
02:36:16 which I mean, I’ll come back to my response in February.
02:36:21 Outrageous thing number two is months later,
02:36:24 Peter Benambarak does an interview on Danish television.
02:36:27 And he says, actually I was lying about extremely unlikely
02:36:32 because the Chinese side,
02:36:34 they didn’t want any mention of a lab incident origin
02:36:38 anywhere including in the report that later came out.
02:36:42 And so the deal we made, even though he himself thought
02:36:46 that at least some manifestation of a lab incident origin
02:36:49 was likely and that there should be an investigation,
02:36:53 particularly he said, well, that’s kind of weird
02:36:54 that the Wuhan CDC moved just across
02:36:57 from the Huanan seafood market
02:36:59 just before the beginning of the pandemic.
02:37:03 But he said as a horse trading deal
02:37:06 with the Chinese authorities,
02:37:08 it shouldn’t be that he agreed to say
02:37:12 it was extremely unlikely and shouldn’t be investigated.
02:37:15 So I was in actually in Colorado staying with my parents
02:37:18 and I stayed up late watching this press event.
02:37:23 And I was appalled because I knew after two weeks
02:37:25 there was no way they could possibly come to that conclusion.
02:37:29 So I immediately sent a private message to Tedros,
02:37:33 the WHO director general, essentially saying
02:37:37 there’s no way they had enough access
02:37:40 to come to this conclusion.
02:37:42 If the WHO doesn’t distance itself from this,
02:37:47 the WHO itself is going to be in danger
02:37:49 because it’s going to be basically institutional capture
02:37:53 by the Chinese.
02:37:54 This was repeating the Chinese government’s
02:37:56 propaganda points.
02:37:57 And Tedros sent me a really, again,
02:38:00 why I have so much respect for Tedros,
02:38:02 sent me a private note saying,
02:38:04 don’t worry, we are determined to do the right thing.
02:38:08 And so I got that private message.
02:38:10 And again, I really like Tedros,
02:38:11 but I thought, well, what are you gonna do?
02:38:14 Three days later, Tedros makes a public statement.
02:38:19 And he says, I’ve heard this thing.
02:38:23 I don’t think that this is a final answer.
02:38:25 We need to have a full investigation into this process.
02:38:29 He then released two more statements
02:38:32 saying we need to have a full investigation
02:38:37 with access to raw data.
02:38:38 And we need a full audit of the Wuhan labs.
02:38:42 So then that part was really, really great.
02:38:46 But then this saga continues because,
02:38:49 so I was part of a group, as I mentioned before,
02:38:51 this Paris group.
02:38:53 It was about two dozen or so experts.
02:38:55 And we’d been meeting since 2020 and having regular meetings.
02:39:00 And we just present papers, present data,
02:39:02 debate to try to really get to the bottom of things.
02:39:04 And it was all private.
02:39:06 So I went to this group and I said, look,
02:39:09 this playing field is now skewed.
02:39:12 These guys, they’ve put out this thing,
02:39:14 lab incident origin, extremely unlikely.
02:39:16 It’s in every newspaper in the world.
02:39:19 We can’t just be our own little private group
02:39:21 talking to each other.
02:39:23 So I led the political process of drafting
02:39:26 what became four open letters that many of us signed,
02:39:31 most of us signed, that saying, all right,
02:39:35 here’s why this study group and the report are not credible.
02:39:41 Here’s what’s wrong.
02:39:42 Here’s what a full investigation would look like.
02:39:45 Here’s a treasure map of all the resources
02:39:48 where people can look.
02:39:50 And we demand a comprehensive investigation.
02:39:52 So those four open letters were in pretty much
02:39:56 every newspaper in the world.
02:39:58 And it played a really significant role
02:40:00 along with some other things.
02:40:02 There was later, there was a letter, a short letter
02:40:05 in Science making basically similar points
02:40:10 in a much more condensed way.
02:40:11 There were some higher profile articles
02:40:14 by Nicholas Wade and Nick Baker and others.
02:40:19 And those collectively shifted the conversation.
02:40:24 And then really impressively, the WHO,
02:40:29 and with Tedros’s leadership, did
02:40:30 something that was really incredible.
02:40:33 And that is earlier this year, they,
02:40:36 meaning the leadership of the WHO, not the World Health
02:40:39 Assembly, but the leadership of the WHO,
02:40:43 announced the establishment of what’s
02:40:45 called SAGO, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins
02:40:49 of Novel Pathogens.
02:40:51 And basically what they did was overrule their own governing
02:40:55 board and say, we’re going to create our own entity.
02:40:59 So it basically dissolved that international, deeply flawed
02:41:03 international joint study group.
02:41:04 And a lot of those people, they have become very critical,
02:41:07 like the Chinese of Tedros.
02:41:11 So then they had an open call for nominations
02:41:15 to be part of SAGO.
02:41:17 And so a lot of people put in their nominations.
02:41:23 They selected 26 people.
02:41:25 But our group, we had a meeting, and we
02:41:27 were unhappy with that list of 26.
02:41:30 It still felt skewed toward the natural origin hypothesis.
02:41:35 So again, I drafted, and we worked on together,
02:41:38 an open letter which we submitted to the WHO saying,
02:41:42 we think this list, it’s a step in the right direction,
02:41:45 but it’s not good enough.
02:41:46 And we call on these three people to be removed,
02:41:50 and we have these three people who we think should be added.
02:41:53 Incredibly, and I was in private touch
02:41:56 with the WHO, after announcing the 26 people,
02:42:00 the WHO said, we’re reopening the process, so send in more.
02:42:04 And so then they added two more people, one of whom
02:42:08 is an expert in the auditing of lab incidents.
02:42:13 And then one of the, so they added those two.
02:42:17 And then when they just released the list of people
02:42:20 who are part of SAGO, this one woman,
02:42:23 a highly respected Dutch virologist named Marion Koopmans,
02:42:26 who had been part of that deeply flawed and compromised
02:42:30 international study group, who had called,
02:42:33 who has consistently called a lab incident origin, quote,
02:42:36 unquote, a debunked conspiracy theory.
02:42:39 As of now, her name is not on the list.
02:42:42 We haven’t seen any announcements.
02:42:44 So I summary, and I’m sorry to go on for so long
02:42:48 and to be so animated about this,
02:42:49 I genuinely feel that the WHO is trying to do the right thing.
02:42:55 But they exist within a political context.
02:42:59 And they’re pushing at the edges,
02:43:03 but there’s only so far that they can go.
02:43:07 And that’s why we definitely need
02:43:10 to have full accountability for the WHO.
02:43:12 We need to expand the mandate to WHO.
02:43:14 But we need to recognize that states have a big role.
02:43:18 And China is an incredibly influential state
02:43:21 that’s doing everything possible to prevent
02:43:24 the kind of full investigation into pandemic origins
02:43:27 that’s so desperately required.
02:43:28 Well, it sounds like the leadership
02:43:31 made all the difference in the WHO.
02:43:34 So like the way to change the momentum of large institutions
02:43:37 is through the leadership.
02:43:38 Leadership and empowerment, as I mentioned,
02:43:42 the World Health Assembly is meeting now.
02:43:45 And I think that it shouldn’t be that we require superhumans.
02:43:50 And there are some people who are big critics of WHO.
02:43:53 The leader of the WHO in SARS 1 was definitely more aggressive.
02:44:00 She had a different set of powers at that time.
02:44:05 But it can’t be entirely, we definitely
02:44:08 need strong willed, aggressive, independent people
02:44:12 in these kinds of roles.
02:44:14 We also need a more empowered WHO.
02:44:17 Like when the Chinese government in the earliest days
02:44:20 of the pandemic said, we’re just not
02:44:23 going to allow you to send a team to collect
02:44:26 your own information.
02:44:27 And we’re not going to allow you to have
02:44:30 any kind of independent surveillance,
02:44:34 there was very little that the WHO could do because
02:44:38 of the limitations of its mandate.
02:44:40 And we can’t just say we’re going to have a WHO that only
02:44:44 compromises Chinese sovereignty.
02:44:46 If we want to have a powerful WHO,
02:44:48 we should say we have emergency teams when the director
02:44:54 general says an emergency team needs to go somewhere.
02:44:57 If they aren’t allowed to go there that day,
02:45:00 you could say there’s an immediate referral
02:45:02 to the Security Council.
02:45:03 There needs to be something.
02:45:05 But we have all these demands, rightfully,
02:45:09 so of the WHO, which doesn’t have the authorities.
02:45:13 The WHO itself only controls 20% of its own budget.
02:45:16 So the governments are saying, we’re
02:45:17 going to give you money to do this or that.
02:45:21 So we need a stronger WHO to protect us,
02:45:27 but we also have to build that.
02:45:28 So looking a little bit into the future,
02:45:33 let’s first step into the past, sort
02:45:35 of the philosophical question about China.
02:45:39 If you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese
02:45:43 government, if they were to be more transparent,
02:45:49 how should they be more transparent?
02:45:51 Because it’s easier to say, we want to see this.
02:45:57 But from a perspective of government,
02:45:59 and not just the Chinese government,
02:46:00 but a government on WHO’s geographic territory,
02:46:07 say it’s a lab leak, a lab leak occurred
02:46:11 that has resulted in trillions of dollars of loss,
02:46:16 countless of lives, just all kinds of damage to the world.
02:46:24 If they were to admit or show data
02:46:27 that could serve as evidence for a lab leak,
02:46:31 that’s something that people could, in the worst case,
02:46:35 start wars over, or in the most likely case,
02:46:41 just constantly bring that up at every turn,
02:46:45 making you powerless in negotiations.
02:46:50 Whenever you want to do something
02:46:51 in geopolitical sense, the United States
02:46:54 will bring up, oh, remember that time
02:46:57 you cost us trillions of dollars because of your fuck up?
02:47:01 So what is the incentive for the Chinese government
02:47:05 to be transparent?
02:47:07 And if it is to be transparent, how should it do it?
02:47:11 So there’s a bunch of people.
02:47:14 The reason I’m talking to you, as opposed
02:47:17 to a bunch of other folks, because you
02:47:19 are kindhearted and thoughtful and open minded
02:47:22 and really respected.
02:47:24 There’s a bunch of people that are talking about lab leak
02:47:27 that are a little bit less interested in building
02:47:31 a better world and more interested in pointing out
02:47:34 the emperor has no clothes.
02:47:36 They want step one, which is saying, basically,
02:47:40 tearing down the bullshitters.
02:47:43 They don’t want to do the further steps of building.
02:47:48 And so as the Chinese government,
02:47:50 I would be nervous about being transparent with anybody that
02:47:53 just wants to tear our power centers, our power
02:47:58 structures down.
02:47:59 Anyway, that’s a long way to ask,
02:48:01 how should the Chinese government be transparent now
02:48:06 and in the future?
02:48:08 So maybe I’ll break that down into a few sub questions.
02:48:12 The first is, what should, in an ideal world,
02:48:15 what should the Chinese government do?
02:48:17 And that’s pretty straightforward.
02:48:20 They should be totally transparent.
02:48:22 The South African government now,
02:48:24 there is an outbreak of this Omicron variant.
02:48:27 And the South African government has done what we would want.
02:48:31 A government to do is say, hey, there’s an outbreak.
02:48:33 We don’t have all of the information.
02:48:35 We need help.
02:48:36 We want to alert the world.
02:48:38 And in some ways, they’re being punished for it
02:48:41 through these travel bans.
02:48:42 But it’s a separate topic.
02:48:43 But I actually think short term travel bans actually
02:48:46 are not a terrible idea.
02:48:49 They should have, on day one, they
02:48:51 should have allowed WHO experts in.
02:48:55 They should have shared information.
02:48:57 They should have allowed a full and comprehensive
02:49:00 investigation with international partnerships
02:49:04 to understand what went wrong.
02:49:07 They should have shared their raw data.
02:49:10 They should have allowed their scientists
02:49:12 to speak and write publicly.
02:49:14 Because nobody knows more about this stuff,
02:49:17 certainly in the early days, than their scientists do.
02:49:20 So it’s relatively easy to say what they should do.
02:49:26 It’s a hard question to say, well, what would happen?
02:49:29 Let’s just say tomorrow, we prove for certain
02:49:35 that this pandemic stems both from an accidental lab
02:49:38 incident and then from what I’ve consistently
02:49:40 called a criminal cover up.
02:49:42 Because the cover up has done, in many ways,
02:49:46 as much or more damage than the incident.
02:49:49 Well, what happens?
02:49:50 You could easily imagine Xi Jinping has had two terms
02:49:54 as the leader of China.
02:49:57 And he can now have unlimited terms.
02:49:59 Well, they’ve changed the rules for that.
02:50:01 But he’s got a lot of enemies.
02:50:03 I mean, there are a lot of people who are waiting in line
02:50:06 to step up.
02:50:07 So is there a chance that Xi Jinping could be deposed
02:50:11 if it was proven that this comes from a lab?
02:50:13 And I think there’s a real possibility.
02:50:15 Would people in the United States Congress, for example,
02:50:19 demand reparations from China?
02:50:21 So we’ve had $4.5 trillion of stimulus,
02:50:26 all of the economic losses, and we owe a lot of money
02:50:29 to China from our debt.
02:50:32 I’m quite certain that members of Congress
02:50:35 would say, we’re just going to wipe that out.
02:50:37 It would destroy the global financial system,
02:50:39 but I think they would be extremely likely.
02:50:42 Would other countries, like India,
02:50:44 that have lost millions of people
02:50:47 and had terrible economic damages,
02:50:50 would they demand reparations?
02:50:53 So I think from a Chinese perspective,
02:50:55 starting from now, it would have
02:50:58 major geopolitical implications.
02:51:00 And go back to Chernobyl, there was
02:51:03 a reason why the Soviet Union went to such length
02:51:06 to cover things up.
02:51:08 And when it came out, I mean, there are different theories,
02:51:11 but certainly Chernobyl played some role
02:51:15 in the end of communist power in the Soviet Union.
02:51:21 So the Chinese are very, very aware of that.
02:51:25 But the difference, of course, with Chernobyl,
02:51:27 the damage to the rest of the world
02:51:28 was not nearly as significant as it was with COVID.
02:51:32 So you say that the coverup is a crime,
02:51:34 but everything you just described,
02:51:37 the response of the rest of the world,
02:51:40 is, I could say, unfair.
02:51:45 Well, it’s not…
02:51:46 So, okay, if we say the best possible version of the story,
02:51:50 you know, lab leaks happen, they shouldn’t happen,
02:51:55 but they happen.
02:51:57 And how is that on the Chinese government?
02:52:02 I mean, what’s a good example?
02:52:04 Well, the Union Carbide.
02:52:05 Union Carbide, there was this American company
02:52:07 operating in India, they had this leak,
02:52:10 all these people were killed.
02:52:12 The company admitted responsibility.
02:52:15 I was working in the White House
02:52:17 when the United States government, in my view,
02:52:19 which I know to be the case,
02:52:20 but other people in China think differently,
02:52:23 bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
02:52:25 And so the United States government
02:52:27 allowed a full investigation,
02:52:29 then we paid reparations to the families.
02:52:34 And so to your question, if I were,
02:52:36 let’s just say I were the Chinese government,
02:52:39 not, I mean, kind of an idealized version
02:52:42 of the Chinese government.
02:52:43 And let’s just say that they had come to the conclusion
02:52:46 that it was a lab incident.
02:52:49 And let’s just say they knew that even if
02:52:52 they continued to cover it up,
02:52:55 eventually this information would come out.
02:52:58 I mean, maybe there was a whistleblower,
02:53:00 maybe they knew of some evidence
02:53:01 that we didn’t know about or something.
02:53:05 What would I do starting right now?
02:53:09 What I would do is I would hold a press conference
02:53:12 and I would say, we had this terrible accident.
02:53:16 The reason why we were doing this research
02:53:19 in Wuhan and elsewhere is that we had SARS one
02:53:23 and we felt a responsibility to do everything possible
02:53:26 to prevent that kind of terrible thing happening again
02:53:29 for our country and for the world.
02:53:31 That was why we collaborated with France,
02:53:34 with the United States in building up those capacities.
02:53:38 We know that nothing is perfect,
02:53:40 but we’re a sovereign country and we have our own system.
02:53:42 And so we had to adapt our systems
02:53:45 so that they made sense internally.
02:53:49 When this outbreak began, we didn’t know how it started.
02:53:53 And that was why we wanted to look into things.
02:53:57 When the process of investigating became so political,
02:54:01 it gave us pause and we were worried that our enemies
02:54:04 were trying to use this investigation
02:54:07 in order to undermine us.
02:54:09 Having said that, now that we’ve dug deeper,
02:54:13 we have recognized because we have access
02:54:16 to additional information that we didn’t have then,
02:54:19 that this pandemic started from an accidental lab incident.
02:54:23 And we feel really terribly about that.
02:54:25 And we know that we were very aggressive
02:54:28 in covering up information in the beginning,
02:54:31 but the reason we were doing that is because we thoroughly,
02:54:34 we fully believe that it came from a natural origin.
02:54:37 Now that we see otherwise, we feel terribly.
02:54:41 Therefore, we’re doing a few different things.
02:54:44 One is we are committing ourselves
02:54:48 to establishing a stronger WHO, a new pandemic treaty
02:54:54 that addresses the major challenges that we face
02:54:57 and allows the World Health Organization
02:55:00 to pierce the veil of absolute sovereignty
02:55:03 because we know that when these pandemics happen,
02:55:06 they affect everybody.
02:55:08 We are also putting, and you can pick your number,
02:55:11 but let’s start with five trillion US dollars,
02:55:15 some massive amount, into a fund
02:55:19 that we will be distributing to the victims of COVID 19
02:55:24 and their, and their.
02:55:26 China would do that?
02:55:27 This is a fantasy speech.
02:55:29 But I disagree with your, I mean, okay.
02:55:34 So you think China has a responsibility?
02:55:36 Well, so it’s not the, like just a lab leak.
02:55:40 Like if China on day one had said we have this outbreak,
02:55:45 we don’t know where it came from,
02:55:47 we want to have a full investigation,
02:55:50 we call on international,
02:55:52 responsible international partners
02:55:53 to join us in that process,
02:55:55 and we’re going to do everything in our power
02:55:58 to share the relevant information
02:56:00 because however this started, we’re all victims.
02:56:03 That’s a totally different story
02:56:05 than punishing Australia, preventing the WHO,
02:56:08 blocking any investigation,
02:56:10 condemning people who are trying to look, and so that’s.
02:56:13 So cover up for a couple weeks,
02:56:16 you can understand maybe,
02:56:18 because there’s so much uncertainty.
02:56:20 You’re like, oh, let’s hide all the Winnie the Pooh pictures
02:56:24 while we figure this out.
02:56:26 But the moment you really figure out what happened,
02:56:30 you always, as a Jew I can say this,
02:56:32 always find like a blame the Jews kind of situation
02:56:35 a little bit, just a little bit.
02:56:36 Be like, all right, it’s not us.
02:56:38 I’m just kidding.
02:56:41 But be proactive in saying.
02:56:44 Just to start here, but the joke about that is
02:56:47 there’s a big problem because a lot of people
02:56:50 have to leave the Jewish socialist conspiracy
02:56:53 to make it for the Jewish capitalist conspiracy meeting.
02:56:56 I love it.
02:56:59 So I would say not five trillion,
02:57:01 but some large amount,
02:57:03 and I would really focus on the future,
02:57:05 which is every time we talk about the lab leak,
02:57:09 the unfortunate thing is I feel like people
02:57:11 don’t focus enough about the future.
02:57:13 To me, the lab leak is important
02:57:16 because we want to construct a kind of framework
02:57:20 of thinking and a global conversation
02:57:23 that minimizes the damage done by future lab leaks,
02:57:28 which will almost certainly happen.
02:57:30 And so to me, any lab leak is about the future.
02:57:35 I would launch a giant investment in saying
02:57:40 we’re going to create a testing infrastructure,
02:57:43 like all of this kind of infrastructure investments
02:57:46 that help minimize the damage of a lab leak
02:57:49 here and the rest of the world.
02:57:51 So the challenge with that is one,
02:57:54 it’s hard to imagine a fully accountable future system
02:57:58 to prevent these kinds of terrible pandemics
02:58:01 that’s built upon obfuscation and coverup
02:58:06 regarding the origins of this worst pandemic in a century.
02:58:09 So it’s just like that foundation isn’t strong enough.
02:58:14 Second, China across the fields of science
02:58:17 is looking to leapfrog the rest of the world.
02:58:20 So China now has current plans to build BSL4 labs
02:58:25 in every of its province.
02:58:27 Yeah, they’re scaling up the.
02:58:28 Scaling up everything ends up with the plan on leading.
02:58:32 And that’s why, again, I was saying before,
02:58:33 I think there’s a lot of similarity between this story,
02:58:36 at least as I see it, at least the most probable case,
02:58:40 and these other areas where China gets knowledge
02:58:42 and then tries to leapfrog.
02:58:44 It’s the same with AI and autonomous killer robots.
02:58:48 It’s the same with human genome editing,
02:58:50 with animal experimentations, with so many,
02:58:52 basically all areas of advanced science.
02:58:58 So the question is, would China stop in that process?
02:59:01 And then third, it’s a little bit
02:59:05 of a historical background,
02:59:07 but defending national sovereignty
02:59:10 is one of the core principles of,
02:59:13 certainly of the Chinese state.
02:59:16 And the historical issue is,
02:59:18 for those of us who come from the West,
02:59:21 I mean, one of the lessons of the postwar planners
02:59:24 was that absolute national sovereignty
02:59:26 was actually a major feeder
02:59:29 into the first and second world wars,
02:59:31 that we had all these conflicting states.
02:59:34 And therefore the logic of the postwar system
02:59:37 is we need to in some ways pool sovereignty
02:59:39 that’s like the EU and have transnational organizations
02:59:44 like the UN organizations
02:59:46 and the Bretton Woods organizations.
02:59:47 For most Asian states,
02:59:49 and also even for some African,
02:59:51 and the people who were kind of
02:59:52 on the colonized side of history,
02:59:55 sovereignty was the thing that was denied them.
02:59:58 That was the thing that they want,
03:00:00 that the European power is denied.
03:00:01 And so the idea of giving up sovereignty
03:00:04 was the absolute opposite.
03:00:07 And so that’s why China is,
03:00:10 and again, I mentioned this Rush Doshi book.
03:00:12 It’s not that China is trying to strengthen
03:00:15 this rules based international order,
03:00:17 which is based on the principle
03:00:19 that while there are certain things that we share
03:00:21 and how do we build a governance system
03:00:23 to protect those things,
03:00:25 what it seems to be doing is trying
03:00:27 to advance its own sovereignty.
03:00:31 And so I think I agree with you,
03:00:33 but I don’t think that we can just go forward
03:00:37 without some accountability for the.
03:00:39 So the coverup was a big problem.
03:00:41 It’s like, I often,
03:00:44 I find myself playing devil’s advocate
03:00:46 because I’m trying to sort of empathize
03:00:49 and then I forget that like two or three people
03:00:54 listen to this thing and then they’re like,
03:00:55 look, Lex is defending the Chinese government
03:00:58 with their coverup.
03:00:59 No, I’m not, I’m just trying to understand.
03:01:05 I mean, it’s the same reason I’m reading Mein Kampf now
03:01:08 is like you have to really understand the minds of people
03:01:13 as if I too could have done that.
03:01:18 You know, you have to understand
03:01:19 that we’re all the same to some degree
03:01:22 and that kind of empathy is required
03:01:25 to figure out solutions for the future.
03:01:29 It’s just in empathizing with the Chinese government
03:01:32 in this whole situation,
03:01:35 I’m still not sure I understand
03:01:38 how to minimize the chance of a coverup in the future,
03:01:41 whether for China or for the United States.
03:01:44 If the virus started in the United States,
03:01:45 I’m not exactly sure we would be
03:01:49 with all the emphasis we put on freedom of speech,
03:01:52 with all the emphasis we put on freedom of the press
03:01:57 and access to the press,
03:02:00 the sort of all aspects of government.
03:02:02 I’m not sure the US government
03:02:04 wouldn’t do the similar kind of coverup.
03:02:06 Let me put it this way.
03:02:07 So we’re in Texas now doing this interview.
03:02:09 Imagine there’s a kind of horseshoe bat
03:02:13 that we’ll call the Texas Horseshoe Bat and the Texas.
03:02:18 There’s a lot of bats in Austin,
03:02:19 but it’s a whole thing. It’s true, it’s true.
03:02:21 And so let’s just say that the Texas Horseshoe Bats
03:02:25 only exist in Texas, but in Montana,
03:02:30 we have a thing, it’s called
03:02:32 the Montana Institute of Virology.
03:02:36 And at the Montana Institute of Virology,
03:02:38 they have the world’s largest collection
03:02:41 of Texas Horseshoe Bats, including horseshoe bats
03:02:45 that are associated with a previous global pandemic
03:02:51 called the Texas Horseshoe Bat pandemic.
03:02:55 And let’s just say that people in Montana,
03:02:58 in the same town where this
03:03:00 Montana Institute of Virology is,
03:03:03 start getting a version of this
03:03:06 Texas Horseshoe Bat syndrome
03:03:09 that is genetically relatively similar
03:03:13 to the outbreak in Texas.
03:03:15 There are no horseshoe bats there.
03:03:18 And the government says, it’s your same point,
03:03:21 Alina’s point about the unicorns,
03:03:23 like nothing to see here, just move along.
03:03:28 Would Joe Rogan and Brett Weinstein and Josh Rogan,
03:03:34 would they say, oh, I guess, I just think that.
03:03:36 No, no, but the point is the government going to say it.
03:03:40 So, Joe Rogan is a comedian.
03:03:45 Brett Weinstein is a podcaster.
03:03:48 The point is, what we want is not just those folks
03:03:53 to have the freedom to speak, that’s important.
03:03:56 But you want the government to have the transparent,
03:03:58 like, I don’t think Joe Rogan is enough
03:04:02 to hold the government accountable.
03:04:04 I think they’re going to do their thing anyway.
03:04:06 But I think that’s our system,
03:04:09 and that was the genius of the founding fathers.
03:04:12 Is that enough?
03:04:13 That the government probably is going to have
03:04:16 a lot of instincts to do the wrong thing.
03:04:18 That was the experience in England before.
03:04:22 And so that’s why we have free speech,
03:04:25 to hold the government accountable.
03:04:27 I mean, I’m kind of broadly a gun control person,
03:04:30 but the people who say, well,
03:04:31 we need to have broad gun rights.
03:04:34 As somebody who’s now in Texas, I am offended.
03:04:39 But their argument is, look,
03:04:40 we don’t fully trust the government.
03:04:42 If the government, just like we fought against the British,
03:04:47 if the government’s wrong,
03:04:48 we want to at least have some authority.
03:04:51 So that’s our system, is to have that kind of voice.
03:04:53 And that is the public voice actually balances.
03:04:57 Because every government, as you correctly said,
03:05:00 every government has the same instincts.
03:05:02 And that’s why we have, and it’s imperfect here,
03:05:06 but kind of these ideas of separation of powers,
03:05:08 of inalienable rights, so that we can have,
03:05:11 it’s almost like a vast market where we can have balance.
03:05:14 So you think if a lab leak occurred in the United States,
03:05:18 what probability would you put some kind of public report
03:05:24 led by Rand Paul would come out saying this was a lab leak?
03:05:29 You have good confidence that that would happen?
03:05:31 I have pretty decent confidence.
03:05:32 And the reason I say, I mentioned that I’m a,
03:05:35 I think of myself, I’m sure I’m not anymore,
03:05:37 because as I get older, but as a progressive person,
03:05:39 I’m a Democrat and I worked in Democratic administrations,
03:05:44 worked for President Clinton on the National Security Council.
03:05:47 But my kind of best friend in the United States Senate,
03:05:52 who I talk to all the time,
03:05:55 is a Senator from Kansas named Roger Marshall.
03:05:59 And Roger, I mean, if you just lined up our positions
03:06:03 on all sorts of things, we’re radically different.
03:06:08 But we have a great relationship.
03:06:11 We talk all the time and we share a commitment to saying,
03:06:16 well, let’s ask the tough questions about how this started.
03:06:20 And again, if we had,
03:06:22 like what is the United States government?
03:06:24 Yeah, it’s the executive branch, but there’s also Congress.
03:06:27 And Congress, you talk about Rand Paul,
03:06:29 and as a former executive branch worker,
03:06:33 when I was on the National Security Council,
03:06:35 and I guess technically when I was at the State Department,
03:06:38 all of this stuff, all of this process,
03:06:40 it just seems like a pain in the ass.
03:06:42 It’s like these Fers, they’re just attacking us.
03:06:46 We tried to do this thing with,
03:06:48 we had all the best intentions
03:06:49 and now they’re holding hearings
03:06:50 and they’re trying to box us in and whatever.
03:06:53 But that’s our process.
03:06:55 And there’s like a form of accountability as chaotic,
03:06:58 as crazy as it is.
03:07:00 And so it makes it really difficult.
03:07:03 I mean, we have other problems of just chaos
03:07:05 and everybody doing their own thing,
03:07:07 but it makes it difficult to have
03:07:09 the kind of systematic coverup.
03:07:11 And again, all of that is predicated on my hypothesis,
03:07:15 not fully proven, although I think likely
03:07:18 that there is a lab incident origin of this pandemic.
03:07:22 Well, I mean, we’re having like several layers
03:07:25 of conversation, but I think whether lab leak hypothesis
03:07:31 is true or not, it does seem that the likelihood
03:07:36 of a coverup, if it leaked from a lab is high.
03:07:41 That’s the more important conversation to be having.
03:07:45 Well, you could argue a lot of things,
03:07:48 but to me arguably, that’s the more important conversation
03:07:51 is about what is the likelihood of a coverup.
03:07:53 100%, like in my mind, there is a legitimate debate
03:07:59 about the origins of the pandemic.
03:08:01 There are people who I respect,
03:08:04 who I don’t necessarily agree with,
03:08:06 people like Stuart Neal, who’s a virologist in the UK,
03:08:10 who’s been very open minded, engaged in productive debate
03:08:14 about the origin and you know where I stand.
03:08:18 There is and can be no debate about whether
03:08:23 or not there has been a coverup.
03:08:25 There has been a coverup.
03:08:26 There is in my mind, no credible argument
03:08:29 that there hasn’t been a coverup.
03:08:31 And I mean, we can just see it in the regulations,
03:08:35 in the lack of access.
03:08:37 There’s an incredible woman named Zhang Zhan,
03:08:40 who is a Chinese, we have to call her a citizen journalist
03:08:44 because everything is controlled by the state.
03:08:46 But in the early days of the pandemic,
03:08:47 she went to Wuhan, started taking videos and posting them.
03:08:52 She was imprisoned for picking quarrels,
03:08:54 which is kind of a catchall.
03:08:57 And now she’s engaged in a hunger strike
03:09:00 and she’s near death.
03:09:02 And so there’s no question that there has been a coverup
03:09:06 and there’s no question in my mind
03:09:08 that that coverup is responsible
03:09:10 for a significant percentage of the total deaths
03:09:13 due to COVID 19.
03:09:15 In a pivot, can I talk to you about sex?
03:09:22 Let’s roll.
03:09:23 Okay, so you’re the author of a book, Hacking Darwin.
03:09:29 So humans have used sex, allegedly, as I’ve read about,
03:09:36 to mix genetic information to produce offspring
03:09:41 and through that kind of process adapted their environment.
03:09:49 Lex, you mentioned earlier about
03:09:51 you’re asking tough questions
03:09:53 and people pushing you to ask tough questions.
03:09:56 Is it okay if I just?
03:09:57 So you said, have done this as I’ve read about.
03:10:01 As I’ve read about on the internet, yeah.
03:10:03 All I’m saying, as a person sitting with you,
03:10:06 to people who would be open minded in experimenting
03:10:11 of, as I’ve read about, to reality,
03:10:13 what I would say is Lex Friedman is handsome, charming.
03:10:19 He’s really a great guy.
03:10:23 I’m sorry to interrupt.
03:10:24 Thank you, I appreciate that.
03:10:26 So I was reading about this last night.
03:10:28 I was gonna tweet it, but then I’m like,
03:10:30 this is going to be misinterpreted.
03:10:32 But this is why I like podcasts,
03:10:36 because I can say stuff like this.
03:10:40 It’s kind of incredible to me that the average human male
03:10:45 produces 500 billion plus sperm cells in their lifetime.
03:10:52 Each one of those are genetically unique.
03:10:57 They can produce unique humans.
03:10:59 Each one of them, 500 billion,
03:11:01 there’s 100 billion people who’s ever lived.
03:11:06 Maybe 110, whatever, whatever the number is.
03:11:09 So it’s five times the number of people who ever lived
03:11:12 is produced by each male of genetic information.
03:11:18 So those are all possible trajectories of lives
03:11:20 that could have lived.
03:11:22 Those are all little people that could have been.
03:11:25 And all the possible stories.
03:11:28 All the Hitlers and Einsteins
03:11:31 that could have been created.
03:11:32 And all that, I mean, I don’t know,
03:11:34 this kind of, you’re painting this possible future,
03:11:38 and we get to see only one little string of that.
03:11:40 I mean, I suppose the magic of that
03:11:43 is also captured by the, in the space of physics,
03:11:47 having multiple dimensions
03:11:49 and the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics,
03:11:53 the interpretation that we’re basically just,
03:11:57 at every point, there’s an infinite offspring
03:12:02 of universes that are created.
03:12:04 But I don’t know, that’s just like a magic
03:12:06 of this game of genetics that we’re playing.
03:12:11 And the winning sperm is not the fastest.
03:12:16 The winning sperm is basically the luckiest,
03:12:19 has the right timing.
03:12:21 So it’s not, I also got into this whole,
03:12:24 I started reading papers about like,
03:12:29 is there something to be said
03:12:30 about who wins the race, right, genetically?
03:12:34 So it’s fascinating, because there’s studies
03:12:36 in animals and so on to answer that question,
03:12:38 because it’s interesting, because I’m a winner, right?
03:12:41 I won, I won a race.
03:12:43 And so you want to know, what does that say about me
03:12:46 in this fascinating genetic race against,
03:12:50 I think, what is it, 200 million others, I think.
03:12:54 So one pool of sperm cells is about something
03:13:01 like 200 million, it could be, yes.
03:13:04 But that, millions, I thought it was much lower than that.
03:13:08 So like that, those are all brothers and sisters of mine,
03:13:13 and I beat them all out, I won.
03:13:16 And so it’s interesting to know,
03:13:21 there’s a temptation to say I’m somehow better than them,
03:13:24 right, and now that goes into the next stage
03:13:28 of something we’re deeply thinking about,
03:13:33 which is if we have more control now
03:13:38 over the winning genetic code that becomes offspring,
03:13:44 if we have first not even control,
03:13:46 just information and then control,
03:13:50 what do you think that world looks like
03:13:53 from a biological perspective
03:13:54 and from an ethical perspective
03:13:56 when we start getting more information and more control?
03:14:00 Yeah, great question.
03:14:02 So first, on the sperm, there can be up to
03:14:05 about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation.
03:14:10 So as I mentioned in Hacking Darwin,
03:14:13 male sperm, it’s kind of a dime a dozen
03:14:15 with all the guys in all the world
03:14:18 just doing whatever they do with it.
03:14:20 And it’s an open question how competitive,
03:14:25 I mean, there is an element of luck
03:14:27 and there is an element of competition,
03:14:31 and it’s an open question how much that competition
03:14:36 impacts the outcome or whether it’s just luck,
03:14:39 but my guess is there’s some combination
03:14:42 of fitness and luck.
03:14:44 But you’re absolutely right that all of those other
03:14:48 sperm cells in the ejaculation,
03:14:51 if that’s how the union of the sperm and egg is happening,
03:14:55 all of them represent a different future.
03:14:59 And there’s a wonderful book called Invisible Cities
03:15:03 by Italo Calvino, and he even talks about a city
03:15:08 as something like this where everybody,
03:15:10 you have your life,
03:15:12 but then you have all these alternate lives
03:15:14 and every time you make any decision,
03:15:16 you’re kind of, and so, but in this Invisible Cities,
03:15:19 there’s a little string that goes toward that alternate life
03:15:23 and then the city becomes this weaving
03:15:25 of all the strings of people’s real lives
03:15:28 and the alternate lives that they could have taken
03:15:31 had they made any other different steps.
03:15:34 So that part, it’s like a deep philosophical question.
03:15:37 It’s not just for us, it’s for all of,
03:15:39 I mean, it’s baked into evolutionary biology.
03:15:43 It’s just what are the different strategies
03:15:45 for different species to achieve fitness?
03:15:48 And there’s some of the different corals or other fish
03:15:52 where they just kind of release the eggs into the water
03:15:55 and there’s all different kinds of ways.
03:15:58 And then you’re right in my book, Hacking Darwin,
03:16:03 and it’s the full title is Hacking Darwin,
03:16:04 Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.
03:16:08 I kind of go deep into exploring
03:16:12 the big picture implications of the future
03:16:15 of human reproduction.
03:16:17 We are already participating
03:16:20 in a revolutionary transformation,
03:16:23 not just because of the diagnostics that we have,
03:16:26 things like ultrasound, but because now
03:16:29 an increasing number of us are being born
03:16:31 through in vitro fertilization,
03:16:33 which means the eggs are extracted from the mother,
03:16:36 they’re fertilized by the father’s sperm in vitro in a lab,
03:16:41 and then reimplanted in the mother.
03:16:45 On top of that, there’s a somewhat newer,
03:16:48 but still now older technology
03:16:52 called preimplantation genetic testing.
03:16:55 And so as everyone knows from high school biology,
03:16:58 you have the fertilized egg,
03:17:01 and then it goes one cell to two cells
03:17:03 to four to eight and whatever.
03:17:05 And after around five days in this PGT process,
03:17:09 a few cells are extracted.
03:17:12 So let’s say you have 10 fertilized eggs,
03:17:15 early stage embryos, a few cells are extracted from each,
03:17:18 and those cells, if they would,
03:17:21 the ones that are extracted
03:17:22 would end up becoming the placenta.
03:17:25 But every one of our cells has, other than a few,
03:17:28 has our full genome.
03:17:30 And so then you sequence those cells
03:17:33 and with preimplantation genetic testing now,
03:17:36 what you can do is you can screen out deadly single gel,
03:17:41 a single gene mutation disorders,
03:17:44 things that could be deadly or life ruining.
03:17:47 And so people use it to determine
03:17:49 which of those 10 early stage embryos
03:17:53 to implant in a mother.
03:17:55 As we shift towards a much greater understanding
03:17:59 of genetics, and that is part of our,
03:18:01 just the broader genetics revolution,
03:18:04 but within that, in our transition from personalized
03:18:07 to precision healthcare, more and more of us
03:18:10 are going to have our whole genome sequenced
03:18:12 because it’s gonna be the foundation
03:18:13 of getting personalized healthcare.
03:18:16 We’re going to have already millions, but very soon,
03:18:19 billions of people who’ve had their whole genome sequenced.
03:18:22 And then we’ll have big databases
03:18:24 of people’s genetic genotypic information
03:18:27 and life or phenotypic information.
03:18:30 And using, coming into your area,
03:18:32 our tools of machine learning and data analytics,
03:18:35 we’re going to be able to increasingly understand
03:18:38 patterns of genetic expression, even though we’re all.
03:18:41 So predict how the genetic information will get expressed.
03:18:44 Correct. Yeah.
03:18:45 Never perfectly perhaps, but more and more,
03:18:48 always more and more.
03:18:50 And so with that information, we aren’t going to just be,
03:18:54 even now, we aren’t going to just be selecting based on
03:18:59 which of these 10 early stage embryos
03:19:02 is carrying a deadly genetic disorder,
03:19:04 but we can, we’ll be able to know everything
03:19:06 that can be partly or entirely predicted by genetics.
03:19:12 And there’s a lot of our humanity
03:19:14 that fits into that category.
03:19:17 And certainly simple traits like height and eye color
03:19:22 and things like that.
03:19:23 I mean, height is not at all simple,
03:19:25 but it’s, if you have good nutrition,
03:19:28 it’s entirely or mostly genetic.
03:19:31 But even personality traits and personality styles,
03:19:34 there are a lot of things that we see just as the experience,
03:19:37 the beauty of life that are partly have a genetic foundation.
03:19:42 And so whatever part of these traits are definable
03:19:47 and influenced by genetics,
03:19:49 we’re going to have greater and greater predictability
03:19:53 within a range.
03:19:54 And so selecting those embryos will be informed
03:19:59 by that kind of knowledge.
03:20:02 And that’s why in Hacking Darwin,
03:20:04 I talk about embryo selection as being a key driver
03:20:09 of the future of human evolution.
03:20:11 But then on top of that, there is in 2012,
03:20:15 Shinya Yamanaka, an amazing Japanese scientist
03:20:19 won the Nobel Prize for developing a process
03:20:22 for creating what are called induced pluripotent stem cells,
03:20:26 IPS cells.
03:20:27 And what IPS cells are is you can induce an adult cell
03:20:31 to go back in evolutionary time and become a stem cell.
03:20:35 And a stem cell is like when we’re a fertilized egg,
03:20:39 like our entire blueprint is in that one cell
03:20:42 and that cell can be anything,
03:20:44 but then it starts to, our cells start to specialize.
03:20:48 And that’s why we have skin cells and blood cells
03:20:50 and all the different types of things.
03:20:51 So with the Yamanaka process,
03:20:54 we can induce an adult cell to become a stem cell.
03:20:59 So the relevance to this story is what you can do.
03:21:02 And it works now in animal models.
03:21:05 And as far as I know, it hasn’t yet been done in humans,
03:21:08 but it works pretty well in animal models.
03:21:11 You take any adult cell,
03:21:12 but skin cells are probably the easiest.
03:21:15 You induce this skin cell into a stem cell.
03:21:19 And if you just take a little skin graft,
03:21:21 it would have millions of cells.
03:21:23 You induce those skin cells into stem cells.
03:21:26 Then you induce those stem cells into egg precursor cells.
03:21:31 Then you induce those egg precursor cells into eggs,
03:21:35 egg cells.
03:21:37 Then because we have this massive overabundance
03:21:41 of male sperm, then you could fertilize,
03:21:45 let’s call it 10,000 of the mother’s eggs.
03:21:49 So you have 10,000 eggs, which are fertilized.
03:21:52 Sounds like a party.
03:21:53 Yeah.
03:21:54 Then you have an automated process
03:21:58 for what I mentioned before
03:22:00 in preimplantation genetic testing,
03:22:02 you grow them all for five days,
03:22:04 you extract a few cells from each, you test them.
03:22:07 And that’s why I had a piece in the New York Times
03:22:09 a couple of years ago,
03:22:09 imagining what it would be like to go to a fertility clinic
03:22:12 in the year 2050.
03:22:14 And the choice is not.
03:22:15 No humans involved.
03:22:16 Yeah.
03:22:17 Well, no, no, there are, but the choice is not,
03:22:19 do you want a kid who does or doesn’t have,
03:22:22 let’s call it Tay Sachs.
03:22:25 It’s a whole range of possibilities,
03:22:28 including very intimate traits
03:22:33 like height, IQ, personality style.
03:22:35 It doesn’t mean you can predict everything,
03:22:37 but it means there will be increasing predictability.
03:22:41 So if you’re choosing from 10,000 eggs,
03:22:45 fertilized eggs, early stage embryos,
03:22:47 that’s a lot of choice.
03:22:49 And on top of that,
03:22:52 then we have the new technology of human genome editing.
03:22:57 Many people have heard of CRISPR,
03:23:00 but what I say is if you think of human genome editing
03:23:02 as a pie, sorry, human genome engineering as a pie,
03:23:07 genome editing is a slice
03:23:08 and CRISPR is just a sliver of that slice.
03:23:11 It’s just one of our tools for genome editing
03:23:13 and things are getting better and better.
03:23:16 Then you can go in and change.
03:23:20 Let’s say, I mean, again, it starts simple.
03:23:23 A small number of genes,
03:23:24 let’s say you’ve selected from among the one of 10
03:23:27 or the one of 10,000,
03:23:29 but there are a number of changes
03:23:31 that you would like to make to achieve some kind of outcome.
03:23:33 And biology is incredibly complex
03:23:36 and it’s not that one gene does one thing.
03:23:38 One gene does probably a lot of things simultaneously,
03:23:42 which is why the decision about changing one gene
03:23:45 if it’s causing deathly harm is easier
03:23:48 than when we think about the complexity of biology.
03:23:51 But then the machine learning
03:23:52 gets better and better at predicting
03:23:54 the full complexity of biology.
03:23:55 So as one gets better,
03:23:58 then you’re editing your ability to reliably edit
03:24:03 such that the conclusions are predictable,
03:24:04 it gets better and better.
03:24:05 So those two are coupled together.
03:24:07 You got it, that’s exactly it.
03:24:08 And then, so that’s why, and people would say,
03:24:11 well, that, I mean, I wrote about that
03:24:12 in my two science fiction novels,
03:24:15 Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata years ago,
03:24:18 and especially with Genesis Code, I wrote about that.
03:24:20 And as a sci fi,
03:24:22 and I had actually testified before Congress,
03:24:25 but now 15 years ago saying,
03:24:27 here’s what the future looks like.
03:24:30 But even I, and in my first edition of Hacking Darwin,
03:24:35 when it was already in production,
03:24:38 and then in November 2018,
03:24:41 this scientist, Hojong Kui, announced in Hong Kong
03:24:47 that the world’s first two, and later three,
03:24:50 CRISPR babies had been born,
03:24:51 which he had genetically altered,
03:24:53 and misguided, in my view, and dangerous view,
03:24:57 dangerous goal of making it so they would have
03:25:02 increased resistance to HIV.
03:25:07 And so I called my publisher,
03:25:09 and I said, I’ve got good news and bad news.
03:25:11 I’ll start with the bad news,
03:25:13 is that the world’s first CRISPR babies have been born,
03:25:17 and so we need to pull my book out of production,
03:25:21 because you can’t have a book on the future
03:25:22 of human genetic engineering,
03:25:24 and have it not mention the first CRISPR babies
03:25:27 that had been born.
03:25:28 But the good news is, in the book,
03:25:31 I had predicted that it’s going to happen,
03:25:34 and it’s going to happen in China, and here’s why.
03:25:37 And all we need to do is add a few more sentences,
03:25:42 and that was the hardback,
03:25:43 and then I updated it more in the paperback,
03:25:45 saying, and it happened, and it was announced on this day.
03:25:48 Yeah.
03:25:50 Well, then let’s fast forward.
03:25:52 Given your predictions are slowly becoming reality,
03:25:59 let’s talk about some philosophy,
03:26:01 and ethics, I suppose.
03:26:03 So I can, I’m not being too self deprecating here,
03:26:07 and saying if my parents had the choice,
03:26:14 I would be probably less likely to come out the winner.
03:26:18 We’re all weird, and I’m certainly a very distinctly
03:26:23 weird specimen of the human species.
03:26:26 I can give the full long list of flaws,
03:26:29 and we can be very poetic of saying those are features,
03:26:33 and so on, but they’re not.
03:26:37 If you look at the menu.
03:26:40 Again, for these women who are listening,
03:26:42 apropos of your thing,
03:26:43 they’re all kind of charming individualities.
03:26:47 Yes, that’s beautiful, that’s one, yes, thank you.
03:26:50 But anyway, but on the full sort of individual,
03:26:52 let’s say IQ alone, right?
03:26:55 That what do we do about a world
03:27:02 where IQ could be selected on a menu
03:27:09 when you’re having children?
03:27:13 What concerns you about that world?
03:27:15 What excites you about that world?
03:27:17 Are there certain metrics that excite you more than others?
03:27:25 IQ has been a source of,
03:27:31 I don’t know, I’m not sure IQ as a measure,
03:27:36 flawed as it is, has been used to celebrate
03:27:40 the successes of the human species
03:27:43 nearly as much as has been used to divide people,
03:27:47 to say negative things about people,
03:27:51 to make negative claims about people.
03:27:54 And in that same way, it seems like
03:27:57 when there’s a selection, a genetic selection based on IQ,
03:28:01 you can start now having classes of citizenry,
03:28:05 like further divide, you know, the rich get richer.
03:28:09 You know, it’ll be very rich people
03:28:12 that’ll be able to do kind of fine selection of IQ
03:28:16 and they will start forming these classes
03:28:22 of super intelligent people.
03:28:23 And those super intelligent people in their minds
03:28:26 would of course be the right people
03:28:27 to be making global authoritarian decisions
03:28:30 about everybody else, all the usual aspects of human nature,
03:28:33 but now magnified with the new tools of technology.
03:28:38 Anyway, all that to say is what’s exciting to you?
03:28:42 What’s concerning to you?
03:28:44 It’s a great question and just stepping into the IQ,
03:28:48 we’ll call it a quagmire for now,
03:28:51 it raises a lot of big issues which are complicated.
03:28:57 Maybe you’ve listened to Sam Harris’s interview
03:29:02 with Charles Murray and then that spawned
03:29:05 kind of a whole industry of debate.
03:29:10 So first, just the background of IQ
03:29:13 and it’s from the early 20th century
03:29:16 and there was the idea that we can measure
03:29:19 people’s general intelligence
03:29:21 and there are so many different kinds of intelligence.
03:29:23 This was measuring a specific thing.
03:29:25 So my feeling is that IQ is not a perfect measure
03:29:30 of intelligence, but it’s a perfect measure of IQ.
03:29:33 Like it’s measuring what it’s measuring,
03:29:35 but that thing correlates to a lot of things
03:29:40 which are rewarded in our society.
03:29:43 So every study of IQ has shown that people
03:29:47 with higher IQs, they make more money,
03:29:51 they live longer, they have more stable relationships.
03:29:53 I mean, that could be something in the testing,
03:29:56 but as Sam Harris has talked about a lot,
03:30:00 you could line up all of these kind of IQ
03:30:03 and IQ like tests correlate with each other.
03:30:07 So the people who score high on one, score high on all
03:30:10 of them and people think that IQ tests are like a thing
03:30:15 like the Earl of Dorchester is coming for dinner.
03:30:18 Does he have two forks or three forks
03:30:21 or something like that?
03:30:22 It’s not that a lot of them are things
03:30:24 that I think a lot of us would recognize are relevant.
03:30:27 Just like how much stuff can you memorize?
03:30:30 If you see some shapes, how can you position them
03:30:33 and things like that.
03:30:36 And so IQ, I mean, it really hit its stride
03:30:38 and certainly in the second world war
03:30:40 when our governments were processing a lot of people
03:30:43 and trying to figure out who to put in what jobs.
03:30:47 So that’s the starting point.
03:30:48 Let me start first with the negatives.
03:30:53 That our societies, when we talk about diversity
03:30:56 in Darwinian terms, it’s not like diversity
03:31:00 is from Darwinian terms.
03:31:01 Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if we have some moths
03:31:05 of different colors because it’ll be really fun
03:31:08 to have different colored moths.
03:31:10 Diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species
03:31:14 and of every species.
03:31:15 And it’s impossible to predict what diversity
03:31:21 is going to be rewarded.
03:31:22 And I’ve said this before, if you went down
03:31:25 and you spoke T. rex and you spoke to the dinosaurs
03:31:29 and said, hey, you can select your kids,
03:31:31 what criteria do you want?
03:31:33 And they say, oh, yeah, sharp teeth, cruel fangs,
03:31:37 roar, whatever it is that makes you a great T. rex.
03:31:42 But the answer from an evolutionary perspective,
03:31:46 from an earth perspective was, oh, it’s much better
03:31:48 to be like a cockroach or an alligator
03:31:50 or some little nothing or a little shrew
03:31:54 because the dinosaurs are gonna get wiped out
03:31:57 when the asteroid hits.
03:31:58 And so there’s no better or worse in evolution.
03:32:01 There’s just better or worse suited for a given environment.
03:32:05 And when that environment changes,
03:32:07 the best suited person from the old system
03:32:11 could be the worst suited person for the new one.
03:32:14 So if we start selecting for the things
03:32:17 that we value the most, including things like IQ,
03:32:21 but even disease resistance, I mean, this is well known,
03:32:26 but people who are recessive carrier of sickle cell disease
03:32:32 have increased resistance to malaria,
03:32:34 which is the biggest reason why that trait
03:32:37 hasn’t just disappeared given how deadly
03:32:41 sickle cell disease is.
03:32:43 Biology is incredibly complex.
03:32:46 We understand such a tiny percentage of it
03:32:49 that we need to have, in your words,
03:32:50 just a level of humility.
03:32:53 There are huge equity issues as you’ve articulated.
03:32:56 Let’s just say that it is the case that in our society,
03:32:59 IQ and IQ like traits are highly rewarded.
03:33:05 There is an equity issue, but it works in both ways.
03:33:08 Because my guess is, let’s just say that we had a society
03:33:11 where we were doing genome sequencing
03:33:13 of everybody who was born.
03:33:15 And we had some predictive model to predict IQ.
03:33:18 And we had decided as a society that IQ
03:33:22 was going to be what we were going to select for.
03:33:24 We were gonna put the highest IQ people
03:33:26 in these different roles.
03:33:28 I guarantee you the people in those roles
03:33:31 would not be the people who are legacy admissions to Harvard.
03:33:36 They would very likely be people who are born in slums,
03:33:40 people who are born with no opportunity or in refugee camps
03:33:44 who are just wasting away because we’ve thrown them away.
03:33:49 And so it’s an easy, like it’s the idea of just being able
03:33:54 to look under the hood of our humanity
03:33:57 is really scary for everybody.
03:34:01 And it should be.
03:34:02 I mean, I’m also an Ashkenazi Jew.
03:34:05 My father was born in Austria.
03:34:07 My father and grandparents came here as refugees.
03:34:10 After the war, most of that side of the family was killed.
03:34:14 So I get what it means to be on the other,
03:34:19 I mean, you said you’re reading Mein Kampf,
03:34:19 on the other side of the story when someone said,
03:34:22 well, here’s what’s good and you’re not good.
03:34:25 And therefore you’re, so I totally get that.
03:34:29 Having said that, I do believe that we’re moving toward
03:34:35 a new way of procreating.
03:34:37 And we’re going to have to decide what are the values
03:34:40 that we would like to realize through that process?
03:34:45 Is it randomness, which is what we currently have now,
03:34:48 which is not totally random
03:34:49 because we have a sort of mating through colleges
03:34:52 and other things.
03:34:54 But if it’s.
03:34:54 Wait, mating through what?
03:34:55 Colleges?
03:34:56 Sort of like if you go, if you go to Harvard or whatever,
03:35:01 and your wife also goes to Harvard, it’s like, it’s.
03:35:05 So it’s location based mating.
03:35:07 Well, it’s not location, it’s selection.
03:35:09 It’s like there are selections that are made
03:35:11 about who gets to a certain place.
03:35:14 And when like, it’s like Harvard admissions is a filter.
03:35:17 So we’re going to have to decide what are the values
03:35:19 that we want to realize through this process
03:35:21 because diversity has, it’s just baked into our biology.
03:35:24 We’re the first species ever that has the opportunity
03:35:28 to make choices about things that were otherwise baked
03:35:32 into our biology.
03:35:33 And there’s a real danger that if we make bad choices,
03:35:37 even with good intentions, it could even drive us
03:35:40 toward extinction and certainly undermine our humanity.
03:35:45 And that’s why I always say, and like I said,
03:35:47 I’m deeply involved with WHO and other things,
03:35:50 that these aren’t conversations about science.
03:35:53 They’re conversations.
03:35:54 Science brings us to the conversation,
03:35:56 but the conversation is about values and ethics.
03:35:58 As you described, that world is wide open.
03:36:00 It’s not even a subtly different world.
03:36:04 That world is fundamentally different
03:36:06 from anything we understand about life on Earth
03:36:09 because natural selection, this random process,
03:36:15 is so fundamental how we think about life.
03:36:18 Being able to program, I mean, it has a chance to,
03:36:23 I mean, it’ll probably make my question
03:36:25 about the ethical concerns around IQ based selection
03:36:29 just meaningless because it’ll change the nature of identity.
03:36:37 It’s possible it will dissolve identity
03:36:41 because we take so much pride in all the different
03:36:45 characteristics that make us who we are.
03:36:48 Whenever you have some control over those characteristics,
03:36:51 those characteristics start losing meaning.
03:36:55 And what may start gaining meaning is the ideas
03:36:58 inside our heads, for example,
03:37:00 versus like the details of like,
03:37:05 is it a Commodore 64, is it a PC, is it a Mac?
03:37:10 It’s gonna be less important than the software
03:37:12 that runs on it.
03:37:14 So we can more and more be operating in the digital space
03:37:17 and the identity could be something
03:37:18 that borrows multiple bodies.
03:37:20 Like the legacy of our ideas may become more important
03:37:24 than the details of our physical embodiment.
03:37:28 Like it, I mean, I’m saying perhaps
03:37:30 ridiculous sounding things, but the point is
03:37:33 it will bring up so many new ethical concerns
03:37:38 that our narrow minded thinking about
03:37:40 the current ethical concerns would not apply.
03:37:43 So it’s, but it’s important to think about
03:37:46 all this kind of stuff, like actively.
03:37:49 What are the right conversations to be having now?
03:37:51 Because it feels like it’s an ongoing conversation
03:37:56 that then continually evolves, like with NIH involved.
03:37:59 Like do you do experiments with animals?
03:38:03 Do you build these brain organoids?
03:38:06 Do you, like through that process you described
03:38:08 with the stem cells, like do you experiment
03:38:10 with a bunch of organisms to see how genetic material,
03:38:16 what form that actually takes,
03:38:18 how to minimize the chance of cancer
03:38:19 and all those kinds of things.
03:38:20 What are the negative consequences of that?
03:38:22 What are the positive consequences?
03:38:24 Yeah, it’s a fascinating world.
03:38:26 It’s a really fascinating world.
03:38:28 Yeah, and then, but those conversations
03:38:29 are just so essential.
03:38:32 Like we have to be talking about ethics.
03:38:34 And then that raises the question of who is the we?
03:38:37 And coming back to your conversation
03:38:39 about science communication,
03:38:41 maybe there was a time earlier
03:38:44 when these conversations needed to be,
03:38:46 were held among a small number of experts
03:38:49 who made decisions on behalf of everybody else.
03:38:53 But what we’re talking about here
03:38:54 is really the future of our species.
03:38:57 And I think that conversation is too important
03:39:01 to be left just to experts and government officials.
03:39:04 So I mentioned that I’m a member,
03:39:06 we just ended our work after two years
03:39:09 of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
03:39:11 on Human Genome Editing.
03:39:13 And my big push in that process
03:39:16 was to have education, engagement and empowerment
03:39:21 of the broad public to bring,
03:39:23 not just bring people into the conversation
03:39:25 with the tools to be able to engage,
03:39:29 but also into the decision making process.
03:39:31 And that’s, it’s a real shift.
03:39:33 And there are countries that are doing it
03:39:35 better than others.
03:39:37 I mean, Denmark is obviously a much smaller country
03:39:39 than the United States,
03:39:40 but they have a really well developed infrastructure
03:39:44 for public engagement
03:39:46 around really complicated scientific issues.
03:39:49 And I just think that we have to,
03:39:50 like it’s great that we have Twitter
03:39:53 and all these other things,
03:39:55 but we need structured conversations
03:39:58 where we can really bring people together
03:40:00 and listen to each other,
03:40:02 which feels like it’s harder than ever.
03:40:06 But even now in this process
03:40:08 where all these people are shouting at each other,
03:40:11 at least there are a bunch of people
03:40:12 who are in the conversation.
03:40:14 So it’s, we have a foundation,
03:40:16 but we just really need to do more work.
03:40:20 And again, and again, and again,
03:40:21 it’s about ethics and values
03:40:24 because we’re at an age,
03:40:27 and this has become a cliche
03:40:28 of exponential technological change.
03:40:31 And so the rate of change is faster going forward
03:40:35 than it has been in the past.
03:40:36 So in our minds, we underappreciate
03:40:39 how quickly things are changing and will change.
03:40:43 And if we’re not careful,
03:40:44 if we don’t know who we are and what our values are,
03:40:48 we’re going to get lost.
03:40:49 And we don’t have to know technology.
03:40:52 We have to know who we are.
03:40:53 I mean, our values are hard won over thousands of years.
03:40:58 No matter how new the technology is,
03:41:01 we shouldn’t and can’t jettison our values
03:41:04 because that is our primary navigational tool.
03:41:08 Absurd question.
03:41:09 Because we were saying that sexual reproduction
03:41:15 is not the best way to define the offspring.
03:41:17 You think there’ll be a day when humans stop having sex?
03:41:21 I don’t think we’ll stop having sex
03:41:23 because it’s so enjoyable,
03:41:26 but we may significantly stop having sex for reproduction.
03:41:30 Even today, most human sex is not for making babies.
03:41:35 It’s for other things,
03:41:36 whether it’s pleasure or love or pair bonding or whatever.
03:41:40 Intimacy.
03:41:41 Intimacy.
03:41:42 I mean, some people do it for intimacy.
03:41:44 Some people do it for pleasure with strangers.
03:41:46 I feel like the people that do it for pleasure,
03:41:48 I feel like there will be better ways
03:41:50 to achieve that same chemical pleasure, right?
03:41:54 You know, there’s just so many different kinds of people.
03:41:57 I just saw this on television,
03:42:00 but there are people who put on those big bunny outfits
03:42:02 and go and have sex with other people.
03:42:04 I mean, there’s just like an unlimited number
03:42:06 of different kinds of people.
03:42:07 I think they’re called,
03:42:09 so I remember hearing about this,
03:42:10 I think Dan Savage is a podcast.
03:42:14 I think they’re called Furries.
03:42:16 Furries.
03:42:17 Furries.
03:42:18 Furry parties.
03:42:19 Yeah, exactly.
03:42:20 So they’re just…
03:42:20 I love people.
03:42:21 Yeah, well, that’s like the thing.
03:42:24 It’s like, whenever you hear these words,
03:42:25 it’s like, humans.
03:42:27 Yeah, yeah.
03:42:28 What will they think of next?
03:42:30 So, but I do think that,
03:42:31 and I write about this in Hacking Darwin,
03:42:33 that as people come to believe that having,
03:42:39 that making children through the application of science
03:42:43 is safer and more beneficial
03:42:46 than having children through sex,
03:42:48 we’ll start to see a shift over time
03:42:52 toward reproduction through science.
03:42:54 We’ll still have sex for all the same great reasons
03:42:58 that we do it now,
03:43:00 it’s just reproduction less and less through the act of sex.
03:43:04 Man, it’s such a fascinating future.
03:43:08 Because as somebody, I value flaws.
03:43:11 I think it’s the good will hunting,
03:43:17 that’s the good stuff.
03:43:18 The flaws, the weird quirks of humans,
03:43:21 that’s what makes us who we are, the weird.
03:43:25 The weird is the beautiful.
03:43:26 And I, there’s a fear of optimization that I…
03:43:33 You should have it.
03:43:33 I mean, it’s very healthy.
03:43:35 And I think that’s, I was saying before,
03:43:36 that’s the danger of all of this selection
03:43:39 is that we make selections just based on social norms
03:43:44 that are so deeply internal
03:43:47 that they feel like they’re eternal truths.
03:43:51 And so we talked about selecting for IQ.
03:43:54 What about selecting for a kind heart?
03:43:56 Like there are lots of them.
03:43:57 You talked about Hitler and Mein Kampf.
03:43:59 Hitler had certainly had a high IQ,
03:44:03 I guess is higher than average IQ.
03:44:06 If we just select,
03:44:07 I mean, that’s why I was saying before,
03:44:11 diversity is baked into our biology.
03:44:13 But the key lesson, and I’ve said this many times before,
03:44:16 the key lesson of this moment in our history
03:44:18 is that after nearly 4 billion years of evolution,
03:44:22 our one species suddenly has the unique
03:44:26 and increasing ability to read, write,
03:44:28 and hack the code of life.
03:44:30 And so as we apply these godlike powers
03:44:34 that we’ve now assumed for ourselves,
03:44:37 we better be pretty careful
03:44:39 because it’s so easy to make mistakes,
03:44:44 particularly mistakes that are guided
03:44:47 by our best intentions.
03:44:49 To jump briefly back onto lab leak,
03:44:52 and I swear there’s a reason for that,
03:44:55 what did you think about the Jon Stewart,
03:44:59 this moment, I forget when it was, maybe a few months ago,
03:45:02 in the summer, I think, of 2021,
03:45:05 where he went on Colbert Report,
03:45:07 or not the Colbert Report, sorry,
03:45:09 the Stephen Colbert’s, whatever his show is.
03:45:13 But again, Jon Stewart reminded us
03:45:15 how valuable his wit and brilliance
03:45:18 within the humor was for our culture.
03:45:22 And so he did this whole bit
03:45:24 that highlighted the common sense nature
03:45:27 about what was the metaphor he used
03:45:30 about the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania.
03:45:33 So what’d you think about that whole bit?
03:45:34 I loved it.
03:45:36 And so not to be overly self referential,
03:45:40 but it’s hard not to be overly self referential
03:45:43 when you’re doing a, however long we are,
03:45:45 five hour interview about yourself,
03:45:47 which it reminds me of when you had Bret Weinstein on,
03:45:50 he said, I have no ego,
03:45:52 but these 57 people have screwed me over,
03:45:55 and I deserve credit.
03:45:56 It’s hard.
03:45:57 So I am a person, I will confess, it’s enjoyable.
03:46:02 Some people feel different.
03:46:03 I kind of like talking about all this stuff
03:46:06 and talking, period.
03:46:08 So for me, in the earliest,
03:46:10 I remember those early days of when the pandemic started,
03:46:13 I was just sitting down,
03:46:14 it was late January, early February, 2020,
03:46:17 and I just was laying out all of the evidence
03:46:20 just that I could collect,
03:46:22 trying to say, make sense of where does this come from?
03:46:26 And it was just logic.
03:46:28 I mean, it was all of the things that Jon Stewart said,
03:46:32 which in some overly wordy form
03:46:36 were all at that time on my website.
03:46:38 Like, what are the odds of having this outbreak
03:46:42 of a bat coronavirus more than a thousand miles away
03:46:45 from where these bats have their natural habitat,
03:46:48 where they have this largest collection
03:46:52 of these bat coronaviruses in the world,
03:46:54 and they’re doing all these very aggressive
03:46:58 research projects to make them more aggressive.
03:47:01 And then you have the outbreak of a virus
03:47:04 that’s primed for human to human transmission.
03:47:09 It was just logic was my first step.
03:47:12 And I kept gathering the information.
03:47:17 But Jon Stewart distilled that
03:47:19 in a way that just everybody got.
03:47:23 And I think that, like, I loved it.
03:47:26 And I just think that there’s a way of reaching people.
03:47:28 It’s the reason why I write science fiction
03:47:31 in addition to thinking and writing about the science
03:47:34 is that we kind of have to reach people where they are.
03:47:37 And I just thought it was just,
03:47:40 there was a lot of depth, I thought,
03:47:42 and maybe that’s too self serving,
03:47:46 but like in the analysis,
03:47:48 but he captured that into those things about,
03:47:54 it’s like the, whatever, the outbreak of chewy goodness
03:47:58 near the Hershey factory.
03:48:00 I wonder where that came from.
03:48:01 Yeah, there’s the humor, there’s metaphor.
03:48:05 Also the, like, sticking with the joke
03:48:07 when the audience is,
03:48:12 the audience is Stephen Colbert.
03:48:13 He was, like, resisting it.
03:48:16 He was very uncomfortable with it.
03:48:17 Maybe that was part of the bit, I’m not sure,
03:48:19 but it didn’t look like it.
03:48:21 So Stephen in that moment kind of represented
03:48:24 the discomfort of the scientific community, I think.
03:48:26 It’s kind of interesting, that whole dynamic.
03:48:28 And I think that was a pivotal moment.
03:48:32 That just, like, highlights the value of comedy,
03:48:35 the value of, like, when Joe Rogan says,
03:48:39 I’m just a comedian.
03:48:42 I mean, that’s such a funny thing to say.
03:48:46 It’s like saying I’m just a podcaster
03:48:48 or I’m just a writer, I’m just a, you know.
03:48:51 That ability in so few words
03:48:55 to express what everybody else is thinking,
03:49:00 it’s so refreshing.
03:49:02 And I wish the scientific communicators would do that too.
03:49:06 A little humor, a little humor.
03:49:08 I mean, that’s what I love Elon Musk very much.
03:49:10 So, like, the way he communicates is, like,
03:49:13 it’s so refreshing for a CEO of a major company,
03:49:18 several major companies, to just have a sense of humor
03:49:22 and say ridiculous shit every once in a while.
03:49:24 That’s so, there’s something to that.
03:49:26 Like, it shakes up the whole conversation
03:49:29 to where it gives you freedom to, like, think publicly.
03:49:33 If you’re always trying to say the proper thing,
03:49:36 you lose the freedom to think, to reason out,
03:49:40 to be authentic and genuine.
03:49:42 When you allow yourself the freedom
03:49:44 to regularly say stupid shit,
03:49:48 have fun, make fun of yourself,
03:49:51 I think you give yourself freedom
03:49:53 to really be a great scientist.
03:49:55 Honestly, I think scientists have a lot to learn
03:49:58 from comedians.
03:50:00 Well, for sure.
03:50:00 I think we all do about just distilling and communicating
03:50:05 in ways that people can hear.
03:50:07 Like, a lot of us say things and people just can’t hear them
03:50:10 either because of the way we’re saying them
03:50:12 or where they are, but.
03:50:14 And like I said before, I’m a big fan of Joe Rogan.
03:50:19 I’ve been on his show twice.
03:50:20 And when Francis Collins was in his conversation with you,
03:50:25 he said, which I think makes sense,
03:50:27 is that when somebody has that kind of platform
03:50:31 and people rightly or wrongly who follow them
03:50:34 and look to them for guidance,
03:50:36 I do think that there is some responsibility
03:50:40 for people in those roles to make whatever judgment
03:50:45 that they make and to share that.
03:50:47 And as I mentioned to you when we were off mic,
03:50:50 Sanjay Gupta is a very close friend of mine.
03:50:53 We’ve been friends for many years
03:50:54 and I fully supported Sanjay’s instinct
03:50:58 to go on the Joe Rogan show.
03:51:02 I thought it was great.
03:51:05 At the end of that whole conversation, Joe said,
03:51:09 well, I’m just a comedian, what do I know?
03:51:12 And I just felt that, yes, Joe Rogan is a comedian.
03:51:16 I wouldn’t say just a comedian among other things.
03:51:20 But I also felt that he had a responsibility
03:51:23 for just saying whatever he believed,
03:51:25 even if he believed or believes as I think is the case
03:51:30 that ivermectin should be studied more,
03:51:32 which I certainly agree.
03:51:34 And that healthy people shouldn’t get vaccinated,
03:51:40 healthy young people, which I don’t agree.
03:51:42 I just felt at the end of that conversation to say,
03:51:44 well, I’m just a comedian, what do I know?
03:51:47 I feel like it didn’t fully integrate the power
03:51:51 that a person like Joe Rogan has to set the agenda.
03:51:55 So I think the reason he says I’m just a comedian
03:51:58 is the same reason I say I’m an idiot,
03:52:00 which I truly believe.
03:52:02 I can explain exactly what I mean by that,
03:52:03 but it’s more for him, or in this case for me,
03:52:09 to just keep yourself humble.
03:52:11 Because I think it’s a slippery slope
03:52:14 when you think you have a responsibility
03:52:16 to then think you actually have an authority,
03:52:21 because a lot of people listen to you,
03:52:22 you think you have an authority
03:52:24 to actually speak to those people
03:52:26 and you have enough authority
03:52:27 to know what the hell you’re talking about.
03:52:29 And I think there’s just the humility
03:52:31 to just kind of make it fun of yourself
03:52:34 that’s extremely valuable.
03:52:35 And saying I’m just a comedian I think is a reminder
03:52:40 to himself that he’s often full of shit, so are all of us.
03:52:48 And so that’s a really powerful way for himself
03:52:51 to keep himself humble.
03:52:53 I mean, I think that’s really useful
03:52:55 in some kind of way for people in general
03:52:57 to make fun of themselves a little bit,
03:53:00 in whatever way that means.
03:53:02 And saying I’m just a comedian is just one way to do that.
03:53:04 Now that coupled that with the responsibility
03:53:07 of doing the research and really having an open mind
03:53:10 and all those kinds of stuff,
03:53:12 I think that’s something Joe does really well
03:53:15 on a lot of topics, but he can’t do that on everything.
03:53:18 And so it’s up to people to decide
03:53:22 how well he does it on certain topics and not others.
03:53:26 But how do you think Sanjay did in that conversation?
03:53:29 So I know I’m gonna get myself into trouble here
03:53:31 because Sanjay is a very close friend.
03:53:35 Joe, my personal interaction with him
03:53:38 has been our two interviews,
03:53:39 but it’s like my interview with now,
03:53:41 sit down with somebody for four hours,
03:53:43 it’s a lot and great and then private communication.
03:53:48 So I am personally more sympathetic to the arguments
03:53:53 that Sanjay was making or trying to make.
03:53:58 I believe that the threat of the virus
03:54:01 is greater than the threat of the vaccine.
03:54:03 That doesn’t mean that we can guarantee 100% safety
03:54:08 for the vaccine,
03:54:09 but these are really well tolerated vaccines.
03:54:13 And we know for all the reasons we’ve been talking about
03:54:15 that this is a really scary virus
03:54:18 and particularly the mRNA vaccines,
03:54:20 what they’re basically doing is getting your body
03:54:23 to replicate a tiny little piece of the virus,
03:54:25 the spike protein and then your body responds to that.
03:54:29 And so that’s a much less of an insult to your body
03:54:34 than being infected by the virus.
03:54:37 So I’m more sympathetic to the people who say,
03:54:41 well, everybody should get vaccinated,
03:54:44 but people who’ve already been infected,
03:54:47 we should study whether they need to be vaccinated or not.
03:54:52 Having said all of that, I felt that
03:54:57 that Joe Rogan won the debate.
03:54:59 I mean, it was, and the reason that I felt
03:55:02 that he won the debate was they were kind of,
03:55:05 they had two different categories of arguments.
03:55:08 So Sanjay, what he was trying to do,
03:55:11 which I totally respect was saying,
03:55:13 there’s so much animosity between the,
03:55:15 on these different sides, let’s lower the temperature.
03:55:17 Let’s model that we can have a respectful dialogue
03:55:22 with each other where we can actually listen.
03:55:24 And Sanjay, again, I’ve known him for many years.
03:55:27 He’s a very empathic, humble,
03:55:30 just an all around wonderful human being,
03:55:33 and I really love him.
03:55:35 And so he was making cases that were based on
03:55:38 kind of averages, studies and things like that.
03:55:41 And Joe was saying, well, I know a guy whose sister’s cousin
03:55:45 had this experience.
03:55:48 And I’m sure that it’s all true in the sense
03:55:51 that we have millions of people who are getting vaccinated
03:55:54 and different things.
03:55:56 And what Sanjay should have said was,
03:55:59 I know that’s anecdote.
03:56:01 Here’s another anecdote of like when Francis Collins
03:56:04 was with you and he talked about the world wrestling guy
03:56:07 who was like 6.6 and a big muscly guy,
03:56:10 and then he got COVID and he was anti vaccine,
03:56:12 and then he got COVID and almost died.
03:56:14 And he said, I’m gonna.
03:56:15 By the way, I don’t know if you know this part.
03:56:17 No.
03:56:18 Oh, this is funny.
03:56:19 Joe’s gonna listen to this.
03:56:20 He’s gonna be laughing.
03:56:21 Does Joe listen like to the four hours of this
03:56:24 in addition to the three hours of his interviews every day?
03:56:28 No, not every day, but he listens to a lot of these.
03:56:30 I love it.
03:56:31 And we talk about it.
03:56:32 I love it.
03:56:33 We argue about it.
03:56:34 Hi, Joe.
03:56:34 Hey, Joe.
03:56:35 We love you, Joe.
03:56:37 So that particular case,
03:56:40 I don’t know why Francis said what he said there,
03:56:43 but that’s not accurate.
03:56:45 Oh, really?
03:56:45 So the wrestler never, he didn’t almost die.
03:56:50 He was no big deal at all for him.
03:56:53 And he said that to him.
03:56:54 I think, I’m not sure.
03:56:56 I think something got mixed up in Francis’s memory.
03:57:00 There was another case he must’ve been like,
03:57:02 cause I don’t imagine he would bring that case up
03:57:05 and just like make it up, you know, cause like why?
03:57:09 But he, that was not at all,
03:57:11 like that was a pretty public case.
03:57:13 He had an interview with him, that wrestler,
03:57:16 he was just fine.
03:57:17 So that anecdotal case, I mean,
03:57:19 Francis should not have done that.
03:57:21 So if I have any, so I have a bunch of criticism
03:57:24 of how that went.
03:57:26 People who criticize that interview,
03:57:28 I feel like don’t give enough respect
03:57:32 to the full range of things
03:57:33 that Francis Collins has done in his career.
03:57:35 He’s an incredible scientist.
03:57:37 And I also think a really good human being.
03:57:40 But yes, that conversation was flawed in many ways.
03:57:44 And one of them was why,
03:57:47 when you’re trying to present some kind of critical,
03:57:53 like criticize Joe Rogan,
03:57:56 why bring up anecdotal evidence at all?
03:57:58 And if you do bring up anecdotal evidence,
03:58:02 which is not scientific, if you’re a scientist,
03:58:04 you should not be using anecdotal evidence.
03:58:06 If you do bring it up,
03:58:07 why bring up one that’s first not true
03:58:12 and you know it’s not true?
03:58:15 So I know, pretend, so you don’t know it’s not true.
03:58:18 So yes, that would find another case where, exactly.
03:58:23 So the basic thing coming back
03:58:24 to Sanjay and Joe’s conversation
03:58:28 was that Sanjay was trying to use statistical evidence
03:58:31 and Joe was using anecdotal evidence.
03:58:33 And so I think that for Sanjay,
03:58:36 and there are all kinds of things where there are debates
03:58:39 where often the person who’s better at debating
03:58:42 wins the debate regardless of the topic.
03:58:46 So I think what Sanjay could have done,
03:58:49 and Sanjay is such a smart guy,
03:58:53 is to say, well, that’s an anecdote,
03:58:55 here’s another anecdote.
03:58:57 And there are lots of different anecdotes.
03:59:00 And there certainly are people who have taken the vaccine
03:59:03 and have had problems that could reasonably be traced
03:59:07 to the vaccines.
03:59:08 And there certainly are lots of people, I would argue,
03:59:11 more people who’ve not had the vaccine,
03:59:14 but who’ve gotten COVID and have either died
03:59:16 or our hospitals are now full of people
03:59:19 who weren’t vaccinated.
03:59:20 And in many ways, I mean, our emergency rooms
03:59:23 are full of unvaccinated people here in the United States.
03:59:26 So I think what Sanjay could have done,
03:59:28 but there was a conflict between wanting to kind of
03:59:32 win the debate and wanting to take the temperature down.
03:59:36 And what he could have done is to say,
03:59:39 well, here’s an anecdote, I have a counter anecdote
03:59:42 and we can go on all day,
03:59:43 but here’s what the statistics show.
03:59:46 And I think that was the thing.
03:59:48 So I think it’s a healthy conversation.
03:59:50 We can’t, I mean, there are a lot of people
03:59:52 who are afraid of the vaccine.
03:59:55 There are a lot of people who don’t trust
03:59:56 the scientific establishment
03:59:58 and lots of them have good reason.
04:00:00 I mean, it’s not just people think of like Trump Republicans.
04:00:04 There are lots of people in the African American community
04:00:08 who’ve had a historical terrible experience
04:00:11 with the Tuskegee and all sorts of things.
04:00:14 So they don’t trust the messages
04:00:16 that were being delivered.
04:00:18 I live in New York City and we had a piece
04:00:21 in the New York Times where in the earliest days
04:00:23 of the vaccines, there was this big movement,
04:00:25 let’s make sure that the poorest people in the city
04:00:28 have first access to the vaccines
04:00:31 because they’re the ones, they have higher density
04:00:35 in their homes, they’re relying on public transport.
04:00:37 So there was this whole liberal effort.
04:00:39 And then in the black community in New York,
04:00:42 according to the New York Times,
04:00:43 there was very low acceptance of the vaccines
04:00:46 and they interviewed people in that article.
04:00:48 And they said, well, if the white people want us
04:00:51 to have it first, there must be something wrong with it.
04:00:54 They must be doing something.
04:00:56 And so we have to listen to each other.
04:00:59 Like I would never, I have a disrespect for everybody.
04:01:04 And if somebody is cautious about the vaccine
04:01:07 for themselves or for their children,
04:01:10 we have to listen to them.
04:01:12 At the same time, public health
04:01:15 is about creating public health.
04:01:19 And there’s no doubt, I think Joe was absolutely right
04:01:23 that older people, obese people are at greater risk
04:01:28 for being harmed or killed by COVID 19
04:01:32 than young, healthy people.
04:01:34 But by everybody getting vaccinated,
04:01:38 we reduce the risk to everybody else.
04:01:41 And so I feel like, like with everything,
04:01:43 there’s the individual benefit argument
04:01:46 and then there’s the community argument.
04:01:49 And I absolutely think our community.
04:01:50 Expressing that clearly that there’s a difference between
04:01:53 the individual health and freedoms
04:01:56 and the community health and freedoms
04:01:59 and steel manning each side of this.
04:02:01 One of the problems that people don’t do enough of
04:02:05 is be able to, so how do you steel man an argument?
04:02:08 You describe that argument in the best possible way.
04:02:12 You have to first understand that argument.
04:02:14 Let’s go to the noncontroversial thing like Flat Earth.
04:02:17 Like most people, most colleagues of mine at MIT
04:02:23 don’t even read about like the full argument
04:02:28 that the Flat Earthers make.
04:02:31 I feel it’s disingenuous for people in the physics community
04:02:37 to roll their eyes at Flat Earthers
04:02:39 if they haven’t read their arguments.
04:02:42 You should feel bad that you didn’t read their arguments.
04:02:46 And like it’s the rolling of the eyes that’s a big problem.
04:02:50 You haven’t read it.
04:02:51 Your intuition says that these are a bunch of crazy people.
04:02:55 Okay, but you haven’t earned the right to roll your eyes.
04:02:59 You’ve earned your right to maybe not read it,
04:03:03 but then don’t have an opinion.
04:03:05 Don’t roll your eyes, don’t do any of that dismissive stuff.
04:03:07 And the same thing in the scientific community
04:03:11 around COVID and so on, there’s often this kind of saying,
04:03:14 oh God, that’s conspiracy theories, that’s misinformation
04:03:17 without actually looking into what they’re saying.
04:03:20 If you haven’t looked into what they’re saying,
04:03:22 then don’t talk about it.
04:03:23 Like if you’re a scientific leader and the communicator,
04:03:26 you need to look into it.
04:03:27 It’s not that much effort.
04:03:28 I totally agree.
04:03:29 And I think that humility,
04:03:31 it’s a constant theme of your podcasts and I love that.
04:03:35 And so after the conversation debate,
04:03:39 whatever it was between Sanjay and Joe,
04:03:42 I reached out on Twitter to someone I’ve never met
04:03:45 in person, but I’m in touch privately
04:03:47 to a guy named Daniel Griffin,
04:03:49 who’s a professor at Columbia Medical School
04:03:54 and just so smart there.
04:03:56 He gives regular updates on COVID 19
04:04:00 on a thing called TWIV this week in virology.
04:04:03 I’m a critic of TWIV for its coverage of origins.
04:04:09 But on this issue, I’m just having regular updates.
04:04:12 Daniel is great.
04:04:13 And so I said to him,
04:04:15 I said, why don’t we have an honest process
04:04:20 to get the people who are raising concerns
04:04:22 about the vaccines in their own words
04:04:25 to raise what are their concerns?
04:04:28 And then let’s do our best job of saying,
04:04:32 well, here are these concerns.
04:04:34 And then here is our evidence making a counterclaim
04:04:38 and here are links to if you want to look at the studies
04:04:41 upon which these claims are made, here they are.
04:04:45 And Daniel, who’s incredibly busy,
04:04:47 I mean, he reads every, I mean, it seems every paper
04:04:51 that comes out every week and it’s unbelievable.
04:04:55 But he sent me a link to the CDC Q&A page
04:05:00 on the CDC website.
04:05:02 And it wasn’t that, it was people who were,
04:05:05 I mean, it was written by people like me
04:05:07 who were convinced in the benefit of these vaccines.
04:05:13 So the questions were framed, they were kind of like,
04:05:16 they weren’t really the framing
04:05:19 of the people with the concerns.
04:05:21 They were framing of people
04:05:22 who were just kind of imagining something else.
04:05:25 I mean, you always talk about kind of humility
04:05:27 and active listening.
04:05:29 I know you don’t mean, and it doesn’t mean
04:05:31 that we don’t stand for something.
04:05:33 Like I certainly am a strong proponent of vaccines
04:05:36 and masks and all of those things.
04:05:39 But if we don’t hear other people,
04:05:42 if we don’t let them hear their voice in the conversation,
04:05:47 if it’s just saying, well, you may think this
04:05:49 and here’s why it’s wrong, the argument may be right.
04:05:52 It’ll just never break through.
04:05:53 By the way, my interpretation of Joe and Sanjay,
04:05:56 I listened to that conversation without looking at Twitter
04:05:58 or the internet and I thought that was a great conversation
04:06:01 and I thought Sanjay actually really succeeded
04:06:04 in bringing the temperature down.
04:06:05 To me, the goal was bringing the temperature down.
04:06:08 I didn’t even think of it as a debate.
04:06:10 I was like, oh, cool, this isn’t gonna be some weird,
04:06:13 it’s like two friendly people talking.
04:06:15 And then I look at the internet
04:06:16 and then the internet says, Joe Rogan slammed Sanjay
04:06:20 like as if it was a heated debate that Joe won.
04:06:24 And it’s like, all right,
04:06:26 it’s really the temperature being brought down.
04:06:30 Real conversation between two humans.
04:06:32 That wasn’t really a debate.
04:06:34 It was just a conversation and that was a success.
04:06:38 I definitely think it was a success,
04:06:40 but I also felt that a takeaway,
04:06:47 and again, because this is something that I don’t agree with,
04:06:51 even though I have great, as I’ve said, respect for Joe,
04:06:54 I think a reasonable person listening to that conversation
04:06:58 would come away with the conclusion
04:07:00 that all in all these vaccines are a good thing,
04:07:05 but if you’re young and healthy, you probably don’t need it.
04:07:11 And I just felt that there was a stronger case to be made,
04:07:16 even though Sanjay made it.
04:07:17 It wasn’t that Sanjay didn’t make it.
04:07:19 It was just that in the flow of that conversation,
04:07:22 I felt that the case for the vaccines
04:07:26 and the vaccines both as an individual choice
04:07:28 and then certainly again, as I said before,
04:07:31 I think that while people can be afraid of the vaccines,
04:07:34 the virus itself is much scarier
04:07:37 and we’re seeing it now in real time
04:07:40 with these variations and variants.
04:07:43 I just felt that that was kind of the rough takeaway
04:07:47 from that conversation.
04:07:50 And I felt that Sanjay, again, whom I love,
04:07:54 I felt it could have made his case a little bit stronger.
04:07:56 So the thing he succeeded is he didn’t come off
04:08:00 as like a science expert looking down at everybody,
04:08:07 talking down to everybody.
04:08:09 So he succeeded in that, which is very respectful.
04:08:12 But I also think sort of making the case
04:08:15 for taking the vaccine when you’re a young, healthy person,
04:08:19 when you’re sitting across from Joe Rogan
04:08:22 is like a high difficulty on the video game level.
04:08:26 For sure.
04:08:26 So it’s difficult to do.
04:08:30 Yeah, for sure. It’s difficult to do.
04:08:31 And also it’s difficult to do
04:08:32 because it’s not as simple as like, look at the data.
04:08:38 There’s a lot of data to go through here.
04:08:42 And there’s also a lot of non data stuff,
04:08:45 like the fact that, first of all,
04:08:48 questioning the sources of the data,
04:08:50 the quality of the data,
04:08:51 because it’s also disappointing about COVID
04:08:54 is that the quality of the data is not great.
04:08:56 But also questioning all the motivations
04:09:00 of the different parties involved,
04:09:02 whether it’s major organizations
04:09:04 that developed the vaccine,
04:09:05 whether it’s major institutions like NIH or NIAID
04:09:09 that are sort of communicating to us about the vaccine,
04:09:12 whether it’s the CDC and the WHO,
04:09:15 whether it’s the Biden or the Trump administration,
04:09:18 whether it’s China and all those kinds of things,
04:09:20 you have to, that’s part of the conversation here.
04:09:24 I mean, vaccination is not just a public health tool.
04:09:28 It’s also a tool for a government
04:09:30 to gain more control over the populace.
04:09:33 Like, there’s a lot of truth to that too.
04:09:36 Things that have a lot of benefit
04:09:40 can also be used as a Trojan horse
04:09:44 to increase bureaucracy and control.
04:09:47 But that has to be on the table for a conversation.
04:09:49 I think it has to be on the conversation.
04:09:52 But your parents, when they were in the Soviet Union
04:09:56 and here in the United States,
04:09:57 and actually it was a big collaboration
04:09:59 between US and Soviet Union,
04:10:02 when the polio vaccine came out,
04:10:04 there were people all around the world
04:10:06 who had a different life trajectory,
04:10:08 no longer living in fear.
04:10:09 And all of these people who were paralyzed
04:10:11 or killed from polio, smallpox has been eradicated.
04:10:15 It was one of the great successes in human history.
04:10:20 And while it for sure is true that you could imagine
04:10:23 some kind of fraudulent vaccination effort,
04:10:27 but here I genuinely think,
04:10:30 I mean, whatever the number, 15 million, 16 million
04:10:33 is the economist number of dead from COVID 19,
04:10:37 many, many, many more people would be dead
04:10:39 but for these vaccines.
04:10:41 And so I get that any activity
04:10:44 that needs to be coordinated by a central government
04:10:47 has the potential to increase bureaucracy
04:10:50 and increase control.
04:10:53 But there are certain things that central governments do,
04:10:57 like the development, particularly these mRNA vaccines,
04:11:00 which it’s purely a US government victory.
04:11:05 I mean, it was huge DARPA funding
04:11:08 and then the National Institute for Allergy
04:11:11 and Infectious Disease, NIH funding.
04:11:13 I mean, this was a public private partnership throughout
04:11:17 and that we got a working vaccine 11 months was a miracle.
04:11:21 So I, yeah.
04:11:21 It’s not purely a victory.
04:11:24 Again, you have to be open minded.
04:11:26 I’m with you here playing a bit of devil’s advocate,
04:11:30 but the people who discuss any viral drugs
04:11:32 like ivermectin and other alternatives
04:11:34 would say that the extreme focus on the vaccine
04:11:39 distracted us from considering other possibilities.
04:11:42 And saying that this is purely a success
04:11:46 is distracting from the story
04:11:48 that there could have been other solutions.
04:11:50 So yes, it’s a huge success
04:11:52 that the vaccine was developed so quickly
04:11:55 and surprisingly way more effective than it was hoped for.
04:12:02 But there could have been other solutions
04:12:04 and they completely distracted from us from that.
04:12:08 In fact, it distracted us from looking into a bunch of things
04:12:11 like the lab leak.
04:12:12 And so it’s not a pure victory.
04:12:15 And there’s a lot of people that criticize
04:12:18 the overreach of government and all of this.
04:12:20 That one of the things that makes the United States great
04:12:24 is the individualism and the hesitancy to ideas of mandates.
04:12:31 Even if the mandates on mass will have a positive,
04:12:35 even strongly positive result,
04:12:37 many Americans will still say no.
04:12:43 Because in the long arc of history,
04:12:46 saying no in that moment will actually lead
04:12:49 to a better country and a better world.
04:12:53 So that’s a messed up aspect of America,
04:12:57 but it’s also a beautiful part.
04:12:59 We’re skeptical even about good things.
04:13:03 I agree and certainly we should all be cautious
04:13:08 about government overreach, absolutely.
04:13:11 And it happens in all kinds of scenarios
04:13:14 with incarceration with a thousand things.
04:13:17 And we also should be afraid of government underreach
04:13:21 that if there is a problem that could be solved
04:13:24 by governments and that’s why we have governments
04:13:26 in the first place is that there’s just certain things
04:13:28 that individuals can’t do on their own.
04:13:31 And that’s why we pool our resources
04:13:34 and we, in some ways, sacrifice our rights
04:13:38 for this common thing.
04:13:39 And that’s why we don’t have, hopefully,
04:13:41 people, murderers marauding
04:13:42 or people driving 200 miles down the street.
04:13:45 We have a process for arriving at a set of common rules.
04:13:49 And so, while I fully agree that we need to respect
04:13:52 and we need to listen, we need to find that right balance.
04:13:56 And you’ve raised the magic I word, ivermectin.
04:14:00 And so, an ivermectin, like my view has always been,
04:14:06 ivermectin could be effective, it could not be effective.
04:14:09 Let’s study it through a full process.
04:14:12 And when you had Francis Collins with you,
04:14:14 even while he was making up stories about this wrestler,
04:14:19 he was saying, yeah, exactly.
04:14:22 But he was saying that they’re going to do
04:14:25 a full randomized highest level trial of ivermectin.
04:14:28 And if ivermectin works,
04:14:30 then that’s another tool in our toolbox.
04:14:32 And I think we should.
04:14:34 And I think that Sanjay was absolutely correct
04:14:37 to concede the point to Joe,
04:14:40 that it was disingenuous for people,
04:14:43 including people on CNN,
04:14:45 to say that ivermectin is for livestock.
04:14:48 And so, I definitely think that we have to,
04:14:53 like we have to have some kind of process
04:14:55 that allows us to come together.
04:14:57 And I totally agree that the great strength of America
04:15:01 is that we empower individuals.
04:15:03 It’s the history of our frontier mentality in our country.
04:15:06 So we, I 100% agree that we have to allow that,
04:15:11 even if sometimes it creates messy processes
04:15:15 and uncomfortable feelings and all those sorts of things.
04:15:19 You are an ultra marathon runner.
04:15:22 Yes.
04:15:23 What are you running from?
04:15:27 No.
04:15:28 It’s the right, it’s the funny thing is,
04:15:30 so I’m an ultra marathoner and I’ve done 13 Ironmans.
04:15:34 And people say, oh my God, that’s amazing.
04:15:36 13 Ironmans.
04:15:37 And what I always say, no, one Ironman is impressive.
04:15:41 13 Ironmans, there’s something effing wrong with you.
04:15:44 We just need to figure out what it is.
04:15:45 Yeah, there’s some demons you’re trying to work through.
04:15:48 I mean, well, you’re doing the work though.
04:15:49 Most people just kind of let the demons sit in the attic.
04:15:53 No, what have you learned about yourself,
04:15:57 about your mind, about your body, about life,
04:16:00 from taking your body limit in that kind of way
04:16:05 to running those kinds of distances?
04:16:07 Well, it’s a great question.
04:16:08 And I know that you are also kind of exploring
04:16:10 the limits of the physical.
04:16:12 And so for me in doing the Ironmans and the ultra marathons,
04:16:17 it’s always the same kind of lesson,
04:16:20 which is just when you think you have nothing left,
04:16:25 you actually have a ton left.
04:16:27 There are a lot of resources that are there
04:16:31 if you call on them.
04:16:32 And the ability to call on them has to be cultivated.
04:16:38 And so for me, especially in the Ironman,
04:16:42 and Ironman in many ways is harder than the ultra marathons
04:16:45 because I’ll be at, I mean, it’s 140 miles.
04:16:48 I’ll be at a 100 mile, 120, having done the swim
04:16:52 and then the bike and I’ll be whatever,
04:16:56 six miles into the run.
04:16:58 And I’ll think, I feel like shit.
04:17:01 I have nothing left.
04:17:02 How am I possibly gonna run 20 miles more?
04:17:07 But there’s always more.
04:17:10 And I think that for me, these extreme sports
04:17:15 are my process of exploring what’s possible.
04:17:21 And I feel like it applies in so many different areas
04:17:25 of life where you’re kind of pushing
04:17:28 and it feels like the limit.
04:17:30 And one of my friend of mine,
04:17:33 who I just have so much respect for,
04:17:35 who actually be a great guest
04:17:37 if you haven’t already interviewed him is Charlie Angle.
04:17:41 And Charlie, he was a drug addict.
04:17:44 He was in prison, his life was total shit.
04:17:48 And somehow, and I can’t remember the full story,
04:17:50 he just started running around the prison yard.
04:17:55 And it’s like Forrest Gump.
04:17:56 And he just kept running and running.
04:17:59 And then he got out of prison and he kept running
04:18:02 and he started doing ultra marathons,
04:18:04 started inspiring all these other people.
04:18:07 Now he’s written all these books.
04:18:09 As a matter of fact, we just spoke a few months ago
04:18:12 that he’s planning on running from the Dead Sea
04:18:18 to somehow to the top of Mount Everest,
04:18:20 from the lowest point to the highest point on earth.
04:18:23 And I said, well, why are you stopping there?
04:18:25 Why don’t you get whatever camera in
04:18:29 and go down to the lowest part of the ocean,
04:18:32 go to the lowest part of the ocean
04:18:34 and then talk to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos
04:18:38 and go to the kind of the highest place
04:18:40 than the stratosphere you can get.
04:18:42 But it’s this thing of possibility.
04:18:44 And I just feel like so many of us and myself included,
04:18:49 we get stuck in a sense of what we think is our range.
04:18:54 And if we’re not careful, that can become our range.
04:18:57 And that’s why for me in all of life,
04:19:00 it’s all about like we’ve been talking about,
04:19:02 challenging the limits, challenging assumptions,
04:19:06 challenging ourselves and hopefully,
04:19:09 we do it in a way that kind of doesn’t hurt anybody.
04:19:12 When I’m at the Ironman, they have all these little kids
04:19:15 and they’ll have these little shirts
04:19:17 and it’ll say like, my dad is a hero
04:19:19 and have the little Ironman logo.
04:19:21 And I wanna say, it’s like, no,
04:19:22 your dad is actually a narcissistic dick
04:19:25 who goes on eight mile bike rides every Sunday
04:19:29 rather than spend time with you.
04:19:31 And so we shouldn’t hurt anybody.
04:19:34 But for me, and also I just find it very enjoyable
04:19:38 and I hope I’m not disclosing too much
04:19:41 about our conversation before we went live
04:19:44 where you’re doing so many different things
04:19:46 with running and your martial arts.
04:19:48 And I encouraged you to do ultra marathons
04:19:53 because there’s so many great ones in Texas.
04:19:55 It’s actually surprisingly a very enjoyable way
04:19:58 to spend a day.
04:19:59 Like how would you recommend?
04:20:01 So yeah, for people who might not know,
04:20:03 I’ve never actually even run a marathon.
04:20:05 I’ve run 22 miles in one time at most.
04:20:08 I did a four by four by 48 challenge with David Goggins
04:20:13 where you run four miles every four hours.
04:20:16 Is it different as less to do with the distance
04:20:19 and more to do with the sleep deprivation.
04:20:21 What advice would you give to a first time ultra marathon
04:20:24 or like me trying to run 50 or more miles
04:20:27 or for anybody else interested
04:20:30 in this kind of exploration of their range?
04:20:32 What I always tell is the same advice is register.
04:20:36 Pick your timeline of when you think you can be ready.
04:20:39 Make it, depending on where you are now,
04:20:41 make it six months, make a year,
04:20:43 and then register for the race.
04:20:45 And then once you’re registered,
04:20:47 just work back from there, what’s it going to take?
04:20:49 But one of the things for people who are just getting going,
04:20:52 you really do need to make sure
04:20:53 that your body is ready for it.
04:20:55 And so particularly, and particularly as we get older,
04:20:59 strengthening is really important.
04:21:02 So I’ll do a plug for my brother, Jordan Metzl.
04:21:06 He’s a doctor at hospital for special surgery,
04:21:08 but his whole thing is functional strength.
04:21:10 And so, and people know about,
04:21:12 and you can actually even go to his website.
04:21:15 You can just Google Jordan Metzl Iron Strength,
04:21:17 but it’s all about like burpees
04:21:19 and just building your muscular strength
04:21:21 so that you don’t get injured as you increase.
04:21:25 And then just increase your mileage with,
04:21:27 in some steady way, make sure that you take rest days
04:21:31 and listen to your body because people like you
04:21:34 who are just very kind of mind over matter,
04:21:37 like you were telling me before about you have an injury,
04:21:39 but you kind of run a little bit differently.
04:21:41 And we need to listen to our bodies
04:21:44 because our bodies are communicating.
04:21:48 But I think it was kind of little by little magic is possible.
04:21:53 And what I will say is,
04:21:54 and I also have done lots and lots of marathons,
04:21:58 and I always tell people that the ultra marathons,
04:22:01 at least the ones that I do,
04:22:02 and I shouldn’t misrepresent myself.
04:22:04 I mean, there are people who do 500 mile races.
04:22:07 The ones that I do are 50K mountain trail runs,
04:22:11 which is 32 miles.
04:22:12 So I do the kind of the easier side of ultras,
04:22:17 but it’s actually much easier than a marathon
04:22:19 because some of the mountain ones,
04:22:21 sometimes it’s so steep that you can’t,
04:22:25 you have to walk it
04:22:26 because walking is faster than running.
04:22:29 And every four or five miles in the supported races,
04:22:32 you stop and eat blintzes and foiled potatoes.
04:22:35 It’s actually quite enjoyable.
04:22:36 But as I started to tell you before we went live,
04:22:42 so I’ve done for lots of years,
04:22:43 these 50K mountain trail runs,
04:22:45 and I was going to Taiwan a number of years ago
04:22:48 for something else.
04:22:49 And I thought, well, wouldn’t it be fun
04:22:50 to do an ultra marathon in Taiwan?
04:22:53 I looked and that the weekend after my visit,
04:22:56 there was a marathon.
04:22:57 It was called the,
04:22:59 every ultra marathon, it was called the Taiwan Beast.
04:23:01 And I figured, oh, beasts, what are they talking about?
04:23:03 It’s 50K mountain trail,
04:23:05 and I’ve done a million of them.
04:23:06 And then I went to register.
04:23:07 And then as part of registration,
04:23:09 they said, you need to have all of this equipment.
04:23:11 And it was all this like wilderness survival equipment.
04:23:14 And I was thinking, God, these Taiwanese,
04:23:17 but what a bunch of wimps.
04:23:18 You have to carry, give me a break, 50K mountain trail.
04:23:22 So I get there and the race starts
04:23:24 at like 4.30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere.
04:23:27 And you have to wear headlamps
04:23:28 and everyone’s carrying all this stuff.
04:23:29 And you kind of go running out into the rainforest.
04:23:34 It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my,
04:23:36 it took 19 hours.
04:23:38 There were maybe 15 cliff faces, like a real cliff.
04:23:41 And somebody had dangled like a little piece of string.
04:23:44 And so you had to hold onto the string with one hand
04:23:46 while it was in the pouring rain, climb up these cliffs.
04:23:49 There were maybe 20 river crossings,
04:23:52 but not just like a little stream, like a torrential river.
04:23:57 There were some things where it was so steep
04:24:00 that everyone was just climbing up
04:24:02 and then you’d slide all the way down and climb up.
04:24:03 And there were people who I met on the way out there
04:24:07 who were saying, oh yeah,
04:24:07 I did the Sahara 500 kilometer race.
04:24:11 And those people were just sprawled out.
04:24:15 A lot of them didn’t finish.
04:24:17 So that was the hardest thing I’ve ever.
04:24:19 So how do you get through something like that?
04:24:22 You just, one step at a time?
04:24:23 Was there, do you remember, is there a?
04:24:26 Yeah.
04:24:27 Is there a dark moments
04:24:28 or is it kind of all spread out thinly?
04:24:31 It wasn’t really dark moments.
04:24:34 I mean, there was one thing where I’d been running so long
04:24:36 I thought, well, I must almost be done.
04:24:39 And then I found out I had like 15 miles more.
04:24:44 But I guess with all of these things,
04:24:48 it’s the messages that we tell ourselves.
04:24:51 And so for me, it’s like the message I always tell myself
04:24:55 is quitting isn’t an option.
04:24:58 I mean, once in a while you kind of have to quit
04:25:00 if like, listen to the universe,
04:25:02 if whatever, you’re gonna kill yourself or something.
04:25:04 But for me, it was just, whatever it takes,
04:25:08 there’s no way I’m stopping.
04:25:10 And if I have to go up this muddy hill 20 times
04:25:14 because I keep sliding, I’m sure there’s a way.
04:25:17 It’s probably a personality flaw.
04:25:21 Where does your love for chocolate come from?
04:25:23 Oh, it’s a great question.
04:25:24 And in both of my Joe Rogan interviews,
04:25:27 that’s the first question that he asked.
04:25:29 So I’m glad that we’ve gotten to that.
04:25:30 So one, I’ve always loved chocolate.
04:25:33 And I call it like a secret, but now that I keep telling,
04:25:37 if you keep telling the same secret,
04:25:39 it’s actually no longer a secret,
04:25:42 that I have a secret, which is not secret
04:25:45 because I’m telling you on a podcast,
04:25:47 life as a chocolate shaman.
04:25:50 And so when I give keynotes at tech conferences,
04:25:53 I always say, I’m happy to give a keynote,
04:25:55 but I want to lead a sacred cacao ceremony in the night.
04:25:59 I’m actually, believe it or not,
04:26:00 the official chocolate shaman
04:26:02 of what used to be called exponential medicine,
04:26:05 which is part of Singularity University.
04:26:06 Now, my friend Daniel Kraft who runs it,
04:26:09 it’s going to be called NextMed.
04:26:12 And so, but I’ll have to go back.
04:26:14 As I was going to Berlin a lot of years ago,
04:26:19 and I’ve always loved chocolate,
04:26:20 I was going to Berlin to give a keynote
04:26:23 at a big conference called TOA, Tech Open Air.
04:26:28 And so when I got there, the first night,
04:26:31 I was supposed to give a talk,
04:26:33 but there had been some mix up.
04:26:34 They’d forgotten to reserve the room.
04:26:36 And so the talk got canceled.
04:26:38 And in the brochure, they had all these different events
04:26:41 around Berlin that you could go to.
04:26:44 And one of them was a cacao ceremony.
04:26:46 And so I went there and actually met somebody,
04:26:49 Viviana, who is still a friend,
04:26:52 but I met, going in there,
04:26:53 and there was this cacao ceremony.
04:26:54 These kind of hippie dudes.
04:26:56 And then everybody got the cacao.
04:26:59 And then they said, all right,
04:27:01 as they talked a little bit about the process,
04:27:03 and then they said, all right,
04:27:04 everyone just stand and kind of,
04:27:06 we’re going to spin around in a circle for 45 minutes.
04:27:09 And so I spun around in the circle for like 10 minutes,
04:27:12 but then I had to leave
04:27:14 because I had to go to something else.
04:27:15 And so that, I thought that was that.
04:27:18 But then I saw Viviana the next day,
04:27:21 and I said, well, how did the cacao ceremony go?
04:27:23 And she showed me these pictures
04:27:25 of all of these people, mostly naked,
04:27:28 like it turned into chaos.
04:27:30 Oh, that’s awesome.
04:27:31 And it was like, oh, and so let me get this straight.
04:27:33 People drank chocolate,
04:27:35 then they spun around in a circle,
04:27:37 and something else happened.
04:27:39 And anyway, so then two days later,
04:27:41 I was invited to another cacao ceremony,
04:27:43 which was also actually part of this Toa.
04:27:46 And that was kind of more structured,
04:27:48 and it was more sane because it was part of this thing.
04:27:51 And at the end of that, I had this,
04:27:53 I thought one, the greatest thing ever,
04:27:56 a sacred cacao ceremony,
04:27:58 like you drink chocolate milk and everybody’s free.
04:28:01 And I love that idea because I’ve never done drugs,
04:28:05 I don’t drink.
04:28:07 But just part of it is because I think whatever,
04:28:09 like I was saying with the ultra running,
04:28:12 all of the possibilities are within us
04:28:14 if we can get out of our own way.
04:28:16 And then I thought, well, you know,
04:28:17 I think I can do a better job
04:28:20 than what I experienced in Berlin.
04:28:22 So I came back and I thought, all right,
04:28:23 I’m gonna get accredited as a cacao shaman.
04:28:26 And this will shock you.
04:28:27 Because I know if you’re gonna be like a rabbi
04:28:30 or a priest or something, there’s some process.
04:28:32 But shockingly, there’s no official process
04:28:35 to become a chocolate shaman.
04:28:38 And so I thought, all right, well, you know,
04:28:40 I’m just gonna train myself.
04:28:42 And when I’m ready, I’m gonna declare my chocolate shamanism.
04:28:45 So I started studying different things.
04:28:47 And when I was ready, I just said,
04:28:50 now I’m a chocolate shaman, self declared.
04:28:52 Self declared.
04:28:53 And so, but I do these ceremonies
04:28:55 and I’ve done them at tech conferences.
04:28:58 I did one in Soho House in New York.
04:29:01 I’ve done it at a place Rancho La Puerta in Mexico.
04:29:04 And every time it’s the same thing.
04:29:05 Because it just, if people are given a license to be free,
04:29:10 just to, it doesn’t matter, and what I always say is,
04:29:13 you’re here for a sacred cacao ceremony,
04:29:15 but the truth is there’s no such thing as sacred cacao.
04:29:18 And there’s no sacred mountains
04:29:19 and there’s no sacred people and there’s no sacred plants.
04:29:22 Because nothing is sacred if we don’t attribute,
04:29:25 ascribe sacredness to it.
04:29:28 But if we recognize that everything is sacred,
04:29:32 then we’ll live different lives.
04:29:33 And for the purpose of this ceremony,
04:29:36 we’re just gonna say, all right,
04:29:37 we’re gonna focus on this cacao,
04:29:39 which actually has been used ceremonially for 5,000 years.
04:29:43 It has all these wonderful properties.
04:29:47 But it’s just people who get that license
04:29:49 and then they’re just free and people are dancing
04:29:52 and all sorts of things.
04:29:53 Is the goal to celebrate life in general?
04:29:57 Is it to celebrate the senses, like taste?
04:30:00 Is it to celebrate yourself, each other?
04:30:03 What is there?
04:30:04 I think the core is gratitude and just appreciation.
04:30:09 All the experiences in life?
04:30:10 Yeah, just of being alive,
04:30:12 of just living in this sacred world
04:30:15 where we have all these things
04:30:16 that we don’t even pay any attention to.
04:30:19 My friend, A.J. Jacobs, he had a wonderful book
04:30:23 that I use the spirit of it in the ceremonies,
04:30:27 not the exactly, but he was in a restaurant in New York,
04:30:31 a coffee shop, and his child said,
04:30:33 hey, where does the coffee come from?
04:30:35 And he’s like a wonderful big thinker.
04:30:38 And he started really answering that question.
04:30:41 Well, here’s where the beans come from,
04:30:42 but how did the beans get here
04:30:44 and who painted the yellow line on the street
04:30:46 so the truck didn’t crash and who made the cup?
04:30:50 And he spent a year making a full spreadsheet
04:30:53 of all of the people who in one way or another
04:30:56 played some role in that one cup of coffee.
04:31:00 And he traveled all around the world thanking them.
04:31:03 Like, it’s like, thank you for painting
04:31:05 the yellow line on the road.
04:31:06 And so for me with the cacao, part of when I do
04:31:09 these ceremonies is just to say like,
04:31:12 you’re drinking this cacao, but there’s a person
04:31:15 who planted the seed, there’s a person
04:31:16 who watered the plant, there’s a person,
04:31:19 and I just think that level of awareness,
04:31:22 and it’s true with anything.
04:31:24 Like you have in front of you a stuffed hedgehog, so.
04:31:27 Somebody made that.
04:31:28 I love it, it’s great.
04:31:30 But like, if we just said, all right,
04:31:32 where does this stuffed hedgehog come from?
04:31:35 We would have a full story of globalization,
04:31:38 of the interconnection of people all around the world
04:31:42 doing all sorts of things of human imagination.
04:31:45 It’s beyond our capacity and our daily,
04:31:47 we’d go insane if every day,
04:31:49 like we’re speaking into a microphone,
04:31:51 well, what are the hundreds of years of technology
04:31:54 that make this possible?
04:31:56 But if just once in a while, we just focus on one thing
04:31:59 and say, this thing is sacred.
04:32:01 And because I’m recognizing that
04:32:04 and I’m having an appreciation for the world around me,
04:32:07 it just kind of makes my life feel more sacred.
04:32:10 It makes me recognize my connection to others.
04:32:12 So that’s the gist of it.
04:32:14 Yeah, it’s funny, I often look at
04:32:19 things in this world and moments and just am in awe
04:32:24 of the full
04:32:27 universe that brought that to be.
04:32:33 In a similar way as you’re saying,
04:32:35 but I don’t as often think about exactly what you’re saying,
04:32:38 which is the number of people behind every little thing
04:32:41 we get to enjoy.
04:32:43 I mean, yeah, this hedgehog, this microphone,
04:32:46 like directly, like thousands of people involved.
04:32:49 Millions.
04:32:50 And then indirectly, it’s millions.
04:32:52 Like, and they’re all like this microphone
04:32:59 that there’s like artists, essentially,
04:33:01 like people who made it their life’s work,
04:33:04 all the costs, like from the factories to the manufacturer,
04:33:07 there’s families that the production of this microphone
04:33:11 and this hedgehog are fed because of the skill
04:33:14 of this human that helped contribute to that development.
04:33:18 Yeah, it’s.
04:33:20 And like Isaac Newton and John von Neumann
04:33:22 are in this microphone.
04:33:24 They’re standing on the shoulders of giants
04:33:26 and we’re standing on their shoulders.
04:33:28 And somebody will be standing on ours.
04:33:34 You mentioned One Shared World, what is it?
04:33:40 Well, thanks for asking.
04:33:41 And by the way, what I will say is the people
04:33:42 who are listening, this is so incredible
04:33:46 and I’m so thrilled to have this kind of long conversation.
04:33:49 Hello, person who’s listening past the five hour mark.
04:33:54 Thanks, mom.
04:33:56 I salute you.
04:33:58 Somebody was like sleeping for the first four hours
04:34:00 and just woke up.
04:34:01 Now’s the good stuff, I’ve been saving it.
04:34:04 But, and I have to say that so much of our lives
04:34:09 is forced into these short bursts
04:34:11 that I’m just so appreciative to have the chance
04:34:14 to have this conversation.
04:34:15 So thank you for that.
04:34:16 Some people would say five hours is short, so.
04:34:18 You know, let’s go.
04:34:20 And yeah, that’s what my girlfriend says.
04:34:25 Like if I was like captured and tortured
04:34:29 and they were gonna interrogate me,
04:34:30 it’s like at the end they’d say, all right.
04:34:32 No, we’re sick of this guy, we quit.
04:34:35 Let him go.
04:34:36 I love it.
04:34:37 So background on One Shared World.
04:34:39 I mentioned I’m on a faculty for Singularity University.
04:34:43 In the earliest days of the pandemic,
04:34:45 I was invited to give a talk on whether the tools
04:34:48 of the genetics and biotech revolutions
04:34:50 were a match for the outbreak.
04:34:52 And my view was then as now
04:34:55 that the answer to that question is yes.
04:34:57 But I woke up that morning
04:34:58 and I felt that that wasn’t the most important talk
04:35:02 that I could give.
04:35:03 There was something else that was more pressing for me.
04:35:06 And that was the realization,
04:35:08 they were asking the question,
04:35:09 well, why weren’t we prepared for this pandemic?
04:35:12 Because we could have been, we weren’t.
04:35:14 And why can’t, and because of that,
04:35:17 why can’t we respond adequately to this outbreak?
04:35:23 And then there was the thing, well,
04:35:24 if we, even if we respond somehow miraculously
04:35:27 overcome this pandemic, it’s a pyrrhic victory
04:35:31 if we don’t prepare ourselves to respond
04:35:35 to the broader category of pandemics,
04:35:37 particularly as we enter the age of synthetic biology.
04:35:40 But if somehow miraculously we solve that problem,
04:35:44 but we don’t solve the problem of climate change,
04:35:47 well, kind of who cares?
04:35:48 We didn’t have a pandemic,
04:35:49 but we wiped everybody out from climate change.
04:35:51 And let’s just say, you get where this is going,
04:35:55 that we organize ourselves and we solve climate change.
04:35:58 And then we have a nuclear war
04:36:00 because everybody’s, particularly China now,
04:36:03 but US, the former Soviet Union
04:36:05 are building all these nuclear weapons.
04:36:07 Who cares that we solved climate change
04:36:09 because we’re all gone anyway.
04:36:10 And the meta category, bringing all of those things together
04:36:14 was this mismatch between the increasingly global
04:36:19 and shared nature of the biggest challenges that we face
04:36:24 and our inability to solve that entire category of problems.
04:36:29 And there’s a historical issue,
04:36:32 which is that prior to the 30 Years War in the 17th century,
04:36:36 we had all these different kinds of sovereignty
04:36:38 and religious and different kinds
04:36:41 of organizational principles and everybody got in this war.
04:36:44 And in this series of treaties
04:36:46 that together are called the Peace of Westphalia,
04:36:50 the framework for the modern,
04:36:52 what we now understand as the modern nation state was laid.
04:36:55 And then through colonialism and other means
04:36:58 that idea of a state is what it is today,
04:37:03 spread throughout the world.
04:37:05 Then through particularly the late 19th
04:37:09 and early 20th century,
04:37:10 we realized how unstable that system was
04:37:14 because you always had these jockeying
04:37:16 between sovereign states and some were rising
04:37:18 and some were falling and you ended up in war.
04:37:21 And that was the genius of the generations
04:37:23 who came together in 1945 in San Francisco
04:37:25 and the planning had even started before then,
04:37:28 who said, well, we can’t just have that world,
04:37:30 we need to have an overlay.
04:37:32 And we talked about the UN and the WHO
04:37:34 of systems which transcend our national sovereignties.
04:37:39 They don’t get rid of them, but they transcend them
04:37:42 so we can solve this category of problems.
04:37:44 But we’re now reaching a point where our reach as humans,
04:37:47 even individually, but collectively is so great
04:37:51 that there’s a mismatch between, as I said,
04:37:52 the nature of the problems
04:37:53 and the ability to solve those problems.
04:37:57 And unless we can address
04:38:00 that broader global collective action problem,
04:38:03 we’re going to extinct ourselves.
04:38:05 And we see these different, what I call verticals,
04:38:08 whether it’s climate change
04:38:09 or trying to prevent a nuclear weapons proliferation
04:38:13 or anything else, but none of those can succeed.
04:38:16 And frankly, it doesn’t even matter if one succeeds
04:38:18 because all of them have the potential
04:38:21 to lead to extinction level events.
04:38:25 So I gave that talk and that talk went viral.
04:38:30 I stayed up all night the next night and I drafted,
04:38:32 I think it was like an insanity,
04:38:35 but I think a lot of us were manic
04:38:36 in those early days of the pandemics
04:38:38 wanting to do something.
04:38:40 And so I stayed up all night and I drafted
04:38:42 what I called a declaration of global interdependence.
04:38:45 And I posted that on my website, my jamiemuscle.com.
04:38:48 It’s still there.
04:38:49 And that went viral.
04:38:51 And so then I called a meeting just on the people
04:38:54 on my personal email list.
04:38:56 And so we had people from 25 countries.
04:38:59 There were all of these people
04:39:00 who were having the same thing.
04:39:02 There’s something wrong in the world.
04:39:03 They wanted to be part of a process of fixing it.
04:39:07 And so it was a crazy 35 days
04:39:10 where we broke into eight different working groups.
04:39:12 We had an amazing team that helped redraft
04:39:16 what became the declaration of interdependence,
04:39:18 which is now in 20 languages.
04:39:21 We laid out a work plan.
04:39:23 We founded this organization called One Shared World.
04:39:27 The URL is oneshared.world.
04:39:28 And it’s just been this incredible journey.
04:39:31 We now have people who are participating
04:39:33 in one way or another from 120 different countries.
04:39:36 We have our public events exploring these issues,
04:39:40 get millions of viewers.
04:39:43 We have world leaders who are participating.
04:39:46 So the vision is to work on some of these big problems,
04:39:51 arbitrary number of problems that present themselves
04:39:53 in the world that face all of human civilization
04:39:56 and to be able to work together.
04:39:58 Well, that is, but there’s a macro, a meta problem,
04:40:02 which is the global collective action problem.
04:40:04 And so the idea is even if we just focus on the verticals,
04:40:10 on the manifestations of the global collective action
04:40:12 problem, there’ll be an infinite number of those things.
04:40:16 So while we work on those things,
04:40:18 like climate change, pandemics, WMD and other things,
04:40:22 we also have to ask the bigger questions
04:40:25 of why can’t we solve this category of problems.
04:40:27 And the idea is, at least from my observation,
04:40:30 is that whenever big decisions are being made,
04:40:34 our national leaders and corporate leaders
04:40:37 are doing exactly what we’ve hired them to do.
04:40:40 They’re maximizing for national interest,
04:40:43 even, or corporate interests,
04:40:45 even at the expense of everybody.
04:40:48 And so it’s not that we wanna get rid of states.
04:40:50 States are essential in our world system.
04:40:52 It’s not we wanna undermine the UN,
04:40:54 which is also essential, but massively underperforming.
04:40:57 What we wanna do is to create
04:40:59 an empowered global constituency of people
04:41:02 who are demanding that their leaders at all levels
04:41:06 just do a better job of balancing
04:41:09 broader and narrower interests.
04:41:10 I see.
04:41:11 So this is more like a,
04:41:14 make it more symmetric in terms of power.
04:41:17 It’s holding accountable the nations, the leaders.
04:41:22 The leaders.
04:41:23 The problem is nations are powerful.
04:41:26 We talked about China quite a bit.
04:41:29 How do you have an organizations of citizens of Earth
04:41:33 that can solve this collective problem
04:41:36 that holds China accountable?
04:41:39 It’s difficult, because UN,
04:41:41 you could say a lot of things,
04:41:42 but to call it effective is hard.
04:41:45 You know, the internet almost is a kind of representation
04:41:50 of a collective force that holds nations accountable.
04:41:57 Not to give Twitter too much credit,
04:41:58 but social networks, broadly speaking.
04:42:03 So you have hope that it’s possible
04:42:05 to build such collections of humans that resist China.
04:42:10 Not necessarily resist China,
04:42:12 but human, I mean, our cultures change over time.
04:42:16 I mean, the idea of the modern nation state
04:42:20 would not have made sense to people
04:42:22 in the 13th or 14th century.
04:42:24 The idea that became the United Nations.
04:42:28 I mean, it had its earliest days in the philosophies of Kant.
04:42:33 It took a long time for these ideas to be realized.
04:42:39 And so the idea, and we’re far from successful.
04:42:44 I mean, we’ve had little minor successes,
04:42:46 which we’re very proud of.
04:42:47 We got the G20 leaders to incorporate the language
04:42:51 that we provided on addressing the needs
04:42:53 of the world’s most vulnerable populations
04:42:56 into the final summit communique
04:42:59 from the G20 summit in Riyadh.
04:43:01 This year, we’re just on the verge
04:43:03 of having our language pat on the same issue,
04:43:07 ensuring everyone on earth has access to safe water,
04:43:10 basic sanitation and hygiene,
04:43:11 and essential pandemic protection by 2030
04:43:14 passed as part of a resolution in the United Nations
04:43:18 General Assembly.
04:43:19 And we’re primarily, I mean, it’s young people
04:43:22 all around the world.
04:43:23 And when I told them in the beginning of this year,
04:43:26 this is our goal.
04:43:26 We’re gonna get the UN General Assembly
04:43:28 to pass a resolution with our language in it.
04:43:32 I mean, first, I think they all thought it was insane,
04:43:35 but they were too young and inexperienced
04:43:38 to know how insane it was.
04:43:39 But now these young people are just so excited
04:43:42 that it’s actually happening.
04:43:43 So what we’re trying to do is really to create a movement,
04:43:48 which we don’t feel that we need to do from scratch
04:43:51 because there are a lot of movements.
04:43:53 Like right now, we just had the Glasgow G20,
04:43:56 I mean, I’m sorry, the Glasgow Climate Change Cup 26,
04:44:00 and then Greta Thunberg, who has a huge following
04:44:03 and who is an amazing young woman,
04:44:05 but I was kind of disappointed in what she said afterwards.
04:44:08 It became like a meme on Twitter, which was blah, blah, blah.
04:44:13 And basically it was like, blah, blah, blah,
04:44:15 these old people are just screwing around
04:44:17 and it’s a waste of time.
04:44:18 And definitely the critique is merited,
04:44:22 but young people have never been more empowered,
04:44:25 educated, connected than they are now.
04:44:29 And so we’ve had a process with One Shared World
04:44:36 where we partnered with the Model United Nations,
04:44:39 the Aga Khan Foundation, the India Sanitation Coalition.
04:44:42 And what we did is say, all right, we have this goal,
04:44:44 water sanitation, hygiene, and pandemic protection
04:44:46 for everyone on earth by 2030.
04:44:49 And we had debates and consultations
04:44:52 using the Model UN framework all around the world
04:44:54 in multiple languages.
04:44:56 And we said, come up with a plan
04:44:58 for how this could be achieved.
04:44:59 And these brilliant young people in every country,
04:45:02 not every country, most countries,
04:45:04 they all contributed, then we had a plan.
04:45:06 Then I recruited friends of mine,
04:45:08 like my friend Hans Carrell in Sweden,
04:45:11 who’s the former chief counsel of the whole United Nations,
04:45:14 and asked him and others to work with these young people
04:45:18 and representatives to turn that
04:45:20 into what looks exactly like a UN resolution.
04:45:24 It’s just written by a bunch of kids all around the world.
04:45:28 We then sent that to every permanent representative,
04:45:31 every government representative at the UN.
04:45:34 And that was why working
04:45:35 with the German and Spanish governments,
04:45:37 why the language is centralized from that document
04:45:40 is about to pass the UN.
04:45:41 And it doesn’t mean that just passing
04:45:43 a UN General Assembly resolution changes anything,
04:45:46 but we think that there’s a model of engaging people,
04:45:49 just like you’re talking about,
04:45:50 these people who are outside
04:45:53 of the traditional power structures
04:45:55 and who want to have a voice.
04:45:57 But I think we need to give a little bit of structure
04:46:00 because just going, I’m a big fan of Global Citizen,
04:46:03 but just going to a Global Citizen concert
04:46:06 and waving your iPhone back and forth
04:46:09 and tweeting about it isn’t enough
04:46:11 to drive the kind of change that’s required.
04:46:14 We need to come together, even in untraditional ways,
04:46:17 and articulate the change we want
04:46:20 and build popular movements to make that happen.
04:46:22 And popular means scale and movements at scale
04:46:26 that actually, at the individual level, do something
04:46:30 and that’s then magnified with the scale
04:46:33 to actually have significant impact.
04:46:35 I mean, at its best, you hear a lot of folks talk
04:46:39 about the various cryptocurrencies as possibly helping.
04:46:44 You have young people get involved
04:46:46 in challenging the power structures
04:46:49 by challenging the monetary system.
04:46:51 And there’s, some of it is number go up,
04:46:56 people get excited when they can make a little bit of money,
04:47:00 but that’s actually almost like an entry point
04:47:04 because then you almost feel empowered.
04:47:07 And because of that, you start to think
04:47:10 about some of these philosophical ideas
04:47:11 that I, as a young person, have the power
04:47:15 to change the world.
04:47:16 All of these senior folks in the position of power,
04:47:20 they were, first of all, they were once young
04:47:24 and powerless like me.
04:47:26 And I could be part of the next generation
04:47:29 that makes a change.
04:47:30 Well, all the things I see that are wrong
04:47:32 with the world, I can make it better.
04:47:34 And it’s very true that the overly powerful nations
04:47:39 of the world could be a relic of the past.
04:47:43 That could be a 20th century and before idea
04:47:47 that was tried, created a lot of benefit,
04:47:52 but we also saw the problems with that kind of world,
04:47:56 extreme nationalism.
04:47:58 We see the benefits and the problems of the Cold War.
04:48:02 Arguably Cold War got us to the moon,
04:48:06 but there could be other, a lot of other different
04:48:08 mechanisms that inspired competition,
04:48:11 especially friendly competition between nations
04:48:13 versus adversarial competition that resulted
04:48:16 in the response to COVID, for example,
04:48:18 with China and the United States and Russia
04:48:20 and the secrecy, the censorship.
04:48:25 Yeah, and all the things that are basically
04:48:27 against the spirit of science
04:48:31 and resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars
04:48:34 and the cost of countless lives.
04:48:37 What gives you hope about the future, Jamie?
04:48:41 Well, one of the things, you mentioned cryptocurrency
04:48:45 and then as you know better than most,
04:48:47 there’s cryptocurrency and then underneath
04:48:50 the cryptocurrency, there’s the blockchain
04:48:52 and the distributed ledger.
04:48:54 And then like we talked about, there are all these
04:48:56 young people who are able to connect with each other,
04:49:00 to organize in new ways.
04:49:03 And I work with these young people every single day
04:49:07 through One Shared World primarily,
04:49:09 but also other things.
04:49:11 And there’s so much optimism.
04:49:13 There’s so much hope that I just have a lot of faith
04:49:18 that we’re gonna figure something out.
04:49:20 I’m an optimist by nature.
04:49:23 And that doesn’t mean that we need to be blind
04:49:26 to the dangers.
04:49:27 There are very, very real dangers,
04:49:30 but just given half the chance, people wanna be good.
04:49:34 People want to do the right thing.
04:49:37 And I do believe that there’s a role,
04:49:40 maybe there’s a role for the at least near term
04:49:42 for governments, but there’s always a role for leadership.
04:49:46 And I’m, I guess like a Gramscian in the sense
04:49:50 that I think that we need to create frameworks
04:49:53 and structures that allow leaders to emerge.
04:49:58 And we need to build norms so that the leaders who emerge
04:50:02 are leaders who call on us, inspire our best instincts
04:50:08 and not drive us toward our worst.
04:50:10 But I really see a lot of hope.
04:50:13 And when you say this all the time in your podcast,
04:50:19 and you may even be more optimistic to me
04:50:21 as you look at the darkest moments of human history
04:50:24 and see hope, but we’re kind of a crazy, wonderful species.
04:50:29 I mean, yes, we figured out ways to slaughter each other
04:50:32 at scale, but we’ve come up with these wonderful philosophies
04:50:36 about love and all of those things.
04:50:38 And yeah, maybe the Bonobos have some love
04:50:41 in their cultures, but this,
04:50:43 we’re kind of a wonderful magical species.
04:50:46 And if we just can create enough of an infrastructure,
04:50:49 doesn’t need to be and shouldn’t be controlling,
04:50:52 just enough of an infrastructure
04:50:54 so that people are stakeholders,
04:50:56 feel like they’re stakeholders
04:50:57 in contributing to a positive story,
04:51:00 I just really feel the sky is the limit.
04:51:04 So if there’s somebody who’s young right now,
04:51:06 somebody in high school, somebody in college
04:51:08 listening to you, you’ve done a lot of incredible things.
04:51:12 You’re respected by a lot of the elites.
04:51:17 You’re respected by the people.
04:51:20 So you’re both able to sort of speak to all groups,
04:51:26 walk through the fire, like you mentioned
04:51:29 with the slab leak.
04:51:32 What advice would you give to young kids today
04:51:36 that are inspired by your story?
04:51:38 Well, thank you.
04:51:39 I mean, I think there’s one, there’s lots of,
04:51:41 I’m honored if anybody is inspired,
04:51:44 but it’s the same thing as I said with the science
04:51:48 that it’s all about values.
04:51:50 The core of everything is knowing who you are.
04:51:54 And so yes, I mean, there’s the broader thing
04:51:56 of follow your passions, a creative mind
04:52:01 and an inquisitive mind is the core of everything
04:52:03 because the knowledge base is constantly sharing.
04:52:06 So learning how to learn,
04:52:09 but at the core of everything is investing
04:52:13 in knowing who you are and what you stand for.
04:52:16 Because that’s the way, that’s the path
04:52:21 to leading a meaningful life, to contributing,
04:52:24 to not feeling alienated from your life as you get older.
04:52:28 And just like you live, it’s an ongoing process
04:52:34 and we all make mistakes
04:52:35 and we all kind of travel down wrong paths
04:52:38 and just have some love for yourself
04:52:41 and recognize that just at every,
04:52:44 like I was saying with the Ironman,
04:52:46 just when you think there’s no possibility
04:52:50 that you can go on, there’s a 100% possibility
04:52:54 that you can go on.
04:52:55 And just when you think that nothing better
04:52:58 will happen to you, there’s a 100% chance
04:53:02 that something better will happen to you.
04:53:03 You just gotta keep going.
04:53:05 Jamie, I’ve been a fan of yours.
04:53:08 I think first heard you on Joe Rogan Experience,
04:53:11 but I’ve been following your work,
04:53:13 your bold, fearless work with speaking about the lab leak
04:53:18 and everything you represent
04:53:20 from your brilliance to your kindness.
04:53:23 And the fact that you spent your valuable time with me today
04:53:27 and now I officially made you miss your flight.
04:53:31 And the fact that you said that
04:53:34 whether you were being nice or not,
04:53:35 I don’t know that you will be okay with that
04:53:38 means the world to me.
04:53:39 And I’m really honored that you spent your time with me today.
04:53:42 Well, really, it’s been such a great pleasure
04:53:44 and thank you for creating a forum
04:53:48 to have these kinds of long conversations.
04:53:51 So I really enjoyed it and thank you.
04:53:53 And if anybody has now listened for,
04:53:58 what’s it been, five and a half hours?
04:53:59 Yep.
04:54:00 Thank you for listening.
04:54:01 Welcome to Five Hour Club.
04:54:03 Represent.
04:54:04 Exactly.
04:54:06 Thank you, Jamie.
04:54:07 Thanks, Lex.
04:54:09 Thanks for listening to this conversation
04:54:10 with Jamie Metzl.
04:54:11 To support this podcast,
04:54:13 please check out our sponsors in the description.
04:54:16 And now let me leave you some words from Richard Feynman
04:54:19 about science and religion,
04:54:21 which I think also applies to science and geopolitics
04:54:24 because I believe scientists have the responsibility
04:54:27 to think broadly about the world
04:54:29 so that they may understand the bigger impact
04:54:31 of their inventions.
04:54:33 The quote goes like this,
04:54:34 In this age of specialization,
04:54:37 men who thoroughly know one field
04:54:39 are often incompetent to discuss another.
04:54:42 The old problems,
04:54:44 such as the relation of science and religion,
04:54:46 are still with us
04:54:47 and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever,
04:54:51 but they are not often publicly discussed
04:54:54 because of the limitations of specialization.
04:54:57 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.