back to indexJamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory | Lex Fridman Podcast #247
link |
The following is a conversation with Jamie Metzl,
link |
author specializing in topics of genetic engineering,
link |
biotechnology, and geopolitics.
link |
In the past two years, he has been outspoken
link |
about the need to investigate and keep an open mind
link |
about the origins of COVID 19.
link |
In particular, he has been keeping an extensive
link |
up to date collection of circumstantial evidence
link |
in support of what is colloquially known
link |
as lab leak hypothesis that COVID 19 leaked in 2019
link |
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
In part, I wanted to explore the idea
link |
in response to the thoughtful criticism
link |
to parts of the Francis Collins episode.
link |
I will have more and more difficult conversations like this
link |
with people from all walks of life
link |
and with all kinds of ideas.
link |
I promise to do my best to keep an open mind
link |
and yet to ask hard questions
link |
while together searching for the beautiful
link |
and the inspiring in the mind of the other person.
link |
It's a hard line to walk gracefully,
link |
especially for someone like me,
link |
who's a bit of an awkward introvert
link |
with barely the grasp of the English language
link |
or any language, except maybe Python and C++.
link |
But I hope you stick around, be patient and empathetic
link |
and maybe learn something new together with me.
link |
This is the Lex Friedman podcast.
link |
To support it, please check out our sponsors
link |
in the description.
link |
And now, here's my conversation with Jamie Metzl.
link |
What is the probability in your mind
link |
that COVID 19 leaked from a lab?
link |
In your write up, I believe you said 85%.
link |
I know it's just a percentage.
link |
We can't really be exact with these kinds of things,
link |
but it gives us a sense where your mind is,
link |
where your intuition is.
link |
So as it stands today, what would you say is that probability?
link |
I would stand by what I've been saying
link |
since really the middle of last year.
link |
It's more likely and not, in my opinion,
link |
that the pandemic stems
link |
from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan.
link |
Is it 90%, is it 65%, I mean, that's kind of arbitrary.
link |
But when I stack up all of the available evidence
link |
and all of it on both sides is circumstantial,
link |
it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin.
link |
So before we dive into the specifics at a high level,
link |
what types of evidence, what intuition, what ideas
link |
are leading you to have that kind of estimate?
link |
Is it possible to kind of condense,
link |
when you look at the wall of evidence before you,
link |
where's your source, the strongest source of your intuition?
link |
And I would have to say it's just logic
link |
and deductive reasoning.
link |
So before I make the case for why I think
link |
it's most likely a lab incident origin,
link |
let's just say why it could be,
link |
and still could be a natural origin.
link |
All of this is a natural origin in the sense
link |
that it's a bat virus backbone, horseshoe bat virus backbone.
link |
Okay, I'm gonna keep pausing you to define stuff.
link |
So maybe it's useful to say, what do we mean by lab leak?
link |
What do we mean by natural origin?
link |
What do we mean by virus backbone?
link |
Okay, great questions.
link |
So viruses come from somewhere.
link |
Viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years,
link |
and they've been around for such a long time
link |
because they are adaptive and they're growing
link |
and they're always changing and they're morphing.
link |
And that's why viruses are,
link |
I mean, they've been very successful and we are our victims.
link |
Sometimes we're beneficiaries.
link |
We have viral DNA has morphed into our genomes,
link |
but now it's certainly in the case of COVID 19,
link |
we are victims of the success of viruses.
link |
And so when we talk about a backbone,
link |
so the SARS CoV2 virus, it has a history
link |
and these viruses don't come out of whole cloth.
link |
There are viruses that morph.
link |
And so we know that at some period,
link |
maybe 20 years ago or whatever,
link |
the virus that is SARS CoV2 existed in horseshoe bats.
link |
It was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere.
link |
And there are some people who say,
link |
there's no evidence of this,
link |
but it's a plausible theory
link |
based on how things have happened in the past.
link |
Maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat
link |
through some intermediate species.
link |
So it's like, let's say there's a bat
link |
and that it infects some other animal.
link |
Let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat.
link |
They're all pangolin.
link |
They're all sorts of animals that have been considered.
link |
And then that virus adapts into that new host
link |
and it changes and grows.
link |
And then according to the quote unquote
link |
natural origins hypothesis,
link |
it jumps from that animal into humans.
link |
And so what you could imagine
link |
and some of the people who are making the case,
link |
all of the people actually,
link |
who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus,
link |
what they're saying is it went from bat
link |
to some intermediate species.
link |
And then from that intermediate species, most likely,
link |
there's some people who say it went directly bat to human,
link |
but through some intermediate species.
link |
And then humans interacted with that species.
link |
And then it jumped from that, whatever it is to humans.
link |
And that's a very plausible theory.
link |
It's just that there's no evidence for it.
link |
And the nature of the interaction is,
link |
do most people kind of suggest this at the wet markets?
link |
So the interaction of the humans with the animal
link |
is in the form of it's either a live animal
link |
as being sold to be eaten or a recently live animal,
link |
but newly dead animal being sold to be eaten.
link |
That's certainly one very possible possibility,
link |
a possible possibility, I don't know if that's a word.
link |
But the people who believe in the wet market origin,
link |
that's what they're saying.
link |
So they had one of these animals,
link |
they were cutting it up, let's say, in a market
link |
and maybe some of the blood got into somebody's,
link |
maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized
link |
and so somebody breathed it.
link |
And then that virus found this new host
link |
and that was the human host.
link |
But you could also have that happen in, let's say, a farm.
link |
So it's happened in the past that let's say
link |
that there are farms and because of human encroachment
link |
into wild spaces, we're pushing our farms
link |
and our animal farms further and further
link |
into what used to be just natural habitats.
link |
And so it's happened in the past, for example,
link |
that there were bats roosting over pig pens
link |
and the bat droppings went into the pig pens.
link |
The viruses in those droppings infected the pigs
link |
and then the pigs infected the humans.
link |
And that's why it's a plausible theory.
link |
It's just that there's basically no evidence for it.
link |
If it was the case that SARS CoV2 comes from this type
link |
of interaction, as in most of the at least recent
link |
past outbreaks, we'd see evidence of that.
link |
Viruses are messy.
link |
They're constantly undergoing Darwinian evolution
link |
and they're changing and it's not that they're just ready
link |
for prime time, ready to infect humans on day one.
link |
Normally you can trace the viral evolution prior
link |
to the time when it infects humans.
link |
But for SARS CoV2, it just showed up on the scene
link |
ready to infect humans.
link |
And there's no history that anybody has found so far
link |
of that kind of viral evolution.
link |
With the first SARS, you could track it
link |
by the genome sequencing that it was experimenting.
link |
And SARS CoV2 was very, very stable,
link |
meaning it had already adapted to humans
link |
by the time it interacted with us.
link |
It's fully adapted.
link |
So with SARS, there's a rapid evolution
link |
when it first kind of hooks onto a human.
link |
Yeah, because it's trying.
link |
Like a virus, its goal is to survive and replicate.
link |
Yeah, no, it's true.
link |
It's like, oh, we're gonna try this.
link |
Oh, that didn't work.
link |
We'll try it exactly like a startup.
link |
And so we don't see that.
link |
And so there are some people who say,
link |
well, one hypothesis is you have a totally isolated
link |
group of humans, maybe in Southern China,
link |
which is more than a thousand miles away from Wuhan.
link |
And maybe they're doing their animal farming
link |
right next to these areas where there are these horseshoe bats.
link |
And maybe in this totally isolated place
link |
that no one's ever heard of,
link |
they're not connected to any other place,
link |
one person gets infected.
link |
And it doesn't spread to anybody else
link |
because they're so isolated.
link |
They're like, I don't know.
link |
I can't even imagine that this is the case.
link |
Then somebody gets in a car and drives all night,
link |
more than a thousand miles through crappy roads
link |
to get to Wuhan, doesn't stop for anything,
link |
doesn't infect anybody on the way.
link |
No one else in that person's village infects anyone.
link |
And then that person goes straight
link |
to the Huanan seafood market,
link |
according to this, in my mind, not very credible theory,
link |
and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected.
link |
And they're only delivering those animals
link |
to the Wuhan market, which doesn't even sell very many
link |
of these kinds of animals
link |
that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else.
link |
So that's, I mean, it's a little bit of a straw man,
link |
but on top of that, the Chinese have sequenced
link |
more than 80,000 animal samples,
link |
and there's no evidence of this type of viral evolution
link |
that we would otherwise expect.
link |
Let's try to, at this moment, steel man the argument
link |
for the natural origin of the virus.
link |
So just to clarify, so Wuhan is actually,
link |
despite what it might sound like to people,
link |
is a pretty big city.
link |
There's a lot of people that live in it.
link |
So not only is there, at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
there's other centers that do work on viruses,
link |
but there's also a giant number of markets.
link |
And everything we're talking about here
link |
is pretty close together.
link |
So when I kind of look at the geography of this,
link |
I think when you zoom out, it's all Wuhan,
link |
but when you zoom in,
link |
there's just a lot of interesting dynamics
link |
that could be happening and what the cases are popping up
link |
and what's being reported, all that kind of stuff.
link |
So I think the people that argue for the natural origin,
link |
and there's a few recent papers
link |
that come out arguing this,
link |
it's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing,
link |
but I think what they're arguing
link |
is that there's this Hunan market
link |
that's one of the major markets, the wet markets in Wuhan,
link |
that there's a bunch of cases
link |
that were reported from there.
link |
So if I look at, for example,
link |
the Michael Warby perspective that he wrote in Science,
link |
he argues, he wrote this a few days ago,
link |
the predominance of early COVID cases linked to Hunan market,
link |
and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment bias,
link |
which I think is what people argue,
link |
that you're just kind of focusing on this region
link |
because a lot of cases came,
link |
but there could be a huge number of other cases.
link |
So people who argue against this
link |
say that this is a later stage already.
link |
So he says no, he says this is the epicenter,
link |
and this is a clear evidence, circumstantial evidence,
link |
but evidence nevertheless
link |
that this is where the jump happened to humans,
link |
the big explosion, maybe not case zero,
link |
I don't know if he argues that, but the early cases.
link |
So what do you make of this whole idea?
link |
Can you steel man it before we talk about the alternative?
link |
And my goal here isn't to attack people on the other side,
link |
and my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented
link |
that should change my view,
link |
I hope that I'll be open minded enough to change my view.
link |
And certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person,
link |
a respected scientist,
link |
and I think this work is contributive work,
link |
but I just don't think that it's as significant
link |
as has been reported in the press.
link |
And so what his argument is,
link |
is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019
link |
around the Huanan seafood market.
link |
And even though he himself argues
link |
that the original breakthrough case,
link |
the original case, the index case
link |
where the first person infected happened earlier,
link |
happened in October or November, so not in December.
link |
His argument is, well, what are the odds
link |
that you would have this number, this cluster of cases
link |
in the Huanan seafood market,
link |
and if the origin happened someplace else,
link |
wouldn't you expect other clusters?
link |
And it's not an entirely implausible argument,
link |
but there are reasons why I think
link |
that this is not nearly as determinative
link |
as has been reported.
link |
And I certainly had a lot of,
link |
I and others had tweeted a lot about this.
link |
And that is first, the people who were infected
link |
in this cluster, it's not the earliest known virus
link |
of the SARS CoV2, it began mutating.
link |
So this is, it's not the original SARS CoV2 there.
link |
So it had to have happened someplace else.
link |
Two, the people who were infected in the market
link |
weren't infected in the part of the market
link |
where they had these kinds of animals
link |
that are considered to be candidates
link |
as an intermediary species.
link |
And third, there was a bias,
link |
and actually I'll have four things.
link |
Third, there was a bias in the early assessment in China
link |
of what they were looking for.
link |
They were asked, did you have exposure to the market?
link |
Because I think in the early days
link |
when people were figuring things out,
link |
that was one of the questions that was asked.
link |
And fourth, and probably most significantly,
link |
we have so little information
link |
about those early cases in China,
link |
and that's really unfortunate.
link |
I know we'll talk about this later
link |
because the Chinese government is preventing access
link |
to all of that information, which they have,
link |
which could easily help us get to the bottom,
link |
at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started.
link |
And so this is, it's like grasping at straws
link |
in the dark with gloves on.
link |
But to steel man the argument,
link |
we have this evidence from this market,
link |
and yes, the Chinese government
link |
has turned off the lights essentially,
link |
so we have very little data to work with,
link |
but this is the data we have.
link |
So who's to say that this data
link |
doesn't represent a much bigger data set
link |
that a lot of people got infected at this market
link |
where even at the parts, or especially at the parts
link |
where the infected meat was being sold?
link |
So that could be true, and it probably is true.
link |
The question is, is this the source?
link |
Is this the place where this began?
link |
Or was this just a place where it was amplified?
link |
And I certainly think that it's extremely likely
link |
that the Huanan seafood market was a point of amplification.
link |
And it's just answering a different question.
link |
Basically what you're saying is it's very difficult
link |
to use the market as evidence for anything
link |
because it's probably not even the starting point.
link |
So it's just a good place for it to continue spreading.
link |
That's certainly my view.
link |
What Michael Warby's argument is, Marco, is that,
link |
well, what are the odds of that?
link |
That we're seeing this amplification in the market.
link |
And if we, let me put it this way.
link |
If we had all of the information,
link |
if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access
link |
to all of this, because there's blood bank information,
link |
there's all sorts of information,
link |
and based on a full and complete understanding,
link |
we came to believe that all of the early cases
link |
were at this market.
link |
I think that would be a stronger argument
link |
than what this is so far.
link |
But everything leads to the fact that why is it
link |
that the Chinese government,
link |
which was, frankly, after a slow start,
link |
the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS 1,
link |
why have they apparently done so little
link |
and shared so little?
link |
I think it asks, it begs a lot of questions.
link |
Okay, so let's then talk about the Chinese government.
link |
There's several governments, right?
link |
So one is the local government of Wuhan.
link |
And not just the Chinese government.
link |
Let's talk about government.
link |
No, let's talk about human nature.
link |
Let's just keep zooming out.
link |
Let's talk about planet Earth.
link |
No, so there's the Wuhan local government.
link |
There's the Chinese government led by Xi Jinping.
link |
And there's governments in general.
link |
I'm trying to empathize.
link |
So my father was involved with Chernobyl.
link |
I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials,
link |
of people who are like,
link |
oh shit, there's a potential catastrophic event
link |
happening here and it's my ass
link |
because there's incompetence all over the place.
link |
Yeah, human nature is such that there's incompetence
link |
all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up.
link |
And so given that context,
link |
I want to lay out all the possible incompetence,
link |
all the possible malevolence,
link |
all the possible geopolitical tensions here.
link |
All right, where in your sense did the coverup start?
link |
So there's this suspicious fact,
link |
it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
had a public database of thousands
link |
of sampled bad coronavirus sequences
link |
and that went offline in September of 2019.
link |
What's that about?
link |
So let me talk about that specific
link |
and then I'll also follow your path of zooming out
link |
and it's a really important.
link |
Is that a good starting point?
link |
It's a great starting point, yeah, yeah.
link |
So but there's a bigger story
link |
but let me talk about that.
link |
So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and we can go into the whole history
link |
of the Wuhan Institute of Virology either now or later
link |
because I think it's very relevant to the story
link |
but let's focus for now on this database.
link |
They had a database of 22,000 viral samples
link |
and sequence information about viruses
link |
that they had collected.
link |
Some of which, the collection of some of which
link |
was supported through funding from the NIH,
link |
not a huge NIH through the EcoHealth Alliance.
link |
It's a relatively small amount, $600,000 but not nothing.
link |
The goal of this database
link |
was so that we could understand viral evolution
link |
so that exactly for this kind of moment
link |
where we had an unknown virus,
link |
we could say, well, is this like anything
link |
that we've seen before?
link |
And that would help us both understand what we're facing
link |
and be better able to respond.
link |
So this was a password protected public access database.
link |
In 2019, in September 2019,
link |
it became inaccessible and then the whole,
link |
a few months later, the entire database disappeared.
link |
What the Chinese have said is that because there were
link |
all kinds of computer attacks on this database
link |
but why would that happen in September 2019
link |
before the pandemic, at least as far as we know.
link |
So just to clarify.
link |
It went down to September 2019
link |
just so we get the year straight.
link |
January 2020 is when the virus
link |
really started getting the press.
link |
So we're talking about December 2019,
link |
a lot of early infections happened.
link |
September 2019 is when this database goes down.
link |
Just to clarify because you said it quickly,
link |
the Chinese government said
link |
that their database was getting hacked.
link |
Therefore, Xu Zhengli, the director of this part
link |
of the Wuhan Institute of Virology said that.
link |
Oh really, she was the one that said it?
link |
She was the one who said it.
link |
Oh boy, I did not even know that part.
link |
Well, she's an interesting character.
link |
We'll talk about her.
link |
So the excuse is that it's getting cyber attacked a lot
link |
so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation
link |
which seems very suspicious.
link |
And then this virus starts to emerge
link |
in October, November, December.
link |
There's a lot of argument about that, but after.
link |
Sorry to interrupt, but some people are saying
link |
that the first outbreak could have happened
link |
as early as September.
link |
I think it's more likely it's October, November,
link |
but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak,
link |
the first incident of a known outbreak,
link |
at least to somebody, happened in September,
link |
they make the argument, well, what if that also happened
link |
in mid September of 2019?
link |
I'm not prepared to go there,
link |
but there are some people who make that argument.
link |
But I think, again, if I were to put myself
link |
in the mind of officials,
link |
whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
or Wuhan local officials,
link |
I think if I notice some major problem,
link |
like somebody got sick,
link |
some sign of, oh shit, we screwed up,
link |
that's when you kind of do the slow,
link |
there's like a Homer Simpson meme
link |
where you slowly start backing out,
link |
and I would probably start hiding stuff.
link |
Yeah, and then coming up with really shady excuses.
link |
It's like you're in a relationship
link |
and your girlfriend wants to see your phone,
link |
and you're like, I'm sorry,
link |
I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now.
link |
The cyber security issue, I can't.
link |
Yeah, I wish I could.
link |
I wish I could, it's just unsafe right now.
link |
So would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view
link |
of the whole information space
link |
and why I believe this has been so contentious?
link |
If I had to give my best guess,
link |
and I underline the word guess of what happened,
link |
and your background, your family background with Chernobyl
link |
I think is highly relevant here.
link |
So after the first SARS, there was a recognition
link |
that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology
link |
and epidemiology around the world,
link |
that people in China and Africa and Southeast Asia,
link |
they were the frontline workers,
link |
and they needed to be doing a lot of the viral monitoring
link |
and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system.
link |
And that was why there was a lot of investment
link |
in all of those places in building capacity
link |
and training people
link |
and helping to build institutional capacity.
link |
And the Chinese government,
link |
they recognized that they needed to ramp things up.
link |
And then the World Health Organization
link |
and the World Health Assembly,
link |
they had their international health regulations
link |
that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure.
link |
So that was the goal.
link |
There were a lot of investments,
link |
and I know we'll talk later
link |
about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
and I won't go into that right now.
link |
So there was all of this distributed capacity.
link |
And so in the early days, there's a breakout in Wuhan.
link |
We don't know, is it September, October, November?
link |
Maybe December is when the local authorities
link |
start to recognize that something's happening.
link |
But at some point in late 2019,
link |
local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up.
link |
And exactly like in Chernobyl,
link |
these guys exist within a hierarchical system,
link |
and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen,
link |
and they're going to be in big trouble
link |
if bad things happen under their watch.
link |
So their initial instinct is to squash it.
link |
And my guess is they think,
link |
well, if we squash this information,
link |
we can most likely beat back this outbreak,
link |
because lots of outbreaks happen all the time,
link |
including of SARS 1,
link |
where there was multiple lab incidents
link |
out of a lab in Beijing.
link |
And so they start their coverup on day one.
link |
They start screening social media.
link |
They send nasty letters to different doctors
link |
and others who are starting to speak up.
link |
But then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue.
link |
And then the national government of China,
link |
again, this is just a hypothesis,
link |
the national government gets involved.
link |
They say, all right, this is getting much bigger.
link |
They go in and they realize
link |
that we have a big problem on our hands.
link |
They relatively quickly know
link |
that it's spreading human to human.
link |
And so the right thing for them to do then
link |
is what the South African government is doing now
link |
is to say, we have this outbreak.
link |
We don't know everything, but we know it's serious.
link |
But that's not the instinct of people in most governments
link |
and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China.
link |
And so the national government,
link |
they have a choice at that point.
link |
They can do option one,
link |
which is what we would hear called the right thing,
link |
which is total transparency.
link |
They criticize the local officials for having this coverup.
link |
And they say, now we're going to be totally transparent.
link |
But what does that do in a system
link |
like the former Soviet Union, like China now?
link |
If local officials say, wait a second,
link |
I thought my job was to cover everything up,
link |
to support this alternative reality
link |
that authoritarian systems need in order to survive.
link |
Well, now I'm gonna be held accountable
link |
for if I'm not totally transparent,
link |
like your whole system would collapse.
link |
So the national government, they have that choice
link |
and their only choice according to the logic of their system
link |
is to be all in on a coverup.
link |
And that's why they block the World Health Organization
link |
from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks.
link |
They overtly lie to the World Health Organization
link |
about human to human transmission.
link |
And then they begin their coverups.
link |
So they begin very, very quickly destroying samples,
link |
hiding records, they start imprisoning people
link |
for asking basic questions.
link |
Soon after they establish a gag order,
link |
preventing Chinese scientists from writing
link |
or saying anything about pandemic origins
link |
without prior government approval.
link |
And what that does means that there isn't a lot of data,
link |
there's not nearly enough data coming out of China.
link |
And so lots of responsible scientists outside of China
link |
who are data driven say, well,
link |
I don't have enough information to draw conclusions.
link |
And then into that vacuum step a relatively small number
link |
of largely virologists, but also others,
link |
respected scientists.
link |
And I know we'll talk about the, I think,
link |
infamous Peter Daszak who say,
link |
well, without any real foundation in the evidence,
link |
they say, we know pretty much this comes from nature
link |
and anyone who's raising the possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
So that message starts to percolate.
link |
And then in the United States, we have Donald Trump
link |
and he's starting to get criticized for America's failure
link |
to respond, prepare for and respond adequately
link |
And so he starts saying, well, I know first
link |
after praising Xi Jinping, he starts saying,
link |
well, I know that China did it and the WHO did it
link |
and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody but himself.
link |
And then we have a media here that had shifted
link |
from the traditional model of he said, she said journalism,
link |
so and so said X and so and so said Y
link |
and then we'll present both of those views.
link |
With Donald Trump,
link |
he would make outlandish starting positions.
link |
So he would say, Lex is an ax murderer.
link |
And then in the early days, they would say,
link |
Lex is an ax murderer, Lex's friend says
link |
he's not an ax murderer and we have a four day debate,
link |
is he or isn't he?
link |
And then at day four, someone would say,
link |
why are we having this debate at all?
link |
Because the original point is just is baseless.
link |
And so the media just got in the habit,
link |
here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong.
link |
It's very complicated to figure out
link |
what is the role of a politician?
link |
What is the role of a leader in this kind of game
link |
But certainly in when there's a tragedy,
link |
when there's a catastrophic event,
link |
what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly
link |
through the fog and to make big bold decisions
link |
that does speak to the truth of things.
link |
And even if it's unpopular truth,
link |
to listen to the people, to listen to all sides,
link |
to the opinions, to the controversial ideas
link |
and to see past all the bullshit,
link |
all the political bullshit and just speak to the people,
link |
speak to the world and make bold, big decisions.
link |
That's probably what was needed in terms of leadership.
link |
And I'm not so willing to criticize whether it's Joe Biden
link |
or Donald Trump on this.
link |
I think most people cannot be great leaders,
link |
but that's why when great leaders step up,
link |
we write books about them.
link |
And even though, I mean, I think of myself
link |
as a progressive person, I certainly was a critic
link |
of a lot of what President Trump did.
link |
But on this particular case,
link |
even though he may have said it in an uncouth way,
link |
Donald Trump was actually, in my view, right.
link |
I mean, when he said, hey, let's look at this lab.
link |
I mean, he said, I have evidence, I can't tell you.
link |
I don't think he even had the evidence.
link |
But his intuition that this probably comes from a lab,
link |
in my view was a correct intuition.
link |
And certainly I started speaking up
link |
about pandemic origins early in 2019.
link |
And my friends, my democratic friends were brutal with me
link |
saying, what are you doing?
link |
You're supporting Trump in an election year.
link |
And I said, just because Donald Trump is saying something
link |
doesn't mean that I need to oppose it.
link |
If Donald Trump says something that I think is correct,
link |
well, I wanna say it's correct,
link |
just as if he says something that I don't like,
link |
I'm gonna speak up about that.
link |
Good, you walked through the fire.
link |
So that's, you laid out the story here.
link |
And I think in many ways it's a human story.
link |
It's a story of politics, it's a story of human nature.
link |
But let's talk about the story of the virus.
link |
And let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
So maybe this is a good time to try to talk about
link |
its history, about its origins,
link |
about what kind of stuff it works on,
link |
about biosafety levels, and about Batwoman.
link |
Yeah, Xu Zhengli, yes.
link |
So what is the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
when did it start?
link |
Yeah, so it's a great question.
link |
So after SARS 1, which was in the early 2000, 2003, 2004,
link |
there was this effort to enhance,
link |
as I mentioned before, global capacity, including in China.
link |
So the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
had been around for decades before then.
link |
But there was an agreement between the French
link |
and the Chinese governments to build the largest BSL4 lab,
link |
BSL4 lab, so biosafety level four.
link |
So in these what are called high containment labs,
link |
there's level four, which is the highest level.
link |
And people have seen that on TV and elsewhere,
link |
where you have the people in the different suits
link |
and all of these protections.
link |
And then there's level three, which is still very serious,
link |
but not as much as level four.
link |
And then level two is just kind of goggles and some gloves
link |
and maybe a face mask, much less.
link |
So the French and the Chinese governments agreed
link |
that France would help build the first
link |
and still the largest BSL4 plus some mobile BSL3 labs.
link |
And they were going to do it in Wuhan.
link |
And Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago.
link |
And I had actually been, it's a different story.
link |
I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long
link |
before the pandemic broke out.
link |
And that was why I knew that Wuhan,
link |
it's not some backwater where there are a bunch of yokels
link |
eating bats for dinner every night.
link |
This is a really sophisticated, wealthy, highly educated
link |
and cultured city.
link |
And so I knew that it wasn't like
link |
that even the one on seafood market
link |
wasn't like some of these seafood markets
link |
that they have in Southern China or in Cambodia,
link |
where I lived for two years.
link |
I mean, it was a totally different thing.
link |
I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the,
link |
including the Wuhan market,
link |
just some of the wild food going on here.
link |
Because you've traveled that part of the world.
link |
But let's not get there.
link |
Let's not get distracted.
link |
Good, as I was telling you, Lex, before,
link |
and this is maybe an advertisement,
link |
is having now listened to a number of your podcasts
link |
when I'm doing long ultra training runs
link |
or driving in the mountains.
link |
Like the really, because in the beginning,
link |
we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic.
link |
But the really good stuff happens later.
link |
So stay tuned. So friends,
link |
you should listen to the end.
link |
I have to say, as I was telling you before,
link |
like when I heard your long podcast with Jérôme Lanier
link |
and he talked about his mother at the very end,
link |
I mean, just beautiful stuff.
link |
So I don't know whether I can match beautiful stuff,
link |
but I'm gonna do my best.
link |
You're gonna have to find out.
link |
Exactly, stay tuned.
link |
So France had this agreement
link |
that they were going to help design and help build
link |
this BSL4 lab in Wuhan.
link |
And it was going to be with French standards,
link |
and there were going to be 50 French experts
link |
who were going to work there
link |
and supervise the work that happened
link |
even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
in the new location started operating.
link |
But then when they started building it,
link |
the French contractors, the French overseers
link |
were increasingly appalled
link |
that they had less and less control,
link |
that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things,
link |
it wasn't built up to French standards,
link |
so much that at the end, when it was finally built,
link |
the person who was the vice chairman of the project
link |
and a leading French industrialist named Marieau
link |
refused to sign off.
link |
And he said, we can't support,
link |
we have no idea what this is,
link |
whether it's safe or not.
link |
And when this lab opened,
link |
remember it was supposed to have 50 French experts,
link |
it had one French expert.
link |
And so the French were really disgusted.
link |
And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and its new location opened in 2018, two things happened.
link |
One, French intelligence privately approached
link |
US intelligence saying, we have a lot of concerns
link |
about the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
about its safety, and we don't even know
link |
who's operating there,
link |
is it being used as a dual use facility?
link |
And also in 2018, the US embassy in Beijing
link |
sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at,
link |
well, at this laboratory.
link |
And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogin
link |
from the Washington Post later got his hands on saying,
link |
this is really unsafe,
link |
they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses
link |
in conditions where a leak is possible.
link |
And so then you mentioned Shujing Li,
link |
and I'll connect that to these virologists
link |
who I was talking about.
link |
So there's a very credible thesis
link |
that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen
link |
in other parts of the world,
link |
having partnerships with experts in those parts of the world
link |
must be a foundation of our efforts.
link |
We can't just bring everything home
link |
because we know that viruses don't care about borders
link |
and boundaries, and so if something happens there,
link |
it's going to come here.
link |
So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships
link |
with experts in these labs,
link |
and Shujing Li was one of those partners.
link |
And her closest relationship was with Peter Daszak,
link |
who's a British, I think now American,
link |
but the president of a thing called EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
which was getting money from NIH.
link |
And basically, EcoHealth Alliance
link |
was a pass through organization.
link |
And over the years, it was only about $600,000.
link |
So almost all of her funding
link |
came from the Chinese government,
link |
but there's a little bit that came from the United States.
link |
And so she became their kind of leading expert
link |
and the point of contact
link |
between the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and certainly Peter Daszak, but also with others.
link |
And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,
link |
I didn't mention that,
link |
I did mention that there were these virologists
link |
who had this fake certainty
link |
that they knew it came from nature
link |
and it didn't come from a lab
link |
and they called people like me conspiracy theorists
link |
just for raising that possibility.
link |
But when Peter Daszak was organizing that effort
link |
in February of 2020,
link |
what he said is we need to rally
link |
behind our Chinese colleagues.
link |
And the basic idea was
link |
these international collaborations are under threat.
link |
And I think it was because of that,
link |
because Peter Daszak's basically his major contribution
link |
as a scientist was just tacking his name
link |
on work that Shujang Li had largely done.
link |
He was defending a lot,
link |
certainly for himself and his organization.
link |
So you think EcoHealth Alliance and Peter
link |
is less about money,
link |
it's more about kind of almost like legacy
link |
because you're so attached to this work?
link |
Is it just on a human level?
link |
I mean, I've been criticized for being actually,
link |
I'm certainly a big critic of Peter Daszak,
link |
but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient.
link |
I mean, it's so easy to say,
link |
oh, somebody they're like an evil ogre
link |
and just trying to do evil
link |
and cackling in their closet or whatever.
link |
But I think for most of us,
link |
even those of us who do terrible, horrible things,
link |
the story that we tell ourselves
link |
and we really believe is that we're doing the thing
link |
that we most believe in.
link |
I mean, I did my PhD dissertation
link |
on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
link |
They genuinely saw themselves as idealists.
link |
They thought, well, we need to make radical change
link |
to build a better future.
link |
And what they described as,
link |
that they felt was radical change
link |
was a monstrous atrocities by us.
link |
So the criticism here of Peter
link |
is that he was a part of an organization
link |
that was kind of, well, funding an effort
link |
that was an unsafe implementation
link |
of a biosafety level four laboratory.
link |
Well, a few things.
link |
So what he thought he was doing was,
link |
and then what he thought he was doing
link |
is itself highly controversial
link |
because there's one there that in 2011,
link |
there were, I know you've talked about this
link |
with other guests, but in 2011,
link |
there were the first published papers
link |
on this now infamous gain of function research.
link |
And basically what they did,
link |
both in different labs and certainly in the United States,
link |
in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands,
link |
was they had a bird flu virus
link |
that was very dangerous, but not massively transmissive.
link |
And they had a gain of function process
link |
through what's called serial passage,
link |
which means basically passing advice,
link |
like natural selection, but forcing natural selection
link |
by just passing a virus through different cell cultures
link |
and then selecting for what it is that you want.
link |
So relatively easily, they took this deadly,
link |
but not massively transmissive virus
link |
and turned it into, in a lab,
link |
a deadly and transmissive virus.
link |
And that showed that this is really dangerous.
link |
And so there were, at that point,
link |
there was a huge controversy.
link |
There were some people, like Richard Ebright
link |
and Mark Lipsitch at Harvard,
link |
who were saying that this is really dangerous.
link |
We're in the idea that we need to create monsters
link |
to study monsters.
link |
I think maybe even you have said that in the past.
link |
It doesn't make sense
link |
because there's an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
And so what are we gonna do?
link |
Create an unlimited number of monsters.
link |
And if we do that,
link |
eventually the monsters are going to get out.
link |
Then there was the Peter Daszak camp,
link |
and he got a lot of funding,
link |
particularly from the United States,
link |
who said, well, and certainly Collins and Fauci
link |
were supportive of this.
link |
And they thought, well, there's a safe way
link |
to go out into the world
link |
to collect the world's most dangerous viruses
link |
and to poke and prod them
link |
to figure out how they might mutate,
link |
how they might become more dangerous
link |
with the goal of predicting future pandemics.
link |
And that certainly never happened
link |
with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments.
link |
And that largely never happened,
link |
but that was, so Peter Daszak kind of epitomized
link |
that second approach.
link |
And as you've talked about in the past,
link |
in 2014, there was a funding moratorium
link |
in the United States, and then in 2017, that was lifted.
link |
It didn't affect the funding
link |
that went to the EcoHealth Alliance.
link |
So when this happened in the beginning,
link |
and again, coming back to Peter's motivations,
link |
I don't think, here's the best case scenario for Peter.
link |
I'm gonna give you what I imagine he was thinking,
link |
and then I'll tell you what I actually think.
link |
So I think here's what he's thinking.
link |
This is most likely a natural origin outbreak.
link |
Just like SARS one, again, in Peter's hypothetical mind,
link |
just like SARS one, this is most likely a natural outbreak.
link |
We need to have an international coalition
link |
in order to fight it.
link |
If we allow these political attacks
link |
to undermine our Chinese counterparts
link |
and the trust in these relationships
link |
that we've built over many years,
link |
we're really screwed because they have
link |
the most local knowledge of these outbreaks.
link |
And even though, and this guy gets a lot more complicated,
link |
even though there are basic questions
link |
that anybody would ask and that Shujing Li herself did ask
link |
about the origins of this pandemic,
link |
even though Peter Daszak, and I'll describe this
link |
in a moment, had secret information that we didn't have,
link |
that in my mind massively increases the possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin, I, Peter Daszak,
link |
would like to guide the public conversation
link |
in the direction where I think it should go
link |
and in support of the kind of international collaboration
link |
that I think is necessary.
link |
That's a strong, positive discussion
link |
because it's true that there's a lot of political BS
link |
and a lot of kind of just bickering and lies
link |
as we've talked about.
link |
And so it's very convenient to say, you know what?
link |
Let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies
link |
and my favorite word, misinformation.
link |
And then because the way out from this serious pandemic
link |
is for us to work together.
link |
So let's strengthen our partnerships
link |
and everything else is just like noise.
link |
Yeah, so let's, and so then now I wanna do
link |
my personal indictment of Peter Daszak
link |
because that's my view, but I wanted to fairly.
link |
Because I think that we all tell ourselves stories
link |
and also when you're a science communicator,
link |
you can't in your public communications
link |
give every doubt that you have or every nuance,
link |
you kind of have to summarize things.
link |
And so I think that he was, again,
link |
in this benign interpretation trying to summarize
link |
in the way that he thought the conversations should go.
link |
Here's my indictment of Peter Daszak.
link |
And I feel like a Brutus here,
link |
but I have not come here to praise Peter Daszak
link |
because while Peter Daszak was doing all of this
link |
and making all of these statements about,
link |
well, we pretty much know it's a natural origin.
link |
Then there was this February, 2020 Lancet letter
link |
where it turns out, and we only knew this later
link |
that he was highly manipulative.
link |
So he was recruiting all of these people.
link |
He drafted the infamous letter calling people like me,
link |
conspiracy theorists.
link |
He then wrote to people like Ralph Barak and Linfa Wang,
link |
who are also very high profile virologists saying,
link |
well, let's not put our names on it.
link |
So it doesn't look like we're doing it,
link |
even though they were doing it.
link |
He didn't disclose a lot of information that they had.
link |
It was a strategic move.
link |
So just in case people are not familiar,
link |
February, 2020, Lancet letter was TLDR,
link |
is a lab leak hypothesis, is a conspiracy theory.
link |
So like with the authority of science,
link |
not saying like it's highly likely,
link |
saying it's obvious, duh, it's natural origin.
link |
Everybody else is just,
link |
everything else is just misinformation.
link |
And look, there's a bunch of really smart people
link |
that signed this, therefore it's true.
link |
Yeah, not only that, so there were the people
link |
who, 27 people signed that letter.
link |
And then after President Trump cut funding
link |
to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates
link |
to have a public letter criticizing that.
link |
But what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know
link |
is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and others, had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA,
link |
which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital
link |
side of the Defense Department.
link |
They're kind of, where they do kind of big ideas.
link |
By the way, as a tiny tangent,
link |
I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA.
link |
They fund a lot of excellent robotics research.
link |
And DARPA is incredible.
link |
And among the things that they applied for
link |
is that we, meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
is gonna go and it's gonna collect
link |
the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in Southern China.
link |
And then we, as this group,
link |
are going to genetically engineer these viruses
link |
to insert a furin cleavage site.
link |
So I think when everyone's now seen the image
link |
of the SARS CoV2 virus, it has these little spike proteins,
link |
these little things that stick out,
link |
which is why they call it a coronavirus.
link |
Within that spike protein are these furin cleavage sites,
link |
which basically help with the virus
link |
getting access into our cells.
link |
And they were going to genetically engineer
link |
these furin cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses,
link |
the serbicoviruses.
link |
And then, and so then a year and a half later,
link |
We see a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site
link |
unlike anything that we've ever seen before
link |
in that category of SARS like coronaviruses.
link |
That, well, yes, I mean, the DARPA very correctly
link |
didn't support that application.
link |
Well, let's actually, let's like pause on that.
link |
So for a lot of people, that's like the smoking gun.
link |
Okay, let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA.
link |
So I guess who's drafted the proposal?
link |
Is it EcoHealth, but the proposal is to do research.
link |
EcoHealth is technically a US funded organization.
link |
And then the idea was to do work
link |
at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
With, yeah, so it was.
link |
Yes, so EcoHealth, basically the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
was gonna go and they were gonna collect these viruses
link |
and store them at Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
But they're also gonna do the actual task.
link |
According, it's a really important point.
link |
According to their proposal, the actual work
link |
was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barak
link |
at the University of North Carolina,
link |
who's probably the world's leading expert on coronaviruses.
link |
And so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work.
link |
We know, I think quite well that Ralph Barak's lab,
link |
in part because it was not funded by DARPA,
link |
they didn't do that specific work.
link |
What we don't know is, well, what work was done
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
because WIV was part of this proposal.
link |
They had access to all of the plans.
link |
They had done, they had their own capacity
link |
and they had already done a lot of work
link |
in genetically altering this exact category of viruses.
link |
They had created chimeric mixed viruses.
link |
They had mastered pretty much all of the steps
link |
in order to achieve this thing that they applied
link |
for funding with EcoHealth to do.
link |
And so the question is, did the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
go through with that research anyway?
link |
And in my mind, that's a very, very real possibility.
link |
It would certainly explain
link |
why they're giving no information.
link |
And as you know, I've been a member
link |
of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
link |
on Human Genome Editing, which Dr. Tedros created
link |
in the aftermath of the announcement
link |
of the world's first CRISPR babies.
link |
And it was just basically the first time
link |
and it was just basically the exact same story.
link |
So Ho Chiang Kui, a Chinese scientist,
link |
it was not a first tier scientist,
link |
but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist,
link |
came to the United States, learned all of these capacities,
link |
went back to China and said,
link |
well, there's a much more permissive environment.
link |
I'm gonna be a world leader.
link |
I'm gonna establish both myself and China.
link |
So in every scientific field, we're seeing this same thing
link |
where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China.
link |
So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
with this exact game plan was doing it anyway?
link |
We have no clue what work was being done
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
It seems extremely likely
link |
that at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
and this is certainly the US government position,
link |
there was the work that was being done in Dr. Hsu's lab,
link |
but that wasn't the whole WIV.
link |
We know, at least according to the United States government,
link |
that there was the Chinese military,
link |
that PLA was doing work there.
link |
Were they doing this kind of work, not to create a bioweapon,
link |
but in order to understand these viruses,
link |
maybe to develop vaccines and treatments?
link |
It seems like a very, very logical possibility.
link |
And then, so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
had all of the skills.
link |
We know that they were part of this proposal.
link |
And then you have Peter Daszak, who knows all of this,
link |
that at that time, in February of 2020, we didn't know.
link |
But then he comes swinging out of the gate,
link |
saying anybody who's raising this possibility
link |
of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
I mean, it really makes him look, in my mind,
link |
And yet, not to at least be somewhat open minded on this,
link |
because he knows all the details.
link |
He knows that it's not 0%.
link |
I mean, there's no way in his mind could you even argue that.
link |
So it's potential because of the bias,
link |
because of your focus.
link |
I mean, it could be the Anthony Fauci masks thing,
link |
whereas he knows there's some significant probability
link |
that this is happening.
link |
But in order to preserve good relations
link |
with our Chinese colleagues,
link |
we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative.
link |
So it's not really lying.
link |
It's doing the best possible action at this time
link |
to help the world.
link |
Not that this already happened.
link |
But that's how like...
link |
I think it's quite likely that that was the story
link |
that he was telling himself.
link |
But it's that lack of transparency, in my mind,
link |
is fraudulent, that we were struggling
link |
to understand something that we didn't understand.
link |
And that I just think that people who possess
link |
that kind of information, especially when the existence,
link |
like the entire career of Peter Daszak
link |
is based on US taxpayers,
link |
there's a debt that comes with that.
link |
And that debt is honesty and transparency.
link |
And for all of us, and you talked about
link |
your girlfriend checking your phone.
link |
For all of us, being honest and transparent
link |
in the most difficult times is really difficult.
link |
If it were easy, everybody would do it.
link |
And I just feel that Peter was the opposite of transparent
link |
and then went on the offensive.
link |
And then had the gall of joining,
link |
I know we can talk about this,
link |
this highly compromised joint study process
link |
with the international experts
link |
and their Chinese government counterparts.
link |
And used that as a way of furthering
link |
this, in my mind, fraudulent narrative
link |
that it almost certainly came from natural origins
link |
and a lab origin was extremely unlikely.
link |
Just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up,
link |
because I do think, in a kind of John Stewart way,
link |
if you heard that a bit yet,
link |
sort of kind of like common sense way,
link |
the 2018 proposal to DARPA from EcoHealth Alliance
link |
and Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
just seems like a bit of a smoking gun to me, like that.
link |
So there's this excellent book that people should read
link |
called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID 19.
link |
Matt Ridley and Alena Chan, I think Alena is in MIT.
link |
Probably. At the Broad, yeah.
link |
At Broad Institute, yeah, yeah.
link |
So she, I heard her in an interview
link |
give this analogy of unicorns.
link |
And where basically somebody writes a proposal
link |
to add horns to horses, the proposal is rejected.
link |
And then a couple of years later or a year later,
link |
a unicorn shows up.
link |
In the place where they're proposing to do it.
link |
I mean, that's so, I had.
link |
And then everyone's like, it's natural origin.
link |
It's like, it's possible it's natural origin.
link |
Like we haven't detected a unicorn yet.
link |
And this is the first time we've detected a unicorn.
link |
Or it could be this massive organization
link |
that was planning, is fully equipped,
link |
has like a history of being able to do this stuff,
link |
has the world experts to do it, has the funding,
link |
has the motivation to add horns to horses.
link |
And now a unicorn shows up and they're saying, nope.
link |
Definitely natural.
link |
That connects to your first question
link |
of how do I get to my 85%?
link |
And here's a summary of that answer.
link |
And so it's what I said in my 60 Minutes interview
link |
a long time ago, of all the gin joints
link |
and all the towns and all the world,
link |
the quote from Casablanca.
link |
And so of all the places in the world
link |
where we have an outbreak of a SARS like bat coronavirus,
link |
it's not in the area of the natural habitat
link |
of the horseshoe bats.
link |
It's the one city in China
link |
with the first and largest level four virology lab,
link |
which actually wasn't even using it.
link |
They were doing level three and level two for this work,
link |
where they had the world's largest collection
link |
of bat coronaviruses,
link |
where they were doing aggressive experiments
link |
designed to make these scary viruses scarier,
link |
where they had been part of an application
link |
to insert a furin cleavage site,
link |
able to infect human cells.
link |
And when the outbreak happened,
link |
we had a virus that was ready for action to infect humans.
link |
And to this day, better able to infect humans
link |
than any other species, including bats.
link |
And then from day one, there's this massive coverup.
link |
And then on top of that,
link |
in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people,
link |
there's basically no evidence
link |
for the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
Everything that I've described just now is circumstantial,
link |
but there's a certain point
link |
where you add up the circumstances
link |
and you see this seems pretty, pretty likely.
link |
I mean, if we're getting to 100%,
link |
we are not at 100% by any means.
link |
There still is a possibility of a natural origin.
link |
And if we find that, great.
link |
But from everything that I know,
link |
that's how I get to my 85.
link |
And we'll talk about why this matters
link |
in the political sense, in the human sense,
link |
in the science, in the realm of science,
link |
all of those factors.
link |
But first, as Nietzsche said, let us look into the abyss
link |
and the games we'll play with monsters.
link |
That is colloquially called gain of function research.
link |
Let me ask the kind of political sounding question,
link |
which is how people usually phrase it.
link |
Did Anthony Fauci fund gain of function research
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
I mean, I've obviously been very closely monitoring this.
link |
I've spoken a lot about it.
link |
I've written about it.
link |
And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton,
link |
but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what
link |
the definition of is is.
link |
And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function,
link |
and by gain of function, there are lots of things
link |
like gene therapies that are gain of function.
link |
But here, what we mean is gain of function
link |
for pathogens potentially able to create human pandemics.
link |
But if you use the kind of common sense language,
link |
well, then he probably did.
link |
If you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH
link |
document, and you read that language very narrowly,
link |
I think you can make a credible argument that he did not.
link |
There's a question, though, and Francis Collins
link |
talked about that in his interview with you.
link |
But then there's a question that we know from now
link |
that we have the information of the reports submitted
link |
by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH, and some of which
link |
were late or not even delivered, that some of this research
link |
was done on MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome virus.
link |
And if that was the case, there is, I think,
link |
a colorable argument that that would be considered
link |
gain of function research even by the narrow language
link |
of that 2017 document.
link |
But I definitely think, and I've said this repeatedly,
link |
that Rand Paul can be right, and Tony Fauci can be right.
link |
And the question is, how are we defining gain of function?
link |
And that's why I've always said the question in my mind
link |
isn't, was it or wasn't it gain of function,
link |
as if that's like a binary thing, if not, grade,
link |
and if yes, guilty.
link |
The question is just, what work was being done at the Wuhan
link |
Institute of Virology?
link |
What role, if any, did US government funding
link |
play in supporting that work?
link |
And what rights do we all have as human beings
link |
and as American citizens and taxpayers
link |
to get all of the relevant information about that?
link |
So let's try to kind of dissect this.
link |
So who frustrates you more, Rand Paul or Anthony
link |
Fauci in his discussion or the discussion itself?
link |
So for example, gain of function is
link |
a term that's kind of more used just
link |
to mean playing with viruses in the lab
link |
to try to develop more dangerous viruses.
link |
Is this kind of research a good idea?
link |
Is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public,
link |
in the political way that it's been talked about?
link |
Is it OK that US may have funded gain of function research
link |
I mean, it's kind of assumed, just like with Bill Clinton,
link |
there was very little discussion of, I think,
link |
correct me if I'm wrong, but whether it's
link |
OK for a president, male or female,
link |
to have extramarital sex or is it
link |
OK for a president to have extramarital sex
link |
with people on his staff or her staff?
link |
It was more the discussion of lying, I think.
link |
It was, did you lie about having sex or not?
link |
And in this gain of function discussion,
link |
what frustrates me personally is there's not
link |
a deep philosophical discussion about whether we
link |
should be doing this kind of research
link |
and what are the ethical lines, research on animals at all.
link |
Those are fascinating questions.
link |
Instead, it's a gotcha thing.
link |
Did you or did you not fund research on gain of function?
link |
And did you fund, it's almost like a bioweapon.
link |
Did you give money to China to develop this bioweapon that
link |
now attacked the rest of the world?
link |
So I mean, all those things are pretty frustrating,
link |
but is there, I think, the thing you
link |
can untangle about Anthony Fauci and gain of function
link |
research in the United States and the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
and Wuhan Institute of Virology that's clarifying.
link |
What were the mistakes made?
link |
So on gain of function, there actually
link |
has been a lot of debate.
link |
I mentioned before in 2011, these first papers,
link |
there was a big debate.
link |
Mark Lipsitch, who's formerly at Harvard now
link |
with the US government working in the president's office,
link |
he led a thing called the Cambridge Group that
link |
was highly critical of this work,
link |
basically saying we're creating monsters.
link |
They had the funding pause in 2014.
link |
They spent three years putting together a framework,
link |
and then they lifted it in 2017.
link |
So we had a thoughtful conversation.
link |
Unfortunately, it didn't work.
link |
And I think that's where we are now.
link |
So I absolutely think that there are real issues
link |
with the relationship between the United States government
link |
and EcoHealth Alliance, and through that,
link |
the EcoHealth Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
And one issue is just essential transparency,
link |
because as I see it, it's most likely the case
link |
that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things
link |
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
And again, I'm sure that Xiaojiang Li is not herself
link |
I'm sure of that, even though I've never met her.
link |
But there are just a different set of pressures
link |
on people working in an authoritarian system
link |
than people who are working in other systems.
link |
That doesn't mean it's entirely different.
link |
And so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give $1
link |
to an organization, and certainly a virology institute,
link |
where you don't have full access to their records,
link |
to their databases.
link |
We don't know what work is happening there.
link |
And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination.
link |
So I understand what Dr. Fauci is doing is saying,
link |
hey, what I hear Dr. Fauci saying,
link |
what I hear from you, Rand Paul, is
link |
you're accusing me of starting this pandemic.
link |
And you're using gain of function as a proxy for that.
link |
And we have, when there are Senate hearings,
link |
every senator gets five minutes.
link |
And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes
link |
into a clip that's going to run on the news.
link |
And so I get that there is that kind of gotcha.
link |
But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the National
link |
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH
link |
should have been more transparent.
link |
Because I think that in this day and age, where
link |
there are a lot of people poking around
link |
and this whole story of COVID origins,
link |
we would not be where we are if it
link |
wasn't for a relatively small number of people.
link |
And I'm part of, there are two, as I know, two groups.
link |
One is these internet sleuths known as Drastic.
link |
And a number of them are part of a group
link |
that I'm part of called, it's not our official name,
link |
but called the Paris Group.
link |
It's about two dozen experts around the world,
link |
but centered around some very high level French academics.
link |
So we've all been digging and meeting with each other
link |
regularly since last year.
link |
And our governments across the board, certainly China,
link |
but including the United States, haven't
link |
been as transparent as they need to be.
link |
So definitely mistakes were made on all sides.
link |
And that's why for me from day one,
link |
I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation
link |
into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China,
link |
but we have to look at ourselves.
link |
We did not get this right.
link |
So do you, I'm just gonna put Rand Paul aside here.
link |
Politician playing political games, it's very frustrating,
link |
but it is what it is on all sides.
link |
Anthony Fauci, you think should have been more transparent
link |
and maybe more eloquent in expressing the complexity
link |
of all of this, the uncertainty in all of this.
link |
Yeah, and I get that it's really hard to do that
link |
because let's say you have one, you speak a paragraph
link |
and it's got four sentences.
link |
And one of those sentences is the thing
link |
that's going to be turned into Twitter.
link |
All right, let me put it back.
link |
I get really, so I'll try not to be emotional about this,
link |
but I've heard Anthony Fauci a couple of times now
link |
say that he represents science.
link |
I know what he means by that.
link |
He means in this political bickering,
link |
all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people,
link |
he represents science, but words matter.
link |
And this isn't just clips.
link |
I mean, maybe I'm distinctly aware of that
link |
doing this podcast.
link |
Yeah, I talked for hundreds of hours now,
link |
maybe over a thousand hours,
link |
but I'm still careful with the words.
link |
I'm trying not to be an asshole
link |
and I'm aware when I'm an asshole
link |
and I'll apologize for it.
link |
If the words I represent science left my mouth,
link |
which they very well could,
link |
I would sure as hell be apologizing for it
link |
and not because I got in trouble,
link |
I would just feel bad about saying something like that.
link |
And even that little phrase, I represent science.
link |
No, Dr. Fauci, you do not represent science.
link |
I love science, the millions of scientists
link |
that inspired me to get into it.
link |
To fall in love with the scientific method
link |
in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science,
link |
that Anthony Fauci does not represent.
link |
He's one, I believe, great scientist of millions.
link |
He does not represent anybody.
link |
He's just one scientist.
link |
And I think the greatness of a scientist
link |
is best exemplified in humility
link |
because the scientific method basically says,
link |
you're standing before the fog, the mystery of it all,
link |
and slowly chipping away at the mystery.
link |
And it's embarrassing, it's humiliating
link |
how little you know, that's the experience.
link |
So the great scientists have to have humility to me.
link |
And especially in their communication,
link |
they have to have humility.
link |
And I mean, I don't know,
link |
and some of it is also words matter
link |
because great leaders have to have the poetry of action.
link |
They have to be bold and inspire action
link |
across millions of people.
link |
But you also have to, through that poetry of words,
link |
express the complexity of the uncertainty
link |
you're operating under.
link |
Be humble in the face of not being able
link |
to predict the future or understand the past,
link |
or really know what's the right thing to do,
link |
but we have to do something.
link |
And through that, you have to be a great leader
link |
that inspires action.
link |
And some of that is just words.
link |
And he chose words poorly.
link |
I mean, so I'm all torn about this.
link |
And then there's politicians, they're taking those words
link |
and magnifying them and playing games with them.
link |
And of course, that's a disincentive
link |
for the people who do, the scientific leaders
link |
that step into the limelight to say any more words.
link |
So they kind of become more conservative
link |
with the words they use.
link |
I mean, it just becomes a giant mess.
link |
But I think the solution is to ignore all of that
link |
and to be transparent, to be honest, to be vulnerable.
link |
And to express the full uncertainty
link |
of what you're operating under,
link |
to present all the possible actions
link |
and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past.
link |
I mean, there's something, even if you're not
link |
directly responsible for those mistakes,
link |
taking responsibility for them is a way to win people over.
link |
I don't think leaders realize this often
link |
in the modern age, in the internet age.
link |
They can see through your bullshit.
link |
And it's really inspiring when you take ownership.
link |
So to do the thought experiment in public,
link |
do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak
link |
and then lay out all the funding, the EcoHealth Alliance,
link |
all the incredible science going on at the Wuhan Institute
link |
of Virology and the NIH.
link |
Lay out all the possible ethical problems.
link |
Lay out all the possible mistakes that could have been made
link |
and say like, this could have happened.
link |
And if this happened, here's the best way to respond to it
link |
and to prevent it in the future.
link |
And just lay all that complexity out.
link |
I wish we would have seen that.
link |
And I have hope that this conversation,
link |
conversations like it, your work,
link |
and books on this topic will inspire young people today
link |
when they become in the Anthony Fauci's role
link |
to be much more transparent and much more humble
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
That this is just a relic of the past
link |
when there's a person, no offense to me,
link |
in a suit that has to stand up and speak
link |
with clarity and certainty.
link |
I mean, that's just a relic of the past.
link |
Do you mind if I...
link |
I agree with a great deal of what you said.
link |
And it's really unfortunate that our,
link |
certainly the Chinese government, as I said before,
link |
our government wasn't as transparent
link |
as I feel they should have been,
link |
particularly in the early days of the pandemic
link |
and particularly with regard to the issue
link |
of pandemic origins.
link |
I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls
link |
with people like Christian Anderson and Scripps and others
link |
in those early days, raising questions.
link |
Is this an engineered virus?
link |
There were a lot of questions.
link |
And it's kind of sad.
link |
I mean, as I mentioned before, I've been one,
link |
I mean, and certainly there were others,
link |
but there weren't a lot of us,
link |
of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic
link |
were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here.
link |
And I launched my website on pandemic origins
link |
in April of last year, April, 2020.
link |
It got a huge amount of attention.
link |
And actually my friend, Matt Pottinger,
link |
who is the deputy national security advisor,
link |
when he was reaching out to people in the US government
link |
and in allied government saying,
link |
hey, we should look into this,
link |
what he was sending them was my website.
link |
It wasn't some US government information.
link |
And by the way, people should still go to the website.
link |
You keep updating it and it's an incredible resource.
link |
Thank you, thank you, jamiemetzel.com.
link |
And it's really unfortunate that our governments
link |
and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020
link |
weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue.
link |
People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus.
link |
And I'm critical of many people,
link |
even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you,
link |
I just felt, well, he wasn't as balanced
link |
on the issue of COVID origins.
link |
Certainly Dr. Fauci could have in his conversation
link |
with Rand Paul, it wasn't even a conversation,
link |
but in some process in the aftermath,
link |
could have laid things out a bit better.
link |
He did say, and Francis Collins did say
link |
that we don't know the origins and that was a shift
link |
and we need to have an investigation.
link |
So now, but having said all of that,
link |
I do kind of one, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Fauci
link |
for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS.
link |
I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine.
link |
Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story
link |
of getting us these vaccines
link |
that have saved millions and millions of lives.
link |
And so I don't think, I mean, there's a lot to this story.
link |
And then the second thing is it's really hard
link |
to be a public health expert
link |
because you have your mission is public health.
link |
And so, and you have to, if you are leading
link |
with all of your uncertainty,
link |
it's a really hard way to do things.
link |
And so like, even now, like if I go to CVS
link |
and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation
link |
of how many people will die from taking Tylenol
link |
and they say, well, all right, we can live with that.
link |
And that's why we have regulation.
link |
And so all of us are doing kind of summaries.
link |
And then we have people in public health who are saying,
link |
wow, we've summed it all up and you should do X.
link |
You should get your kids vaccinated for measles.
link |
You should not drive your car at a hundred miles an hour.
link |
You should, don't drink lighter fluid,
link |
whatever these things are.
link |
And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines.
link |
And yet now our information world is so fragmented
link |
that if you're not being honest about something,
link |
something material, someone's going to find out
link |
and it's going to undermine your credibility.
link |
And so I agree with you that there's a greater requirement
link |
for transparency now.
link |
Maybe there always has been,
link |
but there's an even greater requirement for it now
link |
because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly
link |
and that you're saying, well, here's what I know.
link |
And this is based on what I know,
link |
here are the conclusions that I draw.
link |
But if it's just, and again, I don't think the words,
link |
I'm science or whatever it was are the right words.
link |
But if it's just, trust me because of who I am,
link |
I don't think that flies anywhere anymore.
link |
Can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview
link |
that I did, if you got a chance to hear that part.
link |
I think in the beginning we talk about the lab leak.
link |
What are your thoughts about his response,
link |
basically saying it's worthy of an investigation,
link |
but I mean, I don't know how you would interpret it.
link |
I see, it's funny because I heard it in the moment
link |
as it's great for the head of NIH
link |
to be open minded on this.
link |
But then the internet and Mr. Joe Rogan
link |
and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that,
link |
yeah, well, that's too late and too little.
link |
Yeah, so first let me say, I've been on Joe's podcast twice
link |
and I love the guy, which doesn't mean that I agree
link |
with everything he does or says.
link |
And on this issue, and I'm normally a pretty calm
link |
and measured guy, and when you're just out running
link |
with your AirPods on and you start yelling
link |
into the wind in Central Park,
link |
nobody else knows why you're yelling, but well.
link |
So that you had such a moment?
link |
I had a moment with Collins.
link |
And again, Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously.
link |
I mean, I live a big chunk of my life living in the world
link |
of genetics and biotech and my book, Hacking Darwin
link |
is about the future of human genetic engineering
link |
and his work on the Human Genome Project
link |
and so many other things have been fantastic.
link |
And I'm a huge fan of the work of NIH.
link |
And he was right to say that the Chinese government
link |
hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it.
link |
But then you asked him, well, how will we know?
link |
And then his answer was,
link |
we need to find the intermediate host.
link |
Remember I said before, and so that made it clear
link |
that he thought, well, we should have an investigation,
link |
but it comes from nature and we just need to find
link |
that whatever it is, that intermediate animal host
link |
in the wild, and that'll tell us the story.
link |
So he already had the conclusion in mind
link |
and they're just waiting for the evidence
link |
to support the conclusion.
link |
That was my feeling.
link |
I felt like he was open in general, but he was tilting.
link |
And again, your first question was where do I fall?
link |
He was like, I'm 85% or whatever it is, 80, 75, 90,
link |
whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident.
link |
It made it feel that he was 90, 10 in the other direction,
link |
which is still means that he's open minded
link |
about the possibility.
link |
And that's why, in my view, every single person
link |
who talks about this issue,
link |
I think the right answer in my view is,
link |
we don't know conclusively.
link |
In my, then this is my personal view,
link |
the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor
link |
of a lab incident origin,
link |
but that could immediately shift
link |
with additional information.
link |
We need transparency, but we should come together
link |
in absolutely condemning the outrageous coverup
link |
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation
link |
into pandemic origins.
link |
We have, if you use the economist numbers,
link |
15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic.
link |
And I believe that the actions of the Chinese government
link |
are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead.
link |
They're insulting the families and the billions of people
link |
around the world who have suffered
link |
from this totally avoidable pandemic.
link |
And whatever the origin, the fact the criminal coverup
link |
carried out by the Chinese government,
link |
which continues to this day, but most intensely
link |
in the first months following the outbreak,
link |
that's the reason why we have so many dead.
link |
And certainly, as I was saying before,
link |
I and a small number of others have been carrying this flame
link |
since early last year, but it's kind of crazy
link |
that our governments haven't been demanding it.
link |
And we can talk about the World Health Organization process,
link |
which was deeply compromised in the beginning.
link |
Now it's become much, much better.
link |
But again, it was the pressure of outsiders
link |
that played such an important role in shifting
link |
our national and international institutions.
link |
And while that's better than nothing,
link |
it would have been far better if our governments
link |
and international organizations
link |
had done the right thing from the start.
link |
If I could just make a couple of comments about Joe Rogan.
link |
So there's a bunch of people in my life
link |
who have inspired me, who have taught me a lot,
link |
who I even look up to, many of them are alive,
link |
most of them are dead.
link |
I wanna say that Joe said a few critical words
link |
about the conversation with Francis Collins,
link |
most of it offline, with a lot of great conversations
link |
about it, some he said publicly.
link |
And he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions
link |
in an interview is not my strong suit.
link |
And I really want to kind of respond to that,
link |
which I did privately as well, but publicly,
link |
to say that Joe is 100% right on that.
link |
But that doesn't mean that always has to be the case.
link |
And that is definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
Because most of the conversations I have,
link |
I wanna see the beautiful ideas in people's minds.
link |
But there's some times where you have to ask
link |
the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas.
link |
And it's hard to do.
link |
And Joe is very good at this.
link |
He says the way he put it in his criticisms,
link |
and he does this in his conversations,
link |
which is, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.
link |
There's a kind of sense like,
link |
did you just say what you said?
link |
Let's make sure we get to the bottom,
link |
we'll clarify what you mean.
link |
Because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas
link |
can be said as a quick aside in a sentence,
link |
like it's nothing, but it could be everything.
link |
And you wanna make sure you catch that
link |
and you talk about it.
link |
And not as a gotcha, not as a kinda way
link |
to destroy another human being,
link |
but to reveal something profound.
link |
And that's definitely something I wanna work on.
link |
I also want to say that, as you said,
link |
you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things.
link |
So for a long time, Joe was somebody
link |
that I was just a fan of and listened to.
link |
He's now a good friend.
link |
And I would say we disagree more than we agree.
link |
And I love doing that.
link |
But at the same time, I learned from that.
link |
So it's like dual, like nobody in this world
link |
can tell me what to think.
link |
But I think everybody has a lesson to teach me.
link |
I think that's a good way to approach it.
link |
Whenever somebody has words of criticism,
link |
I assume they're right and walk around with that idea
link |
to really sort of empathize with that idea
link |
because there's a lesson there.
link |
And oftentimes, my understanding of a topic
link |
is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced
link |
or much richer for that kind of empathetic process.
link |
But definitely, I do not allow anybody
link |
to tell me what to think, whether it's Joe Rogan
link |
or Fyodor Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents
link |
or the proverbial girlfriend, which I don't actually have.
link |
But she's still busting my balls.
link |
In my imagination, I have a girlfriend in Canada
link |
that I have imagined, exactly, imagining conversations.
link |
So I want to mention that.
link |
But also, I don't know if you've gotten a chance
link |
to see this, but I'd love to also mention
link |
this Twitter feud between two other interesting people,
link |
which is Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris
link |
or Sam Harris and others in general.
link |
And it kind of breaks my heart that these two people
link |
I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues.
link |
Let's put COVID aside because people are very emotional
link |
I mean, I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent,
link |
whether you agree with them or not.
link |
And I always learn something from their conversations.
link |
And they are legitimately or have been
link |
for a long time friends.
link |
And it's a little bit heartbreaking to me
link |
to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore.
link |
And there's occasional jabs on Twitter.
link |
And I hope that changes.
link |
I hope that changes in general for COVID,
link |
that COVID brought out the, I would say,
link |
the most emotional sides of people, the worst in people.
link |
And I think there hasn't been enough love
link |
and empathy and compassion.
link |
And to see two people from whom I've learned a lot,
link |
whether it's Eric Weinstein, Brett Weinstein, Sam Harris,
link |
you can criticize them as much as you want,
link |
their ideas as much as you want.
link |
But if you're not sufficiently open minded
link |
to admit that you have a lot to learn
link |
from their conversations, I think you're not being honest.
link |
And so I do hope they have those conversations.
link |
And I hope we can kind of,
link |
I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post COVID
link |
of relationships, of conversations.
link |
And I think empathy and love can help a lot there.
link |
This is also just a, I talked to Sam privately,
link |
but this is also a public call out
link |
to put a little bit more love in the world.
link |
And for these difficult conversations to happen.
link |
Because Brett Weinstein could be very wrong
link |
about a bunch of topics here around COVID,
link |
but he could also be right.
link |
And the only way to find out
link |
is to have those conversations.
link |
Because there's a lot of people listening
link |
to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein.
link |
And if you go into these silos
link |
where you just keep telling each other
link |
that you are the possessors of truth
link |
and nobody else is the possessor of truth,
link |
what starts happening is you both lose track
link |
or the capability of arriving at the truth.
link |
Because nobody's in the possession of the truth.
link |
So anyway, this is just a call out
link |
that we should have a little bit more conversation,
link |
a little bit more love.
link |
And both of those guys are guys who I respect.
link |
And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned,
link |
they're just a handful of us,
link |
who were the early people raising questions
link |
about the origins of this.
link |
Of this pandemic, right.
link |
He was there also talking.
link |
So people have heard him speak quite a bit
link |
about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff.
link |
But he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on.
link |
And so, but I completely agree with you
link |
that we don't have to agree with everybody,
link |
but it's great to have healthy conversations.
link |
That's how we grow.
link |
And absolutely, we live in a world where we're kind of,
link |
if we're not careful,
link |
pushed into these little information pockets.
link |
And certainly on social media,
link |
I have different parts of my life.
link |
One is focusing on issues of COVID origins.
link |
And then I have genetics and biotechnology.
link |
And then I have, which maybe we'll talk about later,
link |
one shared world, which is about
link |
how do we build a safer future?
link |
And when I say critical things like the Chinese government,
link |
we'd have to demand a full investigation
link |
into pandemic origins.
link |
This is an outreach.
link |
Then it's really popular.
link |
When I say, let's build a better future
link |
for everyone in peace and love,
link |
it's like, wow, three people liked it.
link |
And one was my mother.
link |
And so I just feel like we need to build,
link |
we used to have that connectivity just built in
link |
because we had these town squares
link |
and you couldn't get away from them.
link |
Now we can get away from them.
link |
So engaging with people who are of a different background
link |
is really essential.
link |
I'm on Fox News sometimes three, four times a week.
link |
And I wouldn't, in my normal life,
link |
I'm not watching that much of Fox News
link |
or even television more generally.
link |
But I just feel like if I just speak to people
link |
who are very similar to me, maybe it'll be comfortable.
link |
But what have I contributed?
link |
So I think we really have to have
link |
those kinds of conversations and recognize
link |
that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy.
link |
They want to live in a better world.
link |
They maybe have different paths to get there.
link |
But if we just break into camps
link |
that don't even connect with each other,
link |
that's a much more dangerous world.
link |
Let's dive back into the difficult pool.
link |
Just like you said, in the English speaking world,
link |
it seems popular, almost easy to demonize China.
link |
The Chinese government, I should say.
link |
But even China, like there's this kind of gray area
link |
that people just fall into.
link |
And I'm really uncomfortable with that.
link |
Perhaps because in my mind, in my heart, in my blood
link |
are echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension.
link |
But it feels like we almost desire conflict.
link |
So we see demons when there is none.
link |
So I'm a little cautious to demonize.
link |
But at the same time, you have to be honest.
link |
So it's like honest with the demons that are there
link |
and honest when they're not.
link |
This is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts.
link |
So let's keep talking about China
link |
a little bit from different angles.
link |
So let's return to the director of the Center
link |
of Emerging Infectious Disease
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Xi Zhengli,
link |
colloquially referred to as Batwoman.
link |
So do you think she's lying?
link |
Do you think she's being forced to lie?
link |
I've known a bunch of virologists
link |
in private and public conversation
link |
that respect her as a human being, as a scientist.
link |
I respect her as a human being.
link |
Sorry, as a scientist, not a human being.
link |
Because I think they don't know the human.
link |
They know the scientists.
link |
And they respect her a lot as a scientist.
link |
Yeah, I respect her.
link |
I've never met her.
link |
We had one exchange, which I'll mention in a second
link |
in a virtual forum.
link |
But I do respect her.
link |
I actually think that she is somebody
link |
who has tried to do the right thing.
link |
She was one of the heroes of tracking down
link |
the origins of SARS 1.
link |
And that was a major contribution.
link |
But as we talked about earlier,
link |
it's a different thing living, being a scientist,
link |
or really kind of anything.
link |
It's different being one of those people
link |
in an authoritarian society
link |
than it is being in a different type of society.
link |
And so when Xi Zhengli said that the reason
link |
the WIV database was taken offline in September 19
link |
was because of computer hacks,
link |
I don't think that's the story.
link |
I don't think she thinks that's the story.
link |
When I asked her in March of 2021, March of this year,
link |
in a Rutgers online forum,
link |
when I asked her whether the Chinese military
link |
had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
in any way, and she said, absolutely not, paraphrasing,
link |
I think she was lying.
link |
Do I think that she had the ability to say,
link |
well, either one, yes, but I can't talk about it,
link |
or I know there are a lot of things
link |
that are happening at this institute
link |
that I don't know about, and that could be one.
link |
Could she have said that the personnel
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
have all had to go through classification training
link |
so that they can know about what can and can't be said?
link |
Like she could have said all those things,
link |
but she couldn't say all of those things.
link |
And I think that's why so many, at least in my view,
link |
so many people certainly in the Western world
link |
got this story wrong from the beginning,
link |
because if your only prism was the science,
link |
and you just assumed this is a science question
link |
to be left to the scientists,
link |
should Zhengli is just like any scientist
link |
working in Switzerland or Norway,
link |
the Chinese government isn't interfering in any way,
link |
and we can trust them, that would lead you down one path.
link |
In my view, the reason why I progressed as I did
link |
is I felt like I had two keys,
link |
and I had one key as I live in the science world
link |
through my work with WHO and my books and things like that.
link |
But I also have another part of my life
link |
in the world of geopolitics as an Asia quote unquote expert
link |
and former National Security Council official
link |
And I felt for me, I needed both keys to open that door.
link |
But if I only had the science key,
link |
I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion
link |
But if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion,
link |
well, it's coming from China,
link |
it must be that the government is guilty,
link |
like that wouldn't help either.
link |
I wonder what's in her mind,
link |
whether it's fear or habit,
link |
because I think a lot of people in the former Soviet Union,
link |
it's like Chernobyl, it's not really fear,
link |
it's almost like a momentum.
link |
It's like the reason I showed up to this interview
link |
wearing clothes, as opposed to being naked.
link |
It's like, all right.
link |
It's like, it's just all of us are doing the clothes thing.
link |
Although there was a startup years ago called Naked News.
link |
Did you ever hear about that?
link |
They just would read the exact news.
link |
No, after each story, they'd take something off
link |
until the end, I don't think.
link |
It's a good idea for a podcast.
link |
Stay tuned, next time I'm with Michael Miles.
link |
So what do you think,
link |
I mean, because the reason I asked that question is,
link |
how do we kind of take steps to improve
link |
without any kind of revolutionary action?
link |
You could say, we need to inspire the Chinese people
link |
to elect, to sort of revolutionize the system
link |
from within, but like, who are we to suggest that?
link |
Because we have our flaws too.
link |
We should be working on our flaws as well.
link |
And so, but at the individual scientist level,
link |
what are the small acts of rebellion that could be done?
link |
How can we improve this?
link |
Well, so I don't know about small acts of rebellion,
link |
but I'll try to answer your question
link |
from a few different perspectives.
link |
So right now, actually, as we speak,
link |
there is a special session
link |
of the World Health Assembly going on.
link |
And the World Health Assembly is the governing authority
link |
over the World Health Organization,
link |
where it's represented by states and territories,
link |
194 of them, tragically not including Taiwan,
link |
because of the Chinese government's assistance.
link |
But they're now beginning a process
link |
of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty
link |
to try to have a better process
link |
for responding to crises exactly like we're in.
link |
But unfortunately, for the exact same reasons
link |
that we have failed, I mean, we had a similar process
link |
after the first SARS, we set up what we thought
link |
was the best available system,
link |
and it has totally failed here.
link |
And it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies
link |
of the Chinese government system.
link |
We are suffering from a pandemic that exists
link |
because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese state.
link |
And that's why on one hand, I totally get this impulse.
link |
Well, we do it our way, they do it their way.
link |
Who's to say that one way is better?
link |
And certainly right now in the United States,
link |
we're at each other's throats.
link |
We have a hard time getting anything meaningful done.
link |
And I'm sure there are people who are saying,
link |
well, that model looks appealing.
link |
But just as people could look to the United States
link |
and say, well, because the United States
link |
has such a massive reach, what we do domestically
link |
has huge implications for the rest of the world,
link |
they become stakeholders in our politics.
link |
And that's why I think for a lot of years,
link |
people have just been looking at US politics,
link |
not because it's interesting,
link |
but because the decisions that we make
link |
have big implications for their lives.
link |
The same is true for ours.
link |
You could say that the lack of civil and political rights
link |
in China is, I mean, it's up to the Chinese,
link |
not even people, because they have no say,
link |
but to their government.
link |
And they weren't democratically elected,
link |
that they are recognized as the government.
link |
But some significant percentage of the 15 million people
link |
now dead from COVID are dead
link |
because in the earliest days following the outbreak,
link |
whatever the origin, the voices of people
link |
sounding the alarm were suppressed,
link |
that the Chinese government had an,
link |
just like in Chernobyl, the Chinese government
link |
had a greater incentive to lie
link |
to the international community than to tell the truth.
link |
And everybody was incentivized
link |
to pretty much do the wrong thing.
link |
And so that's why I think one of the big messages
link |
of this pandemic is that all of our fates
link |
are tied to everybody else's fates.
link |
And so while we can say and should say,
link |
well, let's focus on our own communities and our countries,
link |
we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere.
link |
Can I ask you a weird question?
link |
So I'm gonna do a few podcast interviews
link |
with interesting people in Russia, in the Russian language,
link |
because I could speak Russian.
link |
And a lot of those people have,
link |
are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats.
link |
Do you think it's possible to interview Xi Jinping?
link |
Do you think it's possible to interview somebody like her
link |
or anyone in the Chinese government?
link |
And I think the reason is
link |
because I think they would, one,
link |
be uncomfortable being in any environment
link |
where really unknown questions will be asked.
link |
And I actually, so as you know, on this topic,
link |
the Chinese, as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists.
link |
They can't speak without prior government approval.
link |
Xu Zhengli has been able to speak.
link |
And she's spoken at a number of forums.
link |
I mentioned this Rutgers event.
link |
What was the nature of that forum, the Rutgers event?
link |
All of them were kind of science conversations
link |
about the pandemic, including the origins issue.
link |
But I think that she, in her response to my question,
link |
it was kind of this funny thing.
link |
So they had this event organized by Rutgers.
link |
And I went on, there was an online event on Zoom,
link |
but I got on there and I just realized
link |
it was very poorly organized.
link |
Like normally the controls that you would have
link |
about who gets to chat to who, who gets to ask questions,
link |
none of them were set.
link |
And so I kind of couldn't believe it.
link |
I was just sitting at home in my neon green fleece
link |
and I just started sending chat messages to Xu Zhengli.
link |
So you could, anybody could send any.
link |
Anybody could, it was insane.
link |
But I thought, wow, this is incredible.
link |
And so then it was unclear who got to ask questions.
link |
And so I was like posting questions
link |
and then I was sending chats to the organizers
link |
of the event saying, I really have a question.
link |
And first they said, well, you can submit your questions
link |
and we'll have submitted questions.
link |
And then if we have time, we'll open up.
link |
So I just, I mean, I just thought, well, what the hell?
link |
I just sent messages to everybody.
link |
And then the event was already done.
link |
They were 15 minutes over time.
link |
And then they said, all right,
link |
we have time just for one question.
link |
And it's Jamie Metzl.
link |
And like, as I'm sitting there in my running clothes,
link |
like I wasn't, I was like multitasking and I heard my name.
link |
And so I went diving back and I asked this question
link |
about, did you know all of the work that was happening
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not just your work?
link |
And can you confirm that US intelligence has said
link |
that the military played a role,
link |
was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
Do you deny that the Chinese military was involved
link |
in any way with the Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
And as I said before, she said, this is crazy.
link |
It got, it actually got,
link |
that one question got covered in the media
link |
because it was like, I think an essential question.
link |
But I just think that since then, to my knowledge,
link |
she's not been in any public forums,
link |
but that's why most people would be shocked
link |
that to date there has been no comprehensive
link |
international investigation into pandemic origins.
link |
There is no whistleblower provision.
link |
So if you're, my guess is there are at least tens,
link |
maybe hundreds of people in China
link |
who have relevant information
link |
about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified
link |
and don't dare share it.
link |
And let's just say somebody wanted
link |
to get that information out, to send it somewhere.
link |
There's no official address.
link |
The WHO doesn't have that, nobody has that.
link |
And so I would love, I mean, you may as well ask.
link |
I don't think it's likely that there'll be a yes,
link |
but it could well be that there are defectors
link |
who will want to speak.
link |
So let me also push back on this idea.
link |
So one, I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing.
link |
Because I've talked to,
link |
so I understand Russian culture, I think,
link |
or not understand, this is the thing.
link |
I don't understand basically anything in this world.
link |
But I mean, I hear the music that is Russian culture
link |
I don't hear that music for Chinese culture.
link |
It's just not something I've experienced.
link |
So it's a beautiful, rich, complex culture.
link |
And from my sense, it seems distant to me.
link |
Like whenever I look, even like we mentioned offline Japan
link |
and so on, I probably don't even understand
link |
I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts
link |
my whole life, but even that, it's just so distant.
link |
People who've lived in Japan, foreigners for like 20 years
link |
say the exact same thing, yeah.
link |
This makes me sad.
link |
It makes me sad because I will never be able
link |
to fully appreciate the literature, the conversations,
link |
the people, the little humor and the subtleties.
link |
And those are all essential to understand
link |
even this cold topics of science.
link |
Because all of that is important to understand.
link |
So that's a question for me if you think
link |
language barriers a thing.
link |
But the other thing I just want to kind of comment on
link |
is the criticism of journalism that somebody like
link |
Shi Zhengli or even Shi Zhengpeng, just anybody in China,
link |
very skeptical to have really conversations
link |
with anybody in the western media.
link |
Because it's like what are the odds that they will try
link |
to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person.
link |
And honestly, this is a harsh criticism.
link |
I apologize, but I kind of mean it, is the journalists
link |
that have some of these high profile conversations
link |
often don't do the work.
link |
They come off as not very intelligent.
link |
And I know they're intelligent people.
link |
They have not done the research.
link |
They have not come up and like read a bunch of books.
link |
They have not even read the Wikipedia article.
link |
Meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize,
link |
to try to understand the culture of the people,
link |
all the complexities, all the different ideas in the spaces.
link |
Do all the incredible, not all,
link |
but some of the incredible work that you've done initially.
link |
Like that, you have to do that work to earn the right
link |
to have a deep real conversation with some of these folks.
link |
And it's just disappointing to me
link |
that journalists often don't do that work.
link |
Yeah, so on that, just first I completely agree with you.
link |
I mean, there is just an incredible beauty
link |
in Chinese culture and I think all cultures,
link |
but certainly China has such a deep and rich history,
link |
amazing literature and art and just human beings.
link |
I mean, I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government.
link |
I'm very vociferous about the really genocide in Xinjiang,
link |
the absolute effort to destroy Tibetan culture,
link |
the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong,
link |
incredibly illegal efforts to seize
link |
basically the entire South China Sea.
link |
And I could go on and on and on.
link |
But Chinese culture is fantastic.
link |
And I mean, I can't speak to every technical field,
link |
but just in terms of having journalists,
link |
and I'll speak to American journalists,
link |
people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time
link |
to live in China, to learn the language, learn the culture.
link |
Peter himself, who is maybe one of our best journalists
link |
covering China from a soul level,
link |
he was kicked out of China.
link |
So it's very, very difficult.
link |
Yeah, it's really, and so for me,
link |
you talked about my website on pandemic origins.
link |
So when I launched it, I had it,
link |
I'm not a Chinese speaker,
link |
but I had the entire site translated into Chinese
link |
and I have it up on my website just because I felt like,
link |
well, if somebody, I mean, the great firewall
link |
makes it very, very difficult for people in China
link |
to access that kind of information.
link |
But I figured if somebody gets there
link |
and they wanna have it in their own language.
link |
But it's hard because the Chinese government
link |
is represented by these quote unquote wolf warriors,
link |
which is, it's like these basic ruffians.
link |
And I personally was condemned by name
link |
by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry
link |
from the podium in Beijing.
link |
And so it's really hard because I absolutely think
link |
the American people and the Chinese people,
link |
I mean, maybe all people, but we have so much in common.
link |
I mean, yes, China is an ancient civilization,
link |
but they kind of wiped out their own civilization
link |
in the great leap forward and cultural revolution.
link |
They burned their scrolls, they smashed their artworks.
link |
And so it's a very young society,
link |
kind of like America is a young society.
link |
So we have a lot in common.
link |
And if we just kind of got out of our own ways,
link |
we could have a beautiful relationship,
link |
but there's a lot of things that are happening.
link |
Certainly the United States feels responsible
link |
to defend the post war international order
link |
that past generations helped build.
link |
And I'm a certain believer in that
link |
and China is challenging that and the Chinese government
link |
and they've shared that with that view
link |
with the Chinese people feel
link |
that they haven't been adequately respected.
link |
And now they're building a massive nuclear arsenal
link |
and all these other things to try to position themselves
link |
in the world with an articulated goal
link |
of being the lead country in the world.
link |
And that puts them at odds with the United States.
link |
So there are a lot of real reasons
link |
that we need to be honest about for division.
link |
But if that's all we focus on,
link |
if we don't say that there's another side of the story
link |
that brings us together,
link |
we'll put ourselves on an inevitable glide path
link |
to a terrible outcome.
link |
What do you make of Xi Jinping?
link |
So one in general and two more on lab leak
link |
and his meeting with our president Biden
link |
in discussion of lab leak.
link |
So I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal
link |
articulated of establishing China
link |
as the lead country in the world
link |
by the 100th anniversary of the founding
link |
of the modern Chinese state.
link |
And it's ruthless and it's strategic.
link |
There's a great book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi
link |
who's actually now working in the White House
link |
about this goal and our pretty clearly articulated goal
link |
to subvert the post war international order
link |
and in China's interest.
link |
And maybe every leader wants to organize the world
link |
around their interest.
link |
But I feel that his vision of what that entails
link |
is not one that I think is shareable
link |
for the rest of the world.
link |
I mean, the strength of the United States
link |
with all of our flaws is particularly
link |
in that post war period,
link |
we put forward a model that was desirable
link |
to a lot of people.
link |
Certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe
link |
and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea.
link |
Doesn't mean it's perfect.
link |
The United States is deeply flawed.
link |
As articulated to date,
link |
I don't think most people and countries
link |
would like to live in a Sinocentric world.
link |
And so I certainly, as I mentioned before,
link |
I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing,
link |
the incredible brutality in Xinjiang,
link |
in Tibet and elsewhere.
link |
Yeah, the censorship one gives me a lot of trouble
link |
on the science realm and just in journalism
link |
and just the world that prevents us
link |
from having conversations with each other.
link |
Do you know about the Winnie the Pooh thing?
link |
Yes, I mean, it's ridiculous.
link |
So to me, that's such a good illustration
link |
of censorship being petty.
link |
But censorship has to be petty
link |
because the goal of censorship,
link |
maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union,
link |
is to get into your head.
link |
Like if it's just censorship,
link |
like you say down with the state
link |
and like you can't say that,
link |
but you can say all the other things up to that point,
link |
eventually people will feel empowered
link |
to say down with the state.
link |
And so I think the goal
link |
of this kind of authoritarian censorship
link |
is to turn you into the censor.
link |
Yeah, because they almost have to have you think,
link |
well, if I'm gonna make any criticism,
link |
maybe they're gonna come and get me.
link |
So it's safer to not do it.
link |
I mean, I've traveled through North Korea
link |
pretty extensively and I've seen that in its ultimate form,
link |
but that's what they're trying to do in China too.
link |
Yeah, so for people who are not familiar,
link |
it's such a clear illustration
link |
of just the pettiness of censorship
link |
and leaders, the corrupting nature of power.
link |
But there's a meme of Xi Jinping
link |
with, I guess, Barack Obama.
link |
And the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh
link |
And that was the President Xi Jinping
link |
looks like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
And I guess that became, because that got censored,
link |
like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored
link |
Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero
link |
that represents freedom of speech and so on.
link |
But it's just such a absurd...
link |
Because we spend so much time in this conversation
link |
talking about the censorship
link |
that's a little bit more understandable to me,
link |
which is like, we messed up.
link |
And it wasn't, maybe it's almost understandable errors
link |
that happen in the progress of science.
link |
I mean, you could always argue
link |
that there's a lot of mistakes along the way
link |
and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake.
link |
You can argue that same way for the Chernobyl.
link |
But those are sort of understandable and difficult topics.
link |
Like Winnie the Pooh.
link |
But in your message, it shows both sides of the story.
link |
I mean, one, how petty authoritarian censors have to be.
link |
And that's why the messaging from the Chinese government
link |
No matter who you are,
link |
you have to be careful what you say.
link |
And that's why it's the story of Peng Shui,
link |
the tennis player.
link |
She dared raise her voice in an individual way.
link |
Jack Ma, the richest man in China,
link |
had a minor criticism of the Chinese government.
link |
He had basically disappeared from the public eye.
link |
Fan Bingbing, who's like one of the leading
link |
Chinese movie stars,
link |
she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished.
link |
And so the message is no matter who you are,
link |
no matter what level,
link |
if you don't mind everything you say,
link |
you could lose everything.
link |
I'm pretty hopeful, optimistic about a lot of things.
link |
And so for me, if the Chinese government stays
link |
with its current structure,
link |
I think what I hope they start fixing
link |
is the freedom of speech.
link |
I mean, the thing is if they open up freedom of speech
link |
really in a meaningful way,
link |
they can't maintain their current form of government.
link |
And it's connected, as I was saying before,
link |
to the origins of the pandemic.
link |
I mean, if my hypothesis was right,
link |
that was the big choice that the national government had.
link |
Do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic?
link |
Do we deliver a message that transparency is required,
link |
public transparency is required from local officials?
link |
If they do that, the entire system collapsed.
link |
Pretty much everybody in China has a relative
link |
who has died as a result of the actions
link |
of the Communist Party,
link |
particularly in the Great Leap Forward.
link |
It's nearly 50 million people died
link |
as a result of Mao's disastrous policies.
link |
And yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square
link |
and it's on the money?
link |
Because maintaining that fiction
link |
is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state.
link |
If people were allowed, just say what you want.
link |
Do you really think Mao was such a great guy,
link |
even though your own relatives are dead as a result?
link |
Do you really buy even on this story
link |
that China did nothing wrong,
link |
even though in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
these two, at least Chinese scientists themselves,
link |
courageously issued a preprint paper
link |
that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted,
link |
saying, well, this looks like this comes
link |
from one of the Wuhan labs that we're studying.
link |
Like if you opened up that window,
link |
I think that the Chinese government
link |
would not be able to continue in its current form.
link |
And that's why they cracked down at Tiananmen Square.
link |
That's why with Feng Shui, the tennis player,
link |
if they had let her accuse somebody
link |
from the Communist Party of sexual assault,
link |
and they said, okay, now people,
link |
you can use social media
link |
and you can have your me too moment
link |
and let us know who in the Chinese Communist Party
link |
or your boss in a business has assaulted you.
link |
Just like in every society,
link |
I'm sure there's tons of women
link |
who've been sexually assaulted, manipulated, abused by men.
link |
And so I certainly hope
link |
that there can be that kind of opening.
link |
But if I were an authoritarian dictator,
link |
that's the thing I would be most afraid of.
link |
Yeah, dictator perhaps,
link |
but I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech.
link |
So I think you can maintain control over the freedom
link |
So control the press more,
link |
but let the lower levels sort of open up YouTube, right?
link |
Open up like where individual citizens can make content.
link |
I mean, there's a lot of benefits to that.
link |
And then from an authoritarian perspective,
link |
you can just say that's misinformation,
link |
that's conspiracy theories, all those kinds of things.
link |
But at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech
link |
at the level of the individual citizen,
link |
that's good for entrepreneurship,
link |
for the development of ideas,
link |
of exchange of ideas, all that kind of stuff.
link |
I just think that increased the GDP of the country.
link |
So I think there's a lot of benefits.
link |
I feel like you can still play,
link |
we're playing some like dark thoughts here,
link |
but I feel like you could still play the game of thrones,
link |
still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry.
link |
Like I think just like with North Korea is a good example
link |
of where cracking down too much
link |
can completely destroy your country.
link |
Like there's some balance you can strike in your evil mind
link |
and still maintain authoritarian control over the country.
link |
Obviously, it's not obvious,
link |
but I'm a big supporter of freedom of speech.
link |
I mean, it seems to work really well.
link |
I don't know what the failure cases
link |
for freedom of speech are.
link |
Probably we're experiencing them with Twitter
link |
and like where the nature of truth
link |
is being completely kind of flipped upside down.
link |
But it seems like on the whole,
link |
ability to defeat lies with more,
link |
not through censorship, but through more conversations,
link |
more information is the right way to go.
link |
Can I tell you a little story, true stories
link |
about North Korea?
link |
So a number of years ago, I was invited
link |
to be part of a small six person delegation
link |
advising the government of North Korea
link |
on how to establish special economic zones
link |
because other countries have used these SEZs
link |
as a way of building their economies.
link |
And when I was invited, I thought,
link |
well, maybe there's an opening.
link |
And I certainly believe in that.
link |
So we flew to China across the border into North Korea.
link |
And then we were met by our partners
link |
from the North Korean Development Organization.
link |
And then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks
link |
visiting all these sites for where they were intended
link |
to create these special economic zones.
link |
And in each site, they had their local officials
link |
and they had a map and they showed us where everything
link |
that was going to be built.
link |
And the other people who were like really technical experts
link |
on how to set up a special economic zone,
link |
they were asking questions, well, like,
link |
should you put the entrance over here
link |
or shouldn't you put it over there
link |
and what if there's flooding?
link |
And I kept asking just these basic questions,
link |
like, what do you think you're going to do here?
link |
Why do you think you can be competitive?
link |
Do you know anything about who you're competing against?
link |
Are you empowering your workers to innovate
link |
because everybody else is innovating?
link |
So at the end of the trip, they flew us to Pyongyang
link |
and they put us in this,
link |
it looked kind of like the United Nations.
link |
They probably had 500 people there
link |
and I gave a speech to them.
link |
I obviously was in English and it was translated
link |
and I figured, you know, I've come all this way,
link |
I'm just going to be honest.
link |
If they arrest me for being honest, that's on them.
link |
And I said, I'm here because I believe
link |
we can never give up hope,
link |
that we always have to try to connect.
link |
I'm also here because I think that North Korea
link |
connecting to the world economy is an important first step.
link |
But having visited all of your special economic zone sites
link |
and having met with all of your, or many of your officials,
link |
I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding
link |
because you're trying to sell into a global market,
link |
but you need to have market information that,
link |
and I gave examples of GE and others
link |
that the innovation can't only happen at one place.
link |
And if you want innovation to happen
link |
from the people who are doing this,
link |
you have to empower them, they have to have access,
link |
they have to have voice.
link |
I mean, nobody, I mean, the people after,
link |
they kind of had to condemn me
link |
because what I was saying was challenging.
link |
So I certainly agree with you.
link |
And then just one side story of then that night,
link |
and it was just kind of bizarre
link |
because North Korea is, it's so desperately poor,
link |
but they were trying to impress us.
link |
And so we had these embarrassingly sumptuous banquets.
link |
And so for our final dinner that night,
link |
really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast.
link |
I mean, it was like China and waiters and tuxedos,
link |
and they had this beautiful dinner.
link |
And then afterwards,
link |
because we'd now spent two weeks
link |
with our North Korean partners,
link |
they brought out this karaoke machine
link |
and our North Korean counterparts,
link |
they sang songs to us in Korean.
link |
And so I said, well, we want to reciprocate.
link |
Do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine?
link |
It's North Korea, obviously they didn't.
link |
But there was, I said, well, I have an idea.
link |
And so there was one of the women
link |
who'd been part of the North Korean delegation.
link |
She was able just to play the piano,
link |
just like you could hum a tune
link |
and she could play it on the piano.
link |
And so I said, all right, here's this tune,
link |
which I whispered in her ear.
link |
When I give you the signal,
link |
just play this tune over and over.
link |
And so I got these, I mean, there were the six of us
link |
and maybe 20 North Koreans,
link |
and we were all in a circle,
link |
so everybody hold hands and then put your right,
link |
just try to put your right foot in front of your left
link |
and then left foot in front of the right, going sideways.
link |
And I said, all right, hit it.
link |
And she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila.
link |
And I think it was the first
link |
and only horror that they've ever done in North Korea.
link |
Was this recorded or no?
link |
Yeah, if they had free YouTube,
link |
this would have been a big one.
link |
Let's return to the beginning
link |
and just patient zero.
link |
It's kind of always incredible to think
link |
that there's one human at which it all started.
link |
Who do you think was patient zero?
link |
Do you think it was somebody that worked
link |
at Wuhan Institute of Virology?
link |
Do you think there was a leak of some other kind
link |
that led to the infection?
link |
Because there's this December 8th slash December 16th case
link |
of maybe you can describe what that is.
link |
And then there's like, what's his name?
link |
Michael Warobey has a nice timeline.
link |
I'm sure you have a timeline.
link |
But he has a nice timeline that puts the average
link |
at like November something, like 18th and November 16th
link |
as the average estimate for when the patient zero
link |
got infected, when the first human infection happened.
link |
Yeah, so just two points.
link |
One is it may be that there's infectee zero
link |
It could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic
link |
because we know there's a lot of people
link |
who are asymptomatic.
link |
And then there's the question of, well, who is patient zero?
link |
Meaning the first person to present themselves
link |
in some kind of health facility
link |
where that diagnosis could be made.
link |
So can we actually linger on that definition?
link |
So is that to you a good definition of patient zero?
link |
Okay, there's a bunch of stuff here
link |
because this virus is weird.
link |
So one is who gets infected, one who is infectious
link |
or the first person infect others.
link |
And who shows up to a hospital.
link |
Yeah, so I think that's why I'm calling the first person
link |
to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with COVID 19.
link |
I'm calling that person patient zero.
link |
There's also, there's somewhere the first person
link |
And that person maybe never showed up in a hospital
link |
because maybe they were asymptomatic and never get sick,
link |
So let me start with what I'm calling infectee zero.
link |
Here are some options.
link |
I talked before about some person who was a villager
link |
and some remote village.
link |
It's almost impossible to imagine, but possible to imagine
link |
because strange things happen.
link |
And that person somehow gets to Wuhan.
link |
By the way, just to still make that argument,
link |
there's not an argument, it's a statement,
link |
but strange things happen all the time.
link |
It doesn't mean that logic doesn't apply
link |
and probabilities don't apply, but we all,
link |
I mean, in general principle, everyone, if we were honest,
link |
should be agnostic about everything.
link |
Like I think I'm Jamie, but is there a 0.01% chance
link |
or 0.001% chance that I'm not?
link |
I mean, how would I know?
link |
But there's a large number of people arguing
link |
about the meaning of the word I
link |
and that I'm Jamie.
link |
What is consciousness?
link |
So we could spend another three hours going into that one.
link |
So one possibility is there's some remote villager.
link |
Another possibility is there's somehow bizarrely,
link |
there are these infected animals
link |
that come from Southern China most likely.
link |
They all, maybe there's only one of them that's infected,
link |
which how could that possibly be?
link |
And it's only sent to Wuhan.
link |
It's not sent anywhere else,
link |
to any of the markets there or whatever.
link |
And then maybe somebody in a market is infected.
link |
That's one remote possibility, but a possibility.
link |
Another is that researchers
link |
from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
go down to Southern China.
link |
We didn't, we haven't talked about it yet,
link |
but in 2012, there were six miners were sent
link |
into a copper mine in Southern China and Yunnan province.
link |
All of them got very sick
link |
with what now appear like COVID 19 like symptoms.
link |
Half of them died.
link |
Blood samples from them were taken
link |
to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere.
link |
And then after that, there were multiple site visits
link |
to that mine, collecting viral samples
link |
that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
included among those samples were,
link |
was this now infamous RETG 13 virus,
link |
which is among the genetically closest viruses
link |
There were other nine other or eight other viruses
link |
that were collected from that mine
link |
that were presumably very similar to that.
link |
And again, we have no access to the information
link |
about those and many of the other,
link |
most, almost all of the other viruses.
link |
So could it be that one of the people
link |
who was sent from the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
or the Wuhan Centers for Disease Control,
link |
they went down there to collect
link |
and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back?
link |
Could it be that they were working on these viruses
link |
in the laboratory and there was an issue
link |
with waste disposal?
link |
And we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem
link |
with waste disposal.
link |
And just before the pandemic,
link |
one, they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal.
link |
And in early 2019, they moved to their new site,
link |
which was basically across the street
link |
from the Huanan Seafood Market.
link |
So could there have been issue of somebody infected
link |
in the lab of waste disposal?
link |
Could a laboratory animal, their experiences
link |
in China, actually China just recently passed a law
link |
saying it's illegal to sell laboratory animals
link |
in the market because there were scientists,
link |
or one scientist who was selling laboratory animals
link |
in the market and people would just come and buy.
link |
So there's so many, there are so many scenarios,
link |
but if I, again, connect it to my 85% number,
link |
I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents,
link |
whether it's collection, waste,
link |
something connected to the lab,
link |
I think that's the most likely,
link |
but there are other credible people
link |
who would say they think it's not the most likely
link |
and I welcome their views
link |
and we need to have this conversation.
link |
So in your write up, but what's the URL?
link |
Because I always find it by doing Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
It's probably the easiest, just Google that.
link |
No, no, but if you just go to jamiemetzl.com,
link |
J A M I E M E T Z L dot com,
link |
then they're just a thing, it's COVID origins.
link |
It's COVID origins.
link |
Or you could just Google Jamie Metzl lab leak.
link |
Google search engine is such a powerful thing.
link |
You mentioned in that write up that you don't think,
link |
this could be just me misreading it
link |
or it's just slightly miswritten,
link |
but you don't think that the virus
link |
is from that 2012 mind, which is fascinating,
link |
could be the backbone for SARS COVID too.
link |
So what I mean, just the specific virus,
link |
which I mentioned, RATG13,
link |
and there's a whole history of that
link |
because it had a different name and it looked,
link |
and Xiaojiang Li provided wrong information
link |
about when it had been sequenced.
link |
I mean, there was a whole issue connected to that.
link |
But the genetic difference,
link |
even though it's 96.2% similar to the SARS COVID2 virus,
link |
that's actually a significant difference,
link |
even though that and a virus called Banal 52
link |
that was collected in Laos are the two most similar,
link |
there still are differences.
link |
So I'm not saying RATG13 is the backbone,
link |
but is there, I believe there is a possibility
link |
that other viruses that were collected
link |
either in that mine in Yunnan in Southern China
link |
or in Laos or Cambodia,
link |
because that was with the EcoHealth Alliance
link |
proposals and documents.
link |
Their plan was to collect viruses
link |
in Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere
link |
and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
so that there are people.
link |
As a matter of fact, just when I was sitting here
link |
before this interview,
link |
I got a message from somebody who was saying,
link |
well, Peter Daszak is telling everybody
link |
that the viral sample, the Banal 52 from Laos
link |
proves that there's not a lab incident origin
link |
And it actually doesn't prove that at all
link |
because these viruses were being collected
link |
in places like Laos and Cambodia
link |
and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
link |
Those are like early, early, like the prequel.
link |
So these are, they're not sufficiently similar
link |
to be a, to serve as a backbone,
link |
but they kind of tell a story
link |
that they could have been brought to the lab
link |
through several processes, including genetic modification
link |
or through the natural evolution processes,
link |
accelerated evolution, they could have arrived
link |
to something that has the spike protein
link |
and the cleavage, the foreign cleavage site
link |
and all that kind of stuff.
link |
So what I'm saying is the essential point
link |
is if we had access, if we knew everything
link |
that was being, every virus that was being held
link |
at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan CDC,
link |
we had full access.
link |
We had full access to everybody's lab notes.
link |
And we did just the kind of forensic investigation
link |
that has been so desperately required since day one.
link |
We'd be able to say, well, what did you have?
link |
Because if we knew, if it should come out,
link |
that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in its repository,
link |
prior to the outbreak, either SARS CoV2
link |
or a reasonable precursor to it,
link |
that would prove the lab incident hypothesis.
link |
In my mind, that's almost certainly why they are preventing
link |
any kind of meaningful investigation.
link |
So my hypothesis is not that what RITG13 says
link |
is because as I mentioned earlier,
link |
the genetics of virus are constantly recombinating.
link |
So that what that means is if you have,
link |
you don't have very many total outlier viruses
link |
in a bat community because these viruses
link |
are always mixing and matching with each other.
link |
And so if you have RITG13, which is relatively similar
link |
to SARS CoV2, there's a pretty decent likelihood
link |
there was other stuff that was collected
link |
at this mine called Mojang Mine in Yunnan Province,
link |
maybe in Laos and Cambodia.
link |
And that's why we need to have that information.
link |
Do you think somebody knows who patient zero is
link |
So do you think that is?
link |
Well, there's two things.
link |
One is I think somebody and people probably know.
link |
And then two, it's been incredibly curious
link |
that the best virus chasers in the world are in China.
link |
And they are in Wuhan.
link |
And when we can talk about this deeply compromised,
link |
now vastly improved World Health Organization process.
link |
But when they went there, the Chinese,
link |
the local and national Chinese authorities say,
link |
oh, we haven't done, we haven't tested the samples
link |
in our blood center.
link |
We haven't done any of this tracing.
link |
And these deeply compromised people
link |
who were part of the international part
link |
of the joint study tour, when they came out with their,
link |
they had their visit earlier this year
link |
and came out with their report.
link |
They had in my mind, just an absurd letter
link |
to the editor in nature saying,
link |
well, if we don't hurry back,
link |
we're not gonna know what happened.
link |
Assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins
link |
who on their own don't know how to trace the origin
link |
of a virus and the opposite is the case.
link |
So I think there are people in China
link |
who at least know a lot.
link |
They know a lot more than they're saying.
link |
And at the best case scenario is the Chinese government
link |
wants to prevent any investigation, including by them.
link |
The worst case scenario is that there are people
link |
And that's why, again, my point from day one has been,
link |
we need a comprehensive international investigation
link |
in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records,
link |
samples and personnel.
link |
When this, again, deeply flawed.
link |
Can I give you a little history of this WHO process?
link |
Who are the, that's funny.
link |
I'm so funny with the jokes.
link |
So what is this organization?
link |
What is its purpose?
link |
What role did it play in the pandemic?
link |
It certainly was demonized in the realm of politics.
link |
This is an institution that was supposed to save us
link |
from this pandemic.
link |
A lot of people believe it failed.
link |
And you said it's improving.
link |
How is it improving?
link |
I hope you don't mind.
link |
I'm gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra time.
link |
Good, good, good, good.
link |
So the WHO is an absolutely essential organization
link |
created in 1948 in that wonderful period
link |
after the Second World War
link |
when the United States and allied countries
link |
asked the big bold questions,
link |
how do we build a safer world for everyone?
link |
And so that's the WHO.
link |
If we, although there are many critics of the WHO,
link |
if we didn't have it, we would need to invent it
link |
because the whole nature of these big public health issues
link |
and certainly for pandemics, but all sorts of things
link |
is that they are transnational in nature.
link |
And so we cannot just build moats.
link |
We cannot build walls.
link |
We're all connected to it.
link |
So that's the idea.
link |
There's a political process because the United Nations
link |
and the WHO is part of it,
link |
it exists within a political context.
link |
And so the current director general
link |
of the World Health Organization
link |
who was just reelected for his second five year term
link |
is Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
link |
who is from Ethiopia, Tigrayan from Ethiopia.
link |
And in full disclosure, I have a lot of respect for Tedros.
link |
Tedros got his job.
link |
He was not America's candidate.
link |
He was not Britain's candidate.
link |
Our candidate was a guy named David Nabarro
link |
who I also know and have tremendous respect for.
link |
China led the process of putting Tedros in this position.
link |
And in the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
Tedros, in my view,
link |
even though I have tremendous respect for him,
link |
I think he made a mistake.
link |
The WHO doesn't have its own
link |
independent surveillance network.
link |
It's not organized to have it
link |
and the states have not allowed it.
link |
So it's dependent on member states
link |
for providing it information.
link |
And because it's a poorly funded organization
link |
dependent on its bosses who are these governments,
link |
it's natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses.
link |
It's to say, well, let's quietly work with everybody.
link |
the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros.
link |
And Tedros, in repeating the position
link |
of the Chinese government,
link |
which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump
link |
also did the exact same thing.
link |
Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping
link |
and then repeated what Xi had told him.
link |
Both of them were wrong.
link |
Dr. Tedros, I think when Chinese government was lying,
link |
saying there's no human to human transmission,
link |
Dr. Tedros said that.
link |
And even though within the World Health Organization,
link |
there were private critiques saying
link |
China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one,
link |
it's not providing access,
link |
it's not providing information.
link |
Tedros's instinct because of his background,
link |
because of his role and wrongly,
link |
was to have a more collaborative relationship with China,
link |
particularly by making assertions
link |
based on the information that was wrong.
link |
Don't call people liars,
link |
they're not gonna be happy with you.
link |
They're not gonna be happy.
link |
And the job of the WHO isn't to condemn states,
link |
it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems.
link |
And I think that the culture was,
link |
well, let's do the most that we can.
link |
If we totally alienate China on day one,
link |
we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for.
link |
Not exactly sure, by the way,
link |
that maybe you can also steel man that argument.
link |
Like it's not completely obvious that that's
link |
a terrible decision.
link |
Like if you and I were in that role,
link |
we wouldn't make that decision.
link |
It's complicated because like,
link |
you want China on your side to help solve this.
link |
So I would have made a different decision,
link |
which is why I never would have been selected
link |
as the director general.
link |
There's a selection criteria
link |
that everybody kind of needs to support you.
link |
And so, but let me just, this is just the beginning.
link |
Can you also just elaborate or kind of restate,
link |
what were the inaccuracies that you quickly mentioned?
link |
So human to human transmission, what were the things?
link |
So the most important, there were a few things.
link |
One, China didn't report the outbreak.
link |
Two, they had the sequenced genome
link |
of the SARS CoV2 virus,
link |
and they didn't share it for two critical weeks.
link |
And when they did share it, it was inadvertent.
link |
I mean, there was a very, very courageous scientist
link |
who essentially leaked it and was later punished
link |
for leaking it, even though the Chinese government
link |
is now saying we were so great by releasing the sequenced.
link |
Wait, I was really confused.
link |
So I'm so clueless about this as most things.
link |
Because I thought, because there was a celebration of,
link |
isn't this amazing that we got the sequence,
link |
that's amazing, and then the scientific community
link |
across the world stepped up and were able to do
link |
a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing.
link |
Because I thought the Chinese government shared it.
link |
No, no, so they sat on it for two weeks.
link |
When they shared it against their will, it was incredible.
link |
Moderna, 48 hours later after getting the information,
link |
getting the sequenced genome, they had the formulation
link |
for what's now the Moderna COVID 19 vaccine.
link |
But that's two critical weeks.
link |
In those early days, they blocked the World Health
link |
Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan
link |
for more than three weeks.
link |
I said they lied about human to human transmission.
link |
During that time, they were aggressively enacting
link |
their coverup, destroying records, hiding samples,
link |
imprisoning people who were asking tough questions.
link |
They soon after established their gag order.
link |
They fought internally in the World Health Organization
link |
to prevent the declaration of a global emergency.
link |
So China definitely, I mean, I couldn't be stronger
link |
in my critique of China, particularly what it did
link |
in those early days, but it really, what it's doing
link |
even to today is outrageous.
link |
So that was, so then there was the question of,
link |
well, how do we examine what actually happened?
link |
And the Prime Minister of Australia then and now,
link |
Scott Morrison, was incredibly courageous.
link |
And he said, we need a full investigation.
link |
And because of that, the Chinese government
link |
attacked him personally and imposed trade sanctions
link |
on Australia to try to, not just to punish Australia,
link |
but to deliver a message to every other country.
link |
If you ask questions, we're going to punish you ruthlessly.
link |
And then that certainly was the message that was delivered.
link |
The Australians brought that idea of a full investigation
link |
to the World Health Assembly in May of 2020.
link |
As I mentioned before, the WHA is the governing authority
link |
above, of states above the World Health Organization.
link |
And so, but instead of passing a resolution calling
link |
for a full investigation, what ended up ironically
link |
and tragically passing with Chinese support
link |
was a mandate to have essentially
link |
a Chinese controlled joint study,
link |
where half of the team, a little more than half of the team
link |
was Chinese experts, government affiliated Chinese experts,
link |
and half were independent international experts
link |
but organized by the WHO.
link |
And then it took six months
link |
to negotiate the terms of reference.
link |
And again, while China was doing all this coverup,
link |
they delayed and delayed and delayed.
link |
And by the terms of reference that were negotiated,
link |
China had veto power over who got to be a member
link |
of the international group.
link |
And that group was not entitled to access to raw data.
link |
The Chinese side would give them conclusions
link |
based on their own analysis of the raw data,
link |
which was totally outrageous.
link |
So then, and I was a big, I and others,
link |
now friend of mine, although we've never met in person,
link |
Gilles de Manouf in New Zealand,
link |
he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter
link |
of the terms of reference.
link |
So then it took, now it's the January of this year,
link |
January, 2021, this deeply flawed,
link |
deeply compromised international group is sent to Wuhan.
link |
So what's the connection between this group
link |
and the joint study?
link |
So the joint study, it had the Chinese side
link |
and the international side.
link |
So these international experts,
link |
then part of their examination was going
link |
for one month to Wuhan.
link |
And the nature of the flaws of this international group.
link |
It's okay, really important point.
link |
And I'm sorry, I wasn't clear on that.
link |
Rather, the mandate of what they were doing
link |
was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic.
link |
It was to have a joint study
link |
into the zoonotic origins of the virus,
link |
which means, which was interpreted to mean
link |
the natural origins hypothesis.
link |
They weren't empowered for a single hypothesis,
link |
not so that they weren't empowered
link |
to examine the lab incident origin.
link |
They were there to look at the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
To shop for some meat at some markets.
link |
Yeah, so that was, so then they were there for a month.
link |
So out of the makeup of the team, guess who was?
link |
So the United States government proposed three experts
link |
People who had a lot of background.
link |
This was the Trump administration.
link |
People who had a lot of background,
link |
including in investigating lab incidents.
link |
None of those people were accepted.
link |
The one American who was accepted.
link |
Don't tell me it's Peter Daszak.
link |
Peter Daszak, who had this funding relationship
link |
for many years with the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
link |
whose entire basically professional reputation
link |
was based on his collaboration with Shujang Li,
link |
who had written the February, 2020 Lancet letter
link |
saying it comes from natural origin.
link |
And anybody who's suggesting otherwise
link |
is a conspiracy theorist.
link |
And who, at least according to me,
link |
had been at very, very least the opposite of transparent
link |
and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign.
link |
He is the one American who's on this.
link |
So they go there, they have one month in Wuhan.
link |
Two weeks of it are spent in quarantine
link |
just in their hotel rooms.
link |
So then they have two weeks,
link |
but really it's just 10 working days.
link |
One of the earliest, and so then they're kind of,
link |
we've all seen the pictures.
link |
They're traveling around Wuhan in little buses.
link |
One of the first visits they have
link |
is to this museum exhibition on the,
link |
it's basically a propaganda exhibition on the success,
link |
Xi Jinping and the success in fighting COVID.
link |
And they said, well, we had to show respect
link |
to our Chinese hosts.
link |
But I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is,
link |
let's just, I'm just gonna rub your noses in this.
link |
You're gonna go where we tell you.
link |
You're gonna hear what we want you to hear.
link |
So they have that little short time.
link |
They spend a few hours.
link |
They weren't in control of where the bus goes.
link |
No, I mean, they made recommendations.
link |
Many of their recommendations were accepted,
link |
but like when they went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
link |
and some of them did,
link |
they weren't able to do any kind of audit
link |
when they asked for access to raw data.
link |
They weren't provided that.
link |
They were, it was, as I said in my 60 minutes interview,
link |
it was a chaperoned study tour.
link |
It was not even remotely close to an investigation.
link |
And the thing they were looking at
link |
wasn't the origins of the pandemic.
link |
It was the single hypothesis
link |
of a quote unquote natural origins.
link |
Then, I mean, it was really so shocking for me.
link |
On February 9 of this year in Wuhan,
link |
the Chinese government sets up a joint press event
link |
where it's the Chinese side and the international side.
link |
And during that press event,
link |
a guy named Peter Ben Embarek,
link |
and it's a little confusing.
link |
He was basically the head of this delegation
link |
and he works for the WHO,
link |
even though this was an independent committee,
link |
it was organized by the WHO.
link |
So Peter Ben Embarek gets up there and says,
link |
we think it's most likely it comes from nature.
link |
Then he says, we think it's possible
link |
it comes through frozen food,
link |
which is absolutely outrageous.
link |
I mean, it's basically preposterous.
link |
Alena Chan calls this popsicle origins,
link |
but it's really, really unlikely.
link |
But then most significantly,
link |
he says that we've all agreed
link |
that a lab incident origin is quote unquote
link |
extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated.
link |
We later learned that the way they came up
link |
with that determination was by a show of hands vote
link |
of the international experts and the Chinese experts.
link |
And the Chinese experts had to do their vote
link |
in front of the Chinese government officials
link |
who were constantly there.
link |
So even if whatever they thought,
link |
there was no possibility that someone raises their hand
link |
and say, oh yeah, I think it's a lab origin.
link |
So that was outrageous thing number one.
link |
Outrageous thing number two,
link |
which I mean, I'll come back to my response in February.
link |
Outrageous thing number two is months later,
link |
Peter Benambarak does an interview on Danish television.
link |
And he says, actually I was lying about extremely unlikely
link |
because the Chinese side,
link |
they didn't want any mention of a lab incident origin
link |
anywhere including in the report that later came out.
link |
And so the deal we made, even though he himself thought
link |
that at least some manifestation of a lab incident origin
link |
was likely and that there should be an investigation,
link |
particularly he said, well, that's kind of weird
link |
that the Wuhan CDC moved just across
link |
from the Huanan seafood market
link |
just before the beginning of the pandemic.
link |
But he said as a horse trading deal
link |
with the Chinese authorities,
link |
it shouldn't be that he agreed to say
link |
it was extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated.
link |
So I was in actually in Colorado staying with my parents
link |
and I stayed up late watching this press event.
link |
And I was appalled because I knew after two weeks
link |
there was no way they could possibly come to that conclusion.
link |
So I immediately sent a private message to Tedros,
link |
the WHO director general, essentially saying
link |
there's no way they had enough access
link |
to come to this conclusion.
link |
If the WHO doesn't distance itself from this,
link |
the WHO itself is going to be in danger
link |
because it's going to be basically institutional capture
link |
This was repeating the Chinese government's
link |
propaganda points.
link |
And Tedros sent me a really, again,
link |
why I have so much respect for Tedros,
link |
sent me a private note saying,
link |
don't worry, we are determined to do the right thing.
link |
And so I got that private message.
link |
And again, I really like Tedros,
link |
but I thought, well, what are you gonna do?
link |
Three days later, Tedros makes a public statement.
link |
And he says, I've heard this thing.
link |
I don't think that this is a final answer.
link |
We need to have a full investigation into this process.
link |
He then released two more statements
link |
saying we need to have a full investigation
link |
with access to raw data.
link |
And we need a full audit of the Wuhan labs.
link |
So then that part was really, really great.
link |
But then this saga continues because,
link |
so I was part of a group, as I mentioned before,
link |
It was about two dozen or so experts.
link |
And we'd been meeting since 2020 and having regular meetings.
link |
And we just present papers, present data,
link |
debate to try to really get to the bottom of things.
link |
And it was all private.
link |
So I went to this group and I said, look,
link |
this playing field is now skewed.
link |
These guys, they've put out this thing,
link |
lab incident origin, extremely unlikely.
link |
It's in every newspaper in the world.
link |
We can't just be our own little private group
link |
talking to each other.
link |
So I led the political process of drafting
link |
what became four open letters that many of us signed,
link |
most of us signed, that saying, all right,
link |
here's why this study group and the report are not credible.
link |
Here's what's wrong.
link |
Here's what a full investigation would look like.
link |
Here's a treasure map of all the resources
link |
where people can look.
link |
And we demand a comprehensive investigation.
link |
So those four open letters were in pretty much
link |
every newspaper in the world.
link |
And it played a really significant role
link |
along with some other things.
link |
There was later, there was a letter, a short letter
link |
in Science making basically similar points
link |
in a much more condensed way.
link |
There were some higher profile articles
link |
by Nicholas Wade and Nick Baker and others.
link |
And those collectively shifted the conversation.
link |
And then really impressively, the WHO,
link |
and with Tedros's leadership, did
link |
something that was really incredible.
link |
And that is earlier this year, they,
link |
meaning the leadership of the WHO, not the World Health
link |
Assembly, but the leadership of the WHO,
link |
announced the establishment of what's
link |
called SAGO, the Scientific Advisory Group on the Origins
link |
of Novel Pathogens.
link |
And basically what they did was overrule their own governing
link |
board and say, we're going to create our own entity.
link |
So it basically dissolved that international, deeply flawed
link |
international joint study group.
link |
And a lot of those people, they have become very critical,
link |
like the Chinese of Tedros.
link |
So then they had an open call for nominations
link |
to be part of SAGO.
link |
And so a lot of people put in their nominations.
link |
They selected 26 people.
link |
But our group, we had a meeting, and we
link |
were unhappy with that list of 26.
link |
It still felt skewed toward the natural origin hypothesis.
link |
So again, I drafted, and we worked on together,
link |
an open letter which we submitted to the WHO saying,
link |
we think this list, it's a step in the right direction,
link |
but it's not good enough.
link |
And we call on these three people to be removed,
link |
and we have these three people who we think should be added.
link |
Incredibly, and I was in private touch
link |
with the WHO, after announcing the 26 people,
link |
the WHO said, we're reopening the process, so send in more.
link |
And so then they added two more people, one of whom
link |
is an expert in the auditing of lab incidents.
link |
And then one of the, so they added those two.
link |
And then when they just released the list of people
link |
who are part of SAGO, this one woman,
link |
a highly respected Dutch virologist named Marion Koopmans,
link |
who had been part of that deeply flawed and compromised
link |
international study group, who had called,
link |
who has consistently called a lab incident origin, quote,
link |
unquote, a debunked conspiracy theory.
link |
As of now, her name is not on the list.
link |
We haven't seen any announcements.
link |
So I summary, and I'm sorry to go on for so long
link |
and to be so animated about this,
link |
I genuinely feel that the WHO is trying to do the right thing.
link |
But they exist within a political context.
link |
And they're pushing at the edges,
link |
but there's only so far that they can go.
link |
And that's why we definitely need
link |
to have full accountability for the WHO.
link |
We need to expand the mandate to WHO.
link |
But we need to recognize that states have a big role.
link |
And China is an incredibly influential state
link |
that's doing everything possible to prevent
link |
the kind of full investigation into pandemic origins
link |
that's so desperately required.
link |
Well, it sounds like the leadership
link |
made all the difference in the WHO.
link |
So like the way to change the momentum of large institutions
link |
is through the leadership.
link |
Leadership and empowerment, as I mentioned,
link |
the World Health Assembly is meeting now.
link |
And I think that it shouldn't be that we require superhumans.
link |
And there are some people who are big critics of WHO.
link |
The leader of the WHO in SARS 1 was definitely more aggressive.
link |
She had a different set of powers at that time.
link |
But it can't be entirely, we definitely
link |
need strong willed, aggressive, independent people
link |
in these kinds of roles.
link |
We also need a more empowered WHO.
link |
Like when the Chinese government in the earliest days
link |
of the pandemic said, we're just not
link |
going to allow you to send a team to collect
link |
your own information.
link |
And we're not going to allow you to have
link |
any kind of independent surveillance,
link |
there was very little that the WHO could do because
link |
of the limitations of its mandate.
link |
And we can't just say we're going to have a WHO that only
link |
compromises Chinese sovereignty.
link |
If we want to have a powerful WHO,
link |
we should say we have emergency teams when the director
link |
general says an emergency team needs to go somewhere.
link |
If they aren't allowed to go there that day,
link |
you could say there's an immediate referral
link |
to the Security Council.
link |
There needs to be something.
link |
But we have all these demands, rightfully,
link |
so of the WHO, which doesn't have the authorities.
link |
The WHO itself only controls 20% of its own budget.
link |
So the governments are saying, we're
link |
going to give you money to do this or that.
link |
So we need a stronger WHO to protect us,
link |
but we also have to build that.
link |
So looking a little bit into the future,
link |
let's first step into the past, sort
link |
of the philosophical question about China.
link |
If you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese
link |
government, if they were to be more transparent,
link |
how should they be more transparent?
link |
Because it's easier to say, we want to see this.
link |
But from a perspective of government,
link |
and not just the Chinese government,
link |
but a government on WHO's geographic territory,
link |
say it's a lab leak, a lab leak occurred
link |
that has resulted in trillions of dollars of loss,
link |
countless of lives, just all kinds of damage to the world.
link |
If they were to admit or show data
link |
that could serve as evidence for a lab leak,
link |
that's something that people could, in the worst case,
link |
start wars over, or in the most likely case,
link |
just constantly bring that up at every turn,
link |
making you powerless in negotiations.
link |
Whenever you want to do something
link |
in geopolitical sense, the United States
link |
will bring up, oh, remember that time
link |
you cost us trillions of dollars because of your fuck up?
link |
So what is the incentive for the Chinese government
link |
to be transparent?
link |
And if it is to be transparent, how should it do it?
link |
So there's a bunch of people.
link |
The reason I'm talking to you, as opposed
link |
to a bunch of other folks, because you
link |
are kindhearted and thoughtful and open minded
link |
and really respected.
link |
There's a bunch of people that are talking about lab leak
link |
that are a little bit less interested in building
link |
a better world and more interested in pointing out
link |
the emperor has no clothes.
link |
They want step one, which is saying, basically,
link |
tearing down the bullshitters.
link |
They don't want to do the further steps of building.
link |
And so as the Chinese government,
link |
I would be nervous about being transparent with anybody that
link |
just wants to tear our power centers, our power
link |
Anyway, that's a long way to ask,
link |
how should the Chinese government be transparent now
link |
and in the future?
link |
So maybe I'll break that down into a few sub questions.
link |
The first is, what should, in an ideal world,
link |
what should the Chinese government do?
link |
And that's pretty straightforward.
link |
They should be totally transparent.
link |
The South African government now,
link |
there is an outbreak of this Omicron variant.
link |
And the South African government has done what we would want.
link |
A government to do is say, hey, there's an outbreak.
link |
We don't have all of the information.
link |
We want to alert the world.
link |
And in some ways, they're being punished for it
link |
through these travel bans.
link |
But it's a separate topic.
link |
But I actually think short term travel bans actually
link |
are not a terrible idea.
link |
They should have, on day one, they
link |
should have allowed WHO experts in.
link |
They should have shared information.
link |
They should have allowed a full and comprehensive
link |
investigation with international partnerships
link |
to understand what went wrong.
link |
They should have shared their raw data.
link |
They should have allowed their scientists
link |
to speak and write publicly.
link |
Because nobody knows more about this stuff,
link |
certainly in the early days, than their scientists do.
link |
So it's relatively easy to say what they should do.
link |
It's a hard question to say, well, what would happen?
link |
Let's just say tomorrow, we prove for certain
link |
that this pandemic stems both from an accidental lab
link |
incident and then from what I've consistently
link |
called a criminal cover up.
link |
Because the cover up has done, in many ways,
link |
as much or more damage than the incident.
link |
Well, what happens?
link |
You could easily imagine Xi Jinping has had two terms
link |
as the leader of China.
link |
And he can now have unlimited terms.
link |
Well, they've changed the rules for that.
link |
But he's got a lot of enemies.
link |
I mean, there are a lot of people who are waiting in line
link |
So is there a chance that Xi Jinping could be deposed
link |
if it was proven that this comes from a lab?
link |
And I think there's a real possibility.
link |
Would people in the United States Congress, for example,
link |
demand reparations from China?
link |
So we've had $4.5 trillion of stimulus,
link |
all of the economic losses, and we owe a lot of money
link |
to China from our debt.
link |
I'm quite certain that members of Congress
link |
would say, we're just going to wipe that out.
link |
It would destroy the global financial system,
link |
but I think they would be extremely likely.
link |
Would other countries, like India,
link |
that have lost millions of people
link |
and had terrible economic damages,
link |
would they demand reparations?
link |
So I think from a Chinese perspective,
link |
starting from now, it would have
link |
major geopolitical implications.
link |
And go back to Chernobyl, there was
link |
a reason why the Soviet Union went to such length
link |
to cover things up.
link |
And when it came out, I mean, there are different theories,
link |
but certainly Chernobyl played some role
link |
in the end of communist power in the Soviet Union.
link |
So the Chinese are very, very aware of that.
link |
But the difference, of course, with Chernobyl,
link |
the damage to the rest of the world
link |
was not nearly as significant as it was with COVID.
link |
So you say that the coverup is a crime,
link |
but everything you just described,
link |
the response of the rest of the world,
link |
is, I could say, unfair.
link |
So, okay, if we say the best possible version of the story,
link |
you know, lab leaks happen, they shouldn't happen,
link |
And how is that on the Chinese government?
link |
I mean, what's a good example?
link |
Well, the Union Carbide.
link |
Union Carbide, there was this American company
link |
operating in India, they had this leak,
link |
all these people were killed.
link |
The company admitted responsibility.
link |
I was working in the White House
link |
when the United States government, in my view,
link |
which I know to be the case,
link |
but other people in China think differently,
link |
bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
link |
And so the United States government
link |
allowed a full investigation,
link |
then we paid reparations to the families.
link |
And so to your question, if I were,
link |
let's just say I were the Chinese government,
link |
not, I mean, kind of an idealized version
link |
of the Chinese government.
link |
And let's just say that they had come to the conclusion
link |
that it was a lab incident.
link |
And let's just say they knew that even if
link |
they continued to cover it up,
link |
eventually this information would come out.
link |
I mean, maybe there was a whistleblower,
link |
maybe they knew of some evidence
link |
that we didn't know about or something.
link |
What would I do starting right now?
link |
What I would do is I would hold a press conference
link |
and I would say, we had this terrible accident.
link |
The reason why we were doing this research
link |
in Wuhan and elsewhere is that we had SARS one
link |
and we felt a responsibility to do everything possible
link |
to prevent that kind of terrible thing happening again
link |
for our country and for the world.
link |
That was why we collaborated with France,
link |
with the United States in building up those capacities.
link |
We know that nothing is perfect,
link |
but we're a sovereign country and we have our own system.
link |
And so we had to adapt our systems
link |
so that they made sense internally.
link |
When this outbreak began, we didn't know how it started.
link |
And that was why we wanted to look into things.
link |
When the process of investigating became so political,
link |
it gave us pause and we were worried that our enemies
link |
were trying to use this investigation
link |
in order to undermine us.
link |
Having said that, now that we've dug deeper,
link |
we have recognized because we have access
link |
to additional information that we didn't have then,
link |
that this pandemic started from an accidental lab incident.
link |
And we feel really terribly about that.
link |
And we know that we were very aggressive
link |
in covering up information in the beginning,
link |
but the reason we were doing that is because we thoroughly,
link |
we fully believe that it came from a natural origin.
link |
Now that we see otherwise, we feel terribly.
link |
Therefore, we're doing a few different things.
link |
One is we are committing ourselves
link |
to establishing a stronger WHO, a new pandemic treaty
link |
that addresses the major challenges that we face
link |
and allows the World Health Organization
link |
to pierce the veil of absolute sovereignty
link |
because we know that when these pandemics happen,
link |
they affect everybody.
link |
We are also putting, and you can pick your number,
link |
but let's start with five trillion US dollars,
link |
some massive amount, into a fund
link |
that we will be distributing to the victims of COVID 19
link |
and their, and their.
link |
China would do that?
link |
This is a fantasy speech.
link |
But I disagree with your, I mean, okay.
link |
So you think China has a responsibility?
link |
Well, so it's not the, like just a lab leak.
link |
Like if China on day one had said we have this outbreak,
link |
we don't know where it came from,
link |
we want to have a full investigation,
link |
we call on international,
link |
responsible international partners
link |
to join us in that process,
link |
and we're going to do everything in our power
link |
to share the relevant information
link |
because however this started, we're all victims.
link |
That's a totally different story
link |
than punishing Australia, preventing the WHO,
link |
blocking any investigation,
link |
condemning people who are trying to look, and so that's.
link |
So cover up for a couple weeks,
link |
you can understand maybe,
link |
because there's so much uncertainty.
link |
You're like, oh, let's hide all the Winnie the Pooh pictures
link |
while we figure this out.
link |
But the moment you really figure out what happened,
link |
you always, as a Jew I can say this,
link |
always find like a blame the Jews kind of situation
link |
a little bit, just a little bit.
link |
Be like, all right, it's not us.
link |
But be proactive in saying.
link |
Just to start here, but the joke about that is
link |
there's a big problem because a lot of people
link |
have to leave the Jewish socialist conspiracy
link |
to make it for the Jewish capitalist conspiracy meeting.
link |
So I would say not five trillion,
link |
but some large amount,
link |
and I would really focus on the future,
link |
which is every time we talk about the lab leak,
link |
the unfortunate thing is I feel like people
link |
don't focus enough about the future.
link |
To me, the lab leak is important
link |
because we want to construct a kind of framework
link |
of thinking and a global conversation
link |
that minimizes the damage done by future lab leaks,
link |
which will almost certainly happen.
link |
And so to me, any lab leak is about the future.
link |
I would launch a giant investment in saying
link |
we're going to create a testing infrastructure,
link |
like all of this kind of infrastructure investments
link |
that help minimize the damage of a lab leak
link |
here and the rest of the world.
link |
So the challenge with that is one,
link |
it's hard to imagine a fully accountable future system
link |
to prevent these kinds of terrible pandemics
link |
that's built upon obfuscation and coverup
link |
regarding the origins of this worst pandemic in a century.
link |
So it's just like that foundation isn't strong enough.
link |
Second, China across the fields of science
link |
is looking to leapfrog the rest of the world.
link |
So China now has current plans to build BSL4 labs
link |
in every of its province.
link |
Yeah, they're scaling up the.
link |
Scaling up everything ends up with the plan on leading.
link |
And that's why, again, I was saying before,
link |
I think there's a lot of similarity between this story,
link |
at least as I see it, at least the most probable case,
link |
and these other areas where China gets knowledge
link |
and then tries to leapfrog.
link |
It's the same with AI and autonomous killer robots.
link |
It's the same with human genome editing,
link |
with animal experimentations, with so many,
link |
basically all areas of advanced science.
link |
So the question is, would China stop in that process?
link |
And then third, it's a little bit
link |
of a historical background,
link |
but defending national sovereignty
link |
is one of the core principles of,
link |
certainly of the Chinese state.
link |
And the historical issue is,
link |
for those of us who come from the West,
link |
I mean, one of the lessons of the postwar planners
link |
was that absolute national sovereignty
link |
was actually a major feeder
link |
into the first and second world wars,
link |
that we had all these conflicting states.
link |
And therefore the logic of the postwar system
link |
is we need to in some ways pool sovereignty
link |
that's like the EU and have transnational organizations
link |
like the UN organizations
link |
and the Bretton Woods organizations.
link |
For most Asian states,
link |
and also even for some African,
link |
and the people who were kind of
link |
on the colonized side of history,
link |
sovereignty was the thing that was denied them.
link |
That was the thing that they want,
link |
that the European power is denied.
link |
And so the idea of giving up sovereignty
link |
was the absolute opposite.
link |
And so that's why China is,
link |
and again, I mentioned this Rush Doshi book.
link |
It's not that China is trying to strengthen
link |
this rules based international order,
link |
which is based on the principle
link |
that while there are certain things that we share
link |
and how do we build a governance system
link |
to protect those things,
link |
what it seems to be doing is trying
link |
to advance its own sovereignty.
link |
And so I think I agree with you,
link |
but I don't think that we can just go forward
link |
without some accountability for the.
link |
So the coverup was a big problem.
link |
It's like, I often,
link |
I find myself playing devil's advocate
link |
because I'm trying to sort of empathize
link |
and then I forget that like two or three people
link |
listen to this thing and then they're like,
link |
look, Lex is defending the Chinese government
link |
with their coverup.
link |
No, I'm not, I'm just trying to understand.
link |
I mean, it's the same reason I'm reading Mein Kampf now
link |
is like you have to really understand the minds of people
link |
as if I too could have done that.
link |
You know, you have to understand
link |
that we're all the same to some degree
link |
and that kind of empathy is required
link |
to figure out solutions for the future.
link |
It's just in empathizing with the Chinese government
link |
in this whole situation,
link |
I'm still not sure I understand
link |
how to minimize the chance of a coverup in the future,
link |
whether for China or for the United States.
link |
If the virus started in the United States,
link |
I'm not exactly sure we would be
link |
with all the emphasis we put on freedom of speech,
link |
with all the emphasis we put on freedom of the press
link |
and access to the press,
link |
the sort of all aspects of government.
link |
I'm not sure the US government
link |
wouldn't do the similar kind of coverup.
link |
Let me put it this way.
link |
So we're in Texas now doing this interview.
link |
Imagine there's a kind of horseshoe bat
link |
that we'll call the Texas Horseshoe Bat and the Texas.
link |
There's a lot of bats in Austin,
link |
but it's a whole thing. It's true, it's true.
link |
And so let's just say that the Texas Horseshoe Bats
link |
only exist in Texas, but in Montana,
link |
we have a thing, it's called
link |
the Montana Institute of Virology.
link |
And at the Montana Institute of Virology,
link |
they have the world's largest collection
link |
of Texas Horseshoe Bats, including horseshoe bats
link |
that are associated with a previous global pandemic
link |
called the Texas Horseshoe Bat pandemic.
link |
And let's just say that people in Montana,
link |
in the same town where this
link |
Montana Institute of Virology is,
link |
start getting a version of this
link |
Texas Horseshoe Bat syndrome
link |
that is genetically relatively similar
link |
to the outbreak in Texas.
link |
There are no horseshoe bats there.
link |
And the government says, it's your same point,
link |
Alina's point about the unicorns,
link |
like nothing to see here, just move along.
link |
Would Joe Rogan and Brett Weinstein and Josh Rogan,
link |
would they say, oh, I guess, I just think that.
link |
No, no, but the point is the government going to say it.
link |
So, Joe Rogan is a comedian.
link |
Brett Weinstein is a podcaster.
link |
The point is, what we want is not just those folks
link |
to have the freedom to speak, that's important.
link |
But you want the government to have the transparent,
link |
like, I don't think Joe Rogan is enough
link |
to hold the government accountable.
link |
I think they're going to do their thing anyway.
link |
But I think that's our system,
link |
and that was the genius of the founding fathers.
link |
That the government probably is going to have
link |
a lot of instincts to do the wrong thing.
link |
That was the experience in England before.
link |
And so that's why we have free speech,
link |
to hold the government accountable.
link |
I mean, I'm kind of broadly a gun control person,
link |
but the people who say, well,
link |
we need to have broad gun rights.
link |
As somebody who's now in Texas, I am offended.
link |
But their argument is, look,
link |
we don't fully trust the government.
link |
If the government, just like we fought against the British,
link |
if the government's wrong,
link |
we want to at least have some authority.
link |
So that's our system, is to have that kind of voice.
link |
And that is the public voice actually balances.
link |
Because every government, as you correctly said,
link |
every government has the same instincts.
link |
And that's why we have, and it's imperfect here,
link |
but kind of these ideas of separation of powers,
link |
of inalienable rights, so that we can have,
link |
it's almost like a vast market where we can have balance.
link |
So you think if a lab leak occurred in the United States,
link |
what probability would you put some kind of public report
link |
led by Rand Paul would come out saying this was a lab leak?
link |
You have good confidence that that would happen?
link |
I have pretty decent confidence.
link |
And the reason I say, I mentioned that I'm a,
link |
I think of myself, I'm sure I'm not anymore,
link |
because as I get older, but as a progressive person,
link |
I'm a Democrat and I worked in Democratic administrations,
link |
worked for President Clinton on the National Security Council.
link |
But my kind of best friend in the United States Senate,
link |
who I talk to all the time,
link |
is a Senator from Kansas named Roger Marshall.
link |
And Roger, I mean, if you just lined up our positions
link |
on all sorts of things, we're radically different.
link |
But we have a great relationship.
link |
We talk all the time and we share a commitment to saying,
link |
well, let's ask the tough questions about how this started.
link |
And again, if we had,
link |
like what is the United States government?
link |
Yeah, it's the executive branch, but there's also Congress.
link |
And Congress, you talk about Rand Paul,
link |
and as a former executive branch worker,
link |
when I was on the National Security Council,
link |
and I guess technically when I was at the State Department,
link |
all of this stuff, all of this process,
link |
it just seems like a pain in the ass.
link |
It's like these Fers, they're just attacking us.
link |
We tried to do this thing with,
link |
we had all the best intentions
link |
and now they're holding hearings
link |
and they're trying to box us in and whatever.
link |
But that's our process.
link |
And there's like a form of accountability as chaotic,
link |
as crazy as it is.
link |
And so it makes it really difficult.
link |
I mean, we have other problems of just chaos
link |
and everybody doing their own thing,
link |
but it makes it difficult to have
link |
the kind of systematic coverup.
link |
And again, all of that is predicated on my hypothesis,
link |
not fully proven, although I think likely
link |
that there is a lab incident origin of this pandemic.
link |
Well, I mean, we're having like several layers
link |
of conversation, but I think whether lab leak hypothesis
link |
is true or not, it does seem that the likelihood
link |
of a coverup, if it leaked from a lab is high.
link |
That's the more important conversation to be having.
link |
Well, you could argue a lot of things,
link |
but to me arguably, that's the more important conversation
link |
is about what is the likelihood of a coverup.
link |
100%, like in my mind, there is a legitimate debate
link |
about the origins of the pandemic.
link |
There are people who I respect,
link |
who I don't necessarily agree with,
link |
people like Stuart Neal, who's a virologist in the UK,
link |
who's been very open minded, engaged in productive debate
link |
about the origin and you know where I stand.
link |
There is and can be no debate about whether
link |
or not there has been a coverup.
link |
There has been a coverup.
link |
There is in my mind, no credible argument
link |
that there hasn't been a coverup.
link |
And I mean, we can just see it in the regulations,
link |
in the lack of access.
link |
There's an incredible woman named Zhang Zhan,
link |
who is a Chinese, we have to call her a citizen journalist
link |
because everything is controlled by the state.
link |
But in the early days of the pandemic,
link |
she went to Wuhan, started taking videos and posting them.
link |
She was imprisoned for picking quarrels,
link |
which is kind of a catchall.
link |
And now she's engaged in a hunger strike
link |
and she's near death.
link |
And so there's no question that there has been a coverup
link |
and there's no question in my mind
link |
that that coverup is responsible
link |
for a significant percentage of the total deaths
link |
In a pivot, can I talk to you about sex?
link |
Okay, so you're the author of a book, Hacking Darwin.
link |
So humans have used sex, allegedly, as I've read about,
link |
to mix genetic information to produce offspring
link |
and through that kind of process adapted their environment.
link |
Lex, you mentioned earlier about
link |
you're asking tough questions
link |
and people pushing you to ask tough questions.
link |
Is it okay if I just?
link |
So you said, have done this as I've read about.
link |
As I've read about on the internet, yeah.
link |
All I'm saying, as a person sitting with you,
link |
to people who would be open minded in experimenting
link |
of, as I've read about, to reality,
link |
what I would say is Lex Friedman is handsome, charming.
link |
He's really a great guy.
link |
I'm sorry to interrupt.
link |
Thank you, I appreciate that.
link |
So I was reading about this last night.
link |
I was gonna tweet it, but then I'm like,
link |
this is going to be misinterpreted.
link |
But this is why I like podcasts,
link |
because I can say stuff like this.
link |
It's kind of incredible to me that the average human male
link |
produces 500 billion plus sperm cells in their lifetime.
link |
Each one of those are genetically unique.
link |
They can produce unique humans.
link |
Each one of them, 500 billion,
link |
there's 100 billion people who's ever lived.
link |
Maybe 110, whatever, whatever the number is.
link |
So it's five times the number of people who ever lived
link |
is produced by each male of genetic information.
link |
So those are all possible trajectories of lives
link |
that could have lived.
link |
Those are all little people that could have been.
link |
And all the possible stories.
link |
All the Hitlers and Einsteins
link |
that could have been created.
link |
And all that, I mean, I don't know,
link |
this kind of, you're painting this possible future,
link |
and we get to see only one little string of that.
link |
I mean, I suppose the magic of that
link |
is also captured by the, in the space of physics,
link |
having multiple dimensions
link |
and the many worlds hypothesis of quantum mechanics,
link |
the interpretation that we're basically just,
link |
at every point, there's an infinite offspring
link |
of universes that are created.
link |
But I don't know, that's just like a magic
link |
of this game of genetics that we're playing.
link |
And the winning sperm is not the fastest.
link |
The winning sperm is basically the luckiest,
link |
has the right timing.
link |
So it's not, I also got into this whole,
link |
I started reading papers about like,
link |
is there something to be said
link |
about who wins the race, right, genetically?
link |
So it's fascinating, because there's studies
link |
in animals and so on to answer that question,
link |
because it's interesting, because I'm a winner, right?
link |
I won, I won a race.
link |
And so you want to know, what does that say about me
link |
in this fascinating genetic race against,
link |
I think, what is it, 200 million others, I think.
link |
So one pool of sperm cells is about something
link |
like 200 million, it could be, yes.
link |
But that, millions, I thought it was much lower than that.
link |
So like that, those are all brothers and sisters of mine,
link |
and I beat them all out, I won.
link |
And so it's interesting to know,
link |
there's a temptation to say I'm somehow better than them,
link |
right, and now that goes into the next stage
link |
of something we're deeply thinking about,
link |
which is if we have more control now
link |
over the winning genetic code that becomes offspring,
link |
if we have first not even control,
link |
just information and then control,
link |
what do you think that world looks like
link |
from a biological perspective
link |
and from an ethical perspective
link |
when we start getting more information and more control?
link |
Yeah, great question.
link |
So first, on the sperm, there can be up to
link |
about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation.
link |
So as I mentioned in Hacking Darwin,
link |
male sperm, it's kind of a dime a dozen
link |
with all the guys in all the world
link |
just doing whatever they do with it.
link |
And it's an open question how competitive,
link |
I mean, there is an element of luck
link |
and there is an element of competition,
link |
and it's an open question how much that competition
link |
impacts the outcome or whether it's just luck,
link |
but my guess is there's some combination
link |
of fitness and luck.
link |
But you're absolutely right that all of those other
link |
sperm cells in the ejaculation,
link |
if that's how the union of the sperm and egg is happening,
link |
all of them represent a different future.
link |
And there's a wonderful book called Invisible Cities
link |
by Italo Calvino, and he even talks about a city
link |
as something like this where everybody,
link |
you have your life,
link |
but then you have all these alternate lives
link |
and every time you make any decision,
link |
you're kind of, and so, but in this Invisible Cities,
link |
there's a little string that goes toward that alternate life
link |
and then the city becomes this weaving
link |
of all the strings of people's real lives
link |
and the alternate lives that they could have taken
link |
had they made any other different steps.
link |
So that part, it's like a deep philosophical question.
link |
It's not just for us, it's for all of,
link |
I mean, it's baked into evolutionary biology.
link |
It's just what are the different strategies
link |
for different species to achieve fitness?
link |
And there's some of the different corals or other fish
link |
where they just kind of release the eggs into the water
link |
and there's all different kinds of ways.
link |
And then you're right in my book, Hacking Darwin,
link |
and it's the full title is Hacking Darwin,
link |
Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.
link |
I kind of go deep into exploring
link |
the big picture implications of the future
link |
of human reproduction.
link |
We are already participating
link |
in a revolutionary transformation,
link |
not just because of the diagnostics that we have,
link |
things like ultrasound, but because now
link |
an increasing number of us are being born
link |
through in vitro fertilization,
link |
which means the eggs are extracted from the mother,
link |
they're fertilized by the father's sperm in vitro in a lab,
link |
and then reimplanted in the mother.
link |
On top of that, there's a somewhat newer,
link |
but still now older technology
link |
called preimplantation genetic testing.
link |
And so as everyone knows from high school biology,
link |
you have the fertilized egg,
link |
and then it goes one cell to two cells
link |
to four to eight and whatever.
link |
And after around five days in this PGT process,
link |
a few cells are extracted.
link |
So let's say you have 10 fertilized eggs,
link |
early stage embryos, a few cells are extracted from each,
link |
and those cells, if they would,
link |
the ones that are extracted
link |
would end up becoming the placenta.
link |
But every one of our cells has, other than a few,
link |
has our full genome.
link |
And so then you sequence those cells
link |
and with preimplantation genetic testing now,
link |
what you can do is you can screen out deadly single gel,
link |
a single gene mutation disorders,
link |
things that could be deadly or life ruining.
link |
And so people use it to determine
link |
which of those 10 early stage embryos
link |
to implant in a mother.
link |
As we shift towards a much greater understanding
link |
of genetics, and that is part of our,
link |
just the broader genetics revolution,
link |
but within that, in our transition from personalized
link |
to precision healthcare, more and more of us
link |
are going to have our whole genome sequenced
link |
because it's gonna be the foundation
link |
of getting personalized healthcare.
link |
We're going to have already millions, but very soon,
link |
billions of people who've had their whole genome sequenced.
link |
And then we'll have big databases
link |
of people's genetic genotypic information
link |
and life or phenotypic information.
link |
And using, coming into your area,
link |
our tools of machine learning and data analytics,
link |
we're going to be able to increasingly understand
link |
patterns of genetic expression, even though we're all.
link |
So predict how the genetic information will get expressed.
link |
Never perfectly perhaps, but more and more,
link |
always more and more.
link |
And so with that information, we aren't going to just be,
link |
even now, we aren't going to just be selecting based on
link |
which of these 10 early stage embryos
link |
is carrying a deadly genetic disorder,
link |
but we can, we'll be able to know everything
link |
that can be partly or entirely predicted by genetics.
link |
And there's a lot of our humanity
link |
that fits into that category.
link |
And certainly simple traits like height and eye color
link |
and things like that.
link |
I mean, height is not at all simple,
link |
but it's, if you have good nutrition,
link |
it's entirely or mostly genetic.
link |
But even personality traits and personality styles,
link |
there are a lot of things that we see just as the experience,
link |
the beauty of life that are partly have a genetic foundation.
link |
And so whatever part of these traits are definable
link |
and influenced by genetics,
link |
we're going to have greater and greater predictability
link |
And so selecting those embryos will be informed
link |
by that kind of knowledge.
link |
And that's why in Hacking Darwin,
link |
I talk about embryo selection as being a key driver
link |
of the future of human evolution.
link |
But then on top of that, there is in 2012,
link |
Shinya Yamanaka, an amazing Japanese scientist
link |
won the Nobel Prize for developing a process
link |
for creating what are called induced pluripotent stem cells,
link |
And what IPS cells are is you can induce an adult cell
link |
to go back in evolutionary time and become a stem cell.
link |
And a stem cell is like when we're a fertilized egg,
link |
like our entire blueprint is in that one cell
link |
and that cell can be anything,
link |
but then it starts to, our cells start to specialize.
link |
And that's why we have skin cells and blood cells
link |
and all the different types of things.
link |
So with the Yamanaka process,
link |
we can induce an adult cell to become a stem cell.
link |
So the relevance to this story is what you can do.
link |
And it works now in animal models.
link |
And as far as I know, it hasn't yet been done in humans,
link |
but it works pretty well in animal models.
link |
You take any adult cell,
link |
but skin cells are probably the easiest.
link |
You induce this skin cell into a stem cell.
link |
And if you just take a little skin graft,
link |
it would have millions of cells.
link |
You induce those skin cells into stem cells.
link |
Then you induce those stem cells into egg precursor cells.
link |
Then you induce those egg precursor cells into eggs,
link |
Then because we have this massive overabundance
link |
of male sperm, then you could fertilize,
link |
let's call it 10,000 of the mother's eggs.
link |
So you have 10,000 eggs, which are fertilized.
link |
Sounds like a party.
link |
Then you have an automated process
link |
for what I mentioned before
link |
in preimplantation genetic testing,
link |
you grow them all for five days,
link |
you extract a few cells from each, you test them.
link |
And that's why I had a piece in the New York Times
link |
a couple of years ago,
link |
imagining what it would be like to go to a fertility clinic
link |
And the choice is not.
link |
No humans involved.
link |
Well, no, no, there are, but the choice is not,
link |
do you want a kid who does or doesn't have,
link |
let's call it Tay Sachs.
link |
It's a whole range of possibilities,
link |
including very intimate traits
link |
like height, IQ, personality style.
link |
It doesn't mean you can predict everything,
link |
but it means there will be increasing predictability.
link |
So if you're choosing from 10,000 eggs,
link |
fertilized eggs, early stage embryos,
link |
that's a lot of choice.
link |
And on top of that,
link |
then we have the new technology of human genome editing.
link |
Many people have heard of CRISPR,
link |
but what I say is if you think of human genome editing
link |
as a pie, sorry, human genome engineering as a pie,
link |
genome editing is a slice
link |
and CRISPR is just a sliver of that slice.
link |
It's just one of our tools for genome editing
link |
and things are getting better and better.
link |
Then you can go in and change.
link |
Let's say, I mean, again, it starts simple.
link |
A small number of genes,
link |
let's say you've selected from among the one of 10
link |
or the one of 10,000,
link |
but there are a number of changes
link |
that you would like to make to achieve some kind of outcome.
link |
And biology is incredibly complex
link |
and it's not that one gene does one thing.
link |
One gene does probably a lot of things simultaneously,
link |
which is why the decision about changing one gene
link |
if it's causing deathly harm is easier
link |
than when we think about the complexity of biology.
link |
But then the machine learning
link |
gets better and better at predicting
link |
the full complexity of biology.
link |
So as one gets better,
link |
then you're editing your ability to reliably edit
link |
such that the conclusions are predictable,
link |
it gets better and better.
link |
So those two are coupled together.
link |
You got it, that's exactly it.
link |
And then, so that's why, and people would say,
link |
well, that, I mean, I wrote about that
link |
in my two science fiction novels,
link |
Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata years ago,
link |
and especially with Genesis Code, I wrote about that.
link |
and I had actually testified before Congress,
link |
but now 15 years ago saying,
link |
here's what the future looks like.
link |
But even I, and in my first edition of Hacking Darwin,
link |
when it was already in production,
link |
and then in November 2018,
link |
this scientist, Hojong Kui, announced in Hong Kong
link |
that the world's first two, and later three,
link |
CRISPR babies had been born,
link |
which he had genetically altered,
link |
and misguided, in my view, and dangerous view,
link |
dangerous goal of making it so they would have
link |
increased resistance to HIV.
link |
And so I called my publisher,
link |
and I said, I've got good news and bad news.
link |
I'll start with the bad news,
link |
is that the world's first CRISPR babies have been born,
link |
and so we need to pull my book out of production,
link |
because you can't have a book on the future
link |
of human genetic engineering,
link |
and have it not mention the first CRISPR babies
link |
that had been born.
link |
But the good news is, in the book,
link |
I had predicted that it's going to happen,
link |
and it's going to happen in China, and here's why.
link |
And all we need to do is add a few more sentences,
link |
and that was the hardback,
link |
and then I updated it more in the paperback,
link |
saying, and it happened, and it was announced on this day.
link |
Well, then let's fast forward.
link |
Given your predictions are slowly becoming reality,
link |
let's talk about some philosophy,
link |
and ethics, I suppose.
link |
So I can, I'm not being too self deprecating here,
link |
and saying if my parents had the choice,
link |
I would be probably less likely to come out the winner.
link |
We're all weird, and I'm certainly a very distinctly
link |
weird specimen of the human species.
link |
I can give the full long list of flaws,
link |
and we can be very poetic of saying those are features,
link |
and so on, but they're not.
link |
If you look at the menu.
link |
Again, for these women who are listening,
link |
apropos of your thing,
link |
they're all kind of charming individualities.
link |
Yes, that's beautiful, that's one, yes, thank you.
link |
But anyway, but on the full sort of individual,
link |
let's say IQ alone, right?
link |
That what do we do about a world
link |
where IQ could be selected on a menu
link |
when you're having children?
link |
What concerns you about that world?
link |
What excites you about that world?
link |
Are there certain metrics that excite you more than others?
link |
IQ has been a source of,
link |
I don't know, I'm not sure IQ as a measure,
link |
flawed as it is, has been used to celebrate
link |
the successes of the human species
link |
nearly as much as has been used to divide people,
link |
to say negative things about people,
link |
to make negative claims about people.
link |
And in that same way, it seems like
link |
when there's a selection, a genetic selection based on IQ,
link |
you can start now having classes of citizenry,
link |
like further divide, you know, the rich get richer.
link |
You know, it'll be very rich people
link |
that'll be able to do kind of fine selection of IQ
link |
and they will start forming these classes
link |
of super intelligent people.
link |
And those super intelligent people in their minds
link |
would of course be the right people
link |
to be making global authoritarian decisions
link |
about everybody else, all the usual aspects of human nature,
link |
but now magnified with the new tools of technology.
link |
Anyway, all that to say is what's exciting to you?
link |
What's concerning to you?
link |
It's a great question and just stepping into the IQ,
link |
we'll call it a quagmire for now,
link |
it raises a lot of big issues which are complicated.
link |
Maybe you've listened to Sam Harris's interview
link |
with Charles Murray and then that spawned
link |
kind of a whole industry of debate.
link |
So first, just the background of IQ
link |
and it's from the early 20th century
link |
and there was the idea that we can measure
link |
people's general intelligence
link |
and there are so many different kinds of intelligence.
link |
This was measuring a specific thing.
link |
So my feeling is that IQ is not a perfect measure
link |
of intelligence, but it's a perfect measure of IQ.
link |
Like it's measuring what it's measuring,
link |
but that thing correlates to a lot of things
link |
which are rewarded in our society.
link |
So every study of IQ has shown that people
link |
with higher IQs, they make more money,
link |
they live longer, they have more stable relationships.
link |
I mean, that could be something in the testing,
link |
but as Sam Harris has talked about a lot,
link |
you could line up all of these kind of IQ
link |
and IQ like tests correlate with each other.
link |
So the people who score high on one, score high on all
link |
of them and people think that IQ tests are like a thing
link |
like the Earl of Dorchester is coming for dinner.
link |
Does he have two forks or three forks
link |
or something like that?
link |
It's not that a lot of them are things
link |
that I think a lot of us would recognize are relevant.
link |
Just like how much stuff can you memorize?
link |
If you see some shapes, how can you position them
link |
and things like that.
link |
And so IQ, I mean, it really hit its stride
link |
and certainly in the second world war
link |
when our governments were processing a lot of people
link |
and trying to figure out who to put in what jobs.
link |
So that's the starting point.
link |
Let me start first with the negatives.
link |
That our societies, when we talk about diversity
link |
in Darwinian terms, it's not like diversity
link |
is from Darwinian terms.
link |
Oh, wouldn't it be nice if we have some moths
link |
of different colors because it'll be really fun
link |
to have different colored moths.
link |
Diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species
link |
and of every species.
link |
And it's impossible to predict what diversity
link |
is going to be rewarded.
link |
And I've said this before, if you went down
link |
and you spoke T. rex and you spoke to the dinosaurs
link |
and said, hey, you can select your kids,
link |
what criteria do you want?
link |
And they say, oh, yeah, sharp teeth, cruel fangs,
link |
roar, whatever it is that makes you a great T. rex.
link |
But the answer from an evolutionary perspective,
link |
from an earth perspective was, oh, it's much better
link |
to be like a cockroach or an alligator
link |
or some little nothing or a little shrew
link |
because the dinosaurs are gonna get wiped out
link |
when the asteroid hits.
link |
And so there's no better or worse in evolution.
link |
There's just better or worse suited for a given environment.
link |
And when that environment changes,
link |
the best suited person from the old system
link |
could be the worst suited person for the new one.
link |
So if we start selecting for the things
link |
that we value the most, including things like IQ,
link |
but even disease resistance, I mean, this is well known,
link |
but people who are recessive carrier of sickle cell disease
link |
have increased resistance to malaria,
link |
which is the biggest reason why that trait
link |
hasn't just disappeared given how deadly
link |
sickle cell disease is.
link |
Biology is incredibly complex.
link |
We understand such a tiny percentage of it
link |
that we need to have, in your words,
link |
just a level of humility.
link |
There are huge equity issues as you've articulated.
link |
Let's just say that it is the case that in our society,
link |
IQ and IQ like traits are highly rewarded.
link |
There is an equity issue, but it works in both ways.
link |
Because my guess is, let's just say that we had a society
link |
where we were doing genome sequencing
link |
of everybody who was born.
link |
And we had some predictive model to predict IQ.
link |
And we had decided as a society that IQ
link |
was going to be what we were going to select for.
link |
We were gonna put the highest IQ people
link |
in these different roles.
link |
I guarantee you the people in those roles
link |
would not be the people who are legacy admissions to Harvard.
link |
They would very likely be people who are born in slums,
link |
people who are born with no opportunity or in refugee camps
link |
who are just wasting away because we've thrown them away.
link |
And so it's an easy, like it's the idea of just being able
link |
to look under the hood of our humanity
link |
is really scary for everybody.
link |
I mean, I'm also an Ashkenazi Jew.
link |
My father was born in Austria.
link |
My father and grandparents came here as refugees.
link |
After the war, most of that side of the family was killed.
link |
So I get what it means to be on the other,
link |
I mean, you said you're reading Mein Kampf,
link |
on the other side of the story when someone said,
link |
well, here's what's good and you're not good.
link |
And therefore you're, so I totally get that.
link |
Having said that, I do believe that we're moving toward
link |
a new way of procreating.
link |
And we're going to have to decide what are the values
link |
that we would like to realize through that process?
link |
Is it randomness, which is what we currently have now,
link |
which is not totally random
link |
because we have a sort of mating through colleges
link |
Wait, mating through what?
link |
Sort of like if you go, if you go to Harvard or whatever,
link |
and your wife also goes to Harvard, it's like, it's.
link |
So it's location based mating.
link |
Well, it's not location, it's selection.
link |
It's like there are selections that are made
link |
about who gets to a certain place.
link |
And when like, it's like Harvard admissions is a filter.
link |
So we're going to have to decide what are the values
link |
that we want to realize through this process
link |
because diversity has, it's just baked into our biology.
link |
We're the first species ever that has the opportunity
link |
to make choices about things that were otherwise baked
link |
And there's a real danger that if we make bad choices,
link |
even with good intentions, it could even drive us
link |
toward extinction and certainly undermine our humanity.
link |
And that's why I always say, and like I said,
link |
I'm deeply involved with WHO and other things,
link |
that these aren't conversations about science.
link |
They're conversations.
link |
Science brings us to the conversation,
link |
but the conversation is about values and ethics.
link |
As you described, that world is wide open.
link |
It's not even a subtly different world.
link |
That world is fundamentally different
link |
from anything we understand about life on Earth
link |
because natural selection, this random process,
link |
is so fundamental how we think about life.
link |
Being able to program, I mean, it has a chance to,
link |
I mean, it'll probably make my question
link |
about the ethical concerns around IQ based selection
link |
just meaningless because it'll change the nature of identity.
link |
It's possible it will dissolve identity
link |
because we take so much pride in all the different
link |
characteristics that make us who we are.
link |
Whenever you have some control over those characteristics,
link |
those characteristics start losing meaning.
link |
And what may start gaining meaning is the ideas
link |
inside our heads, for example,
link |
versus like the details of like,
link |
is it a Commodore 64, is it a PC, is it a Mac?
link |
It's gonna be less important than the software
link |
So we can more and more be operating in the digital space
link |
and the identity could be something
link |
that borrows multiple bodies.
link |
Like the legacy of our ideas may become more important
link |
than the details of our physical embodiment.
link |
Like it, I mean, I'm saying perhaps
link |
ridiculous sounding things, but the point is
link |
it will bring up so many new ethical concerns
link |
that our narrow minded thinking about
link |
the current ethical concerns would not apply.
link |
So it's, but it's important to think about
link |
all this kind of stuff, like actively.
link |
What are the right conversations to be having now?
link |
Because it feels like it's an ongoing conversation
link |
that then continually evolves, like with NIH involved.
link |
Like do you do experiments with animals?
link |
Do you build these brain organoids?
link |
Do you, like through that process you described
link |
with the stem cells, like do you experiment
link |
with a bunch of organisms to see how genetic material,
link |
what form that actually takes,
link |
how to minimize the chance of cancer
link |
and all those kinds of things.
link |
What are the negative consequences of that?
link |
What are the positive consequences?
link |
Yeah, it's a fascinating world.
link |
It's a really fascinating world.
link |
Yeah, and then, but those conversations
link |
are just so essential.
link |
Like we have to be talking about ethics.
link |
And then that raises the question of who is the we?
link |
And coming back to your conversation
link |
about science communication,
link |
maybe there was a time earlier
link |
when these conversations needed to be,
link |
were held among a small number of experts
link |
who made decisions on behalf of everybody else.
link |
But what we're talking about here
link |
is really the future of our species.
link |
And I think that conversation is too important
link |
to be left just to experts and government officials.
link |
So I mentioned that I'm a member,
link |
we just ended our work after two years
link |
of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee
link |
on Human Genome Editing.
link |
And my big push in that process
link |
was to have education, engagement and empowerment
link |
of the broad public to bring,
link |
not just bring people into the conversation
link |
with the tools to be able to engage,
link |
but also into the decision making process.
link |
And that's, it's a real shift.
link |
And there are countries that are doing it
link |
better than others.
link |
I mean, Denmark is obviously a much smaller country
link |
than the United States,
link |
but they have a really well developed infrastructure
link |
for public engagement
link |
around really complicated scientific issues.
link |
And I just think that we have to,
link |
like it's great that we have Twitter
link |
and all these other things,
link |
but we need structured conversations
link |
where we can really bring people together
link |
and listen to each other,
link |
which feels like it's harder than ever.
link |
But even now in this process
link |
where all these people are shouting at each other,
link |
at least there are a bunch of people
link |
who are in the conversation.
link |
So it's, we have a foundation,
link |
but we just really need to do more work.
link |
And again, and again, and again,
link |
it's about ethics and values
link |
because we're at an age,
link |
and this has become a cliche
link |
of exponential technological change.
link |
And so the rate of change is faster going forward
link |
than it has been in the past.
link |
So in our minds, we underappreciate
link |
how quickly things are changing and will change.
link |
And if we're not careful,
link |
if we don't know who we are and what our values are,
link |
we're going to get lost.
link |
And we don't have to know technology.
link |
We have to know who we are.
link |
I mean, our values are hard won over thousands of years.
link |
No matter how new the technology is,
link |
we shouldn't and can't jettison our values
link |
because that is our primary navigational tool.
link |
Because we were saying that sexual reproduction
link |
is not the best way to define the offspring.
link |
You think there'll be a day when humans stop having sex?
link |
I don't think we'll stop having sex
link |
because it's so enjoyable,
link |
but we may significantly stop having sex for reproduction.
link |
Even today, most human sex is not for making babies.
link |
It's for other things,
link |
whether it's pleasure or love or pair bonding or whatever.
link |
I mean, some people do it for intimacy.
link |
Some people do it for pleasure with strangers.
link |
I feel like the people that do it for pleasure,
link |
I feel like there will be better ways
link |
to achieve that same chemical pleasure, right?
link |
You know, there's just so many different kinds of people.
link |
I just saw this on television,
link |
but there are people who put on those big bunny outfits
link |
and go and have sex with other people.
link |
I mean, there's just like an unlimited number
link |
of different kinds of people.
link |
I think they're called,
link |
so I remember hearing about this,
link |
I think Dan Savage is a podcast.
link |
I think they're called Furries.
link |
So they're just...
link |
Yeah, well, that's like the thing.
link |
It's like, whenever you hear these words,
link |
it's like, humans.
link |
What will they think of next?
link |
So, but I do think that,
link |
and I write about this in Hacking Darwin,
link |
that as people come to believe that having,
link |
that making children through the application of science
link |
is safer and more beneficial
link |
than having children through sex,
link |
we'll start to see a shift over time
link |
toward reproduction through science.
link |
We'll still have sex for all the same great reasons
link |
that we do it now,
link |
it's just reproduction less and less through the act of sex.
link |
Man, it's such a fascinating future.
link |
Because as somebody, I value flaws.
link |
I think it's the good will hunting,
link |
that's the good stuff.
link |
The flaws, the weird quirks of humans,
link |
that's what makes us who we are, the weird.
link |
The weird is the beautiful.
link |
And I, there's a fear of optimization that I...
link |
You should have it.
link |
I mean, it's very healthy.
link |
And I think that's, I was saying before,
link |
that's the danger of all of this selection
link |
is that we make selections just based on social norms
link |
that are so deeply internal
link |
that they feel like they're eternal truths.
link |
And so we talked about selecting for IQ.
link |
What about selecting for a kind heart?
link |
Like there are lots of them.
link |
You talked about Hitler and Mein Kampf.
link |
Hitler had certainly had a high IQ,
link |
I guess is higher than average IQ.
link |
If we just select,
link |
I mean, that's why I was saying before,
link |
diversity is baked into our biology.
link |
But the key lesson, and I've said this many times before,
link |
the key lesson of this moment in our history
link |
is that after nearly 4 billion years of evolution,
link |
our one species suddenly has the unique
link |
and increasing ability to read, write,
link |
and hack the code of life.
link |
And so as we apply these godlike powers
link |
that we've now assumed for ourselves,
link |
we better be pretty careful
link |
because it's so easy to make mistakes,
link |
particularly mistakes that are guided
link |
by our best intentions.
link |
To jump briefly back onto lab leak,
link |
and I swear there's a reason for that,
link |
what did you think about the Jon Stewart,
link |
this moment, I forget when it was, maybe a few months ago,
link |
in the summer, I think, of 2021,
link |
where he went on Colbert Report,
link |
or not the Colbert Report, sorry,
link |
the Stephen Colbert's, whatever his show is.
link |
But again, Jon Stewart reminded us
link |
how valuable his wit and brilliance
link |
within the humor was for our culture.
link |
And so he did this whole bit
link |
that highlighted the common sense nature
link |
about what was the metaphor he used
link |
about the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania.
link |
So what'd you think about that whole bit?
link |
And so not to be overly self referential,
link |
but it's hard not to be overly self referential
link |
when you're doing a, however long we are,
link |
five hour interview about yourself,
link |
which it reminds me of when you had Bret Weinstein on,
link |
he said, I have no ego,
link |
but these 57 people have screwed me over,
link |
and I deserve credit.
link |
So I am a person, I will confess, it's enjoyable.
link |
Some people feel different.
link |
I kind of like talking about all this stuff
link |
and talking, period.
link |
So for me, in the earliest,
link |
I remember those early days of when the pandemic started,
link |
I was just sitting down,
link |
it was late January, early February, 2020,
link |
and I just was laying out all of the evidence
link |
just that I could collect,
link |
trying to say, make sense of where does this come from?
link |
And it was just logic.
link |
I mean, it was all of the things that Jon Stewart said,
link |
which in some overly wordy form
link |
were all at that time on my website.
link |
Like, what are the odds of having this outbreak
link |
of a bat coronavirus more than a thousand miles away
link |
from where these bats have their natural habitat,
link |
where they have this largest collection
link |
of these bat coronaviruses in the world,
link |
and they're doing all these very aggressive
link |
research projects to make them more aggressive.
link |
And then you have the outbreak of a virus
link |
that's primed for human to human transmission.
link |
It was just logic was my first step.
link |
And I kept gathering the information.
link |
But Jon Stewart distilled that
link |
in a way that just everybody got.
link |
And I think that, like, I loved it.
link |
And I just think that there's a way of reaching people.
link |
It's the reason why I write science fiction
link |
in addition to thinking and writing about the science
link |
is that we kind of have to reach people where they are.
link |
And I just thought it was just,
link |
there was a lot of depth, I thought,
link |
and maybe that's too self serving,
link |
but like in the analysis,
link |
but he captured that into those things about,
link |
it's like the, whatever, the outbreak of chewy goodness
link |
near the Hershey factory.
link |
I wonder where that came from.
link |
Yeah, there's the humor, there's metaphor.
link |
Also the, like, sticking with the joke
link |
when the audience is,
link |
the audience is Stephen Colbert.
link |
He was, like, resisting it.
link |
He was very uncomfortable with it.
link |
Maybe that was part of the bit, I'm not sure,
link |
but it didn't look like it.
link |
So Stephen in that moment kind of represented
link |
the discomfort of the scientific community, I think.
link |
It's kind of interesting, that whole dynamic.
link |
And I think that was a pivotal moment.
link |
That just, like, highlights the value of comedy,
link |
the value of, like, when Joe Rogan says,
link |
I'm just a comedian.
link |
I mean, that's such a funny thing to say.
link |
It's like saying I'm just a podcaster
link |
or I'm just a writer, I'm just a, you know.
link |
That ability in so few words
link |
to express what everybody else is thinking,
link |
it's so refreshing.
link |
And I wish the scientific communicators would do that too.
link |
A little humor, a little humor.
link |
I mean, that's what I love Elon Musk very much.
link |
So, like, the way he communicates is, like,
link |
it's so refreshing for a CEO of a major company,
link |
several major companies, to just have a sense of humor
link |
and say ridiculous shit every once in a while.
link |
That's so, there's something to that.
link |
Like, it shakes up the whole conversation
link |
to where it gives you freedom to, like, think publicly.
link |
If you're always trying to say the proper thing,
link |
you lose the freedom to think, to reason out,
link |
to be authentic and genuine.
link |
When you allow yourself the freedom
link |
to regularly say stupid shit,
link |
have fun, make fun of yourself,
link |
I think you give yourself freedom
link |
to really be a great scientist.
link |
Honestly, I think scientists have a lot to learn
link |
I think we all do about just distilling and communicating
link |
in ways that people can hear.
link |
Like, a lot of us say things and people just can't hear them
link |
either because of the way we're saying them
link |
or where they are, but.
link |
And like I said before, I'm a big fan of Joe Rogan.
link |
I've been on his show twice.
link |
And when Francis Collins was in his conversation with you,
link |
he said, which I think makes sense,
link |
is that when somebody has that kind of platform
link |
and people rightly or wrongly who follow them
link |
and look to them for guidance,
link |
I do think that there is some responsibility
link |
for people in those roles to make whatever judgment
link |
that they make and to share that.
link |
And as I mentioned to you when we were off mic,
link |
Sanjay Gupta is a very close friend of mine.
link |
We've been friends for many years
link |
and I fully supported Sanjay's instinct
link |
to go on the Joe Rogan show.
link |
I thought it was great.
link |
At the end of that whole conversation, Joe said,
link |
well, I'm just a comedian, what do I know?
link |
And I just felt that, yes, Joe Rogan is a comedian.
link |
I wouldn't say just a comedian among other things.
link |
But I also felt that he had a responsibility
link |
for just saying whatever he believed,
link |
even if he believed or believes as I think is the case
link |
that ivermectin should be studied more,
link |
which I certainly agree.
link |
And that healthy people shouldn't get vaccinated,
link |
healthy young people, which I don't agree.
link |
I just felt at the end of that conversation to say,
link |
well, I'm just a comedian, what do I know?
link |
I feel like it didn't fully integrate the power
link |
that a person like Joe Rogan has to set the agenda.
link |
So I think the reason he says I'm just a comedian
link |
is the same reason I say I'm an idiot,
link |
which I truly believe.
link |
I can explain exactly what I mean by that,
link |
but it's more for him, or in this case for me,
link |
to just keep yourself humble.
link |
Because I think it's a slippery slope
link |
when you think you have a responsibility
link |
to then think you actually have an authority,
link |
because a lot of people listen to you,
link |
you think you have an authority
link |
to actually speak to those people
link |
and you have enough authority
link |
to know what the hell you're talking about.
link |
And I think there's just the humility
link |
to just kind of make it fun of yourself
link |
that's extremely valuable.
link |
And saying I'm just a comedian I think is a reminder
link |
to himself that he's often full of shit, so are all of us.
link |
And so that's a really powerful way for himself
link |
to keep himself humble.
link |
I mean, I think that's really useful
link |
in some kind of way for people in general
link |
to make fun of themselves a little bit,
link |
in whatever way that means.
link |
And saying I'm just a comedian is just one way to do that.
link |
Now that coupled that with the responsibility
link |
of doing the research and really having an open mind
link |
and all those kinds of stuff,
link |
I think that's something Joe does really well
link |
on a lot of topics, but he can't do that on everything.
link |
And so it's up to people to decide
link |
how well he does it on certain topics and not others.
link |
But how do you think Sanjay did in that conversation?
link |
So I know I'm gonna get myself into trouble here
link |
because Sanjay is a very close friend.
link |
Joe, my personal interaction with him
link |
has been our two interviews,
link |
but it's like my interview with now,
link |
sit down with somebody for four hours,
link |
it's a lot and great and then private communication.
link |
So I am personally more sympathetic to the arguments
link |
that Sanjay was making or trying to make.
link |
I believe that the threat of the virus
link |
is greater than the threat of the vaccine.
link |
That doesn't mean that we can guarantee 100% safety
link |
but these are really well tolerated vaccines.
link |
And we know for all the reasons we've been talking about
link |
that this is a really scary virus
link |
and particularly the mRNA vaccines,
link |
what they're basically doing is getting your body
link |
to replicate a tiny little piece of the virus,
link |
the spike protein and then your body responds to that.
link |
And so that's a much less of an insult to your body
link |
than being infected by the virus.
link |
So I'm more sympathetic to the people who say,
link |
well, everybody should get vaccinated,
link |
but people who've already been infected,
link |
we should study whether they need to be vaccinated or not.
link |
Having said all of that, I felt that
link |
that Joe Rogan won the debate.
link |
I mean, it was, and the reason that I felt
link |
that he won the debate was they were kind of,
link |
they had two different categories of arguments.
link |
So Sanjay, what he was trying to do,
link |
which I totally respect was saying,
link |
there's so much animosity between the,
link |
on these different sides, let's lower the temperature.
link |
Let's model that we can have a respectful dialogue
link |
with each other where we can actually listen.
link |
And Sanjay, again, I've known him for many years.
link |
He's a very empathic, humble,
link |
just an all around wonderful human being,
link |
and I really love him.
link |
And so he was making cases that were based on
link |
kind of averages, studies and things like that.
link |
And Joe was saying, well, I know a guy whose sister's cousin
link |
had this experience.
link |
And I'm sure that it's all true in the sense
link |
that we have millions of people who are getting vaccinated
link |
and different things.
link |
And what Sanjay should have said was,
link |
I know that's anecdote.
link |
Here's another anecdote of like when Francis Collins
link |
was with you and he talked about the world wrestling guy
link |
who was like 6.6 and a big muscly guy,
link |
and then he got COVID and he was anti vaccine,
link |
and then he got COVID and almost died.
link |
And he said, I'm gonna.
link |
By the way, I don't know if you know this part.
link |
Oh, this is funny.
link |
Joe's gonna listen to this.
link |
He's gonna be laughing.
link |
Does Joe listen like to the four hours of this
link |
in addition to the three hours of his interviews every day?
link |
No, not every day, but he listens to a lot of these.
link |
And we talk about it.
link |
We argue about it.
link |
So that particular case,
link |
I don't know why Francis said what he said there,
link |
but that's not accurate.
link |
So the wrestler never, he didn't almost die.
link |
He was no big deal at all for him.
link |
And he said that to him.
link |
I think, I'm not sure.
link |
I think something got mixed up in Francis's memory.
link |
There was another case he must've been like,
link |
cause I don't imagine he would bring that case up
link |
and just like make it up, you know, cause like why?
link |
But he, that was not at all,
link |
like that was a pretty public case.
link |
He had an interview with him, that wrestler,
link |
So that anecdotal case, I mean,
link |
Francis should not have done that.
link |
So if I have any, so I have a bunch of criticism
link |
People who criticize that interview,
link |
I feel like don't give enough respect
link |
to the full range of things
link |
that Francis Collins has done in his career.
link |
He's an incredible scientist.
link |
And I also think a really good human being.
link |
But yes, that conversation was flawed in many ways.
link |
And one of them was why,
link |
when you're trying to present some kind of critical,
link |
like criticize Joe Rogan,
link |
why bring up anecdotal evidence at all?
link |
And if you do bring up anecdotal evidence,
link |
which is not scientific, if you're a scientist,
link |
you should not be using anecdotal evidence.
link |
If you do bring it up,
link |
why bring up one that's first not true
link |
and you know it's not true?
link |
So I know, pretend, so you don't know it's not true.
link |
So yes, that would find another case where, exactly.
link |
So the basic thing coming back
link |
to Sanjay and Joe's conversation
link |
was that Sanjay was trying to use statistical evidence
link |
and Joe was using anecdotal evidence.
link |
And so I think that for Sanjay,
link |
and there are all kinds of things where there are debates
link |
where often the person who's better at debating
link |
wins the debate regardless of the topic.
link |
So I think what Sanjay could have done,
link |
and Sanjay is such a smart guy,
link |
is to say, well, that's an anecdote,
link |
here's another anecdote.
link |
And there are lots of different anecdotes.
link |
And there certainly are people who have taken the vaccine
link |
and have had problems that could reasonably be traced
link |
And there certainly are lots of people, I would argue,
link |
more people who've not had the vaccine,
link |
but who've gotten COVID and have either died
link |
or our hospitals are now full of people
link |
who weren't vaccinated.
link |
And in many ways, I mean, our emergency rooms
link |
are full of unvaccinated people here in the United States.
link |
So I think what Sanjay could have done,
link |
but there was a conflict between wanting to kind of
link |
win the debate and wanting to take the temperature down.
link |
And what he could have done is to say,
link |
well, here's an anecdote, I have a counter anecdote
link |
and we can go on all day,
link |
but here's what the statistics show.
link |
And I think that was the thing.
link |
So I think it's a healthy conversation.
link |
We can't, I mean, there are a lot of people
link |
who are afraid of the vaccine.
link |
There are a lot of people who don't trust
link |
the scientific establishment
link |
and lots of them have good reason.
link |
I mean, it's not just people think of like Trump Republicans.
link |
There are lots of people in the African American community
link |
who've had a historical terrible experience
link |
with the Tuskegee and all sorts of things.
link |
So they don't trust the messages
link |
that were being delivered.
link |
I live in New York City and we had a piece
link |
in the New York Times where in the earliest days
link |
of the vaccines, there was this big movement,
link |
let's make sure that the poorest people in the city
link |
have first access to the vaccines
link |
because they're the ones, they have higher density
link |
in their homes, they're relying on public transport.
link |
So there was this whole liberal effort.
link |
And then in the black community in New York,
link |
according to the New York Times,
link |
there was very low acceptance of the vaccines
link |
and they interviewed people in that article.
link |
And they said, well, if the white people want us
link |
to have it first, there must be something wrong with it.
link |
They must be doing something.
link |
And so we have to listen to each other.
link |
Like I would never, I have a disrespect for everybody.
link |
And if somebody is cautious about the vaccine
link |
for themselves or for their children,
link |
we have to listen to them.
link |
At the same time, public health
link |
is about creating public health.
link |
And there's no doubt, I think Joe was absolutely right
link |
that older people, obese people are at greater risk
link |
for being harmed or killed by COVID 19
link |
than young, healthy people.
link |
But by everybody getting vaccinated,
link |
we reduce the risk to everybody else.
link |
And so I feel like, like with everything,
link |
there's the individual benefit argument
link |
and then there's the community argument.
link |
And I absolutely think our community.
link |
Expressing that clearly that there's a difference between
link |
the individual health and freedoms
link |
and the community health and freedoms
link |
and steel manning each side of this.
link |
One of the problems that people don't do enough of
link |
is be able to, so how do you steel man an argument?
link |
You describe that argument in the best possible way.
link |
You have to first understand that argument.
link |
Let's go to the noncontroversial thing like Flat Earth.
link |
Like most people, most colleagues of mine at MIT
link |
don't even read about like the full argument
link |
that the Flat Earthers make.
link |
I feel it's disingenuous for people in the physics community
link |
to roll their eyes at Flat Earthers
link |
if they haven't read their arguments.
link |
You should feel bad that you didn't read their arguments.
link |
And like it's the rolling of the eyes that's a big problem.
link |
You haven't read it.
link |
Your intuition says that these are a bunch of crazy people.
link |
Okay, but you haven't earned the right to roll your eyes.
link |
You've earned your right to maybe not read it,
link |
but then don't have an opinion.
link |
Don't roll your eyes, don't do any of that dismissive stuff.
link |
And the same thing in the scientific community
link |
around COVID and so on, there's often this kind of saying,
link |
oh God, that's conspiracy theories, that's misinformation
link |
without actually looking into what they're saying.
link |
If you haven't looked into what they're saying,
link |
then don't talk about it.
link |
Like if you're a scientific leader and the communicator,
link |
you need to look into it.
link |
It's not that much effort.
link |
And I think that humility,
link |
it's a constant theme of your podcasts and I love that.
link |
And so after the conversation debate,
link |
whatever it was between Sanjay and Joe,
link |
I reached out on Twitter to someone I've never met
link |
in person, but I'm in touch privately
link |
to a guy named Daniel Griffin,
link |
who's a professor at Columbia Medical School
link |
and just so smart there.
link |
He gives regular updates on COVID 19
link |
on a thing called TWIV this week in virology.
link |
I'm a critic of TWIV for its coverage of origins.
link |
But on this issue, I'm just having regular updates.
link |
And so I said to him,
link |
I said, why don't we have an honest process
link |
to get the people who are raising concerns
link |
about the vaccines in their own words
link |
to raise what are their concerns?
link |
And then let's do our best job of saying,
link |
well, here are these concerns.
link |
And then here is our evidence making a counterclaim
link |
and here are links to if you want to look at the studies
link |
upon which these claims are made, here they are.
link |
And Daniel, who's incredibly busy,
link |
I mean, he reads every, I mean, it seems every paper
link |
that comes out every week and it's unbelievable.
link |
But he sent me a link to the CDC Q&A page
link |
on the CDC website.
link |
And it wasn't that, it was people who were,
link |
I mean, it was written by people like me
link |
who were convinced in the benefit of these vaccines.
link |
So the questions were framed, they were kind of like,
link |
they weren't really the framing
link |
of the people with the concerns.
link |
They were framing of people
link |
who were just kind of imagining something else.
link |
I mean, you always talk about kind of humility
link |
and active listening.
link |
I know you don't mean, and it doesn't mean
link |
that we don't stand for something.
link |
Like I certainly am a strong proponent of vaccines
link |
and masks and all of those things.
link |
But if we don't hear other people,
link |
if we don't let them hear their voice in the conversation,
link |
if it's just saying, well, you may think this
link |
and here's why it's wrong, the argument may be right.
link |
It'll just never break through.
link |
By the way, my interpretation of Joe and Sanjay,
link |
I listened to that conversation without looking at Twitter
link |
or the internet and I thought that was a great conversation
link |
and I thought Sanjay actually really succeeded
link |
in bringing the temperature down.
link |
To me, the goal was bringing the temperature down.
link |
I didn't even think of it as a debate.
link |
I was like, oh, cool, this isn't gonna be some weird,
link |
it's like two friendly people talking.
link |
And then I look at the internet
link |
and then the internet says, Joe Rogan slammed Sanjay
link |
like as if it was a heated debate that Joe won.
link |
And it's like, all right,
link |
it's really the temperature being brought down.
link |
Real conversation between two humans.
link |
That wasn't really a debate.
link |
It was just a conversation and that was a success.
link |
I definitely think it was a success,
link |
but I also felt that a takeaway,
link |
and again, because this is something that I don't agree with,
link |
even though I have great, as I've said, respect for Joe,
link |
I think a reasonable person listening to that conversation
link |
would come away with the conclusion
link |
that all in all these vaccines are a good thing,
link |
but if you're young and healthy, you probably don't need it.
link |
And I just felt that there was a stronger case to be made,
link |
even though Sanjay made it.
link |
It wasn't that Sanjay didn't make it.
link |
It was just that in the flow of that conversation,
link |
I felt that the case for the vaccines
link |
and the vaccines both as an individual choice
link |
and then certainly again, as I said before,
link |
I think that while people can be afraid of the vaccines,
link |
the virus itself is much scarier
link |
and we're seeing it now in real time
link |
with these variations and variants.
link |
I just felt that that was kind of the rough takeaway
link |
from that conversation.
link |
And I felt that Sanjay, again, whom I love,
link |
I felt it could have made his case a little bit stronger.
link |
So the thing he succeeded is he didn't come off
link |
as like a science expert looking down at everybody,
link |
talking down to everybody.
link |
So he succeeded in that, which is very respectful.
link |
But I also think sort of making the case
link |
for taking the vaccine when you're a young, healthy person,
link |
when you're sitting across from Joe Rogan
link |
is like a high difficulty on the video game level.
link |
So it's difficult to do.
link |
Yeah, for sure. It's difficult to do.
link |
And also it's difficult to do
link |
because it's not as simple as like, look at the data.
link |
There's a lot of data to go through here.
link |
And there's also a lot of non data stuff,
link |
like the fact that, first of all,
link |
questioning the sources of the data,
link |
the quality of the data,
link |
because it's also disappointing about COVID
link |
is that the quality of the data is not great.
link |
But also questioning all the motivations
link |
of the different parties involved,
link |
whether it's major organizations
link |
that developed the vaccine,
link |
whether it's major institutions like NIH or NIAID
link |
that are sort of communicating to us about the vaccine,
link |
whether it's the CDC and the WHO,
link |
whether it's the Biden or the Trump administration,
link |
whether it's China and all those kinds of things,
link |
you have to, that's part of the conversation here.
link |
I mean, vaccination is not just a public health tool.
link |
It's also a tool for a government
link |
to gain more control over the populace.
link |
Like, there's a lot of truth to that too.
link |
Things that have a lot of benefit
link |
can also be used as a Trojan horse
link |
to increase bureaucracy and control.
link |
But that has to be on the table for a conversation.
link |
I think it has to be on the conversation.
link |
But your parents, when they were in the Soviet Union
link |
and here in the United States,
link |
and actually it was a big collaboration
link |
between US and Soviet Union,
link |
when the polio vaccine came out,
link |
there were people all around the world
link |
who had a different life trajectory,
link |
no longer living in fear.
link |
And all of these people who were paralyzed
link |
or killed from polio, smallpox has been eradicated.
link |
It was one of the great successes in human history.
link |
And while it for sure is true that you could imagine
link |
some kind of fraudulent vaccination effort,
link |
but here I genuinely think,
link |
I mean, whatever the number, 15 million, 16 million
link |
is the economist number of dead from COVID 19,
link |
many, many, many more people would be dead
link |
but for these vaccines.
link |
And so I get that any activity
link |
that needs to be coordinated by a central government
link |
has the potential to increase bureaucracy
link |
and increase control.
link |
But there are certain things that central governments do,
link |
like the development, particularly these mRNA vaccines,
link |
which it's purely a US government victory.
link |
I mean, it was huge DARPA funding
link |
and then the National Institute for Allergy
link |
and Infectious Disease, NIH funding.
link |
I mean, this was a public private partnership throughout
link |
and that we got a working vaccine 11 months was a miracle.
link |
It's not purely a victory.
link |
Again, you have to be open minded.
link |
I'm with you here playing a bit of devil's advocate,
link |
but the people who discuss any viral drugs
link |
like ivermectin and other alternatives
link |
would say that the extreme focus on the vaccine
link |
distracted us from considering other possibilities.
link |
And saying that this is purely a success
link |
is distracting from the story
link |
that there could have been other solutions.
link |
So yes, it's a huge success
link |
that the vaccine was developed so quickly
link |
and surprisingly way more effective than it was hoped for.
link |
But there could have been other solutions
link |
and they completely distracted from us from that.
link |
In fact, it distracted us from looking into a bunch of things
link |
like the lab leak.
link |
And so it's not a pure victory.
link |
And there's a lot of people that criticize
link |
the overreach of government and all of this.
link |
That one of the things that makes the United States great
link |
is the individualism and the hesitancy to ideas of mandates.
link |
Even if the mandates on mass will have a positive,
link |
even strongly positive result,
link |
many Americans will still say no.
link |
Because in the long arc of history,
link |
saying no in that moment will actually lead
link |
to a better country and a better world.
link |
So that's a messed up aspect of America,
link |
but it's also a beautiful part.
link |
We're skeptical even about good things.
link |
I agree and certainly we should all be cautious
link |
about government overreach, absolutely.
link |
And it happens in all kinds of scenarios
link |
with incarceration with a thousand things.
link |
And we also should be afraid of government underreach
link |
that if there is a problem that could be solved
link |
by governments and that's why we have governments
link |
in the first place is that there's just certain things
link |
that individuals can't do on their own.
link |
And that's why we pool our resources
link |
and we, in some ways, sacrifice our rights
link |
for this common thing.
link |
And that's why we don't have, hopefully,
link |
people, murderers marauding
link |
or people driving 200 miles down the street.
link |
We have a process for arriving at a set of common rules.
link |
And so, while I fully agree that we need to respect
link |
and we need to listen, we need to find that right balance.
link |
And you've raised the magic I word, ivermectin.
link |
And so, an ivermectin, like my view has always been,
link |
ivermectin could be effective, it could not be effective.
link |
Let's study it through a full process.
link |
And when you had Francis Collins with you,
link |
even while he was making up stories about this wrestler,
link |
he was saying, yeah, exactly.
link |
But he was saying that they're going to do
link |
a full randomized highest level trial of ivermectin.
link |
And if ivermectin works,
link |
then that's another tool in our toolbox.
link |
And I think we should.
link |
And I think that Sanjay was absolutely correct
link |
to concede the point to Joe,
link |
that it was disingenuous for people,
link |
including people on CNN,
link |
to say that ivermectin is for livestock.
link |
And so, I definitely think that we have to,
link |
like we have to have some kind of process
link |
that allows us to come together.
link |
And I totally agree that the great strength of America
link |
is that we empower individuals.
link |
It's the history of our frontier mentality in our country.
link |
So we, I 100% agree that we have to allow that,
link |
even if sometimes it creates messy processes
link |
and uncomfortable feelings and all those sorts of things.
link |
You are an ultra marathon runner.
link |
What are you running from?
link |
It's the right, it's the funny thing is,
link |
so I'm an ultra marathoner and I've done 13 Ironmans.
link |
And people say, oh my God, that's amazing.
link |
And what I always say, no, one Ironman is impressive.
link |
13 Ironmans, there's something effing wrong with you.
link |
We just need to figure out what it is.
link |
Yeah, there's some demons you're trying to work through.
link |
I mean, well, you're doing the work though.
link |
Most people just kind of let the demons sit in the attic.
link |
No, what have you learned about yourself,
link |
about your mind, about your body, about life,
link |
from taking your body limit in that kind of way
link |
to running those kinds of distances?
link |
Well, it's a great question.
link |
And I know that you are also kind of exploring
link |
the limits of the physical.
link |
And so for me in doing the Ironmans and the ultra marathons,
link |
it's always the same kind of lesson,
link |
which is just when you think you have nothing left,
link |
you actually have a ton left.
link |
There are a lot of resources that are there
link |
if you call on them.
link |
And the ability to call on them has to be cultivated.
link |
And so for me, especially in the Ironman,
link |
and Ironman in many ways is harder than the ultra marathons
link |
because I'll be at, I mean, it's 140 miles.
link |
I'll be at a 100 mile, 120, having done the swim
link |
and then the bike and I'll be whatever,
link |
six miles into the run.
link |
And I'll think, I feel like shit.
link |
I have nothing left.
link |
How am I possibly gonna run 20 miles more?
link |
But there's always more.
link |
And I think that for me, these extreme sports
link |
are my process of exploring what's possible.
link |
And I feel like it applies in so many different areas
link |
of life where you're kind of pushing
link |
and it feels like the limit.
link |
And one of my friend of mine,
link |
who I just have so much respect for,
link |
who actually be a great guest
link |
if you haven't already interviewed him is Charlie Angle.
link |
And Charlie, he was a drug addict.
link |
He was in prison, his life was total shit.
link |
And somehow, and I can't remember the full story,
link |
he just started running around the prison yard.
link |
And it's like Forrest Gump.
link |
And he just kept running and running.
link |
And then he got out of prison and he kept running
link |
and he started doing ultra marathons,
link |
started inspiring all these other people.
link |
Now he's written all these books.
link |
As a matter of fact, we just spoke a few months ago
link |
that he's planning on running from the Dead Sea
link |
to somehow to the top of Mount Everest,
link |
from the lowest point to the highest point on earth.
link |
And I said, well, why are you stopping there?
link |
Why don't you get whatever camera in
link |
and go down to the lowest part of the ocean,
link |
go to the lowest part of the ocean
link |
and then talk to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos
link |
and go to the kind of the highest place
link |
than the stratosphere you can get.
link |
But it's this thing of possibility.
link |
And I just feel like so many of us and myself included,
link |
we get stuck in a sense of what we think is our range.
link |
And if we're not careful, that can become our range.
link |
And that's why for me in all of life,
link |
it's all about like we've been talking about,
link |
challenging the limits, challenging assumptions,
link |
challenging ourselves and hopefully,
link |
we do it in a way that kind of doesn't hurt anybody.
link |
When I'm at the Ironman, they have all these little kids
link |
and they'll have these little shirts
link |
and it'll say like, my dad is a hero
link |
and have the little Ironman logo.
link |
And I wanna say, it's like, no,
link |
your dad is actually a narcissistic dick
link |
who goes on eight mile bike rides every Sunday
link |
rather than spend time with you.
link |
And so we shouldn't hurt anybody.
link |
But for me, and also I just find it very enjoyable
link |
and I hope I'm not disclosing too much
link |
about our conversation before we went live
link |
where you're doing so many different things
link |
with running and your martial arts.
link |
And I encouraged you to do ultra marathons
link |
because there's so many great ones in Texas.
link |
It's actually surprisingly a very enjoyable way
link |
Like how would you recommend?
link |
So yeah, for people who might not know,
link |
I've never actually even run a marathon.
link |
I've run 22 miles in one time at most.
link |
I did a four by four by 48 challenge with David Goggins
link |
where you run four miles every four hours.
link |
Is it different as less to do with the distance
link |
and more to do with the sleep deprivation.
link |
What advice would you give to a first time ultra marathon
link |
or like me trying to run 50 or more miles
link |
or for anybody else interested
link |
in this kind of exploration of their range?
link |
What I always tell is the same advice is register.
link |
Pick your timeline of when you think you can be ready.
link |
Make it, depending on where you are now,
link |
make it six months, make a year,
link |
and then register for the race.
link |
And then once you're registered,
link |
just work back from there, what's it going to take?
link |
But one of the things for people who are just getting going,
link |
you really do need to make sure
link |
that your body is ready for it.
link |
And so particularly, and particularly as we get older,
link |
strengthening is really important.
link |
So I'll do a plug for my brother, Jordan Metzl.
link |
He's a doctor at hospital for special surgery,
link |
but his whole thing is functional strength.
link |
And so, and people know about,
link |
and you can actually even go to his website.
link |
You can just Google Jordan Metzl Iron Strength,
link |
but it's all about like burpees
link |
and just building your muscular strength
link |
so that you don't get injured as you increase.
link |
And then just increase your mileage with,
link |
in some steady way, make sure that you take rest days
link |
and listen to your body because people like you
link |
who are just very kind of mind over matter,
link |
like you were telling me before about you have an injury,
link |
but you kind of run a little bit differently.
link |
And we need to listen to our bodies
link |
because our bodies are communicating.
link |
But I think it was kind of little by little magic is possible.
link |
And what I will say is,
link |
and I also have done lots and lots of marathons,
link |
and I always tell people that the ultra marathons,
link |
at least the ones that I do,
link |
and I shouldn't misrepresent myself.
link |
I mean, there are people who do 500 mile races.
link |
The ones that I do are 50K mountain trail runs,
link |
which is 32 miles.
link |
So I do the kind of the easier side of ultras,
link |
but it's actually much easier than a marathon
link |
because some of the mountain ones,
link |
sometimes it's so steep that you can't,
link |
you have to walk it
link |
because walking is faster than running.
link |
And every four or five miles in the supported races,
link |
you stop and eat blintzes and foiled potatoes.
link |
It's actually quite enjoyable.
link |
But as I started to tell you before we went live,
link |
so I've done for lots of years,
link |
these 50K mountain trail runs,
link |
and I was going to Taiwan a number of years ago
link |
for something else.
link |
And I thought, well, wouldn't it be fun
link |
to do an ultra marathon in Taiwan?
link |
I looked and that the weekend after my visit,
link |
there was a marathon.
link |
It was called the,
link |
every ultra marathon, it was called the Taiwan Beast.
link |
And I figured, oh, beasts, what are they talking about?
link |
It's 50K mountain trail,
link |
and I've done a million of them.
link |
And then I went to register.
link |
And then as part of registration,
link |
they said, you need to have all of this equipment.
link |
And it was all this like wilderness survival equipment.
link |
And I was thinking, God, these Taiwanese,
link |
but what a bunch of wimps.
link |
You have to carry, give me a break, 50K mountain trail.
link |
So I get there and the race starts
link |
at like 4.30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere.
link |
And you have to wear headlamps
link |
and everyone's carrying all this stuff.
link |
And you kind of go running out into the rainforest.
link |
It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my,
link |
There were maybe 15 cliff faces, like a real cliff.
link |
And somebody had dangled like a little piece of string.
link |
And so you had to hold onto the string with one hand
link |
while it was in the pouring rain, climb up these cliffs.
link |
There were maybe 20 river crossings,
link |
but not just like a little stream, like a torrential river.
link |
There were some things where it was so steep
link |
that everyone was just climbing up
link |
and then you'd slide all the way down and climb up.
link |
And there were people who I met on the way out there
link |
who were saying, oh yeah,
link |
I did the Sahara 500 kilometer race.
link |
And those people were just sprawled out.
link |
A lot of them didn't finish.
link |
So that was the hardest thing I've ever.
link |
So how do you get through something like that?
link |
You just, one step at a time?
link |
Was there, do you remember, is there a?
link |
Is there a dark moments
link |
or is it kind of all spread out thinly?
link |
It wasn't really dark moments.
link |
I mean, there was one thing where I'd been running so long
link |
I thought, well, I must almost be done.
link |
And then I found out I had like 15 miles more.
link |
But I guess with all of these things,
link |
it's the messages that we tell ourselves.
link |
And so for me, it's like the message I always tell myself
link |
is quitting isn't an option.
link |
I mean, once in a while you kind of have to quit
link |
if like, listen to the universe,
link |
if whatever, you're gonna kill yourself or something.
link |
But for me, it was just, whatever it takes,
link |
there's no way I'm stopping.
link |
And if I have to go up this muddy hill 20 times
link |
because I keep sliding, I'm sure there's a way.
link |
It's probably a personality flaw.
link |
Where does your love for chocolate come from?
link |
Oh, it's a great question.
link |
And in both of my Joe Rogan interviews,
link |
that's the first question that he asked.
link |
So I'm glad that we've gotten to that.
link |
So one, I've always loved chocolate.
link |
And I call it like a secret, but now that I keep telling,
link |
if you keep telling the same secret,
link |
it's actually no longer a secret,
link |
that I have a secret, which is not secret
link |
because I'm telling you on a podcast,
link |
life as a chocolate shaman.
link |
And so when I give keynotes at tech conferences,
link |
I always say, I'm happy to give a keynote,
link |
but I want to lead a sacred cacao ceremony in the night.
link |
I'm actually, believe it or not,
link |
the official chocolate shaman
link |
of what used to be called exponential medicine,
link |
which is part of Singularity University.
link |
Now, my friend Daniel Kraft who runs it,
link |
it's going to be called NextMed.
link |
And so, but I'll have to go back.
link |
As I was going to Berlin a lot of years ago,
link |
and I've always loved chocolate,
link |
I was going to Berlin to give a keynote
link |
at a big conference called TOA, Tech Open Air.
link |
And so when I got there, the first night,
link |
I was supposed to give a talk,
link |
but there had been some mix up.
link |
They'd forgotten to reserve the room.
link |
And so the talk got canceled.
link |
And in the brochure, they had all these different events
link |
around Berlin that you could go to.
link |
And one of them was a cacao ceremony.
link |
And so I went there and actually met somebody,
link |
Viviana, who is still a friend,
link |
but I met, going in there,
link |
and there was this cacao ceremony.
link |
These kind of hippie dudes.
link |
And then everybody got the cacao.
link |
And then they said, all right,
link |
as they talked a little bit about the process,
link |
and then they said, all right,
link |
everyone just stand and kind of,
link |
we're going to spin around in a circle for 45 minutes.
link |
And so I spun around in the circle for like 10 minutes,
link |
but then I had to leave
link |
because I had to go to something else.
link |
And so that, I thought that was that.
link |
But then I saw Viviana the next day,
link |
and I said, well, how did the cacao ceremony go?
link |
And she showed me these pictures
link |
of all of these people, mostly naked,
link |
like it turned into chaos.
link |
Oh, that's awesome.
link |
And it was like, oh, and so let me get this straight.
link |
People drank chocolate,
link |
then they spun around in a circle,
link |
and something else happened.
link |
And anyway, so then two days later,
link |
I was invited to another cacao ceremony,
link |
which was also actually part of this Toa.
link |
And that was kind of more structured,
link |
and it was more sane because it was part of this thing.
link |
And at the end of that, I had this,
link |
I thought one, the greatest thing ever,
link |
a sacred cacao ceremony,
link |
like you drink chocolate milk and everybody's free.
link |
And I love that idea because I've never done drugs,
link |
But just part of it is because I think whatever,
link |
like I was saying with the ultra running,
link |
all of the possibilities are within us
link |
if we can get out of our own way.
link |
And then I thought, well, you know,
link |
I think I can do a better job
link |
than what I experienced in Berlin.
link |
So I came back and I thought, all right,
link |
I'm gonna get accredited as a cacao shaman.
link |
And this will shock you.
link |
Because I know if you're gonna be like a rabbi
link |
or a priest or something, there's some process.
link |
But shockingly, there's no official process
link |
to become a chocolate shaman.
link |
And so I thought, all right, well, you know,
link |
I'm just gonna train myself.
link |
And when I'm ready, I'm gonna declare my chocolate shamanism.
link |
So I started studying different things.
link |
And when I was ready, I just said,
link |
now I'm a chocolate shaman, self declared.
link |
And so, but I do these ceremonies
link |
and I've done them at tech conferences.
link |
I did one in Soho House in New York.
link |
I've done it at a place Rancho La Puerta in Mexico.
link |
And every time it's the same thing.
link |
Because it just, if people are given a license to be free,
link |
just to, it doesn't matter, and what I always say is,
link |
you're here for a sacred cacao ceremony,
link |
but the truth is there's no such thing as sacred cacao.
link |
And there's no sacred mountains
link |
and there's no sacred people and there's no sacred plants.
link |
Because nothing is sacred if we don't attribute,
link |
ascribe sacredness to it.
link |
But if we recognize that everything is sacred,
link |
then we'll live different lives.
link |
And for the purpose of this ceremony,
link |
we're just gonna say, all right,
link |
we're gonna focus on this cacao,
link |
which actually has been used ceremonially for 5,000 years.
link |
It has all these wonderful properties.
link |
But it's just people who get that license
link |
and then they're just free and people are dancing
link |
and all sorts of things.
link |
Is the goal to celebrate life in general?
link |
Is it to celebrate the senses, like taste?
link |
Is it to celebrate yourself, each other?
link |
I think the core is gratitude and just appreciation.
link |
All the experiences in life?
link |
Yeah, just of being alive,
link |
of just living in this sacred world
link |
where we have all these things
link |
that we don't even pay any attention to.
link |
My friend, A.J. Jacobs, he had a wonderful book
link |
that I use the spirit of it in the ceremonies,
link |
not the exactly, but he was in a restaurant in New York,
link |
a coffee shop, and his child said,
link |
hey, where does the coffee come from?
link |
And he's like a wonderful big thinker.
link |
And he started really answering that question.
link |
Well, here's where the beans come from,
link |
but how did the beans get here
link |
and who painted the yellow line on the street
link |
so the truck didn't crash and who made the cup?
link |
And he spent a year making a full spreadsheet
link |
of all of the people who in one way or another
link |
played some role in that one cup of coffee.
link |
And he traveled all around the world thanking them.
link |
Like, it's like, thank you for painting
link |
the yellow line on the road.
link |
And so for me with the cacao, part of when I do
link |
these ceremonies is just to say like,
link |
you're drinking this cacao, but there's a person
link |
who planted the seed, there's a person
link |
who watered the plant, there's a person,
link |
and I just think that level of awareness,
link |
and it's true with anything.
link |
Like you have in front of you a stuffed hedgehog, so.
link |
Somebody made that.
link |
I love it, it's great.
link |
But like, if we just said, all right,
link |
where does this stuffed hedgehog come from?
link |
We would have a full story of globalization,
link |
of the interconnection of people all around the world
link |
doing all sorts of things of human imagination.
link |
It's beyond our capacity and our daily,
link |
we'd go insane if every day,
link |
like we're speaking into a microphone,
link |
well, what are the hundreds of years of technology
link |
that make this possible?
link |
But if just once in a while, we just focus on one thing
link |
and say, this thing is sacred.
link |
And because I'm recognizing that
link |
and I'm having an appreciation for the world around me,
link |
it just kind of makes my life feel more sacred.
link |
It makes me recognize my connection to others.
link |
So that's the gist of it.
link |
Yeah, it's funny, I often look at
link |
things in this world and moments and just am in awe
link |
universe that brought that to be.
link |
In a similar way as you're saying,
link |
but I don't as often think about exactly what you're saying,
link |
which is the number of people behind every little thing
link |
I mean, yeah, this hedgehog, this microphone,
link |
like directly, like thousands of people involved.
link |
And then indirectly, it's millions.
link |
Like, and they're all like this microphone
link |
that there's like artists, essentially,
link |
like people who made it their life's work,
link |
all the costs, like from the factories to the manufacturer,
link |
there's families that the production of this microphone
link |
and this hedgehog are fed because of the skill
link |
of this human that helped contribute to that development.
link |
And like Isaac Newton and John von Neumann
link |
are in this microphone.
link |
They're standing on the shoulders of giants
link |
and we're standing on their shoulders.
link |
And somebody will be standing on ours.
link |
You mentioned One Shared World, what is it?
link |
Well, thanks for asking.
link |
And by the way, what I will say is the people
link |
who are listening, this is so incredible
link |
and I'm so thrilled to have this kind of long conversation.
link |
Hello, person who's listening past the five hour mark.
link |
Somebody was like sleeping for the first four hours
link |
Now's the good stuff, I've been saving it.
link |
But, and I have to say that so much of our lives
link |
is forced into these short bursts
link |
that I'm just so appreciative to have the chance
link |
to have this conversation.
link |
So thank you for that.
link |
Some people would say five hours is short, so.
link |
You know, let's go.
link |
And yeah, that's what my girlfriend says.
link |
Like if I was like captured and tortured
link |
and they were gonna interrogate me,
link |
it's like at the end they'd say, all right.
link |
No, we're sick of this guy, we quit.
link |
So background on One Shared World.
link |
I mentioned I'm on a faculty for Singularity University.
link |
In the earliest days of the pandemic,
link |
I was invited to give a talk on whether the tools
link |
of the genetics and biotech revolutions
link |
were a match for the outbreak.
link |
And my view was then as now
link |
that the answer to that question is yes.
link |
But I woke up that morning
link |
and I felt that that wasn't the most important talk
link |
that I could give.
link |
There was something else that was more pressing for me.
link |
And that was the realization,
link |
they were asking the question,
link |
well, why weren't we prepared for this pandemic?
link |
Because we could have been, we weren't.
link |
And why can't, and because of that,
link |
why can't we respond adequately to this outbreak?
link |
And then there was the thing, well,
link |
if we, even if we respond somehow miraculously
link |
overcome this pandemic, it's a pyrrhic victory
link |
if we don't prepare ourselves to respond
link |
to the broader category of pandemics,
link |
particularly as we enter the age of synthetic biology.
link |
But if somehow miraculously we solve that problem,
link |
but we don't solve the problem of climate change,
link |
well, kind of who cares?
link |
We didn't have a pandemic,
link |
but we wiped everybody out from climate change.
link |
And let's just say, you get where this is going,
link |
that we organize ourselves and we solve climate change.
link |
And then we have a nuclear war
link |
because everybody's, particularly China now,
link |
but US, the former Soviet Union
link |
are building all these nuclear weapons.
link |
Who cares that we solved climate change
link |
because we're all gone anyway.
link |
And the meta category, bringing all of those things together
link |
was this mismatch between the increasingly global
link |
and shared nature of the biggest challenges that we face
link |
and our inability to solve that entire category of problems.
link |
And there's a historical issue,
link |
which is that prior to the 30 Years War in the 17th century,
link |
we had all these different kinds of sovereignty
link |
and religious and different kinds
link |
of organizational principles and everybody got in this war.
link |
And in this series of treaties
link |
that together are called the Peace of Westphalia,
link |
the framework for the modern,
link |
what we now understand as the modern nation state was laid.
link |
And then through colonialism and other means
link |
that idea of a state is what it is today,
link |
spread throughout the world.
link |
Then through particularly the late 19th
link |
and early 20th century,
link |
we realized how unstable that system was
link |
because you always had these jockeying
link |
between sovereign states and some were rising
link |
and some were falling and you ended up in war.
link |
And that was the genius of the generations
link |
who came together in 1945 in San Francisco
link |
and the planning had even started before then,
link |
who said, well, we can't just have that world,
link |
we need to have an overlay.
link |
And we talked about the UN and the WHO
link |
of systems which transcend our national sovereignties.
link |
They don't get rid of them, but they transcend them
link |
so we can solve this category of problems.
link |
But we're now reaching a point where our reach as humans,
link |
even individually, but collectively is so great
link |
that there's a mismatch between, as I said,
link |
the nature of the problems
link |
and the ability to solve those problems.
link |
And unless we can address
link |
that broader global collective action problem,
link |
we're going to extinct ourselves.
link |
And we see these different, what I call verticals,
link |
whether it's climate change
link |
or trying to prevent a nuclear weapons proliferation
link |
or anything else, but none of those can succeed.
link |
And frankly, it doesn't even matter if one succeeds
link |
because all of them have the potential
link |
to lead to extinction level events.
link |
So I gave that talk and that talk went viral.
link |
I stayed up all night the next night and I drafted,
link |
I think it was like an insanity,
link |
but I think a lot of us were manic
link |
in those early days of the pandemics
link |
wanting to do something.
link |
And so I stayed up all night and I drafted
link |
what I called a declaration of global interdependence.
link |
And I posted that on my website, my jamiemuscle.com.
link |
And that went viral.
link |
And so then I called a meeting just on the people
link |
on my personal email list.
link |
And so we had people from 25 countries.
link |
There were all of these people
link |
who were having the same thing.
link |
There's something wrong in the world.
link |
They wanted to be part of a process of fixing it.
link |
And so it was a crazy 35 days
link |
where we broke into eight different working groups.
link |
We had an amazing team that helped redraft
link |
what became the declaration of interdependence,
link |
which is now in 20 languages.
link |
We laid out a work plan.
link |
We founded this organization called One Shared World.
link |
The URL is oneshared.world.
link |
And it's just been this incredible journey.
link |
We now have people who are participating
link |
in one way or another from 120 different countries.
link |
We have our public events exploring these issues,
link |
get millions of viewers.
link |
We have world leaders who are participating.
link |
So the vision is to work on some of these big problems,
link |
arbitrary number of problems that present themselves
link |
in the world that face all of human civilization
link |
and to be able to work together.
link |
Well, that is, but there's a macro, a meta problem,
link |
which is the global collective action problem.
link |
And so the idea is even if we just focus on the verticals,
link |
on the manifestations of the global collective action
link |
problem, there'll be an infinite number of those things.
link |
So while we work on those things,
link |
like climate change, pandemics, WMD and other things,
link |
we also have to ask the bigger questions
link |
of why can't we solve this category of problems.
link |
And the idea is, at least from my observation,
link |
is that whenever big decisions are being made,
link |
our national leaders and corporate leaders
link |
are doing exactly what we've hired them to do.
link |
They're maximizing for national interest,
link |
even, or corporate interests,
link |
even at the expense of everybody.
link |
And so it's not that we wanna get rid of states.
link |
States are essential in our world system.
link |
It's not we wanna undermine the UN,
link |
which is also essential, but massively underperforming.
link |
What we wanna do is to create
link |
an empowered global constituency of people
link |
who are demanding that their leaders at all levels
link |
just do a better job of balancing
link |
broader and narrower interests.
link |
So this is more like a,
link |
make it more symmetric in terms of power.
link |
It's holding accountable the nations, the leaders.
link |
The problem is nations are powerful.
link |
We talked about China quite a bit.
link |
How do you have an organizations of citizens of Earth
link |
that can solve this collective problem
link |
that holds China accountable?
link |
It's difficult, because UN,
link |
you could say a lot of things,
link |
but to call it effective is hard.
link |
You know, the internet almost is a kind of representation
link |
of a collective force that holds nations accountable.
link |
Not to give Twitter too much credit,
link |
but social networks, broadly speaking.
link |
So you have hope that it's possible
link |
to build such collections of humans that resist China.
link |
Not necessarily resist China,
link |
but human, I mean, our cultures change over time.
link |
I mean, the idea of the modern nation state
link |
would not have made sense to people
link |
in the 13th or 14th century.
link |
The idea that became the United Nations.
link |
I mean, it had its earliest days in the philosophies of Kant.
link |
It took a long time for these ideas to be realized.
link |
And so the idea, and we're far from successful.
link |
I mean, we've had little minor successes,
link |
which we're very proud of.
link |
We got the G20 leaders to incorporate the language
link |
that we provided on addressing the needs
link |
of the world's most vulnerable populations
link |
into the final summit communique
link |
from the G20 summit in Riyadh.
link |
This year, we're just on the verge
link |
of having our language pat on the same issue,
link |
ensuring everyone on earth has access to safe water,
link |
basic sanitation and hygiene,
link |
and essential pandemic protection by 2030
link |
passed as part of a resolution in the United Nations
link |
And we're primarily, I mean, it's young people
link |
all around the world.
link |
And when I told them in the beginning of this year,
link |
We're gonna get the UN General Assembly
link |
to pass a resolution with our language in it.
link |
I mean, first, I think they all thought it was insane,
link |
but they were too young and inexperienced
link |
to know how insane it was.
link |
But now these young people are just so excited
link |
that it's actually happening.
link |
So what we're trying to do is really to create a movement,
link |
which we don't feel that we need to do from scratch
link |
because there are a lot of movements.
link |
Like right now, we just had the Glasgow G20,
link |
I mean, I'm sorry, the Glasgow Climate Change Cup 26,
link |
and then Greta Thunberg, who has a huge following
link |
and who is an amazing young woman,
link |
but I was kind of disappointed in what she said afterwards.
link |
It became like a meme on Twitter, which was blah, blah, blah.
link |
And basically it was like, blah, blah, blah,
link |
these old people are just screwing around
link |
and it's a waste of time.
link |
And definitely the critique is merited,
link |
but young people have never been more empowered,
link |
educated, connected than they are now.
link |
And so we've had a process with One Shared World
link |
where we partnered with the Model United Nations,
link |
the Aga Khan Foundation, the India Sanitation Coalition.
link |
And what we did is say, all right, we have this goal,
link |
water sanitation, hygiene, and pandemic protection
link |
for everyone on earth by 2030.
link |
And we had debates and consultations
link |
using the Model UN framework all around the world
link |
in multiple languages.
link |
And we said, come up with a plan
link |
for how this could be achieved.
link |
And these brilliant young people in every country,
link |
not every country, most countries,
link |
they all contributed, then we had a plan.
link |
Then I recruited friends of mine,
link |
like my friend Hans Carrell in Sweden,
link |
who's the former chief counsel of the whole United Nations,
link |
and asked him and others to work with these young people
link |
and representatives to turn that
link |
into what looks exactly like a UN resolution.
link |
It's just written by a bunch of kids all around the world.
link |
We then sent that to every permanent representative,
link |
every government representative at the UN.
link |
And that was why working
link |
with the German and Spanish governments,
link |
why the language is centralized from that document
link |
is about to pass the UN.
link |
And it doesn't mean that just passing
link |
a UN General Assembly resolution changes anything,
link |
but we think that there's a model of engaging people,
link |
just like you're talking about,
link |
these people who are outside
link |
of the traditional power structures
link |
and who want to have a voice.
link |
But I think we need to give a little bit of structure
link |
because just going, I'm a big fan of Global Citizen,
link |
but just going to a Global Citizen concert
link |
and waving your iPhone back and forth
link |
and tweeting about it isn't enough
link |
to drive the kind of change that's required.
link |
We need to come together, even in untraditional ways,
link |
and articulate the change we want
link |
and build popular movements to make that happen.
link |
And popular means scale and movements at scale
link |
that actually, at the individual level, do something
link |
and that's then magnified with the scale
link |
to actually have significant impact.
link |
I mean, at its best, you hear a lot of folks talk
link |
about the various cryptocurrencies as possibly helping.
link |
You have young people get involved
link |
in challenging the power structures
link |
by challenging the monetary system.
link |
And there's, some of it is number go up,
link |
people get excited when they can make a little bit of money,
link |
but that's actually almost like an entry point
link |
because then you almost feel empowered.
link |
And because of that, you start to think
link |
about some of these philosophical ideas
link |
that I, as a young person, have the power
link |
to change the world.
link |
All of these senior folks in the position of power,
link |
they were, first of all, they were once young
link |
and powerless like me.
link |
And I could be part of the next generation
link |
that makes a change.
link |
Well, all the things I see that are wrong
link |
with the world, I can make it better.
link |
And it's very true that the overly powerful nations
link |
of the world could be a relic of the past.
link |
That could be a 20th century and before idea
link |
that was tried, created a lot of benefit,
link |
but we also saw the problems with that kind of world,
link |
extreme nationalism.
link |
We see the benefits and the problems of the Cold War.
link |
Arguably Cold War got us to the moon,
link |
but there could be other, a lot of other different
link |
mechanisms that inspired competition,
link |
especially friendly competition between nations
link |
versus adversarial competition that resulted
link |
in the response to COVID, for example,
link |
with China and the United States and Russia
link |
and the secrecy, the censorship.
link |
Yeah, and all the things that are basically
link |
against the spirit of science
link |
and resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars
link |
and the cost of countless lives.
link |
What gives you hope about the future, Jamie?
link |
Well, one of the things, you mentioned cryptocurrency
link |
and then as you know better than most,
link |
there's cryptocurrency and then underneath
link |
the cryptocurrency, there's the blockchain
link |
and the distributed ledger.
link |
And then like we talked about, there are all these
link |
young people who are able to connect with each other,
link |
to organize in new ways.
link |
And I work with these young people every single day
link |
through One Shared World primarily,
link |
but also other things.
link |
And there's so much optimism.
link |
There's so much hope that I just have a lot of faith
link |
that we're gonna figure something out.
link |
I'm an optimist by nature.
link |
And that doesn't mean that we need to be blind
link |
There are very, very real dangers,
link |
but just given half the chance, people wanna be good.
link |
People want to do the right thing.
link |
And I do believe that there's a role,
link |
maybe there's a role for the at least near term
link |
for governments, but there's always a role for leadership.
link |
And I'm, I guess like a Gramscian in the sense
link |
that I think that we need to create frameworks
link |
and structures that allow leaders to emerge.
link |
And we need to build norms so that the leaders who emerge
link |
are leaders who call on us, inspire our best instincts
link |
and not drive us toward our worst.
link |
But I really see a lot of hope.
link |
And when you say this all the time in your podcast,
link |
and you may even be more optimistic to me
link |
as you look at the darkest moments of human history
link |
and see hope, but we're kind of a crazy, wonderful species.
link |
I mean, yes, we figured out ways to slaughter each other
link |
at scale, but we've come up with these wonderful philosophies
link |
about love and all of those things.
link |
And yeah, maybe the Bonobos have some love
link |
in their cultures, but this,
link |
we're kind of a wonderful magical species.
link |
And if we just can create enough of an infrastructure,
link |
doesn't need to be and shouldn't be controlling,
link |
just enough of an infrastructure
link |
so that people are stakeholders,
link |
feel like they're stakeholders
link |
in contributing to a positive story,
link |
I just really feel the sky is the limit.
link |
So if there's somebody who's young right now,
link |
somebody in high school, somebody in college
link |
listening to you, you've done a lot of incredible things.
link |
You're respected by a lot of the elites.
link |
You're respected by the people.
link |
So you're both able to sort of speak to all groups,
link |
walk through the fire, like you mentioned
link |
with the slab leak.
link |
What advice would you give to young kids today
link |
that are inspired by your story?
link |
I mean, I think there's one, there's lots of,
link |
I'm honored if anybody is inspired,
link |
but it's the same thing as I said with the science
link |
that it's all about values.
link |
The core of everything is knowing who you are.
link |
And so yes, I mean, there's the broader thing
link |
of follow your passions, a creative mind
link |
and an inquisitive mind is the core of everything
link |
because the knowledge base is constantly sharing.
link |
So learning how to learn,
link |
but at the core of everything is investing
link |
in knowing who you are and what you stand for.
link |
Because that's the way, that's the path
link |
to leading a meaningful life, to contributing,
link |
to not feeling alienated from your life as you get older.
link |
And just like you live, it's an ongoing process
link |
and we all make mistakes
link |
and we all kind of travel down wrong paths
link |
and just have some love for yourself
link |
and recognize that just at every,
link |
like I was saying with the Ironman,
link |
just when you think there's no possibility
link |
that you can go on, there's a 100% possibility
link |
that you can go on.
link |
And just when you think that nothing better
link |
will happen to you, there's a 100% chance
link |
that something better will happen to you.
link |
You just gotta keep going.
link |
Jamie, I've been a fan of yours.
link |
I think first heard you on Joe Rogan Experience,
link |
but I've been following your work,
link |
your bold, fearless work with speaking about the lab leak
link |
and everything you represent
link |
from your brilliance to your kindness.
link |
And the fact that you spent your valuable time with me today
link |
and now I officially made you miss your flight.
link |
And the fact that you said that
link |
whether you were being nice or not,
link |
I don't know that you will be okay with that
link |
means the world to me.
link |
And I'm really honored that you spent your time with me today.
link |
Well, really, it's been such a great pleasure
link |
and thank you for creating a forum
link |
to have these kinds of long conversations.
link |
So I really enjoyed it and thank you.
link |
And if anybody has now listened for,
link |
what's it been, five and a half hours?
link |
Thank you for listening.
link |
Welcome to Five Hour Club.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation
link |
To support this podcast,
link |
please check out our sponsors in the description.
link |
And now let me leave you some words from Richard Feynman
link |
about science and religion,
link |
which I think also applies to science and geopolitics
link |
because I believe scientists have the responsibility
link |
to think broadly about the world
link |
so that they may understand the bigger impact
link |
of their inventions.
link |
The quote goes like this,
link |
In this age of specialization,
link |
men who thoroughly know one field
link |
are often incompetent to discuss another.
link |
such as the relation of science and religion,
link |
and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever,
link |
but they are not often publicly discussed
link |
because of the limitations of specialization.
link |
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.