The Power of Optimism: A Conversation with Jamie Metzel

As we sit down to talk with Jamie Metzel, it's clear that he embodies the spirit of optimism. Despite the dire warnings from experts about the dangers facing humanity, Jamie remains steadfastly hopeful. He believes that there is a role for governments and leadership in creating frameworks and structures that allow people to emerge as leaders who can inspire us to be our best selves.

"We need to create an infrastructure that allows people to feel like they are stakeholders in contributing to a positive story," Jamie explains. "We don't need to control everything, but just enough so that people feel invested in making a difference." This approach is rooted in his own experiences and observations of human nature. Despite the capacity for violence and destruction that exists within us, Jamie believes that there is also a deep wellspring of love, kindness, and compassion that can guide us towards a more positive path.

"I'm like a Gramsian in the sense that I think we need to create frameworks and structures that allow leaders to emerge," Jamie says. "We need to build norms so that the leaders who emerge inspire our best instincts, rather than driving us towards our worst." This approach requires a deep understanding of human nature and a willingness to invest time and effort into creating a positive impact.

For Jamie, the key to making a difference is to focus on building relationships and connecting with others. "I've done a lot of incredible things," he says with humility, "but it's not about being respected by elites or ignored by the people. It's about finding common ground and working together towards a shared goal."

As we talk, Jamie shares his advice for young people who are inspired by his story. "At the core of everything is knowing who you are and what you stand for," he says. "Learning how to learn is essential, but it's not just about accumulating knowledge – it's about investing in yourself." Jamie also emphasizes the importance of self-love and recognizing that we all make mistakes along the way.

"I was saying with Iron Man, just when you think there's no possibility that you can go on, there's a 100 percent chance that something better will happen to you," he says. "You just gotta keep going." This mindset is essential for navigating life's challenges and finding success in our personal and professional pursuits.

As we wrap up our conversation, Jamie expresses his gratitude for the opportunity to share his thoughts with us. He acknowledges that missing his flight was an inconvenience, but recognizes that it also allowed him to spend quality time with his fans. "I'm honored to have this forum to have these kinds of long conversations," he says.

In a parting shot, Jamie offers words from Richard Feynman about the importance of thinking broadly and understanding the bigger picture. Feynman's quote reads: "In this age of specialization, men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another." As we strive to make sense of the world around us, it's essential that we remain open-minded and willing to explore new ideas and perspectives.

The Conversation Continues...

As we bring our conversation with Jamie Metzel to a close, we can't help but feel inspired by his optimism and commitment to making a positive impact. Whether you're listening for scientific insights or philosophical musings, Jamie's words are sure to resonate. And as he leaves us with the wisdom of Richard Feynman, it's clear that the power of optimism is a force to be reckoned with.

Support this Podcast...

If you enjoyed this conversation with Jamie Metzel, we hope you'll consider supporting our podcast. We rely on the generosity of our listeners to bring you these important conversations and in-depth discussions. To support our work, please check out our sponsors in the description below.

The Future of Science and Religion

As scientists, we have a responsibility to think broadly about the world and understand its complexities. But how do we navigate the difficult dilemmas that arise from the intersection of science and religion? According to Richard Feynman, it's essential that we approach these challenges with an open mind and a willingness to explore new ideas.

"In this age of specialization, men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another," Feynman writes. "The old problems such as the relation of Science and religion are still with us and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever." By embracing our limitations and seeking out diverse perspectives, we can work towards a deeper understanding of the world and our place within it.

The Lab Leak: A Call to Action

As we reflect on the conversation with Jamie Metzel, it's clear that the lab leak is just one aspect of a much larger issue. The consequences of scientific hubris and the failure to prioritize human values are far-reaching and devastating.

But Jamie's message of hope and optimism offers a powerful counterpoint to these concerns. By focusing on building relationships, investing in ourselves, and working towards a shared goal, we can create a more positive and sustainable future for all.

As we look to the future, it's essential that we remain committed to this vision of possibility. Whether you're a scientist, philosopher, or simply someone who cares deeply about the world around us, there is always room for growth, learning, and exploration. The conversation may be just beginning, but one thing is clear: the power of optimism is here to stay.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe following is the conversation with Jamie Metzel author specializing in topics of genetic engineering biotechnology and geopolitics in the past two years he has been outspoken about the need to investigate and keep an open mind about the origins of covid-19 in particular he has been keeping an extensive up-to-date collection of circumstantial evidence in support of what is colloquially known as lab leak hypothesis that covid-19 leaked in 2019 from the Wuhan Institute of virology in part I wanted to explore the idea in response to the thoughtful criticism to parts of the Francis Collins episode I'll have more and more difficult conversations like this with people from all walks of life and with all kinds of ideas I promise to do my best to keep an open mind and yet to ask hard questions while together searching for the beautiful and the inspiring in the mind of the other person it's a hard line to walk gracefully especially for someone like me who's a bit of an awkward introvert with barely the grasp of the English language or any language except maybe Python and C plus plus but I hope you stick around be patient and empathetic and maybe learn something new together with me this is a lux Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with Jamie Metzel what is the probability in your mind that covid-19 leaked from a lab in your write-up I believe you said 85 percent I know it's just a percentage we can't really be exact with these kinds of things but it gives us a sense where your mind is where your intuition is so as it stands today what would you say is that probability I would stand by what I've been saying since really the middle of last year it's more likely and not in my opinion that the pandemic stems from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan is it 90 is it 65 percent I mean that's kind of arbitrary but when I stack up all of the available evidence and all of it on both sides is circumstantial it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin so before we dive into the specifics at a high level what uh types of evidence what intuition what ideas are leading you to uh to have that kind of estimate is it possible to kind of condense when you when you look at the wall of evidence before you where's your Source the the strongest source of your intuition yeah and I would have to say it's just logic and deductive reasoning so before I make the case for why I think it's most likely a lab incident origin let's just say why it could be and still could be what we natural origin all of this is a natural origin in the sense that it's a bat virus backbone horseshoe bat virus backbone okay I'm Gonna Keep pausing you yeah to find stuff so maybe it's useful to say what do we mean by lab leak what do we mean by natural origin what do we mean by virus backbone okay great questions um so viruses come from somewhere viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years and we they've been around for such a long time because they are adaptive and they're growing and they're always changing and they're morphing and that's why viruses are I mean they've been very successful and we are are victims sometimes we're beneficiaries we have viral DNA has morphed into our our genomes but now certainly in the case of covid-19 we are victims of the success of viruses and so when we talk about a backbone so the SARS cov2 virus um has a it has a history and these viruses don't come out of whole cloth there are viruses that that morph and so we know that at some period maybe 20 years ago or whatever um the the the virus that is SARS cov2 existed in horseshoe bats it was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere and there are some people who say there's no evidence of this but it's a plausible Theory based on how things have happened in the past maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat through some intermediate species so it's like let's say there's a bat and then it infects some other animal let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat they're all Pangolin they're all sorts of animals that have been considered and then that virus adapts into that new host and it changes and grows and then according to the quote-unquote Natural Origins hypothesis it jumps from that animal into humans and so what you could imagine and some of the people who are making the case all of the people actually who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus what they're saying is it went from bat to some intermediate species and then from that intermediate species most likely there's some people who say it went directly Back To Human but through some intermediate species and then humans interacted with that species and then it jumped from that whatever it is to to humans and that's a very plausible Theory it's just that there's no evidence for it and the nature of the interaction is do most people kind of suggest that the like What markets so the interaction with the humans the animal is in the form of it's either a live animal that's being sold to be eaten or uh recently live animal but newly dead animal being sold that's certainly one very possible possibility a possible possibility I don't know if that's a word but the people who believe in the wet Market origin that's what they're saying so they had one of these animals they were cutting it up let's say in a market and maybe some of the blood got into somebody maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized and so somebody breathed it and then that virus found this new host and that was the the human host but you could also have that happen in let's say a farm so it's happened in the past that let's say that there are farms and because of human encroachment into Wild Spaces we're pushing our our farms and our Animal Farms further and further into what used to be the the just natural habitats and so it's happened in the past for example that there were bats roosting over pig pens and the bat droppings went into the pig pens the viruses in those droppings infected the pigs and then the pigs infected the the humans and and that's why it's a plausible Theory it's just that there's basically no evidence for it if it was the case that SARS cov2 comes from this type of interaction um as in most of the at least recent past outbreaks we'd see evidence of that viruses are messy they're constantly undergoing darwinian Evolution and they're changing and it's not that they're just ready for Prime Time ready to infect humans on day one normally you can trace the viral Evolution prior to the time when it infects humans but for SARS cov2 it just showed up on the scene ready to infect humans and there's no history that anybody has found so far of that kind of a viral Evolution with the first SARS you could track it by the The genome sequencing that it was experimenting and uh SARS cov2 was very very stable and meaning it had already adapted to humans by the time it interacted with us fully adapted so with SARS there's a rapid Evolution when it like first kind of hooks onto a human yeah because it's trying like a virus its goal is to survive and replicate yeah no it's true it's like oh we're going to try this oh that didn't work we'll try exactly like it like like a startup and so we don't we don't see that and so there are some people who say why well one hypothesis is are you have a totally isolated group of humans maybe in in southern China which is more than a thousand miles away from uh from Wuhan and maybe they're doing their animal farming um right next to these uh where these areas where there are these horseshoe bats and maybe in this totally isolated place that no one's ever heard of they're not connected to any other place one person gets infected and it doesn't spread to anybody else because they're so isolated they're like I don't know I mean I can't even imagine that this is is the case then somebody gets in a car and drives all night more than A Thousand Miles through crappy roads to get to Wuhan doesn't stop for anything doesn't infect anybody on the way no one else in that person's village infects anyone and then that person goes straight to the the juanan seafood market according to this in my mind not very credible Theory and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected and they're only delivering those animals to the Wuhan Market which doesn't even sell very many of these kinds of animals that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else so that's it's a little bit of a straw man um but on top of that the Chinese have sequenced more than 80 000 animal samples and there's no evidence of this type of a viral Evolution that we would otherwise expect Let's uh try to at this moment steal man the argument for the natural origin of the virus so just uh to clarify so Wuhan is actually despite what it might sound like to people is a pretty big city there's a lot of people that live in it 11 million so not only is there the Wuhan Institute of virology there's other centers that do work on viruses yes but there's also a giant number of markets and everything we're talking about here is pretty close together so when I kind of look at the geography of this I think when you zoom out it's all Wuhan but when you zoom in there's just a lot of interesting dynamics that could be happening and where the cases are popping up and what's being reported all that kind of stuff so I think the people that argue for the natural origin and there's a few recent papers that come out arguing this it's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing but I think what they're arguing is that there's this Hunan Market that's one of the major markets uh the wet markets in Wuhan that uh there's a bunch of cases that were reported from there so if I look at for example the Michael Warby perspective the hero in science he argues he wrote this a few days ago the the predominance of early covet cases linked to Hunan market and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment bias which I think is what people argue that you're just kind of focusing on this region because a lot of cases came but there could be a huge number of other cases so people who argue against this say that this is a later stage already right um so he says no he says this is this is the epicenter and uh this is a clear uh evidence that uh circumstantial evidence but evidence nevertheless that this is where the jump happened to humans the big explosion maybe not k0 I don't know if he argues that but with the early cases so what do you make of this whole idea Can you steal man it yeah before yeah and my goal here isn't to attack people on on the other side and and if my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented um that that should change my view I I hope that I'll be open-minded enough to change my view and certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person a respectful a respected scientist and and I think this work is is contributive work but I just don't think um uh that it it it that it's as significant as has been reported in in the press and so what his argument is is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019 around the the Juan on seafood market and even though he himself argues that the original break through case the original case the index case where the first person infected happened earlier happened in October or November so not in December his argument is well what are the odds that you would have this number this cluster of cases in the huanan seafood market and if the origin happened someplace else wouldn't you expect other other clusters and it's not an entirely implausible argument but there are reasons why I think it's uh that it's this is not nearly as determinative as has been reported and I certainly had a lot of I and others had tweeted a lot about this and that is first uh the the people who were infected in this cluster it's not the earliest known uh virus of the SARS cov2 it began mutating so this is it's not the original SARS cov2 there so you it had to have happened someplace else too the people who were infected in the market um weren't infected in the part of the market where they had these kinds of animals that are considered to be candidates um for as an intermari intermediary species and third there was a bias actually I'll have four things uh third there was a bias in the early assessment in China of what what they were looking for they were asked did you have exposure to the market because I think in the early days when people were figuring things out that was one of the questions that uh that was asked and fourth and probably most significantly we have so little information about those early cases in China and that's really unfortunate and we'll talk about this later because the Chinese government is preventing access to all of that information which they have which could easily help us get to the bottom at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started and so this is it it's like grasping at straws in the dark with gloves on that's right but to steal man the argument we have this evidence from this market and yes the Chinese government has turned off the lights essentially so we have very little data to work with but this is the data we have so who's to say that this data doesn't represent a much bigger data set that a lot of people got infected at this Market where it even at the parts or especially at the parts with the the meat the infected meat was being sold so that could be true and it probably is true the question is is this the source is this the place where this began or was did this just a place where it was Amplified and I certainly think that it's it's extremely likely that the Juan on seafood market was an at point of amplification and that's it's just answering a different question basically what you're saying is it's very difficult to use the market as evidence for anything because it's probably not even the starting point so it's just a good place for it to continue spreading that's certainly my view what Michael warby's argument is um is that well what are the odds of that that we're seeing this amplification at this particular in the market and if we if let's let me put this way if we had all of the information if if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access to all of this because there's blood bank information there's all sorts of information uh and based on a full and complete understanding we came to believe that all of the early cases um were at this Market I think that would be a stronger argument than what this is so far but everything leads to the fact that why is it that the Chinese government which was frankly after a slow start the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS one why have they apparently done so little and shared so little I think it asks it it begs a lot of questions okay so let's uh then talk about the Chinese government uh let's there's several governments right so one is the local government of Wuhan and not just the Chinese government let's talk about government uh no let's talk about human nature it just keeps zooming out yeah let's talk about planet Earth yeah no uh so there's the Wuhan local government there's the Chinese government uh led by Xi Jinping and uh there's governments in general I'm trying to empathize so my father was involved with Chernobyl I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials of people who are like oh shit there is there's a potential catastrophic event happening here and uh it's my ass because I we there's incompetence all over the place the human nature is such that there's incompetence all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up and so so given that context I want to lay out all the possible incompetence all the possible malevolence all the possible geopolitical tensions here all right where in your sense did the cover-up start so uh there's this suspicious uh fact it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of virology at a public database of thousands of uh sampled bad coronavirus sequences and that went offline in September 2019. what was that about so let me talk about that specific and then I'll also follow your path zooming out and it's really important is that a good start it's a great starting point yeah yeah so but there's there's a a bigger story and but let me talk about about that so the Wuhan Institute of virology um and we can go into the whole history of the Wuhan Institute of virology either now or later because I think it's it's very relevant to this story but let's focus for now on this database they had a database of 22 000 viral samples and sequence information about the viruses that they had had collected some of which the collection of some of which was supported through funding from the NIH not a huge NIH through the Eco Health Alliance it's a relatively small amount 600 000 but but not nothing um the goal of this database um was so that we could understand viral Evolution so that exactly for this kind of moment where we had an unknown virus we could say well is this like anything that we've seen before and that would help us both understand what we're facing and be better able um to to respond so this was a an act a password protected public access database in 2019 um it was in September 2019 um it became inaccessible and then the whole a few months later the entire database uh disappeared the Chinese have said is that because there were all kinds of computer attacks on this on this database but why would that happen in September 2019 before the the pandemic at least as far as as we know so so just to clarify yes it went down to September 2019 just so we'll get the year straight January 2020 is when the virus really started getting um the Press so we're talking about the December 2019 a lot of early infections happened September 2019 is when this database goes down just to clarify because you said it quickly the Chinese government said that uh their database was getting hacked right therefore the director of this part of the Wuhan Institute of virology said that oh sh oh she was the one that said it she was the one who said oh yeah boy I did not even know that part yeah okay well she's an interesting character we'll talk about her yeah uh so so the excuse is that uh that's getting cyber attacked a lot so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation which seems very suspicious and then this virus starts to emerge in October November December there's a lot of argument about that but after sorry to interrupt like but some people are saying that the first outbreak could have happened as early as September I'm not I think it's more likely it's October November but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak uh the first incident of a of a known outbreak at least to somebody happened in September they make the argument well what if that also happened in mid-september of of 2019 I'm not prepared to go there but there are some people who make that argument but I think if again if I were to put myself in the mind of officials whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of virology or Wuhan local officials um I think if I notice some major problem like somebody got sick some sign of uh oh shit was screwed up that's when you kind of uh do this slow there's like a Homer Simpson meme where you slowly start backing out and I would probably start um hiding stuff cya yeah yeah and then coming up with really shady excuses it's like you're in a relationship and your girlfriend wants to see your phone and you're like I'm sorry I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now that's that courteous I can't yeah I wish I wish I could I wish I could it's just I'm unsafe right now so so would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view of the whole information space and and why I believe this has been so contentious it's it's it's so here's here's if I had to give my best guess and I underlined the word guess um of of what happened and and your background your family background with Chernobyl I think is highly relevant here so after the first SARS there was a recognition that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology and epidemiology around the world that people in China and Africa in Southeast Asia they are were the front line workers and they needed to be doing a lot of the the viral monitoring and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system um and that was why there was a lot of investment in in all of those places in building capacity and training people and helping to build institutional capacity and the Chinese government they recognized that they needed to ramp uh ramp things up and then the World Health Organization in the world Health assembly they had their their International Health regulations that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure so that was that was the goal there were a lot of Investments and and I know we'll talk later about the Wuhan Institute of virology and I won't go into that into that right now so there was all of this distributed capacity and so in the early days there's a breakout in Wuhan we don't know is it September October November uh maybe uh December is when the the local authorities start to recognize that something's happening but at some point in late 2019 uh local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up and exactly like in Chernobyl these guys exist within a hierarchical system and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen and they're going to be in big trouble if bad things happen under their watch so their initial instinct is to squash it uh it's and they my guess is they think well if we squash this information we can most likely beat back this outbreak because lots of outbreaks happen all the time including of SARS one where there was a multiple lab incidents out of out of the lab in in Beijing and so they start their cover-up on day one they they start screening social media they send nasty letters to to different doctors and others who are starting to speak up but then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue and then the the national government of China again this is just hypothesis the national government gets involved they say all right this is getting much bigger they go in and they realize that we have a big problem on our hands they relatively quickly know that it's spreading human to human and so the right thing for them to do then is what the South African government is doing now is to say we have this outbreak we don't know everything but we know it's serious um we need help but that's not the Instinct of people in in most governments and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China and so the the national government they have a choice at that point they can do option one which is what we would hear called the right thing which is total transparency they criticize the local officials for having this cover up and they say now we're going to be totally transparent but what does that do in a system like the former Soviet Union like China now if local officials say wait a second I thought my job was to cover everything up to support this alternative reality that authoritarian systems need in order to to survive well now I'm going to be held accountable for if I'm not totally transparent like your whole system um would would collapse so the the national government they have that choice and they their only choice according to the logic of their system is to be all in on a cover-up and that's why they block the World Health Organization from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks they overtly Lie To The World Health Organization about human to human transmission and then they begin their cover-ups so they begin very very quickly destroying samples hiding records they start imprisoning people for uh asking basic questions soon after they establish a gag order preventing Chinese scientists from writing or saying anything about pandemic Origins without prior government approval and what that does means that there isn't a lot of data there's not nearly enough data coming out of China and so lots of responsible scientists outside of China who are data driven say well I don't have enough information to draw conclusions and then into that vacuum step a relatively small number of largely virologists but also others respected scientists and I know we'll talk about the I think Infamous Peter daisak who who say well with without any real foundation in in the evidence they say we know pretty much this comes from nature and anyone who's raising the possibility of a lab incident origin is a is a conspiracy theorist so that message um starts to to percolate and then in the United States we have Donald Trump and he's starting to get criticized for America's failure to respond prepare for and respond adequately to the outbreak and so he starts saying well I know first after praising Xi Jinping he starts saying well I know that China did it and the who did and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody uh but uh but himself and then we have a media here that had shifted from the from the traditional model of he said she said journalism so and so said X and so and so said why and then we'll present both of those views but with Donald Trump he would make outlandish starting positions so he would say Lex is an Ax Murderer and then in the early days they would say Lex is an Ax Murderer you know Lex's friend says he's not an expert and we'd have a four-day debate is he or isn't he and then at day four someone would say why are we having this debate at all because the original point is is just is baseless and so the media just got in the habit here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong it's very complicated to figure out what is the role of a politician what is the role of a leader in this kind of game of politics but certainly in um when there's a tragedy when there's a catastrophic event what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly through the fog and to make big bold decisions and to speak to the truth of things and even if it's unpopular truth to listen to the people to listen to all sides to the opinions to the controversial ideas and to see past all the bullshit all the political bullshit and just speak to the people speak to the world and make bold big decisions that that's probably what was needed in terms of leadership and I'm not so willing to criticize whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump on this I think most people cannot be great leaders but that's why when great leaders step up we write books about them yeah and I and I agree and and even though I mean I I think of myself as a progressive person I certainly was a Critic of a lot of of what uh president Trump did but on this particular case even though he may have said it in an uncouth way Donald Trump was actually in my view right I mean when he said hey let's look at this lab he said I have evidence I can't tell you I don't think he even had the evidence but his intuition that this probably comes from a lab in my view was a correct intuition and certainly I started speaking up about pandemic Origins early in 2019 and my friends my Democratic friends were brutal with me saying what are you doing you're supporting Trump in an election year and I said just because Donald Trump is saying something doesn't mean that I need to oppose it if he's if Donald Trump says something that I think is correct well I want to say it's correct just as if he says something that I don't like I'm going to speak up about that good you walk through the fire so that's a that's you laid out the story here and uh I think in many ways it's a human story it's the story of politics it's a story story of human nature but let's talk about the story of the virus and let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of virology so maybe this is a good time to try to talk about his history about its Origins about what kind of stuff it works on about biosafety levels and about Batwoman yeah so what what is the honesty of our algae when did it start yeah so it's a great question so um after SARS one which was in the early 2000s 2003 2004 um there was this effort to um to enhance as I mentioned before Global capacity including in China so the Wuhan Institute of virology had been around for decades before then but there was an agreement between the French and the Chinese governments to build a the largest bsl4 lab so biosafety level four so in these what are called high containment Labs there's level four which is the highest level and people have seen that and on TV and elsewhere where you have the the people in the different in suits and all of these protections and then there's level three which is still very serious uh and uh but not as much as as level four and then level 2 is just kind of goggles and and some gloves and maybe that and maybe a face mask much less so the French and the Chinese governments agreed that France would help build the first and and still the largest bsl4 plus some mobile bsl3 labs and they were going to do it in Wuhan and Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago and I had actually been it's a different story I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long before the pandemic broke out and that was why I knew that Wuhan is it's a it's not some Backwater where there are a bunch of yokels eating bats for dinner every night this is a really sophisticated wealthy highly educated and and cultured City and so I I knew that it wasn't like that even the Juan and seafood market wasn't like some of these seafood markets that they have in southern China or in Cambodia where I lived for uh for two years I mean this it was a totally open thing I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the including the Wuhan Market just some of the wild food going on here because you've traveled that part of the world yeah well let's not get there yes let's not get distracted good as I was telling you Lex before and this is maybe an advertisement yes um is having now listened to to a number of your your podcasts when I'm doing long Ultra training runs or driving in the mountains like the really because in the beginning we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic but the really good stuff happens later so so friends if you listen to the end I you know I I have to say as I was telling you before like when I heard your long podcast with Jeron Lanier and he talked about his mother at the very end I mean it was just beautiful stuffs I don't know whether I can I can match beautiful stuff but I'm gonna I'm gonna gonna do my best you're gonna have to find out exactly stay tuned um so um so France had this agreement um that they were going to help design and help build uh this bsl4 lab in Wuhan and um it was going to be with French standards and there were going to be 50 French experts who were going to work there and supervise the the work that happened even after the Wuhan Institute of virology um uh in in the new location um uh started started operating but then when they started building it uh the the French contractors the the French overseers were increasingly appalled um that they had less and less control that the Chinese uh contractors were swapping out new things they it wasn't built up to French standards so much um that at the end when it was finally built uh the the the person who was the vice chairman of the project and a leading French industrialist named maryah refused to sign off and he said we we can't um support we have no idea um what this is whether it's safe or not and when this this lab opened remember we were supposed to have 50 French experts it had one French expert and so the the French were really disgusted and actually when the Wuhan Institute of virology in its new location opened in in 2018 um two things happened one French intelligence privately approached U.S intelligence saying we have a lot of concerns about the Wuhan Institute of virology about its safety and we don't even know who's operating there is it being used as a dual use facility and also in 2018 the U.S embassy in Beijing uh sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at well at this laboratory and they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogan from The Washington Post later got his his hands on saying um this is really unsafe they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses in conditions where a leak is is possible and so then you mentioned shujang Li and I'll connect that to the these virologists who I was was was talking about so there's a very credible thesis that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen in other parts of the world having Partnerships with experts in those parts in those parts of the world must be a foundation of our of our efforts we can't just bring everything home because we know that that viruses don't care about borders and boundaries and so if something happens there it's going to come here so very correctly and we have all kinds of Partnerships with experts in in these labs and shujang Lee was one of those partners and her closest relationship was with Peter dazek who's a British I think now American but the the president of a thing called Eco Health Alliance which was getting money from NIH and basically Eco Health Alliance was a pass-through organization and and you know over the years it was only about six hundred thousand dollars so almost all of her funding came from the Chinese government but there's a little bit that came from the United States and so she became their kind of leading expert and the the point of contact between the Wuhan Institute of virology and certainly Peter dazick but also uh also with with others and that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak I didn't mention that um I did mention that there were these virologists who had this fake certainty that they knew it came from nature and it didn't come from a lab and they called people like me conspiracy theorists just for raising that that possibility but when Peter dazek was organizing that effort in February of 2020 what he said is we need to Rally behind our Chinese colleagues and that the basic idea was um these International collaborations are under threat and I think it was because of that because Peter dazek's basically his his major contribution as a scientist was just tacking his name on work that xujang Lee had largely done um he was defending a lot certainly for himself and his organization so you think equal Health Alliance and Peter is less about money it's more about kind of um almost like Legacy because you're so attached to this work it's just not a human life so I I think so I mean I've been criticized for being actually I'm certainly a big critic of Peter daisig but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient I mean it's so easy to say oh somebody they're like an evil ogre and just trying to do evil and and cackling in their in their closet or whatever but I think for most of us even those of us who do terrible horrible things the story that we tell ourselves and we really believe is that we're doing the thing that we most believe in I mean I did my PhD dissertation on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia they genuinely saw themselves as idealists they they thought well we need to make radical change to build a better future and what they described as what they felt was Radical change was was a monstrous atrocities by us so the criticism here of Peter is a uh is that uh he was uh part of an organization that was kind of um well funding an effort that was an unsafe implementation of a biosafety level for laboratory well a few things so what he thought he was doing um was and and what he thought he was doing is itself highly controversial because there's one there that in 2011 um there were I know you've talked about this with other guests but in in 2011 uh there were the first published papers on this now Infamous gain of function uh research and and basically what they did both in in different labs and certainly in the United States in in Wisconsin and in in the Netherlands was they had a bird flu virus that was that was very dangerous but not massively uh transmissive and they they had a gain a function process through what's called serial passage which means basically passing advice like natural selection but forcing natural selection by just passing a virus through a different cell cultures and then selecting for what it is that you want so relatively easily they took this deadly but not massively transmissive virus and turned it into in a lab a deadly and transmissive virus and that showed that this is really dangerous and so there were at that point there was a huge controversy there were some people like Richard ebright and Mark lipsich at Harvard who were saying that this is really dangerous we're in the the idea that we need to create monsters to study monsters I think maybe even you have said that in the past it doesn't make sense because there's an unlimited number of monsters and so what are we going to do create an unlimited number of monsters and if we do that eventually the monsters are are going to get out then there was the Peter daisik camp and he got a lot of fun funding particularly from the United States who said well and and certainly Collins and fauci were supportive of this and they thought well there's a safe way to go out into the world to collect the world's most dangerous viruses and to poke and prod them um to figure out how they might mutate how they might become more dangerous with the goal of predicting future pandemics and that certainly never happened with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments and that largely never happened but that was so Peter daisak kind of epitomized that that second second approach um and as as you've talked about in the past in 2014 there was a funding moratorium in the United States and then in 2017 that was lifted it didn't affect the funding that went to the to the Eco Health Alliance um so when this happened in in the beginning and again coming back to Peter's motivations I don't think here's the best case scenario for for Peter I'm going to give you if what I imagine he was thinking and then I'll tell you what I actually think so I think here's what he's thinking um this is most likely a natural origin outbreak it it just like SARS won and again in Peter's hypothetical mind just like SARS one this is most likely a natural outbreak we need to have an International Coalition in order to fight it if we allow these political attacks to undermine our Chinese counterparts and the Trust In This release relationships that we've built over many years we're really screwed because they have the most local knowledge of these outbreaks and even though and and this guy gets a lot more complicated even though there are basic questions that anybody would ask and that shojang Li herself did ask about the origins of this pandemic even though Peter dazak and I'll mention this describe this in a moment had secret information that we didn't have that in my mind massively increases the possibility of a lab incident origin I Peter daisak would like to guide the public conversation in the direction where I think it should go and in the in support of the kind of international collaboration that I think is necessary that's a strong positive discussion because it's true that there's a lot of political BS and a lot of uh kind of just the bickering and lies as we've talked about and so it's very convenient to say you know what let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies and my favorite word misinformation uh and then because the way out from this serious pandemic is for us to work together so let's strengthen our Partnerships and everything else is just like noise yeah so let's and so then now I want to do my personal indictment of Peter dazek because that that's my view but I wanted to fairly because I think that that you know we all tell ourselves stories and and and I and and also when you're a science Communicator um you can't in your public Communications give every doubt that you have or every Nuance you kind of have to summarize things and so I think that he was again in this this benign interpretation trying to summarize in the way that he thought the the conversations should go here's my indictment of Peter daisak and I I I it's I feel like uh Brutus here but I I um I've not come here to praise um uh Peter daisak because um while Peter dazek was doing all of this and making all of these statements about well we pretty much know it's a natural origin and then there was this February 2020 Lancet letter where it turns out and we only knew this later that he was highly manipulative so he was recruiting all of these people he drafted the the infamous letter calling people like me uh conspiracy theorists he then wrote to people like Ralph Barrick and linfa Wang who are also very high profile virologists saying well let's not put our names on it so it doesn't look like we're doing it even though they were doing it he didn't disclose a lot of information that they had it was a strategic move so just uh in case people are not familiar Feb year 2020 Lance a letter was tldr is a lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory essentially yes so like with the authority of science not saying like it's highly likely saying it's obvious duh it's uh it's natural origin everybody else is just uh is everything else is just misinformation and look there's a bunch of really smart people that sign this therefore it's true yeah not only that so there were um the people whose 27 people signed that letter and then after president Trump cut funding uh to Eco Health Alliance then he organized 77 Nobel laureates to to have a public letter criticizing that but what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know is that in March of 2018 Eco Health Alliance in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of virology and others had applied for a 14 million dollar Grant um too DARPA which is kind of like the the VC side of the Venture Capital side of the of the defense department they're kind of where they do kind of Big Ideas uh by the way as a tiny tangent I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA they fund a lot of excellent robotics research and darp is incredible and among the things that they applied for is that we meaning Wuhan Institute of Urology is going to go and it's going to collect the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in southern China and then we as this as this group are going to genetically engineer these viruses to insert a furin cleavage site so I think when when everyone's now seen the image of the SARS cov2 virus it has these little Spike proteins these little things that that stick out which is why they call it a coronavirus within that Spike protein are these if you're on cleavage sites which basically help with the virus getting access into our cells and they're going to genetically engineer these furion cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses the cervical viruses and then and so then a year and a half later what do we see we see a bat Coronavirus with if you're in cleavage site unlike anything that we've ever seen before in that category of SARS like coronaviruses that well yes I mean it the the DARPA very correctly didn't support that application well that's actually let's like pause on that so for a lot of people that's like the Smoking Gun yeah okay let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA so I guess who's drafted the proposal is it yeah ego Health but the proposal is to do so Eco health is technically uh a U.S funded organization primarily and then the idea was to do work at Wuhan Institute of virology with yeah so it was with equal Health yes so Eco Health basically that um the one Institute of biology was going to go and they were going to collect these viruses and store them at we wanted to do but they're also going to do the actual test recording it's a really important Point according to their proposal the actual work was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barrick at the University of North Carolina who's probably the world's leading expert on uh Corona coronaviruses and so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work um we know I think quite well that Ralph Barrack's lab in part because it was not funded by by DARPA they didn't do that specific work what we don't know is well what work was done at the Wuhan Institute of virology because wiv was part of this proposal they had access to all of the plans they had done they had their own capacity and they had already done a lot of work in genetically engine genetically altering this exact category of viruses they had created a chimeric mixed viruses they had done they had mastered pretty much all of the steps in order to achieve this thing that they applied for funding with ecohealth to do and so the question is did the Wuhan Institute of virology go through with that research anyway and in my mind there's that's a very very real possibility it would certainly explain why they're giving no information and as you know I've been a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing which Dr Tedros created in the aftermath of the announcement of the world's first crispr babies and and it was just basically the exact same story so ho John Quay Chinese scientist it was not a first-tier scientist but a perfectly adequate second-tier scientist came to the United States learned all of these capacities went back to China and said well there's a much more permissive environment I'm gonna you know be a world leader I'm going to establish both myself and China so in every scientific field we're seeing this this same thing where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China so is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of virology with this exact game plan was doing it anyway do we possible we have no clue what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of virology it seems extremely likely that at the Wuhan Institute of virology and this is certainly the U.S government position there was the work that was being done in Dr shu's lab but that wasn't the whole wiv we know at least a coin in the United States government that there was the Chinese military the pla was doing work there were they doing this kind of work not to create a bio weapon but in order to understand these viruses maybe to develop vaccines and treatments it seems like a very very logical possibility and then so we know that the the one instead of virology had all of the skills we know that they were part of this proposal and then you have Peter dazak who knows all of this that at that time in February of 2020 we didn't know but then he comes swinging out of the gate saying anybody who's raising this possibility of a of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist I mean it really makes him look in my mind very very bad and yeah not to at least be somewhat open-minded on this because he knows all the details he knows that it's not zero percent I mean there's no way in his mind could you even argue that so it's potential because of the bias because of your focus I mean it could be the Anthony fauci masks thing whereas he knows there's some significant probability that this is happening but in order to preserve good relations with our Chinese colleagues we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative so it's not really lying it's doing the best possible action at this time to help the world not that this already happened yeah but that's how like yeah I I think it's quite likely that that was the story that he was telling himself but it's that that lack of transparency in my mind is fraudulent um that the word that we were struggling to understand something that we didn't understand and that I just think that people who possess that kind of information especially when um the existence like his the entire career of Peter daisak is based on U.S taxpayers there's a debt that comes with that and that debt is honesty and transparency and for all of us and our you talked about your girlfriend checking your phone for all of us being honest and and transparent in the most difficult times is really difficult if it were easy everybody would do it and that's I just feel that that uh Peter was the opposite of transparent and then went on the offensive and then um uh had the gall of joining I know we can talk about this this um highly compromised joint study process with the the international experts and their Chinese government counterparts and used that as a way of furthering this um in my mind fraudulent narrative um that it almost certainly came from natural Origins and um and the lab origin was extremely unlikely just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up because I do think in a in a kind of John Stewart way if you heard that uh a bit he yeah sort of kind of like common sense way the 2018 proposal to DARPA from equal Health Alliance and wuhanistan virology just seems like a bit of a Smoking Gun to me like that um so there's this excellent book that people should read uh called viral the search for the origin of covid-19 Matt Ridley and Alina Chan I think Alina is in MIT should probably look at the broad yeah at Broad Institute yeah yeah so she I heard her in an interview give this analogy of unicorns yeah and uh where basically somebody writes a proposal to add horns to Horses The Proposal is rejected and then a couple of years later a year later a unicorn shows up and then I was like yeah I is not your lord yeah it's like it's possible it's natural origin like we haven't detected a unicorn yet and this is the first time we've detected a unicorn or it could be this massive organization that was planning is fully equipped has like a history of being able to do this stuff as the world experts to do it has the funding has the motivation to add horns to horses and now unicorn shows up and they're saying nope yeah definitely definitely natural that connects to the to what you your first question of how do I get to my 85 percent and here's here's a summary of that of that answer and so it's what I said in my 60 Minutes uh interview a long time ago of all the Gin joints and all the towns in all the world the quote from from Casablanca and so of all the places in the world where we have an outbreak of a sars-like bat coronavirus it's not in the area of the natural habitat of the Horseshoe bats it's the one city in China with the first and largest level 4 virology lab which actually wasn't even using it they were doing level three and level two for this work where they had the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses um where they were doing aggressive experiments designed to make these scary viruses scarier where they had been part of an application to insert a fury cleavage site able to infect human cells and where when the outbreak happened we had a virus that was ready ready for action to infect humans and to this day better able to infect humans than any other species including including bats and then from day one there's this massive cover-up and then on top of that in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people there's basically no evidence for the natural origin hypothesis everything that I've described just now is circumstantial but there's a certain point of where you add up the circumstances and you see this seems pretty pretty likely I mean if we're getting to a hundred percent we are not at a hundred percent by any means there still is a possibility of a natural origin and if we find that great but from everything that I know that's how I get to my 85. and we'll talk about the why this matters in the political sense in the human sense in a science in the realm of science all of those factors but uh first as Nietzsche said let us look into the abyss and the games will play with monsters that is uh colloquially called gain of function research let me ask the kind of political sounding question which is how people usually phrase it did Anthony fauci uh fund gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of virology so it depends I mean I've obviously been very closely monitoring this I've spoken a lot about it I've written about it and it depends on I mean not to quote Bill Clinton but to quote Bill Clinton it depends on what the definition of is is and so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function and by gain a function there are lots of things like Gene therapies that are going to function but here what we mean is gain a function for uh pathogens able potentially able to create human pandemics but if you use the kind of Common Sense language and well then he probably did if you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH document and you read that language very narrowly I think you can make a credible argument that he that he did not there's a question though and and Francis Collins talked about that in his in his interview with you but then there's a question that we know from now that we have the information of the reports submitted by equal Health Alliance to the the NIH and some of which were late or not even delivered that some of this research was done on MERS Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome virus and if that was the case um there is a I think a colorable argument that that would be considered gain of function research even by the narrow language of that 2017 document but I but I I definitely think and I've said this repeatedly that Rand Paul can be right and Tony fauci can be right and the question is um what how are we defining gain a function and that's why I've always said the question in my mind isn't was it or wasn't it gain of function as if that's like a binary thing if if not grade and if yes guilty the question is just what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of virology what role if any did U.S government funding play in supporting that that work and what rights do we all have as as as human beings and as American citizens and taxpayers to get all of the relevant information about them so let's try to kind of dissect this so who frustrates you more Rand Paul or Anthony falchini's discussion or the discussion itself so for example gain a function is a term that's kind of more used uh just to mean making uh playing with viruses in the lab to try to develop more dangerous viruses is this uh kind of research um a good idea is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public in the political way that has been talked about is it okay that um us may have funded gain of function research elsewhere I mean it's kind of assumed uh just like with Bill Clinton there was very little discussion of uh I think correct me if I'm wrong but you know whether it's okay for a president male or female to have extramarital sex okay or is it okay for a president to have uh extramarital sex with people on their on his staff or her staff it was more the discussion of lying I think it was did you did you lie about having sex or not and in this gain of function discussion what frustrates me personally is there's not a deep philosophical discussion about whether we should be doing this kind of research and what kinds like what are the ethical lines research on animals at all those are fascinating questions instead it's a gotcha thing did you or did you not fund research and gain a function and did you fund it's almost like a bio weapon did you give money to China to develop this bio weapon that now attacked the rest of the world so I mean all all those things are pretty frustrating but is there um I think the thing you can untangle about Anthony fauci and gaining functional research in the United States and equal Health Alliance and Wuhan Institute virology that's kind of um that's clarifying what were the mistakes made sure so on gain function there actually has been a lot of of debate and I mentioned before in 2011 these first papers uh there was a big debate uh Mark lipsich who's formerly at Harvard now with the the US government working the president's office um he led a thing called the Cambridge group uh that was highly critical of this work but basically saying we're we're creating monsters they had the funding pause in 2014 and they spent three years putting together a framework and then they they lifted it in 2017. so we had a thoughtful conversation unfortunately it didn't work and I think that's where where we are now so I absolutely think um that there are real issues with the relationship between the United States government and Eco Health Alliance and through that Eco Health Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of virology and one issue is just essential transparency because as I see it it's most likely the case that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things to the Wuhan Institute of virology and again I'm sure that shojiang Li is not herself a monster I'm sure of that even though I've never met her but there are just a different set of pressures on people working in an authoritarian system than people who are working in other systems that doesn't mean it's entirely entirely different and so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give one dollar um to an organization and certainly a virology Institute where you don't have full access to to their records to their databases we don't know what work is is is happening there and I think that we need to have um that kind of full examination and that's why so I understand what what Dr fauci is doing is saying Hey What I Hear Dr fat you think what I hear from you Rand Paul is you're accusing me of starting this pandemic and you're using gain of function as a proxy for that and we have in when there are Senate hearings every Senator gets five minutes and the name of the game is to translate your five minutes into a clip that's going to run on the news and so I get that there is that kind of game gotcha um but I also think that uh the Dr fauci and the Nia the National Institute of allergy and infectious diseases and the NIH should have been more transparent um because I I think that in this day and age where there are a lot of people poking around and this whole story of coveted Origins uh we would not be where we are if it wasn't for a relatively small number of people and and I'm I'm part of there are two as I know two groups one is these internet sleuths known as drastic and a number of them are part of a group that I'm part of called it's it's not our official name but called the Paris group it's about two dozen experts um uh around the world but centered around some some very high level French academics so we've all been digging uh and meeting with each other regularly since uh since last year and our governments across the board certainly China but including the United States haven't been as transparent as they as they they need to be so there's definitely mistakes were made on all sides and that's why for me from day one I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China but we have to look at ourselves we did not get this right so to you I'm just gonna put Rand Paul aside here he politician playing political games it's very frustrating but it is what it is on all sides Anthony fauci you think should have been more transparent and um maybe more eloquent in expressing the the complexity of all of this the uncertainty in all of this yeah and and I get that it's really hard to do that because let's say you you have one you speak a paragraph and it's got four sentences and one of those sentences is the thing that's going to be turned into Twitter and let me put it back I'll get really so um I'll try not to be emotional about this but I I've heard uh Anthony fauci a couple of times now say that he represents science I know what he means by that he means in this political bickering all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people he represents science but words matter and this isn't Just Clips I mean maybe I'm distinctly aware of that doing this podcast like yeah I talked for like hundreds of hours now maybe over a thousand hours but like I'm still careful with the words like I'm trying not to be an asshole and I'm aware when I'm gonna ask when I'll apologize for it uh like if the words I represent science left my mouth which they very well could I would sure as hell be apologizing for it and not enough because I got in trouble I would just feel bad about saying something like that and even that little phrase I represent science no Dr fauci you do not represent science I love science the the millions of scientists that inspired me to get into it is to fall in love with the scientific method in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science that Anthony fall she does not represent he's one I believe great scientist of millions he does not represent anybody uh he's just one scientist and I think the greatness of a scientist is best exemplified in humility because the scientific method basically says like you're you're like standing before the fog the mystery of it all and like slowly chipping away at the mystery and the it's it's like it's embarrassing it's uh humiliating how little you know that's the experience so the the great scientists have to have humility to me and especially in their communication they have to have humility and I mean I don't know and some of it is also Wars matter because you have to like great leaders have to have the Poetry of action they have to be bold and Inspire action across millions of people but you also have to uh through that poetry of words Express the complexity of the uncertainty you're operating under be humble in the face of not being able to predict the future or understand the past or really know what's the right thing to do but we have to do something and through that you have to be a great leader that inspires action and some of that is just words and he chose words poorly I I mean I so I I'm all torn about this and then there's politicians they're taking those words and magnifying them and playing games with them and of course that's a disincentive for the people who do the the scientific leaders that step into the Limelight to say any more words so they kind of become more conservative with the the words they use I mean it just becomes a giant mess but I think the solution is to ignore all of that and to be transparent to be honest to be vulnerable and uh the the express the full uncertainty of the what you're operating under to present all the possible actions and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past I mean there's something even if you're not directly responsible for those mistakes taking responsibility for them is uh as a way to win people over like I don't think leaders realize this often in in the modern age in the internet age they can see through your bullshit and it's really inspiring when you take ownership so to do the thought experiment like in public do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak and then lay out all the funding the equal Health Alliance all the incredible signs going on at the uh Wuhan Institute of virology and the NIH lay out all the possible ethical problems lay out all the possible um mistakes that could have been made and say like this could have happened and if this happened here's the best way to respond to it and to prevent it in the future and just lay all that complexity out I mean I wish we would have uh seen that and I have hope that this conversation conversations like it your work and books on this topic will inspire young people today when they become in the Anthony fauci's role to be much more transparent and much more humble and all all those kinds of things that this is just a relic of the past when there's a person no offense to me in a suit that has to stand up and speak with Clarity and certainty I mean that's just the relic of the past is uh it is my hope but do you mind if I ever agree with a great deal of of what you said and I and I it's it's really unfortunate uh that our certainly the Chinese government as I said before our government um wasn't as transparent as I feel they should have been particularly in the early days of the pandemic and particularly with regard to the issue of pandemic Origins I mean we know that that Dr fauci was on calls with people like um Christian Anderson and Scripps and others in those early days raising questions is this an engineered virus there were a lot of of questions and it's kind of sad I mean as I mentioned before I've I've been um one I mean and certainly there were were others but there weren't a lot of us of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic were raising questions about hey not so fast um here and I and I launched my web website on pandemic origins in April of last year April 2020 it got a huge amount of attention and actually my friend Matt pottinger who is the Deputy National Security advisor when he was reaching out to people in the U.S government and in Allied government saying hey we should look into this the what he was sending them was my website it wasn't some U.S government information and so by the way people should still go to the website you keep getting keep updating it and it's it's an incredible resource well thank you thank you jamiemensel.com um and it's really unfortunate that our governments and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020 weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue people were hiding behind this kind of false uh consensus and and I'm critical of many people even when I heard Francis Collins uh interview with you I just felt well he wasn't as balanced on the issue of of covet Origins certainly Dr fauci could have in his conversation with Rand Paul it wasn't even a conversation but in some process in the aftermath could have laid things out a bit better he did say in Francis Collins did say that we don't know the origins and that was a shift um uh and we need to have an investigation so now um but having said all of that I do kind of one I have tremendous respect for Dr fauci for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS I mean I have been vaccinated with the moderna vaccine uh Dr fauci was a big part of the story of getting us these vaccines that have saved millions and millions of of lives and so I I don't think I mean there's a lot to this story and then the second thing is it's really hard to be a public health expert because you have your mission is public health and so and you have to if you are leading with all of your uncertainty um it's a really hard way to do things and so like even now like if I go to CVS and I and I get a Tylenol somebody has done a calculation of how many people will die from taking Tylenol and they say well we can live with that and that's why we have regulation and so all of us are doing kind of summaries and then we have people in public health who are saying well we've summed it all up and you should do X you should get your kids you know vaccinated for measles you should not drive your car at 100 miles an hour you you should don't drink lighter fluid whatever these these things are and we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines and yet now our information world is so fragmented that if you if you're not being honest about something that something material someone's going to find out and it's going to undermine your credibility and so I agree with you that that there is a greater requirement for transparency now maybe there always has been but there's an even greater requirement for it now because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly and that you're saying well here's what I know and this is based on what I know here are the conclusions that I draw but if it's just and and again I I don't I don't think the words I'm science or whatever it was are are the right words but if it's just you know trust me because of who I am I don't think that that flies anywhere anymore can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview that I did if you got a chance to hear that part I think in the beginning we talk about the loud leak um what are your thoughts about his response basically saying it's worthy of an investigation but I mean I don't know how you would interpret it I see it's funny because I I heard it in the moment as is great for the head of NIH to be open-minded on this yeah but then the internet and uh Mr Joe Rogue and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that yeah well that's too late and too little yeah so first let me say I've been on Joe's podcast twice and I love the guy which doesn't mean that I agree with everything he does or says um and on this issue and I'm normally a pretty calm and measured guy and when you're just out running with your airpods on and you start yelling into the wind in Central Park nobody else knows why you're yelling but whether you had such a moment I had a moment with Collins and again Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously I mean I live a big chunk of My Life um living in in the world of genetics and biotech and my book hacking Darwin is about the future of human genetic engineering and his work on the Human Genome Project and so many other things have been fantastic and I'm a huge fan of the work of uh of NIH and he was right to say that the Chinese government hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it but then you asked him well how will we know and then his answer was we need to find the intermediate host remember I said before and so that made it clear that he thought well we should have an investigation but it comes from nature and we just need to find that whatever it is that intermediate animal host in the wild and that'll tell us the story so here we had the conclusion in mind and they're just waiting for the evidence to support the conclusion that was my feeling I felt like he was and that was frustrating in general but he was tilting and I again I used my your first question was where do I fall he was like I'm 85 uh percent or whatever it is 80 75 90 whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident it made it feel that he was 90 10 in the other direction which is still means that he's open-minded about the possibility and that's why in my view every single person who talks about this issue meaning the right answer in my view is we don't know conclusively um in my then this is my personal view the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor of a lab incident origin but that could immediately shift with additional information we need transparency but we should come together and absolutely condemning the outrageous cover-up carried out by the Chinese government which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation into pandemic Origins we have if you use the The Economist numbers 15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic and I believe that the actions of the Chinese government are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead they're insulting the families and the billions of people around the world who have suffered from this totally avoidable uh pandemic and whatever the origin the fact the criminal cover-up carried out by the Chinese government which continues to this day but most intensely in in the first months following the outbreak that's the reason why we have so many uh so many dead and certainly as I was saying before I in a small number of others have been carrying this flame since early last year but it's kind of crazy uh that our governments haven't been uh demanding it and we can talk about the World Health Organization uh process which was deeply compromised in the beginning now it's become much much uh better but again it was the pressure of Outsiders who that played such an important role in shifting our national and international institutions and while that's better than nothing it would have been far better if our governments and and international organizations had done the right thing from the story if I could just uh make a couple of comments about uh Joe Rogan so uh there's a bunch of people in my life who have inspired me who have taught me a lot who I even look up to the many of them are alive most of them are dead I I want to say that uh so Joe said a few critical words about the conversation with Francis Collins most of it offline with a lot of great conversations about it uh some he said publicly and um he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions in an interview is not my strong suit and I really want to kind of respond to that which I did privately as well but publicly to say that uh Joe is 100 right on that but that doesn't mean that always has to be the case and that is definitely something I want to work on because most of the conversations I have I want to see the the beautiful ideas in people's minds but there's some times where you have to ask the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas and um it's hard to do it's a skill and and Joe is very good at this he says the way he put it in in his criticisms and he does this in his conversations which is whoa whoa whoa stop stop stop stop stop there's a kind of sense like did you just say what you said let's let's make sure we get to the bottom we clarify what you mean because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas can be said as a as a quick aside in a sentence like it's nothing but it could be everything and you want to make sure you catch that and you you talk about it and not the not as a gotcha not as a kind of way to destroying other human being but to reveal something profound and that's definitely something I want to work on I also want to say that uh as you said you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things so for a long time Joe was somebody that I was just a fan of listened to he's now a good friend and I would say we disagree more than we agree and I love doing that and uh but at the same time I learned from that so it's like a duel like nobody in this world can tell me what to think but I think everybody has a lesson to teach me I think that's a good way to approach it like I whenever somebody has words of criticism I assume they're right and walk around with that idea to really sort of empathize with that idea because there's a lesson there and oftentimes my understanding of of a topic becomes uh is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced and much more a much richer for the that kind of empathetic process but definitely I do not allow anybody to tell me what to think whether it's Joe Rogan or Theodore Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents or um the the like the proverbial girlfriend which I don't actually have like all but she's still busting my balls exactly exactly in my imagination I have a girlfriend in Canada yeah that I have to imagine it exactly uh imagining conversation I still want to mention that but also I I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see this I'd love to also mention this um Twitter feud between two other interesting people which is uh Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris or Sam Harris and others in general and uh it kind of breaks my heart that these two people I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues let's let's put covet aside because people are very emotional about this topic I mean I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent whether you agree with them or not and I always learn something from their conversations and they are legitimately or have been for long time friends and it's a little bit heartbreaking to me to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore and there's occasional Jabs on Twitter and um I hope that changes I hope that changes in general for covid that covet brought out the the I would say the most emotional sides of people the worst in people and um I think there hasn't been enough love and empathy and compassion and to see two people from whom I've learned a lot whether it's Eric was time Brett Weinstein Sam Harris you can criticize them as much as you want their ideas as much as you want but if if you're not sufficiently open-minded to admit that you have a lot to learn from their conversations um I think you're not being honest and so I I do hope they have those conversations and I hope we can kind of I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post covid of of relationships of conversations and I think empathy and love can help a lot there and this is also just a I I talked to uh Sam privately but this is also a public call out to to put a little bit more uh love in the world um yeah and and for these difficult conversations to to happen because um Brett Weinstein could be very wrong about a bunch of topics here around covid but he could also be right and the only way to find out is to have those conversations because there's a lot of people listening to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein and uh if you go into these uh silos where you just keep telling each other the uh that you're the possesses of Truth and nobody else is the possessor of Truth what starts happening is you both lose track or the capability of arriving at the truth because nobody's in the possession of the truth so anyway there's just a call out that we should have a little bit more conversation a little bit more love totally agree and and both of those guys are guys who I uh who I respect and as you know uh Brett and again as I mentioned they're just a handful of us who were the early people raising questions about about the origins pandemic right he was there also talking yeah so people have heard him speak quite a bit about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff but he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on yeah exactly and so but I completely agree with you that we don't have to agree with everybody but it's great to have healthy conversations that's how how we grow and absolutely um we live in in a world where we're kind of if we're not careful pushed into these little information pockets and certainly on social media I have different parts of my of my life one is focusing on issues of um of coveted Origins and then I have genetics and biotechnology and then I have which maybe we'll talk about later one shared World which is about how do we build a safer future and when I say critical things like the Chinese government we have to demand a full investigation into pandemic Origins this is an outrage then it's really popular when I say let's build a better future for everyone in peace and love it's like wow three people liked it and one was one was my mother and so I just feel like we need to build we used to have that connectivity just built in um because we had these Town squares and and you couldn't get away from them now we can get away from them so the I so engaging with people who are of a different background is really essential I mean I'm on Fox News sometimes you know three four times a week and I wouldn't in my normal life I'm not watching that much of um uh Fox News or even television more more generally but I just feel like if I just speak to people who are very similar to me it'll be comfortable um but what what have I contributed so I think we really have to have those those kinds of of conversations and and recognize that at the end of the day most people want to be happy they want to live in a better world they maybe have different paths to get there but if we just break into camps that don't even connect with each other that's a much more dangerous world let's dive back into the difficult pool yes just like you said in the English-speaking World it seems popular almost easy to to uh demonize China the Chinese government I should say but even China like there's this kind of gray area that people just fall into and I'm really uncomfortable with that perhaps because in my mind in my heart and my blood or Echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension it it feels like we almost desire conflict so we see demons when there is none so I'm a little like cautious to demonize but at the same time you have to be honest so it's like uh it honest with the demons that are there and honest when they're not um this is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts so let's keep talking about China a little bit from different angles so let's return to um the director of the center of emerging infectious disease at the Wuhan Institute of virology XI jangli colloquially referred to as Batwoman so do you think she's lying yes do you think she's being forced to lie yes I've known a bunch of virologists in private and public conversation that respect her as a human being as a scientist human being um sorry as a scientist yeah not a human being because I think they don't know the human they know the scientists and they respect for a lot of the scientists yeah I respect her I've never met her and we had one exchange which I'll mention in a second in a virtual Forum but I I do respect her I actually I think that she is somebody who has tried to do the right thing she was one of the heroes of tracking down the origins of of SARS one and that was a major uh contribution um but as we we talked about earlier it's it's a different thing living being a scientist or really kind of anything it's different being one of those people in an authoritarian Society um than it is being in a different type of society and so when shujang Lee said that the reason the uh the wiv database was taken offline in September 19 was because of computer hacks I don't think that's the story I don't think she thinks that's uh that's the story when I asked her in March of 2021 March of this year in a Rutgers online Forum when I asked her whether the Chinese military had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of virology in any way and she said absolutely not paraphrasing I think she was lying do I think that she had the ability to say well either one yes but I can't talk about it it or I know there are a lot of things that are happening at this institute that I don't know about and that could be one uh could she have said um that the uh the Personnel at the 100 Institute of virology have all had to go through classification training um to so that they can know about what can and and can't be said like she could have said all those things but she couldn't say all of those things and so um and I think that's why so many at least in my view so many people uh in the certainly in the Western World got this story wrong from the beginning because if you're only prism was the science and you just assumed this is a science question to be left to the scientists shujang Lee is is just like any scientist working in Switzerland or Norway the Chinese government isn't interfering in in any way and we can trust them that would lead you down One path uh in my view the reason why I I progressed as I did is I felt like I had two keys I had one key as I live in this in the Science World through my work with who and my books and and things like that but I also have another part of my life in the world of geopolitics as a an Asia quote-unquote expert and former National Security Council official and other things and I felt for me I needed both keys to open that that door uh but if I only had the science key I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion that I have but if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion well it's coming from China it must be that the government is guilty like that wouldn't help either I wonder what's in her mind whether it's fear or habit because I think um a lot of people in the former Soviet Union sector Noble it's not really fear it's almost like a momentum it's like um it's like the reason I I showed up to this interview wearing clothes as opposed to being naked it's like all right it's like it's just all of us are doing the right the clothes thing although you there was a startup years ago called Naked News did you ever hear about that they just would read the exact news but naked no they would after each story they'd take something off until the end they were they were I don't think it's a good idea for a podcast they have an IPO stay tuned next time I'm with uh Michael Mouse yeah okay um so what do you think I mean because the reason I asked that question is how do we kind of take steps to improve without any kind of revolutionary action you could say we need to uh Inspire the Chinese people to elect uh to to sort of revolutionize the system from within um but like who are we to suggest that because we have our flaws too we should be working on our flaws as well and so but at the individual scientists level what are the small acts of rebellion that can be done how can we improve this well I don't know about small acts of of rebellion but I'll try to answer your question from a few a few different perspectives so right now actually as we speak um there is a special session of the World Health assembly going on in the world Health assembly is the governing authority over the World Health Organization where it's represented by States and territories 194 of them tragically not including Taiwan because of of the Chinese government's assistance but they're now beginning a process of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty to try to have a better process for responding to crises exactly like like we're in but unfortunately for the exact same reasons that we have failed I mean we had the a similar process after the first SARS we set up what we thought was the best available system and it has totally failed here and it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies of the Chinese government system we are suffering from a pandemic that exists because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese State and that's why on one hand I totally get this impulse what we do it our way they do it their way who's to say that that one way is better and certainly right now in the United States we're at each other's throats we have a hard time getting anything meaningful done um and I'm sure there are people who are saying well that model looks looks appealing but just as people could look to the United States and say well because the United States has such a massive reach what we do domestically has huge implications for the rest of the world they become stakeholders in our in our politics and that's why I think for a lot of years people have just been looking at U.S politics not because it's interesting but because the decisions that we make have big implications for their lives the same is true for ours you could say that the lack of of civil and political rights in China is the the I mean it's up to the Chinese not even people because they have no say but to their uh their government and they weren't democratically elected but that they are recognized as as the government but some significant percentage of the 15 million people now dead from covid are dead because in the earliest days following the outbreak whatever whatever the origin the voices of people sounding the alarm were suppressed that the Chinese government had an just like in Chernobyl the Chinese government had a greater incentive to lie to the International Community than to tell to tell the truth and everybody was incentivized to pretty much do the wrong thing and so that's I mean that's why I think one of the big messages of this pandemic is that all of our Fates are tied to everybody else's Fates and so while we we can say and should say well let's focus on our own communities and our and our countries we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere Gasco a weird uh question so I'm gonna do a few podcast interviews with uh interesting people in Russia in the Russian language because I could speak Russian and a lot of those people have you know are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats um do you think it's possible to interview XI Jin Li do you think it's possible to interview somebody like her or anyone in the Chinese government I think not um and I think the reason is because I think they would one be uncomfortable being in any environment where really unknown questions will be uh will be asked and I actually I was so as you know on this topic the Chinese as I mentioned earlier the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists they can't speak without prior government approval xujing Lee has been able to speak and she's spoken in a number of forums I mentioned uh this Rutgers event what was the nature of that Forum it was it was it was all of them were kind of science conversations um about about the pandemic including the uh the origins issue um but I think that she in in her response to my question it was kind of this funny thing so they had this event for uh for organized by Rutgers and I went on there was an online event on Zoom um but I got on there and I just realized it was very poorly organized like normally the controls that you would have about who gets to chat to who who gets to ask questions none of them were were set and so I kind of couldn't believe it I was just sitting at home in my in my neon green fleece and I just started sending sending chat messages to shojang Lee so you could anybody could anybody could it was insane and so I but I thought wow this is incredible and so then it was unclear who got to ask questions and so I was like posting questions and then I was sending chats to the organizers of the event saying I really have a question um and first they said well you can submit your questions and we'll have um submitted questions and then if we have time we'll open up so I just I mean I just thought what the hell I just sent messages to everybody and then the event was already done they were 15 minutes over time and then they say all right we have time just for one question and it's uh Jamie Metzel and like I'm sitting there in my running clothes like I wasn't I was like multitasking and I heard my name and so I I went diving back and I asked this this question um about did you know all of the work that was happening at the Wuhan Institute of uh virology not just uh your work um and can you confirm um that U.S intelligence has said that the military um played a role uh it was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Urology do you deny that the Chinese military was involved in any way with the Wuhan Institute of virology and as I said before she said this is you know crazy absolutely not it got it actually got that one question got covered in the media because it was like I think an essential question but I just think that since then to my knowledge she's not been in any public forums but that's why most people would be shocked that to date there has been no comprehensive International investigation into pandemic Origins there is no whistleblower provision so if you're a my guess is there are at least tens maybe hundreds of people in China who have relevant information about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified and don't dare share it and let's just say somebody wanted to get that information out to send it somewhere there's no official address the who doesn't doesn't have that nobody has that and so I would love him you may as well ask I don't think it's likely that they'll be a yes but it could well be that there are defectors who will will want to speak so let me also push back as I do so one I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing because I've uh talked so that I've understand Russian culture I think or not understand this is this uh I don't I don't understand basically anything in this world but I mean I I hear the music that uh that is Russian culture and I enjoy it I don't hear that music for Chinese culture it's just not something I've experienced so it's a beautiful Rich complex culture and uh from my sense it seems distant to me like I it like whenever I look even like we mentioned offline Japan and so on I probably don't even understand Japanese culture I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts my whole life but even that it's just so distant people who've lived in Japan Foreigners for like 20 years say the exact same thing yeah it makes you sad it makes you sad because I can't I will never be able to fully appreciate the literature the conversations the the people the little humor and the subtleties and those are all essential to understand even this cold topics of science because all of that is important to understand so that's a question for me if you think language barrier is a thing but the other the other thing I just want to kind of comment on is um the is the criticism of Journalism that uh somebody like uh XI jang li or even XI Jiang Pang so just anybody in China is very skeptical to have really conversations with anybody in the western media yeah because it it's like what are the odds that they will uh try to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person and honestly just this is a harsh criticism I apologize but I kind of mean it is the journalists that have some of these high profile conversations often don't do the work they come off as not very intelligent and I know they're intelligent people they have not done the research they have not come up and like read a bunch of books they have not even read the Wikipedia article meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize to try to understand the culture of the people all the complexities all the different ideas in the spaces all do all the incredible not all but some of the incredible work that you've done initially like that you have to do that work to earn the right to have a deep real conversation with uh with some of these folks and it's just disappointing to me that journalists often don't do that work yeah so on that just first I completely agree with you I mean there is just an incredible beauty in Chinese culture and I think all cultures but certainly China has such a deep and Rich history amazing literature and art and and just human human beings I mean I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government I'm very vociferous about the really genocide and xinjiang the absolute effort to destroy a Tibetan culture the the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong um incredibly illegal efforts to seize basically the entire South China Sea and I could go on and on and on but Chinese culture is fantastic and I can't speak to every technical field but just in terms of having journalists and I'll speak to American journalists people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time to live in China to learn the language learn the culture Peter himself who's maybe one of our best journalists covering China from a soul level he was kicked out of of China so it's it's very very uh difficult so yeah it's really and so for me you talked about about my website on pandemic origin so when I launched it I had it I'm not a Chinese speaker but I had the entire site translated into Chinese and I have it up on my uh on my on my website just because I felt like well if if somebody I mean the the the great firewall makes it very very difficult for people in China to access access that kind of of information but I figured if somebody gets there and they want to have it in their own their own language but it's hard because the Chinese government is is represented by these quote-unquote wolf Warriors which is it's like these basic Ruffians and I personally was condemned by name um by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign Ministry from the podium in Beijing and so it's it's really hard because I I absolutely think um the American people and the Chinese people I mean maybe all people but we have so much in common I mean yes China is an ancient civilization but they kind of wiped out their own civilization in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution they burned their Scrolls they smashed their artworks and so it's a very young Society kind of like America is a is a young Society so we have a lot in in common um and if we just kind of got out of our own ways we could have a beautiful relationship but there's a lot of things that are happening certainly the United States feels responsible to defend the post-war International order that that past Generations helped build and I'm a certainly a certain believer in that and China is challenging that and the Chinese government and and they've shared that with that view with the Chinese people feel that they haven't been adequately respected and now they're building a massive nuclear nuclear Arsenal and and all these other things to try to position themselves in the world with an articulated goal of being the lead country in the world and that puts them at odds with the United States so there's there are a lot of real reasons that we need to be honest about for division but if that's all we focus about focus on if we don't say that there's another side of this story that brings us together we'll put ourselves on an inevitable Glide path to a terrible outcome what do you make of uh Xi Jinping what uh so two questions so one in general and two more on lab leak and his meeting with uh our President Biden uh in discussion of uh lab leak yeah so I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal of articulated of establishing China as the lead country in in the world um by the 100th anniversary of the the founding of the of the modern Chinese State and it's ruthless and it's strategic there's a great book called The Long game by Rush Doshi who's actually now working in the in the White House about this goal and and are pretty clearly articulated goal to subvert this the post-war International order and and in China's interest in every maybe every leader wants to organize the world around their interests but I feel that his vision of what that entails um is not one that I think is shareable for the rest of the world I mean the strength of the United States with all of our flaws is particularly in that that post-war period we we put forward a model that was desirable to a lot of people certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea um doesn't mean it's perfect the United States is is deeply flawed as articulated to date I don't think um most people and countries and would like to live in a sino-centric world um and so I certainly as I mentioned before I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing the incredible brutality in xinjiang in Tibet and um and and elsewhere yeah the censorship one is it gives me a lot of trouble on the science realm and just in journalism and just the world that prevents us from having conversations with each other do you know about the the Winnie the Pooh thing yes I mean it's ridiculous it's so so to me that's such a good illustration of a censorship being petty but censorship has to be Petty because the goal of censorship maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union is to get into your head like if it's just censorship like you you say down with the state and like you can't say that but you can say all the other things up to that point eventually people will feel empowered to say down with the state and so I think the goal of this kind of authoritarian censorship is to turn you into the sensor and so the the self-censorship because they almost have to have you think well if I'm going to make any criticism um maybe they're going to come and get me so it's it's safer to not do I mean I've traveled through North Korea pretty extensively and I've seen that in its ultimate form but well that's what they're trying to do in China too yeah so it's for people who are not familiar such a clear illustration of just the pettiness of censorship and leaders the corrupting nature of power but uh there's a meme of Xi Jinping with I guess uh Barack Obama and uh the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh in that picture and that was uh the presidency champagne looks like Winnie the Pooh and I guess that became because that got censored or like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored all across China Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero that represents freedom of speech and and so on but it's just such a absurd because because we spent all so much time in this conversation talk about the censorship that's a little bit more understandable to me which is like we messed up and it wasn't maybe it's almost understandable errors that happen in the progress of science I mean you could always uh argue that uh there's a lot of mistakes along the way and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake you can argue that same way for the Chernobyl but those are sort of understandable and difficult topics and Winnie the Pooh but in your message it shows both sides of the story I mean one how Petty authoritarian censors have to be and that's why the messaging from the Chinese government is so consistent no matter who you are you have to be careful what you say and that's why it's the story of uh feng shui the tennis player she dared raised her voice in an individual way Jack ma the richest man in China had a minor criticism of the Chinese government uh he had you know basically disappeared from the public eye Fon bing bing who's like one of the the leading Chinese movie stars um she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished and so the message is no matter who you are no matter what level if you don't mind everything you say and you could lose everything I'm pretty hopeful optimistic about a lot of things and so for me if the Chinese government stays with his current structure I think what I hope they start fixing is the the freedom of speech but they can't I mean the thing is if they open up freedom of speech really in a meaningful way they can't maintain their current form of of government and it's it's connected as I was saying before to the origins of the pandemic and if my hypothesis was right that was the big choice that they that the the national government had do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic do we deliver a message that transparency is required public transparency is required from local officials if they do that the entire system collapse pretty much everybody in China has a relative who has died as a result of the actions of the Communist Party particularly in the Great Leap Forward it's nearly 50 million people died as a result of Mao's disastrous policies and yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square and it's on the money me because maintaining that fiction is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state if people were allowed just say what you want do you really think Mao was such a great guy even though your own relatives are dead as a as a result do you really buy even on this um this uh this story that China did nothing wrong even though in the earliest days of the pandemic um these two at least Chinese scientists themselves courageously um issued a a pre-print paper that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted saying well this looks like this comes from one of the Wuhan Labs that we're studying like if you if you opened up that window I think that the the Chinese government would would not be able to continue in its current forms and that's why they crack down at Tiananmen Square that's why with Feng Shui the tennis player if they had let her accuse somebody from the Communist Party of sexual assault and they said okay now people you can use social media and you can have your metoo moment and let us know who in the Chinese Communist party May or your boss in a business has assaulted you just like in every society I'm sure there's tons of women who've been sexually assaulted manipulated abused by by men and so I I certainly hope that there can be that kind of opening um but if I were an authoritarian dictator that's the thing I would be most afraid of yeah dictator perhaps but uh I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech so I think you can maintain control over the freedom of press first so control the Press more but let the the lower levels sort of open up YouTube Right open up like where individual citizens can make content I mean there's a lot of benefits to that and then uh you know from an authoritarian perspective you can just say that's misinformation that's uh conspiracy theories all those kinds of things but at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech at the level of the individual citizen that's good for entrepreneurship for the development of ideas of exchange of ideas all that kind of stuff I just think that increased the GDP of the country yeah but I think there's a lot of benefits I feel like you can still play we're playing some like dark thoughts here but I I feel like you could still play The Game of Thrones still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry like I think just like with North Korea is a good example of where cracking down too much can completely destroy your country I think there there's some balance you can strike in your evil mind and still maintain authoritarian control over the country obviously I'm uh it's not obvious but I'm a big supporter of freedom of speech I mean it seems to work really well I don't know what the failure case is for freedom of speech are probably we're experiencing them with Twitter and like where the nature of Truth is being completely kind of uh flipped upside down but it seems like on the whole ability to uh uh defeat lies with more in not through censorship but through uh more conversations more information is is the right way to go can I tell you a little story true stories about North Korea so a number of years ago I was invited to be part of a small six-person delegation advising the government of North Korea on how to establish special economic zones because other countries have used these these secs as a way of of building their economies and when I was invited I thought well maybe there's an opening and I certainly believe in in that so we flew to China across the border uh into North Korea and then we were met by our our partners from the North Korean development organization and then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks visiting all these sites for um where they were intended to create these special economic zones and in each site they had their their local officials and they had a a map and they showed us where everything that was going to be built and the other people who were like really technical experts on how to set up a special economic zone they were asking questions well like should you put the entrance over here or shouldn't you put it over there and what if there's flooding and I kept asking just these basic questions like what do you think you're going to do here why do you think you can be competitive do you know anything about who you're competing against are you empowering your workers to innovate because everybody else is going to be so at the end of the trip they flew us to Pyongyang and they put us in this it looked kind of like the United Nations they probably had 500 people there and I was and I gave a speech to them I obviously it was in English and it was translated and I and I figure you know they I've come all this way I'm just going to be honest if they arrest me for being honest that that's on them and I said you know I'm here because I believe we can never give up hope that we always have to try to connect I'm also here because I think that um you can North Korea connecting to the world economy is an important first uh First Step but having visited all of your special economic zone sites and having met with all of your or many of your officials I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding because you're you're trying to sell into a global market but you need to have Market information um that and I gave examples of GE and other their others that the Innovation can't only happen at one place and if you want Innovation to happen um from the people who are doing this you have to empower them they have to have access they have to have voice I mean nobody um uh I mean they they the people after they kind of had to condemn me because what I was saying was was challenging so I certainly agree with you and then just one side story of them that night um and it was just kind of bizarre because North Korea is it's so desperately poor but they were trying to impress us and so we had these I mean embarrassingly uh Sumptuous Banquets and so for our final dinner that night it really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast in the I mean it was like China and waiters and tuxedos and they had this beautiful dinner and then afterwards because we'd now spent two weeks with these our North Korean Partners they brought out this karaoke machine and then our North Korean counterparts they sang songs to us in in Korean and so I said well we want to reciprocate do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine it's North Korea obviously they they didn't but there was I said well I have an idea and so there was one of the women who'd been part of the North Korean delegation um she was able just to to play the piano just like you could hum a tune and she could play it on the piano and so I um I said all right here's this tune which I whispered in her ear when I give you the signal just play this tune over and over and so I got the these I mean there were the six of us and maybe 20 North Koreans and I we are all in the circle Sarah everybody hold hands and then put your right just try put your right foot in front of your left and then left foot in front of the right going sideways and I said all right hit it and she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila and I think it was the first and only Hora that they've ever done in in North Korea I survived was this reported or no it was not oh no yeah that huge if they had free YouTube yeah let's return to the beginning and it just patient zero it's kind of uh always incredible to think that there's one human at which it all started who do you think was patient zero do you think it was uh somebody that worked at uh Wuhan Institute of virology do you think it was um there was a leak of some other kind that uh led to the infection like what do we know because there's this December 8th slash December 16th case of um maybe you can describe what that is and then there's like uh what uh what's his name uh Michael willby has has a has a nice timeline I'm sure you have a timeline but here's a nice timeline that puts the average at like November or something um like 18th and November 16th that's the average estimate for uh when the patient zero got infected when the first human infection happened yeah so the just two points one is it may be that there's infecty zero and patient zero like it could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic because we know there's a lot of people who are asymptomatic and then there's the question of well who is patient zero meaning the first person to present themselves in some kind of health facility where that diagnosis could be made so can we actually look on that definition yeah so is that to you a good definition of patient zero what okay there's a bunch of stuff here because this virus is weird uh so one is who gets infected one who is infectious or the first person infect others yeah so so I think who shows up to hospital yeah so I think that's why that's why I'm calling the first person to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with covid-19 I'm calling that person patient zero um there's also the there's somewhere the first person to be infected and that person maybe never showed up in a hospital because maybe they were symptomatic and and never get sick so got sick so let me start with what I'm calling infect t zero here are some options I talked before about you know some person who was a villager in some remote Village it's it's almost impossible to imagine but possible to imagine because strange things happen um and that person you know somehow gets to Wuhan by the way just the steel man that argument there's not an argument it's a statement but strange things happen yeah all the time no I agree it doesn't mean that logic doesn't apply and probabilities don't apply but we also I mean in general principle everyone if we were honest should be agnostic about everything like I think I'm Jamie but is there a 0.01 chance or 001 chance that I'm not but could be I mean there's a large number of people arguing about the meaning of the word I in that eyes Jamie so exactly what is conscious exactly exactly so we I mean we could spend another three hours going into that one so one possibility is there's some remote villager another possibility is there's some somehow bizarrely uh there are these infected animals that come from Southern China most likely they all maybe there's only one of them that's infected which how could that possibly be um and it's only sent to Wuhan it's not sent anywhere else uh to any of the markets there or whatever and then maybe somebody in the market is infected that's one remote possibility but a possibility another is that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of virology go down to Southern China we didn't we haven't talked about it yet but in 2012 um there were six miners were sent into a copper mine in southern China and Yunnan Province all of them got very sick with what now appear like covid-19 like symptoms half of them died um blood samples um from them uh were taken to the Wuhan Institute of virology and elsewhere and then after that um there the there were multiple uh site visits to that mine collecting viral samples that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of virology including included among those samples were was this now Infamous ratg-13 virus which is among the genetically closest viruses to SARS cov2 there were other nine other or eight other viruses that were collected from that mine that were presumably very similar to that and again we have no access to the information about those and many of the other most almost all of the other viruses so could it be that one of the people who was sent from the one is to the virology or the Wuhan Center for Centers for Disease Control they went down there to collect and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back could it be that they were working on these viruses in the laboratory and there was an issue with waste disposal we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem with waste disposal and just before the pandemic one they they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal and in early 2019 they moved to their new site which was basically across the street from the Juan on seafood market um so could there have been issue of somebody infected in the lab of waste disposal could a laboratory animal their experiences in China actually China just recently passed a law saying it's illegal to sell laboratory animals in the market because there were scientists or once scientist who was selling laboratory animals in the market and people would just come and and buy they'd say so there's so many there are so many scenarios but if I again connect it to my 85 number I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents whether it's collection waste something connected to the lab I think that's um that's the most likely but there are other credible people um who would say they think it's not the most likely and I I welcome their views and and we need to have this conversation so in your write-up um but what's the URL because I always find it by doing Jamie Marshall uh lab leak yeah that's probably the idea no no but if you just go to jamymymetzel.com j-a-m-i-e-m-e-t-z-l.com then there's just a thing it's covered Origins or you could just Google Jamie Metzel oblique uh um Google's search engine is such a powerful thing you mentioned in that write up that you don't think this could be just me misreading it or it was just slightly miswritten but you don't think that the virus is from that 2012 mind which is fascinating could be the backbone for SARS cov2 so what I mean just the specific virus which I mentioned ratg 13 and there's a whole history of that because it had a different name and it looked and and should jang li provided wrong information about when it had been sequenced I mean there was a whole issue connected uh to that uh but the genetic difference even though it's um it's 96.2 percent similar to the SARS cov2 virus that's actually a significant difference even though that and and a virus called banal 52 that was collected in Laos are the two most similar there still are are differences so I'm not saying ritg 13 is the backbone um but is there I believe there is a possibility that other viruses that were collected either are in that mine in in Yunnan in southern China or in Laos or Cambodia because that was with the Eco Health Alliance um proposals and documents their plan was to collect viruses in Laos and and Cambodian elsewhere and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of virology so that there are people as a matter of fact just when I was sitting here before this message I got before this interview I got a message uh from somebody who was saying well Peter dazak is telling everybody uh that the that the viral sample the banal 52 from Laos proves that there's not a lab incident origin of the pandemic and it's actually doesn't prove that at all because these viruses were being collected in places like uh Laos and and Cambodia and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of virology so those are like early early uh like the the prequel so these are they're not sufficiently similar to be a to serve as a backbone but they kind of tell a story that they could have been brought to the lab through uh through several processes including genetic modification or throughout the Natural Evolution processes accelerated Evolution they could have arrived as something that has the the the spike protein and the cleavage the fern cleavage side and all that kind of stuff so what I'm saying is the the essential point is if we had access if we knew everything that was being every virus it was being held at the the Wuhan Institute of virology and the Wuhan CDC we had full access we had full access to everybody's lab notes and we did just the kind of forensic investigation that has been so desperately required since day one we'd be able to say why what what did you have because if we knew if it if it should come out that the Wuhan Institute of virology had in its repository I prior to the outbreak either SARS cov2 or a reasonable precursor to it that would prove the lab incident hypothesis in my mind that's almost certainly why they are preventing any kind of meaningful meaningful investigation so my hypothesis is not that our that what ritg-13 says is because as I mentioned earlier the the genetics of virus are are constantly recombinating um so that what that means is if you have you don't have very many total outlier viruses in a bat Community because these viruses are always mixing and matching with each other and so if you have rotg 13 which is relatively similar to SARS cov2 there's a pretty decent likelihood there was other stuff that was collected at this this mine called Mojang mine in Yunnan Province maybe in Laos and Cambodia and that's why we need to we need to have that information do you think somebody knows who patient zero is within China so do you think that is well there's two there's two things one is I think some somebody and people probably know and then two it's been incredibly curious that the best virus Chasers in the world are in China and they are in Wuhan and when I mean we can talk about this this deeply compromised now vastly improved World Health Organization process um but when they went there uh the Chinese the local and National Chinese authorities say oh we haven't done we haven't tested the samples in our blood center we haven't done any of this tracing and these these deeply compromised people who were part of the the international um part of the joint study uh tour um when they came out with their they had their visit earlier this year and came out with their report they had in my mind just an absurd um uh letter to the editor in in nature saying well if we don't hurry back we're not going to know what happened assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins who on their own aren't don't know how to trace the origin of a virus and the opposite is is the case so I think there are people in China who at least know a lot they know a lot more uh than they're saying uh and at the best case scenario is the Chinese government wants to prevent any investigation including by them the worst case scenario is that there are people who already know and that's why again my point from day one has been we need a comprehensive International investigation in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records samples and Personnel when this again deeply flood can I give you a little history of this uh who process okay who are the that's funny um that's I'm sorry who's on first who's on first I'm just so funny with the jokes yeah look at me go uh who are the who so what's what is this organization what is this purpose what role did it play in the pandemic uh it certainly was demonized in the realm of politics um this is an institution That was supposed to save us from this pandemic a lot of people believe it failed has it failed why did it fail and you said it's improving how is it improving great all right I hope you don't mind I'm gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra I love this oh I love this good good good so the who is an absolutely essential organization created in 1948 in that wonderful period after the second world war when the United States and Allied countries asked the big bold questions how do we build a safer world for everyone and so that's the The Who if we although there are many critics of the who if we didn't have it we would need to invent it because the whole nature of these uh big public health issues and certainly for uh pandemics but all sorts of things is that they are transnational in nature and so we cannot just build moats we cannot build walls we are all connected to us so that's the the idea um there's a political process because the United Nations and the who is part of it um is it there it exists within a political context and so the the current director general of the World Health Organization who was just uh re-elected for his second five-year term is Dr Tedros ardenome Gabriel who is from Ethiopia to grahan from Ethiopia and in in full disclosure I have a lot of respect for uh for Tedros Tedros got his job uh he was not America's candidate he was not Britain's candidate our candidate was a guy named David nabaro who I also know and have tremendous respect for China led the process of putting Tedros in this in this position in this position and in the earliest days of the pandemic Tedros in my view even though I have tremendous respect for him I think he made a mistake the who doesn't have its own independent surveillance Network it's not organized to have it and the states have not allowed it so it's dependent on member states for providing it information and because it's a poorly funded organization dependent on its bosses who are these governments it's not its natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses it's to say well let's quietly work with with everybody having said that the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros and Tedros in repeating uh the position of the Chinese government which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump also did the exact same thing I mean Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping and then repeated um she what she had told him both of them were wrong um Dr Tedros I think when it took when Chinese government was lying knowingly lying saying there's no human to human transmission uh Dr tedro said that and even though within the World Health Organization there was there were private critiques saying China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one it's not providing access it's not providing information Tedros is Instinct because of his background because of his uh his role and wrongly um was uh to have a more collaborative relationship with China particularly by making assertions based on the information that was just don't call people Liars they're not going to be happy with you they're not going to have you and the job of the who isn't to condemn States it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems and I think that the culture was well let's let's do the most that we can if we totally alienate China on day one yes we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for for not exactly sure by the way that maybe you can also steal men that argument like it's it's not completely obvious that that's a terrible decision like if uh you or and I were in that role we would make that decision it's complicated because like you want China and your side to help solve this so I would have made a different decision which is why I never would have been selected as the Director General there's a selection criteria that everybody kind of needs to support you and so but let me let me just this is just the beginning can you also just uh elaborate or kind of restate what were the inaccuracies that you you quickly mentioned so human to human transmission what were the things that was so the the most important um where there were a few things um one um China didn't report the outbreak two they had the sequenced Genome of the Stars cov2 virus and they didn't share it for two critical weeks and um and when they did share it it was inadvertent I mean there was a very very courageous scientist who essentially leaked it and was later punished for leaking it even though the Chinese government is now saying we were so great by by releasing it's really confusing really so I I'm I'm so clueless about this as most things because I thought because there's a celebration of isn't this amazing that we got the the sequence like like that's amazing and then the scientific Community across the world stepped up and were able to do a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing because I thought the Chinese government shared no no they did so they sat on it for two weeks when they shared it against their will it was incredible moderna 48 hours later after getting the the information getting the sequence genome they had the formulation for what's now the moderna covid-19 vaccine but that's two critical weeks in those uh that or those early days they blocked the World Health Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan for more than three weeks I said they lied about human to human transmission during that time they were aggressively enacting their cover-up destroying records hiding uh samples imprisoning uh people who were asking uh tough questions they soon after established their uh their gag order they fought internally in the World Health Organization to prevent and the Declaration of a global emergency so China definitely I mean I couldn't be stronger in my critique of of China particularly what it did in those early days but it really it's what it's doing even to today is is outrageous so that was so then there was the question of well how do we examine what actually happened and the Prime Minister of Australia then and now Scott Morrison was incredibly courageous and he said we need a full investigation and because of that the Chinese government attacked him personally and and imposed trade sanctions on Australia to try to not just to punish Australia but to deliver a message to every other country if you ask questions we're going to punish you ruthlessly and and that certainly was the message that was that was delivered um the Australians brought that idea of a full investigation to the World Health assembly in May of 2020 as I mentioned before the wha is the governing Authority above of States above um the World Health Organization and so but instead of passing a resolution calling for a full investigation what ended up ironically and tragically passing with Chinese support was a mandate to have essentially a chinese-controlled joint study where half of the team a little more than half of the team was Chinese experts government Affiliated Chinese experts and half were independent International experts where but organized by the The Who and then it took six months to negotiate the terms of reference and again while China was doing all this cover-up They delayed and delayed and delayed and by the terms of reference that were negotiated China had veto power over who got to be a member of the International Group and um the that group was not entitled to access to Raw data the Chinese side would give them conclusions based on their own analysis this of the raw data which was totally outrageous so then and I was a big eye and and others now A friend of mine although we've never met in person Gil de Manoff in New Zealand he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter of the terms of uh of reference so then it took now it's it's the January of this year January 2021 this deeply flawed deeply compromised uh International group is sent to Wuhan this is so what's the connection between this group in the joint study so the joint study it had the Chinese side and the international side so the these International experts then part of their examination was going for one month to Wuhan and the nature of the flaws of this International Group has it's it's okay really important point and I'm sorry I was I wasn't clear on that they were rather the Mandate of what they were doing was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic it was to have a joint study into the zoonotic origins of the virus which means which was interpreted to mean the natural Origins hypothesis for a single hypothesis not so that they weren't empowered to to examine the lab incident origin they were there to look at the natural origin how to shop for some meat it's a market yeah that was so then they were there for a month yeah of the makeup up of the team um guess who was so the United States government proposed three experts for this team people who had a lot of background this was the Trump Administration people who had a lot of background including in investigating lab incidents none of those people were accepted the one American who was accepted Peter Peter dasek who had this funding relationship for many years with the Wuhan Institute of virology whose entire basically professional reputation was based on his collaboration with shojang Lee who had written the February 2020 Lancet letter saying it comes from natural origin and anybody who's suggesting otherwise is a conspiracy theorist and who at least according to me had been at very very least the opposite of transparent and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign he is the one American who's who's on this so they go there they have one month in Wuhan two weeks of it are spent in quarantine um just in their hotel rooms so then they have two weeks but really it's just 10 working days one of the earliest and so then they're kind of we've all seen the pictures they're traveling around Wuhan in in little buses um one of the first visits they they have is to this Museum exhibition on the it's a basically a propaganda exhibition on the success Xi Jinping and the success in fighting covet and they said well we had to show respect to our Chinese host I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is let's just I'm just going to rub your noses and this you're gonna go where we tell you you're going to hear um what what we want you to what we want you to hear so they have that little short time they spend you know a few hours they weren't in control of where the bus goes no I mean they made recommendations um many of their recommendations were accepted but they like when they went to the Wuhan Institute of virology and some of them of them did they had a they weren't able to do any kind of audit when they had asked for access to Raw data they weren't provided uh they weren't provided that they were it was a it was as I said in my 60 Minutes interview it was a chaperoned study tour it was not even remotely close to an investigation and the thing they were looking at wasn't the origins of the pandemic it was the single hypothesis of a quote-unquote natural uh natural Origins then I mean it was really so shocking for me on February 9 of this year in Wuhan the Chinese government sets up a joint press event where it's the Chinese side and the international side and during that press event a guy named Peter Ben and Barack and it's a little confusing he was basically the head of this delegation and he works for the who even though this was an independent uh committee it was organized by The Who so Peter Ben imbaric gets up there and and says we think it's most likely it comes from nature then he says we think it's possible it comes through frozen food which is absolutely outrageous I mean it's basically Preposterous Elena Chan calls this Popsicle Origins um but it's it's really really unlikely and but then most significantly um he says that we've all agreed uh that a lab incident origin is quote unquote extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated we later learned that the re the way they came up with that determination was by a show of hands vote of the the international experts and the Chinese experts and the Chinese of experts had to do their vote in front of the Chinese government officials who were constantly there so even if whatever they thought there was no possibility that someone raises their hands oh yeah I think it's a it's a lab origin so that was outrageous thing number one outrageous thing number two which I mean I which and I'll come back to my response in in February outrageous thing number two is months later Peter Ben and Barak does an interview on Danish television and he says actually I was lying about extremely unlikely because the Chinese side they didn't want any mention of a lab incident origin anywhere in including in the report that later uh that later came out and so the deal we made even though he himself thought that at least some manifestation of a lab incident origin was likely um and that there should be an investigation particularly he said well that's kind of weird that the Wuhan CDC moved just across from the Juan on seafood market just before the beginning of the pen of the pandemic but he said as a horse trading deal with the Chinese authorities it shouldn't be it should uh that he he agreed to say it was extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated so I I was in actually in Colorado staying with my parents and I stayed up late watching this um uh this press event and I was appalled because I knew after two weeks there was no way they could possibly come to that conclusion so I immediately sent a private message to Tedros The Who director General essentially saying there's no way they had enough access to come to this conclusion if the who doesn't distance and distance itself from this the who itself is going to be in danger because it's going to be basically institutional capture by the Chinese this was repeating the Chinese government's propaganda points and and tedro sent me a really again why I have so much respect for Tetris send me a private note saying don't worry we are determined to do to do the right thing and so I got that private message and again I really like Ted Rose but I thought well what are you going to do three days later um Tedros makes a public statement and he says um I've I've heard this thing I don't think that this is a final answer we need to have a full investigation uh into this process he then released two more statements um saying we need to have a full uh we need to have a full investigation with access to Raw data and we need a full audit of the of the Wuhan labs so and that that part was was really really great but then this saga continues because so I was part of a group as I mentioned before this Paris group um it was about you know two dozen or so experts and we'd been meeting since 2020 um having regular meetings and we just present papers present data debate to try to really get to the bottom of things and it was all private so I went to this group and I said look this this playing field is now skewed these guys they've put out this thing labins didn't origin extremely unlikely it's in every newspaper in the world we can't just be our own little private group talking uh to each other so I led the political process of drafting what became four open letters that many of us signed um most of us signed um that saying all right here's why this investigation not in this study group and the report are not credible here's what's wrong here's a TR here's what a full investigation would look like here's a treasure map of all the resources where people can look and we demand a comprehensive investigation so those um four open letters were in pretty much every newspaper in the world and it played a really significant role along with some other things there was later there was a letter a short letter in science Making basically similar points in a much more condensed way there were some Prof higher profile articles by Nicholas Wade and and um and Nick Baker and others and those collectively shifted the the conversation and then really impressively um The Who and with Ted Rose's leadership did something that was really incredible and that is earlier this year uh they meaning the leadership of the who not the World Health assembly but the leadership of the of the of the who announced the establishment of what's called Sago the scientific Advisory Group on the origins of Novel pathogens and basically what they did was overrule their own governing board and say we're going to create our own entity and so it basically dissolved that International deeply flawed International joint study group and all and a lot of those people they um have become very critical like the Chinese of of Tedros so then they had an open call for nominations to be part of Sago and so a lot of people um put in their uh their uh nominations they selected 26 people but our group we had a meeting and we were unhappy with that list of 26. it it still felt it felt skewed toward the natural origin hypothesis so again I drafted and we worked on together an open letter which we submitted to the who saying we think this list it's a step in the right direction but it's not good enough and we we call on these three people to be removed and we have these three people who we think should be added incredibly and I was in in private touch with the who after announcing the 26 people the who said we're reopening the process so send in more and so then they added two more people one of whom is an expert in the audit auditing of lab incidents and then one of the of the so they added those two and then when they just released the list of people who are part of Sago this one woman a highly respected Dutch virologist named Marion coopmans who had been part of that deeply flawed and compromised international study group who had called who has consistently called a lab incident origin quote unquote a debunked conspiracy theory as of now her name is not on the list we haven't seen any announcements so I summary and I'm sorry to go on for so long and to be so animated about this I genuinely feel that the who is trying to do the right thing but they exist within a political context and they're they're kind of it's like you know they're they're pushing at the edges but there's only so far that they can can go and that's why we definitely need to have full accountability for the who we need to expand the mandate to who but we need to recognize that states have a big role and China is an incredibly influential State that's doing everything possible to prevent the kind of full investigation into pandemic Origins that so desperately required well it sounds like the leadership made all the difference in the who so like the way to change the momentum of large institutions is through the leadership if leadership and and empowerment as I mentioned the World Health assembly is meeting now and I think that it shouldn't be that we require super humans and there are some people who are big critics of of who the the leader um of the who in SARS one um was definitely more aggressive she had a different set of of powers at that time um but it can't be entirely I mean we should we definitely need strong-willed aggressive independent people in these kinds of of roles we also need a more empowered who like when the Chinese government in in the earliest days of the pandemic um said we're just not going to allow you to send a team to collect your own information and we're not and and we're not going to allow you to to have any kind of independent surveillance there was very little that the who could do because of the limitations of its mandate and we can't just say we're going to have a who then only compromises Chinese sovereignty if we want to have a powerful who we should say you have emergency teams when you when the the director General says an emergency team needs to go somewhere if they aren't allowed to go there that day you could say there's an immediate referral to the security Council there needs to be something but we have all these demands rightfully so of the who which doesn't have the authorities The Who itself only controls 20 percent of its own budget so the governments are saying we're going to give you money to do this or or or that so we need a stronger who to prevent to protect us but we also have to build that so looking a little bit into the future let's first step into the past sort of the philosophical question about um China if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese government if they were to be more transparent how should they be more transparent because like it's easy to say we want we want to see this but from a perspective of government and not just the Chinese government but a government on Whose Geographic territory uh say it's a lab leak a lab leak occurred that has resulted in trillions of dollars of loss uh countless of lives just just all kinds of damage to the world if they were to admit or show data that could serve as evidence for a lab leak that's something that people uh could like in the worst case start wars over or uh in the most likely case just constantly bring that up at every turn making you like uh powerless in negotiations it's like whenever you want to do something in a geopolitical sense the United States will bring up oh remember that time you cost us trillions of dollars because of your fuck up yeah so how what is the incentive for the Chinese government to transfer to be transparent and if it is to be transparent how should it do it so like there's a bunch of people like the reason I'm talking to you uh as opposed to a bunch of other folks because you are kind-hearted and thoughtful and open-minded and really respected there's a bunch of people that are talking about lab League they're a little bit less interested in uh building a better world and more interested in pointing out the emperor has no clothes they want step one which is saying like a basically tearing tearing down the bullshitters they don't want to uh do the further steps of building and so as a Chinese government I would be nervous about being transparent with anybody that just wants to tear our power centers our power structures down anyway that's a long way to ask like how how should the Chinese government be transparent now and in the future so maybe I'll break that down into a few sub questions the first is what should in an Ideal World what should the Chinese government do and and that's pretty straightforward they should be totally transparent the South African government now there's an outbreak of this uh Omicron variant and the the South African government has done what we would want a government to do is say hey there's an outbreak we don't have all of the information we need help we want to alert the world and in some ways they're being punished for it through these travel bans but it's a separate topic but I actually think short-term travel bans actually are not a terrible idea um they should have in on day one if they uh they should have allowed uh who experts in they should have shared information uh they should have allowed a full and comprehensive investigation um with uh International Partnerships to understand uh what went wrong they should have shared their raw data they should have allowed their scientists to speak and write publicly because nobody knows more about this stuff certainly in the early days than their scientists do so it's relatively easy to say um what they what they should do it's a hard question to say well what would happen let's just say um let's just say tomorrow we prove for certain that this pandemic stems from an both from an accidental lab incident and then from what I've consistently called a criminal cover-up because if the cover-up has done in many ways as much or more damage than than and the incident Mo what happens you could easily imagine Xi Jinping has had two terms as as the the leader of of China and he can now have unlimited turns they've changed the rules for that but he's got a lot of enemies I mean there are a lot of people who are waiting in line to to step up so it is there a chance that Xi Jinping could be deposed if it was proven that this comes from a lab is it I think there's a real possibility um would uh people in the United States Congress for example demand reparations from China so we've had four and a half a trillion dollars of stimulus all of the economic losses and we owe a lot of money to China from our our debt I'm quite certain that members of Congress would say you know we're just going to wipe that out it would destroy the Global Financial system but I think they would be extremely likely would other countries like India that have lost millions of uh of people and had terrible economic damages would they demand reparations so I I think from a Chinese perspective starting from now it would have major geopolitical implications and and go back to to Chernobyl like there was a reason why the Soviet Union went to such length to cover things up and when it came out I mean there are different theories but certainly uh Chernobyl played some role in the end of communist power in in the Soviet Union so the the Chinese are very very aware of that but but the difference of course with Chernobyl the damage to the rest of the world was not a nearly as significant exactly with covid so you you say that the cover-up is a crime but everything you just described the response of the rest of the world is uh I could say unfair if it's a so okay if we say the best possible version of the story you know lab leaks happen they shouldn't happen right but they they happen and how is that on the Chinese government I mean what was a good example well the Union Carbide Union Carbide there was this American company operating in India they had this Lake all these people were were killed the company admitted responsibility I was working in in the white house when the United States government in my view which I know to be the case but other people in China think differently a bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and so the United States government allowed a full investigation then we paid reparations to the family the families and so to your question if I were let's just say I were the Chinese government not I mean in kind of an idealized version of the Chinese government and let's just say that they had come to the conclusion that it was a lab incident and let's just say they knew that even if they continued to cover it up eventually this information would would come out I mean maybe there was a whistleblower maybe they knew of some evidence that we didn't know about or something what would I do starting right now um what I would do is I would um hold a press conference and and we would say and I would say we had this terrible accident the reason why we were doing this research in Wuhan and elsewhere is that we had SARS one and we felt a responsibility to do everything possible to prevent now that kind of terrible thing happening again for our country and for the world that was why we collaborated with France with the United States in building up those those capacities we know that nothing is is perfect but we're a sovereign country and we have our own system and so we had to adapt our systems um so that they they made sense um internally when this outbreak began we didn't know how it started and that was why um we wanted to look into things when the process of investigating became so political it gave us pause and we were worried that our enemies were trying to use this investigation in order to undermine us having said that now that we've Dig Dug deeper we have recognized because we have access to additional information that we didn't have then that this pandemic started from an accidental lab incident and we feel really terribly about that and we know that we were very aggressive in covering up information in the beginning but the reason we were doing that is because we thoroughly we fully believed that it came from a natural origin now that we see otherwise we feel terribly therefore we're doing a few different things one is we are committing ourselves to establishing a stronger who a new pandemic treaty that addresses the major challenges that we face and allows the World Health Organization to pierce the veil of absolute sovereignty because we know that when these pandemics happen they affect everybody we are also so pudding and you can pick your number but let's start with five trillion US Dollars some massive amount into a fund that we will be Distributing to the victims of covid-19 and their uh and China would do that this is a fantasy speech but I disagree with your I mean okay so you think China has a responsibility so it's not the like just a lab leak like if China on day one had said we have this outbreak we don't know where it came from we want to have a full investigation we call on International responsible International Partners to join us in that process and we're going to do everything in our power to share the relevant information because however this started we're all victims that's a totally different story than punishing Australia preventing the who blocking any investigation condemning people who are trying to look and so so cover up for a couple weeks you can understand maybe because there's so much uncertainty you're like oh let's hide all the Winnie the Pooh pictures yeah while we figure this out but the moment you really figure out what happened you you always as a joker says always find like a like blame the Jews kind of situation a little bit just a little bit like all right it's not us yeah I'm just kidding but uh be proactive proactive and saying but the joke about that is uh there's a big problem uh because a lot of people have to leave the Jewish socialist conspiracy to make it for the Jewish capitalist conspiracy meeting I love it so I would uh say not 5 trillion but some large amount and I would really focus on the future it was just every time we talk about the lab League the unfortunate thing is I feel like people don't focus enough about the future to me the lab leak is important because we want to construct the kind of uh framework of thinking and a global conversation that minimizes uh the Damage Done by Future lab leaks which will almost certainly happen and so to me though any lab league is about the future I would launch a giant investment in saying we're going to create the testing infrastructure like all of this kind of infrastructure Investments that help minimize the damage of a lab leak here in the rest of the world so the challenge with that is one it's hard to imagine a fully in accountable future system to prevent these kinds of terrible pandemics that's built upon obfuscation and cover-up regarding the origins of this worst pandemic in a century so it's just like that that Foundation isn't strong enough second um China across the fields of science is looking to LeapFrog the rest of the world so China has current plans to build BSL for labs in every of its Province yeah they're scaling up they're scaling up everything and with the plan on leading and that's why again I was saying before I think there's a lot of similarity between this story at least as I see it at least the most probable case and these other areas where China gets knowledge and then tries to LeapFrog it's the same with with AI and autonomous Killer Robots it's the same with human genome editing with animal experimentations with so many basically all areas of advanced science um so the the question is would China stop in that process and then third um and there's it's a little bit of a historical background but defending national sovereignty is one of the core principles of certainly of the then of the Chinese State and the historical issue is for those of us who come from the West I mean one of the lessons of the post-war planners was that absolute National sovereignty was actually a major feeder into the first and second world wars that we had all these conflicting States and therefore the logic of the post-war system is we need to in some ways pool sovereignty that's like the uh the EU and have transnational organizations like the UN organizations and the Britain Woods organizations for most Asian States and and also even for some African the people who are kind of on the colonized side of History sovereignty was the thing that was denied them that was the thing that they want the European power is denied and so the idea of giving up sovereignty was that the absolute opposite and so that's why China is and again I mentioned this Rush Doshi book it's not that China is trying to destroy strengthen this rules-based International order which is based on the the principle that well there are certain things that we share and how do we build a governance system to protect those things what it seems to be doing is trying to advance its own sovereignty and so I think I agree with you but I don't I don't think that just we can just go forward without some accountability for the so the cover-up was a big problem it's like I I often I find myself Playing devil's advocate because I'm trying to sort of empathize and then I forget that like two or three people listen to this thing and then they're like look Lex is the pain the Chinese government with their cover-up no I'm not you know I'm just trying to understand I mean it's the same reason how I'm reading mineconf now it's like you have to you have to really understand the minds of people as if I too could have done that you know you have to understand that we're all the same to some degree and uh that kind of empathy is required to figure out solutions for the future it's just in empathizing with the Chinese government in this whole situation I'm I'm still not sure I I understand how to minimize the chance of a cover-up in the future whether for China or the United States if the virus started in the United States I'm not exactly sure we would be with all the emphasis we put on freedom of speech with with all the emphasis we put on um freedom of the press and uh access to the press the sort of all aspects of government I'm not sure the US government wouldn't do the similar kind of cover-up let me let me put it this way so we're in Texas now doing this interview imagine there's a kind of horseshoe bat that we'll call the Texas horseshoe bat and the Texas a lot of bats in Austin but it's true the whole thing it's true it's true and so let's just say that the Texas horseshoe bats only exist in Texas but in Montana um we have a thing they it's called the Montana Institute of virology and at the Montana Institute of virology they have the world's largest collection of Texas horseshoe bats including horseshoe bats that are associated um with a previous Global pandemic called the Texas horseshoe at pandemic and let's just say that people in Montana in the same town where this Montana Institute of virology is start getting a version of this Texas horseshoe bat syndrome that is genetically relatively similar to the outbreak in Texas there are no horseshoe bats there and the government says it's your same point Alina's point about the unicorns like nothing to see here just move along you know I and Brett Weinstein and Josh Rogan and and I mean when they say oh I guess I mean I just think that no no but the point is the government going to say it so uh Joe Rogan is a comedian Brett Weinstein is a podcaster uh the point is what we want is not just those folks to have the freedom to speak that's important but you want the government to have the transparent like like I don't think Joe Rogan is enough to hold the government accountable I I think they're going to do their thing anyway but I but I I think that's our system and that was the genius of the the founding fathers that the government probably is going to have a lot of instincts to do the wrong thing that was the experience in in our in in England before and so that's why we have free speech to hold the government accountable I mean I'm a kind of broadly a gun control person but the people who say well we need to have broad gun rights um as somebody who's now in Texas yeah offended but their argument is look we don't we don't fully trust the government if the government just like we you know fought against the the British if if the government's wrong we want to at least have some some Authority so that's our system is to have that kind of voice and that that is the public voice actually balances because every government as you correctly said every government has the same instincts and and that's why we have and it's it's imperfect here but kind of these ideas of separation of powers of inalienable rights so that we can have it's almost like a vast Market where we can have balance so you think if a lab leak occurred in the United States what probability would you put some kind of public report led by Rand Paul uh would come out saying this was a lab leak you have good confidence decent comment and the reason I said I mentioned that I'm a I might think of myself I'm sure I'm not anymore because as I get older but as a progressive person I'm a Democrat and I worked in in Democratic administrations worked for President Clinton on the National Security Council um but my kind of best friend in the United States Senate who I talked to all the time is a senator from Kansas named Roger Marshall and uh Roger I mean if you just lined up our positions on all sorts of things we're radically different um but we we have a great relationship we we talk all the time and we and we share a commitment to saying well let's ask the tough questions about how this started and again if we had like what is the United States government yeah it's the executive branch but there's also Congress and Congress you talk about Rand Paul and and as a former executive branch worker when I was on the National Security Council and I guess Technically when I was at the at the state department all of this stuff all of this process it just seems like a pain in the ass it's like these you know efforts they're just attacking us we tried to do this thing with we had all the best intentions and now they're holding hearings and they're trying to box Us in and whatever but that's our process and it there's like a form of accountability as chaotic as crazy as as it is and so it makes it really difficult I mean we have other problems of just chaos and everybody doing their own thing but it makes it difficult to have the kind of systematic cover-up and again all of that is predicated on my hypothesis not fully proven although I think likely that this is a lab incident origin of this of this pandemic well I mean we're having like several layers of conversation but I think whether lab leak hypothesis is true or not it does seem that the likelihood of a cover-up if it leaked from a lab is high well that's the more important conversation to be having uh well you could argue a lot of things but to me arguably that's the more important conversation is about what is the likelihood of a cover-up 100 like in my mind there is a legitimate debate about the origins of the pandemic there are people who I respect who I don't necessarily agree with people like Stuart Neal who's a virologist in the UK who's been very open-minded engaged in in productive debate about the origin and and you know where I where I stand there is is and can be no debate about whether or not there has been a cover-up there has been a cover-up there is in my mind no credible argument that there hasn't been a cover-up and and I mean we can just see it in the regulations in the lack of access there's an incredible woman named Zhang Zhang who is a Chinese we have to call her a citizen journalist because everything is controlled by the state but in the early days of the pandemic she went to Wuhan started taking videos and posting them she was imprisoned for picking quarrels which is kind of a catch-all and now she's engaged in a hunger strike and she's near death and so there's no question that there has been a cover-up and there's no question in my mind that that cover-up is responsible for a significant percentage of the total deaths due to covet 19. in a pivot can I talk to you about sex let's roll okay so you're the author of uh book hacking Darwin yeah so humans have used um sex allegedly as as I've read about to uh to mix genetic um information to produce Offspring and sort of through that kind of process um adapt to their environment Lex you mentioned earlier about you're asking tough questions and people pushing you to ask tough questions this is is it okay if I just so um you said have done this as I've read about as I've read about on the internet yeah all I'm saying as a person sitting with you to people who would uh be open-minded in experimenting of as I've read about to reality what I would say is Lex Friedman is handsome charming he's I'm gonna open it really a great guy I'm sorry to interrupt that I appreciate that thank you so I was reading about this last night I was going to Tweet it but then I'm like this is going to be misinterpreted but uh it it's this is why I like podcasts because I can I could I could say stuff like this um is kind of incredible to me that the average human male produces like 500 billion plus sperm cells in their lifetime like each one of those are genetically unique like they can produce like unique humans each one of the 500 billion there's like a hundred billion people who's ever lived 100 maybe like 110 whatever whatever the number is so it's like five times the number of people who ever lived is produced by each male of genetic information so those are all possible trajectories of lives that could have lived like those are all little people that could have been and like all the possible stories all the Hitlers and Einsteins that could have been created and all that I mean I I don't know this kind of you're painting this possible future and we get to see only one little string of that I mean that I suppose the magic of that is also captured by the uh in specific physics or having like multiple dimensions in the uh the many worlds hypothesis quantum mechanics that the the interpretation that were basically just at every Point there's an infinite uh offspring of universes that that are created but I don't know that's just like a magic of um this game of genetics that we're playing and the winning sperm is not the fastest the winning sperm is basically the luckiest has the right timing so it's not um I was also gotten into this whole uh I started reading papers about like is there something to be said about who wins the race right genetically so it's fascinating because there's studies and in animals and so on to dance to that question because it's interesting because like because I'm a winner right I want I want to race yes and so you want to know like what what does that say about me in this uh in this fascinating genetic race against I think what is it 200 200 million others I think so one uh you know pool of uh sperm cells is uh is about something like 200 million it could be yes so but that Millions yeah I thought it was much much lower than that so like that those are all brothers and sisters of mine and I beat them all out yeah I won and so it's interesting to to know um there's a temptation to say I'm somehow better than them right and now that goes into the next stage of something you're or deeply thinking about which is um if we have more control now over the the winning genetic code that becomes Offspring if we have first not even control just information and then control what do you think that world looks like from a biological perspective and from an ethical perspective when we start getting more information and more control yeah great great question so first on the sperm there can be up to about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation so as I mentioned in hacking Darwin male sperm it's kind of a dime a dozen with all the all the guys in all in all the world just doing whatever they do with it um and it's an open question um how competitive I mean there is an element of luck and there is an element of competition and it's an open question how much that competition impacts the the outcome or whether it's just luck but my guess is there's some combination of of fitness and luck but you're absolutely right that all of those other sperm cells in in the ejaculation if that's how the union of spermine egg is is happening all of them represent a different future and it's there's a wonderful full book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and he even talks about a city as something like this where everybody you have your life but then you have all these alternate lives and every time you make any decision you're kind of and so but in this Invisible Cities there's a little string that goes toward that alternate life and then the city becomes this weaving of all the strings of people's real lives and the alternate lives that they could have taken had they made any other any other different steps so that part it's like a a deep philosophical question it's not just for us it's for all of it's It's baked into evolutionary biology is this what are the different strategies for different species to achieve Fitness and there's some of the different corals or other fish where they just kind of release the eggs into the water and there's there's all different kinds of of ways and then you're right in my book um hacking Darwin and into the full titles hacking Darwin genetic engineering and the future of humanity um I I kind of go deep into exploring the big picture implications of the future of human reproduction um we are already participating in a revolutionary transformation not just because of the Diagnostics that we have things like ultrasound um but because now an increasing number of us are being born through in vitro fertilization which means the eggs are extracted from the mother they're fertilized by the father's sperm in vitro in a lab and then re-implanted in the mother on top of that there's a somewhat newer but still now you know older technology called pre-implantation genetic testing and so as everyone knows from high school biology you have the the fertilized egg and then it goes one cell to two cells to four to eight and whatever and after around five days in this PGT process a few cells are extracted so let's say you have 10 fertilized eggs early stage embryos a few cells are extracted from each and those cells if they would the ones that are attracted would end up becoming the placenta but every one of our cells has other than a few has our full genome and so then you sequence those cells and with pre-implantation genetic testing now what you can do is you can screen out deadly uh single gel a single gene mutation disorders things that could be deadly or life ruining and so people use it to determine which of those 10 um early stage embryos to implant in a mother as we shift towards a much greater understanding of genetics and that is part of our just the broader genetics Revolution um but within that in our transition from personalized to Precision Healthcare more and more of us are going to have our whole genome sequenced because it's going to be the foundation of getting personalized health care we're going to have already Millions but very soon billions of people who've had their whole genome sequenced and then we'll have big databases of people's genetic genotypic information and life or phenotypic information and using coming into your area are tools of machine learning and data analytics we're going to be able to increasingly understand patterns of genetic expression even though we're all so predict how that genetic information will get expressed correct yeah never perfectly perhaps but more and more always more and more and so with that information we aren't going to just be in the even now um we aren't going to just be selecting based on which of these 10 early stage embryos is carrying a deadly genetic disorder but we can we'll be able to know everything that can be partly or entirely predicted by genetics and there's a lot of our Humanity that that fits into that category and um certainly simple traits like height and eye color and and things like that I mean height is not at all simple but it's it's in if you have good nutrition it's it's entirely or mostly genetic but even personality traits and personality Styles there are a lot of things that we see just as the experience the beauty of life that are partly have a genetic foundation and so whatever part of these traits are definable and influenced by genetics we're going to have greater and greater predictability within a range and so selecting those embryos will be informed by that kind of of knowledge and that's why in hacking Darwin I talk about embryo selection as being a key driver of the future of human evolution then on top of that there is in 2012 yamanaka a Japanese amazing Japanese scientists won the Nobel Prize for developing a process for creating what are called induced pluripotent stem cells IPS cells and what IPS cells are is you can induce an adult cell to go back in evolutionary time and become a stem cell and a stem cell is like when we're when you're when we're a fertilized egg like our entire blueprint is in that one cell and that cell can be anything but then it starts to spend our cells start to specialize and that's why we have skin cells and blood cells and all the different types of things so with the yamanaka process we can induce an adult adult cell to become a stem cell so the relevance to this story is what you it can do and it works now in animal models and as far as I know it hasn't yet been done in humans but it works pretty well in animal models you take any adult cell but skin cells are probably the easiest you induce this skin cell into a stem cell and if you just take a little skin graft it would have millions of of cells you induce those skin cells into stem cells then you induce those stem cells into egg precursor cells then you induce those egg precursor cells into eggs egg cells then because we have this massive over abundance of male sperm it's then you could fertilize let's call it ten thousand of the mother's egg so you have 10 000 eggs which are fertilized sounds like a party yeah then you have an automated process um for what I what I mentioned before in pre-implantation genetic testing you grow them all for five days you extract a few cells from each you test them and that's I had a piece in the New York Times a couple of years ago imagining what it would be like to go to a fertility clinic in the year 2050 and the choice is is involved yeah well no no there are but the choice is not do you want a kid who does or doesn't have let's call it um Tay Sachs um it's a whole range of possibilities including very intimate um uh traits like height IQ personality style it doesn't mean you can predict everything but it means there will be increasing predictability so if you're if you're choosing from 10 000 eggs fertilized eggs early stage embryos that's a lot of choice um and on top of that then we have the new technology of human genome editing many people have heard of crispr but what I say is if you think of human genome editing as a pie human I'm sorry Human Genome engineering as a pi genome editing is a slice and crispr is just a sliver of that slice it's just one of our tools for genome editing and then things are getting better and better better then you can go in and change let's say I mean again it starts simple a small number of genes let's say you've selected from among the one of ten or the one of ten thousand but there are a number of changes that you would like to make to achieve some kind of outcome and biology is incredibly complex and it's not that one gene does one thing one gene does probably a lot of things simultaneously which is why the decision about changing one gene if it's causing deathly harm is easier than when we think about the complexity of of biology whether the machine learning gets better and better predicting the full complexity biology so exactly as one gets better than your editing uh your ability to uh reliably edit such that the conclusions are predictable gets better and better so those are two are coupled together exactly and then so that's why and and people would say well that I mean I I wrote about that in my my two science fiction novels Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata years ago especially with Genesis Code I wrote about that and and as a Sci-Fi and and I had actually testified before Congress but now 15 years ago saying here's what the future looks like um but even I and and in my first edition of hacking Darwin um uh when it was it was already in production uh and then in November 2018 this scientist who John Quay announced uh in Hong Kong um that the world's first two and later three crispr babies had been born which he had genetically altered in and misguided in my view and and dangerous view a dangerous goal um of making it so they would have increased resistance to uh to HIV and so I called my publisher and I said I've got good news and bad news I'll start with the bad news is that the world's first crispr babies have been born and so we need to pull my book out of production because you can't have a book on the future of human genetic engineering and have it not mentioned the first crispr babies that have been born but the good news is in the book I had predicted that it's going to happen and it's going to happen in China and here's why and all we need to do is add a few more sentences and now that was the hardback and then I updated it more in the paperback saying and it happened and it was announced on on this diff yeah well then let's fast forward given your predictions are slowly becoming reality let's talk about some philosophy and ethics I suppose so I can I'm not being too self-deprecating here and saying if um my parents had the choice uh I I would be probably less likely to come out the winner uh we're all weird and I'm certainly a very um distinctly weird specimen of the human species I can give the full long list of flaws and we can be very poetic of saying like those are features and so on but they're not if you look at the menu again for for these uh women who are listening apropos of your thing they're all kind of charming individualities yes it's beautiful that's one yes thank you but anyway but on on the full sort of individual let's say IQ alone right that um what do we what do we do about a world where um IQ could be selected in a menu when you're having children foreign what concerns you about that world what excites you about that world are there certain metrics that excite you more than others IQ has been a a source of um I don't know I'm not sure IQ as a measure flawed as it is has been used to celebrate the successes of the human species nearly as much as has been used to divide people to say negative things about people um to make negative claims about people and in that same way it seems like when there's a selection a genetic selection based on IQ you can start now having classes of citizenry and like further divide you know the rich get richer you know it'll be very rich people they'll be able to do kind of uh fine selection of IQ and then um they they will start forming these classes of super intelligent people and those super intelligent people in their minds would of course be the right people to be making Global authoritarian decisions about everybody else all the usual aspects of human nature but now magnified with with the the new tools of Technology anyway all that to say is what's exciting to you of what's concerning to you it's a it's a great question and just stepping into the the IQ we'll call it a quagmire for now it raises a lot of big issues um which are are complicated um maybe you've listened to Sam Harris's uh interview with Charles Murray and then that that spawned a kind of a whole industry of of debate so first just the background of of IQ and it's it's from the early 20th century and there was the idea that we can measure people's general intelligence and and there are so many different kinds of intelligence this was measuring a specific thing so it's my feeling is that IQ doesn't is not a perfect measure of intelligence but it's a perfect measure of IQ like it's measuring what it's what it's measuring but that thing is correlates to a lot of of things which are rewarded in our society so the the every study of IQ has shown that people with higher IQs they make more money they live longer they have more stable relationships I mean that that could be something in the in the testing but as Sam Harris has has talked about a lot you could line up all of the all of these kind of IQ and IQ like tests correlate with each other so the people who score high on one score high on all of them and and people think that IQ tests are like um a you know a thing like you know the Earl of Dorchester is coming for dinner does he have two forks or Three Forks or something like that it's it's not that a lot of them are are things that that I think a lot of us would recognize are relevant just like how much stuff can you memorize if you see some shapes how can you position them and and things like that and so IQ I mean it really hit its stride in certainly in the second world war when we were just our governments were processing a lot of people and trying to figure out who to put in what in what in what job so that's the starting point let me start first with the negatives um that our societies that when we talk about diversity in Dar darwinian terms it's not like diversity is from darwinian terms oh wouldn't it be nice if we have you know some moths of different colors because it'll be really fun to have different colored moths diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species and of every species and it's and and it's impossible to predict um which what diversity is going to be rewarded and I've said this before if you went down and you had if you spoke T-Rex and you spoke to the dinosaurs and said hey you can select your kids um what criteria do you want and they say oh yeah yeah sharp teeth cruel things Roar whatever it is that makes you a great T-Rex um but the answer from from an evolutionary perspective from an earth perspective was always much better to be like a cockroach or an alligator or some little nothing or a little shrew um because the dinosaurs are going to get wiped out when the asteroid hits and so there's no better or worse in evolution there's just better or worse suited for a given environment and when that environment changes the best suited person from the old system could be the worst suited person for the new one so if we start selecting for the things that we value the most including things like IQ but even disease resistance I mean this is well known but if you um people who are recessive carrier of of sickle cell disease have increased resistance to malaria which is the biggest reason why that that trait has hasn't just disappeared given how deadly sickle cell disease is the biology is incredibly complex we understand such a tiny percentage of it that we need to have in your words just a level of of humility there are huge Equity issues as you've articulated let's just say that it I mean it is the case that in our society IQ and IQ like traits are highly rewarded there isn't an equity issue but it works in both ways because my guess is let's just say that we had a society where we were doing genome sequencing of everybody who was born and we had some predictive model to predict IQ and we had decided as a society that IQ was going to be what we were going to select for we were going to put the highest IQ people in these these different roles I guarantee you the people in that in those roles would not be the people who are legacy admissions to Harvard they would very likely be people who are born in slums um people who are born with no opportunity or in refugee camps who have are just wasting away because we've we've we've thrown them away and so it's it's an easy like it's it's the idea of just being able to look under the hood of our humanity is really scary for everybody and it should be I mean I'm also an Ashkenazi Jew my father was born in Austria my father and grandparents came here as refugees after the war most of that side of the family was killed so I get what it means to be on the other I mean you said you're reading Mein Kampf on the other side of the story when someone said well here's what's good and you're not good and therefore you're so I I totally get that having said that um I do believe that we're moving toward a new way of procreating and we're going to have to decide what are the values that we would like to uh to realize through that process is it Randomness which is what we currently have now which is not totally random because we have a sort of mating through colleges and and other things like you go to Harvard yeah or whatever and your wife also goes to Harvard it's like it's this location based uh meeting well it's not location it's selection it's like there are selections that are made about who gets to a certain place and when like it's like Harvard admissions is a filter so so we're going to have to decide what are the values that we want to realize through this process because diversity has it's just baked into our biology we're the first species ever that has the opportunity to make choices about things that were otherwise baked into our biology and there's a real danger that if we make bad choices even with good intentions it could even drive us toward Extinction and certainly undermine our our humanity and that's why I always say and like I said I'm deeply involved with who and other things that these aren't conversations about science there are conversations science brings us to the conversation but the conversation is about values and ethics as you described that world is wide open it's not even uh a subtly different world that world is fundamentally different from anything we understand about life on Earth because um natural selection this random process is so fundamental how we think about life being able to program I mean it has the chance to I mean it'll probably make my question about the ethical concerns around IQ based selection um just meaningless because it'll change the nature of identity like it's possible it will dissolve identity because we take so much pride in all the different characteristics that make us who we are whenever you have some control over those characteristics those characteristics start losing meaning and what may start gaining meaning is the ideas inside our heads for example versus like the the details of like is it a Commodore 64 is it a PC is it a Mac it's going to be less important than the software that runs on it so we can more and more be operating in the digital space and the identity could be something that borrows multiple bodies like it the the legacy of our ideas may become more important than the details of our physical embodiment like it I mean I'm saying perhaps ridiculous sounding things but they the point is it will bring up so many new ethical concerns that are narrow-minded thinking about the current ethical concerns will not apply so it's uh but it's important to think about all this kind of stuff like actively what are the right conversations to be having now because it feels like it's um it's an ongoing conversation then continually evolves like with an NIH involved like do you do experiments with animals do you build these brain organoids do you still like through that process you describe but the stem cells like do you experiment with a bunch of organisms to see how genetic uh material what uh what form that actually takes how to minimize the chance of cancer and all those kinds of things what are the negative consequences of that what are the positive consequences yeah it's a fascinating world it's a really fascinating world yeah and then but those conversations are just so essential like we have to be talking about ethics and then that raises the question of who is the we and coming back to to your conversation about science communication maybe there was a time earlier when these conversations needed to be were were held among a small number of experts who made decisions on behalf of every everybody else but what we're talking about here is really the future of our species and I think that conversation is too important to be left just to experts and and government officials so I mentioned them that I'm a member we just ended our our work after two years of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing and my big push in that process was to have education engagement and empowerment of the broad public to bring not just bring people into the conversation with the tools to be able to engage but also into the decision-making process and that's it's a real shift and there are countries that are doing it better than others I mean Denmark is obviously a much smaller country than the United States but they have a really well developed infrastructure for public engagement around really complicated scientific issues and I I just think that we have to like it's great that we have Twitter and all these other things we need structured conversations that where we can really bring people together and and listen to each other which feels like it's it's harder than than ever um but even now in this process where all these people are shouting at each other at least there are a bunch of people who are in the the conversation so it's we have a foundation but we just really need to do more work and again and again and again it's about ethics and values because we're at an age and this has become a cliche of exponential technological change and so the rate of change is faster going forward than it has been in the past so in our minds we under appreciate how quickly things are changing and um and will change and if we're not careful if we don't know who we are and what our values are we're going to get lost and we don't have to know technology we have to know who we are I mean our values are hard won over thousands of years no matter how new the technology is we shouldn't and can't jettison our our values because that is the our primary navigational tool absurd question because we were saying that uh sexual rep reproduction is not the best way to define The Offspring you think there'll be a day when humans stop having sex I don't think we'll stop having sex because it's so enjoyable um but we may significantly stop having sex for reproduction even today most human sex is not for making babies it's for other things whether it's pleasure or love or pair bonding or or whatever intimacy intimacy I mean some people do it for intimacy some people do it for for pleasure with strangers I feel like the people that do it for pleasure I feel like there will be better ways to achieve that same chemical pleasure right you know there's just so many different kinds of people there I mean they're I just saw this on I just saw this on television but there are people who put on those big bunny outfits and go and have sex with other people I mean they're just like an unlimited number of different kinds of people and I think they're called so I remember hearing about this I think Dan Savage is a podcast um I think they're called furries first like furry yeah exactly so they're just I love people yeah but it's you know that's like the thing it's like whenever you hear these words like humans yeah what would I think of next um so but I do think that and I write about this in in hacking Darwin that as uh people come to believe that having uh that making children through the application of science is safer and more beneficial than having children through sex um we'll start to see a a shift over time toward reproduction through through science we'll still have sex for all this the the same great reasons that we that we do it now it's just reproduction less and less through the act of sex man it's such a fascinating future because as somebody I value flaws I think uh it's the uh Goodwill Hunting that's the good stuff the flaws the the weird quirks of humans that's what makes us who we are the the weird the weirdest the beautiful and I yeah there's a fear of optimization that I you should have it I mean it's very healthy I mean and I think that's the same word that's the danger of all of this selection is that we make selections just based on social norms that are so deeply internal that they feel like their Eternal truths and so we we talked about selecting for IQ what about selecting for a kind heart like there are lots of people you talked about Hitler and Minecon pillar has certainly had a high IQ I guess is higher than average IQ um if we just select I mean that's why I was saying before diversity is baked into our biology but the the key lesson and I've said this many times before the key lesson of this moment in our history is that after nearly four billion years of evolution are one species suddenly has the unique and increasing ability to read write and hack the code of life and so as we apply these god-like powers that we've now assumed for ourselves um we better be pretty careful uh because it's so easy to make mistakes uh particularly mistakes that are Guided by our best intentions to jump briefly back onto lab league and I swear there's a reason for that um what did you think about the Jon Stewart this moment I forget what it was maybe a few months ago in the summer I think of 2021 where he went on Colbert Report or Not The Colbert Report sorry the you know Stephen Colbert's whatever his show is uh but again Jon Stewart reminded us how valuable his wit and Brilliance within the humor was for our culture and so he uh did this whole bit that highlighted the common sense nature about what was the metaphor he used about the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania so what'd you think about that whole bit I loved it and so not to be overly self-referential but it's hard not to be overly self-referential when you're doing a whatever however long we are five hour interview about yourself which it reminds like when you had Brett Weinstein on he said I have no ego but these 57 people have screwed me over here so it's hard so yeah no so you know I am a person I will confess I it's enjoyable some people feel different I kind of like talking about all this stuff and and talking period um so for me in the earliest I remember those early days of when the pandemic started I was just sitting down it was late January or early February 2020 and I just was laying out all of the evidence just as I that I could collect trying to say make sense of where does this come from and it just it was just logic I mean I it was all the things that Jon Stewart said which in some you know overly wordy form were all at that time on my website like what are the odds of having this this outbreak of a bad coronavirus of more than a thousand miles away from where these bats have their natural habitat where they have the the largest collection of these bad coronaviruses in the world and they're doing all these very aggressive research projects to make them more aggressive and then you have the outbreak of a virus that's that's primed for a human to human transmission um it was just logic was my first step and I you know kept Gathering Gathering the the information but Jon Stewart distilled that in a way that just everybody got and I think that like I loved it and I just think that there's a way of reaching people it's the reason why I write science fiction in addition to thinking and writing about the science is that we kind of have to reach people where they are and and I just thought it was just there was a lot of depth I thought and I mean maybe that's too self-serving but like in the analysis but he he captured that into the in in into those things about it's like the the whatever the chewy the outbreak of chewy goodness near the Hershey factory I wonder where that came from yeah this the humor this metaphor also the like sticking with the joke when the audience is uh um in the audience that Stephen Colbert he was like resisting it he was very uncomfortable with it maybe that was part of the bit I'm not sure but it didn't look like it so Stephen in that moment kind of represents the discomfort of the scientific Community I think it's kind of interesting that whole dynamic and I think that was a pivotal moment that just like highlights the value of Comedy the value of um like when Joe Rogan says I'm just a comedian I mean that's such a funny thing to say it's like saying I'm just a podcaster or I'm just a writer I'm just a you know that ability in so few words to express what everybody else is thinking um it's so refreshing and I wish the scientific communicators would do that too a little humor a little humor I mean that's why I love uh Elon Musk very much so like the way he communicates is like us it's it's so refreshing for for a CEO of our major company several major companies to just have a sense of humor and say ridiculous shit every once in a while that's so there's something to that like it shakes up the whole conversation to where it gives you freedom to like think publicly if you're always trying to say the proper thing you lose the freedom to think to uh to reason out to be authentic and genuine when you say when you allow yourself the freedom to regularly say stupid shit have fun make fun of yourself I think you give yourself freedom to really be a great scientist with it again honestly I I I think science and stuff a lot to learn from comedians well for sure I think we all do about just distilling and communicating in ways that people can hear like a lot of us say things and people just can't hear them yes either because of the way we're saying them or or where they are but and and like I said before I I'm a big fan of Joe Rogan I've been on his show twice and whatever but when Francis Collins was in his conversation with you he said um which I think makes sense is that when somebody has that kind of platform and people rightly or wrongly who follow them and look to them for guidance I do think um that there is some responsibility for people in those roles to make whatever judgment um that they make and to share that and as I mentioned to you when we are off mic uh Sanjay Gupta is a very close friend of mine we've been friends for many years and I and I fully supported uh Sanjay's instinct to go on the on The Joe Rogan show I thought it was yeah it was great at the end of that whole conversation Joe said well I'm just a comedian what do I know and I just felt that um yes Joe Rogan is a comedian I wouldn't say just a comedian among among other things but I also felt that he had a responsibility for just saying whatever he believed even if he believed or believed as I think is the case that Ivermectin should be studied more which I certainly agree um and that you know healthy people shouldn't get vaccinated healthy young people which I don't agree I just felt at the end of that conversation to say well I'm just a comedian what do I know I feel like it it it it didn't fully integrate the power that a person like Joe Rogan has to set the agenda so I think the reason he says I'm just a comedian is the same reason I say I'm an idiot which I truly believe I can explain exactly what I mean by that but like it's it's it's more for him or in this case for me to just keep yourself humble and you know because I think it's a slippery slope when you think you have responsibility to then think you actually have an authority because a lot of people listen to you you think you have an authority to actually like speak to those people and you have the enough authority to know what the hell you're talking about and I think there's just a humility to just kind of making fun of yourself that's extremely valuable and saying I'm just a comedian um I think is a reminder to himself that uh you know he's often full of shit so are all of us and so that's a really powerful way for himself to keep himself humble I mean I I think that's really useful to in some kind of way for people in general to um yeah make fun of themselves a little bit in whatever way that means and saying I'm just a comedian is just one way to do that now that that coupled that with the responsibility of doing the research and really having your open mind and all those kinds of stuff um I think that's something Joe does really well on a lot of topics but he can't do that and everything and so that it's it's up to the people to decide how well he does it on on certain topics and and not others um but how do you think uh Sanjay did in that conversation so I know I'm going to get myself into trouble here um because Sanjay is a very close friend Joe my personal interaction with him has been our two interviews but it's like my interview with now sit down with somebody for four hours it's it's a lot and and great and then and then private uh communication so I am personally more sympathetic now to the arguments that Sanjay was making or trying uh trying to make I believe that the threat of the virus is greater than the threat of the vaccine that doesn't mean that we can guarantee 100 safety um for the vaccine but these are really well tolerated vaccine and we know for all the reasons we've been talking about this is a really scary virus and particularly the MRNA vaccines what they're basically doing is getting your body to replicate a tiny little piece of the virus the spike protein and then your body responds to that and so that's a much less much less of an insult to your body than being infected by the virus so I'm I'm more sympathetic to the people who say well everybody should get vaccinated but people who've already been infected we should study whether they need to be vaccinated or not having said all of that I felt that that Joe Rogan won the debate I mean it was and the reason that I felt that he won the debate was there if they were kind of had they had two different categories of arguments so Sanjay what he was trying to do which I totally respect was was saying there's so much animosity between the on these different sides let's lower the temperature let's let's model that we can have a respectful dialogue with each other we can actually listen and Sanjay again I've known him for many years he's a very empathic humble just a all-around wonderful human being and I really love him and so he was making cases that were based on kind of averages studies and things like that and Joe was saying well I know a guy whose sister's cousin had this experience and I'm sure that it's all true in the sense that we have millions of people who are getting vaccinated and and different things and what Sanjay should have said was I I know that's anecdote here's another anecdote of like when Francis Collins was with you and he talked about the World Wrestling guy who was like six six and a big muscly guy and then he got kovid and he was anti-vaccine and then he got coveted and almost died and he said I'm gonna by the way yeah I don't know if you know this part no oh this is funny Joe's gonna listen to this is he's gonna be laughing does Joe listen like to the four hours of this in addition to the three hours of his interviews every day no not every day but he listens to a lot of these and we talk about it and we argue about it hi Joe we love you Joe but he uh so that particular case I don't know why Francis said what he said there but that's not accurate oh really so the wrestler never he didn't almost die he was no big deal at all for him and he said that to him I think I'm not sure I think something got mixed up in francis's memory he there was another case he must have been like because I don't imagine he would bring that case up and just like make it up you know because like why but he that was not at all like that was a pretty public case to get an interview with him that uh that wrestler he was just fine so that anecdotal case I mean Francis should not have done that so if I have any so I have a bunch of criticism of how that went people who criticize that interview I feel like don't give enough respect to the full range of things that Francis Collins has done in his career here is an incredible scientist and I also think a really good human being but uh yes that conversation was flawed in many ways and one of them was why when you're trying to present some kind of critical like criticized Joe Rogan why bring up an adult events at all and if you do bring up anecdotal evidence which is not scientific if you're scientist you should not be using anecdotal evidence if you do bring it up why bring up one that's not that's first not true and you know it's not true so I know to pretend so you don't know it's not your book so yes that would have been find another case exactly uh where exactly so the basic thing in it coming back to Sanjay and and Joe's uh conversation was that Sanjay was trying to use statistical evidence and Joe was using anecdotal evidence and so I think that for Sanjay and there are all kinds of of things where there are debates where the often the person who's better at debating wins the debate regardless of the topic um so I think what what Sanjay could have done and Sanjay is such a smart a smart guy um is to say why well that's that's an anecdote here's another anecdote and there are lots of different anecdotes and there certainly are people who have taken the vaccine and have had problems that could reasonably be traced to the vaccines and there certainly are lots of people I would argue more people who've not had the vaccine but who've gotten coveted and have either died or our hospitals are now full of people who weren't vaccinated in many ways um I mean our emergency rooms are full of undaccinated people here in the United States so I think what Sanjay could have done but there was a conflict between um wanting to kind of win the debate and wanting to take the temperature down and what he could have done is to say well here's an anecdote I have a counter anecdote and we can go on all day but here's what the statistics show and I think that was the the things I think it's it's a healthy conversation we can't I mean there are a lot of people who are afraid of the vaccine there are a lot of people who don't trust the scientific establishment and lots of them have good reason it's not just people think of like Trump Republicans there are lots of of people in the African-American Community who've had a historical terrible experience variants with the Tuskegee and and all sorts of things so they they don't trust the messages that were being delivered I live in in New York City and they had a we had a piece in the New York Times where in the in the earliest days of the vaccines there were this big movement let's make sure that the poorest people in the city have first access to the vaccines because they're the ones they have higher density in their homes they're relying on public transport so there's this whole liberal effortless and then in the black community in New York according to the New York Times there was very low acceptance of the vaccines and they interviewed people in that article and they said well if the white people want us to have it first there must be something wrong with it they must be doing something right and so we have to listen to each other the like I would never I mean I I have a disrespect for everybody and if somebody is cautious about the vaccine for themselves or or for their children we have to listen to that at the same time public health is about creating public health and there's no doubt I think Joe was absolutely right that older people obese people are at greater risk for being harmed or killed by the by covid-19 than young healthy people but by everybody getting vaccinated we reduce the risk to everybody else and so I feel like like with everything there's the individual benefit argument and then there's the community argument and I absolutely think about expressing that clearly that there's a difference between the individual health and freedoms and uh the community health and freedoms and exp steel Manning each side of this this is one of the problems that people don't do enough of is be able to so how do you just steal men an argument you describe that argument in the best possible way you have to first understand that argument let's go to the non-controversial thing like Flat Earth like most people most colleagues of mine at MIT don't even read about right like the the full argument that the flat earthers make I feel is disingenuous for people in the physics community to roll their eyes at flat earthers if they haven't read their arguments you should you should feel bad that you didn't read their arguments and like like the it's the rolling of the eyes that's a big problem you haven't read it your intuition says that these are a bunch of crazy people okay but you don't get you you haven't earned the right to roll your eyes you've earned your right to maybe not read it but then don't have an opinion don't roll your eyes don't do any of that dismissive stuff and the same thing in this the the scientific Community around covet and so on there's often this kind of saying oh God that's conspiracy theories that's misinformation without actually looking into what they're saying if you haven't looked into what they're saying then don't talk about it like if you're a scientific leader and the communicator you need to look into it it's not that much effort I totally agree and I think that humility it's a it's a constant theme of your podcast and I love that and so after the the uh conversation debate whatever it was between Sanjay and Joe I reached out on Twitter to someone I've never met in person but I'm in in touch privately to a guy named Daniel Griffin who's a a professor at uh at Columbia medical school and just so smart there he's uh he gives regular updates on covid-19 on a thing called twiv this weekend critic of twiv for its its coverage of academic Origins yes um but on this issue and just having regular updates Daniel is great and so I said you know to him I said why don't we um have a an honest process to get the people who are raising concerns about the vaccines in their own words to raise what are their concerns not and then um let's do our best job of saying well here are these concerns and then here is um our evidence making a counter claim and here are links to if you want to look at the studies upon which these claims are made here here they are and Daniel who's incredibly busy I mean he he reads every I mean it seems every paper that comes out every week and it's unbelievable um so but he sent me a link to the CDC q a page um on on the CDC website and it wasn't that it was people who were I mean it was written by people like me who were convinced in the benefit of these um of these vaccines so the questions were framed they were kind of like they weren't really the framing of the people with the concerns they were framing of people who were just kind of imagining something else I mean you always talk about kind of humility and active listening I know you don't mean and it doesn't mean that we don't stand for something like I I certainly am a strong proponent of vaccines and masks and and all of those things um but if we don't hear other people we don't let if we don't let them hear their voice in the conversation if it's just saying well you may think this and here's why it's wrong the argument may be right it'll just never break through by the way my interpretation of Joe and Sanjay I listened to that conversation without looking at Twitter or the internet and I thought that was a great conversation and I thought Sanji actually really succeeded at bringing the temperature down to me the goal was bringing the temperature down I didn't even think of it as a debate I was like oh cool this isn't going to be some weird it's like two friendly people talking and then I look at the internet and then the internet says Joe Rogan slams such like like I said as if it was a heated debate that Joe won and it's like all right it's really the temperature being brought down real conversation with your two humans that wasn't really a debate it was just a conversation yeah and that was a success yeah and I definitely think it was a success but I also felt um that um that a a takeaway and again this isn't because this is something that I don't agree with even though I have great as I've said respect for Joe I think a reasonable person listening to that conversation would come away with the conclusion that um all in all these vaccines are a good thing um but if you're young and healthy um You probably don't need it and I just felt that um that there was a stronger case to be made even though Sanjay made it it wasn't that Sanjay didn't make it it was just that in the flow of that conversation I felt that the case for the vaccines and the vaccines both as an individual Choice and then certainly again as I as I said before I think that well people can be afraid of the vaccines the virus itself is much scarier and we're just we're seeing it now in in real time now with these variations and variants I just felt that that was kind of the the rough takeaway from that conversation um and I felt that that Sanjay again whom I love I felt could have made his case a little bit cheaper uh so the way the thing he succeeded is he didn't come off as uh like uh a science expert looking down at everybody talking down to everybody so he succeeded in that yeah which is very respectful but I also think sort of making the case for taking the vaccine where you when you're a young healthy person when you're sitting across from Joe Rogan is like a high difficulty on the video game level for sure so it's not a it's difficult to do yeah it's difficult to do and also it's difficult to do because it's not like it's not a simple as like look at the data there's a lot of data to go through here yeah and there's also a lot of non-data stuff like the fact that first of all uh questioning the sources of the data the quality of the data because it's also disappointing about covet is that the quality of the data is not great but also questioning all the motivations of the different parties involved whether it's major organizations that develop the vaccine whether it's major institutions like NIH or nyad that that are sort of communicating to us about the vaccine whether it's the CDC and the who whether it's the Biden or the Trump Administration whether it's China and all those kinds of things you have to that's part of the conversation here I mean vaccination is not just a public health tool it's also a tool for a government to gain more control over the populace like there's a lot of Truth to that too things that have a lot of benefit can also be used as a trojan horse to increase bureaucracy and control but those that has to be on the table for a conversation yeah I I think it has to be on the conversation but um I mean your parents and when they were in the Soviet Union and here in the United States and actually it was a big collaboration between US and Soviet Union when the polio vaccine came out but there were people all around the world who had a different life trajectory no longer living in fear and all these people who were paralyzed or killed from polio smallpox has been eradicated it was one of the the great successes in human history and while it for sure is true that you could imagine some kind of fraudulent vaccination effort but here I genuinely think I mean whatever the number 15 million 16 million is the economist number of dead from uh covet 19. many many more people would be dead but for these vaccines and so I get that any activity that needs to be coordinated by a central government has the potential to increase bureaucracy and increase control but there are certain things that Central governments do like the development particularly these mRNA vaccines which it's it's purely a a U.S government Victory I mean it was a huge DARPA funding and then ni the National Institute for allergy and infectious disease NIH funding I mean this was a public-private partnership throughout and that we got a a working vaccine in 11 months was a miracle so it's not purely a victory again you have to be open-minded I mean I'm I'm with you here playing a bit of Devil's Advocate but the people who discuss any viral drugs that got them acting and other Alternatives would say that the extreme focus on the vaccine distracted us from considering other possibilities and saying that this is purely a success is distracting from the story that there could have been other Solutions so yes it's a huge success that the vaccine was developed so quickly and surprisingly way more effective than it was hoped for but there could have been other Solutions and they're completely distracted from us from that in fact it distracted us from looking into a bunch of things like the lab leak and that so it's not a pure Victory and fair enough and there's a lot of people that criticize the overreach of government and all of this that one of the things that makes the United States great is the individualism and the hesitancy to ideas of mandates even if the mandates on mass will have a positive even strongly positive result the Americans many Americans will still say no because in the long Arc of History saying no in that moment will actually lead to a better country and a better world so that's a messed up aspect of America but it's also a beautiful part we're skeptical even about good things I I agree and and certainly um we should all be cautious about government overreach absolutely and it happens in all kinds of scenarios with incarceration with a thousand things and we also should be afraid of government underreach that if there is a problem that could be solved by governments and that's why we have governments in the first place is that they're just certain things that individuals can't do on their own and that's why we we pool our resources and we in some ways sacrifice our rights for this common thing and that's why we don't have hopefully people murderers marauding or people driving 200 miles down the street that we we have a process for arriving at a set of of common rules and so while I fully agree that we need to respect and we need to listen um we need to find that right balance and you've raised the magic I word Ivermectin um and so in Ivermectin like my view has always been um Ivermectin could be effective it could not be effective let's study it through a full process and when you had Francis Collins with you even while he was making up stories about this um this wrestler um he was saying exactly but he was he was saying that they're going to do a full randomized highest level trial of ivermectin and if Ivermectin works then that's another tool in our in our toolbox and I think we we should and and I think that in that Sanjay was absolutely correct to concede the point to Joe um that it was disingenuous for people including people on CNN to say that Ivermectin is is um is for livestock and so I like I definitely think that we have to like we have to have some kind of process that allows us to come together and I totally agree that the great strength of America is that we Empower individuals it's the history of our Frontier mentality in our country so we I 100 agree that we have to allow that even if sometimes it creates messy processes and uncomfortable feelings and all those sorts of things you are an ultra marathon runner yes what what uh what are you running from no uh what is the right it's the funny thing is so I'm an ultra marathoner and I've done 13 Iron Mans and people say oh my God that's amazing 13 Iron Man's and what I always say no one Iron Man is impressive 13 Iron Man answers there's something effing wrong with you we just need to figure out what it is yeah there's there's some demons trying to work through I mean well you're doing the work though most people just kind of let the demons sit in the Attic no um what have you learned about yourself about your mind about your body about life from you know taking taking your body to the limit in that kind of way to running those kinds of distances well it's it's a great question and I know that you are also kind of exploring the limits of the physical and so for me and doing the Iron Mans and the ultra marathons it's always the same kind of lesson um which is just when you think you have nothing left you actually have a ton left there are a lot of resources that are there if you call on them and the ability to call on them has to be cultivated it really and so for me especially in the the Iron Man and Iron Man in many ways is is harder than the the ultra marathons because it'll be it I mean it's 140 miles I'll be at a hundred and mile 120 um having done the swim and then the bike and I'll be whatever six miles into the run and I'll think I feel like shit I have nothing left how am I possibly gonna run 20 miles more but there's there's always more and I and I think that for me these extreme sports are my process of exploring what is what's possible and I feel like it applies in so many different areas of life where you're kind of pushing and it feels like the the limit and and you know one of my a friend of mine who I just have so much respect for who actually be a great guest if you haven't already interviewed him interviewed him is Charlie Engel and Charlie he was a drug addict he was in prison his life was total shit and somehow and I can't remember the full story he just started running around the prison yard and if it's like Forrest Gump and he just kept running and running and then he got out of prison and he kept running and he started doing Ultra marathons started inspiring all these other people now he's written all these books as a matter of fact we just spoke a few months ago uh that he's uh he's planning on running um from the Dead Sea to somehow to the top of Mount Everest from the lowest point to the highest point on Earth and and I said well why why are you stopping there why don't you get whatever Cameron and go down to the lowest part of the ocean go to the lowest part of the ocean and then talk to to Elon Mar uh Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and go to the kind of the highest place in the stratosphere you can get but it's it's this thing of possibility and I just feel like so many of us and and myself included we get stuck in a sense of what we think is our range and if we're not careful that can become our range and and that's why for me in all of life it's all about like we've been talking about challenging the limits challenging assumptions challenging ourselves and and hopefully you know we do it in a way that kind of doesn't hurt anybody I you know when I'm at the Iron Man they have all these little kids and they'll have these little shirts and it'll say like my dad is a hero and have the little Iron Man logo and and I want to say it's like no your your dad is actually a narcissistic dick who goes on Eight Mile bike rides every Sunday rather than spend time with you and so we shouldn't hurt anybody um but I for me I I and I also I just find it very enjoyable and I hope I'm not disclosing uh too much about our Commerce station before we went live where you're doing so many different things with running and your and your Martial Arts and I encouraged you to do um Ultra marathons in because there's so many great ones in Texas it's actually surprisingly a very enjoyable way to spend a day like how how would you recommend so yeah for people who might not know I I've never actually even run a marathon around uh 22 miles in one time at most I did the 4x4 by 48 challenge with David Goggins where you run four miles every four hours is it different as less to do with the distance and more to do with the sleep deprivation what advice would you give to a first time ultra marathon or like me trying to run 50 or more miles or for um anybody else interested in this kind of exploration of their range what I always tell is the same advice is register pick your timeline of when you think it you can be ready make it depending on where you are now make it six months make a year and then register for the race and then once you're registered just work back from there what's it what's it going to take but one of the things for people who are just getting going you really do need to make sure that your body is ready for it and so particularly and particularly as we get older strengthening is really important so I'll do a plug for my brother Jordan Metzel he's a doctor at hospital for special surgery but his whole thing is functional strength and it then so and people know about and you can actually even go to his website um that you just Google Jordan Metzel iron strength but it's all about like burpees and just building your muscular strength so that you don't get injured as you as you increase and then just increase your mileage with you know in some steady way make sure sure that you you take rest days and listen to your body because people like you who are just very kind of Mind Over Matter like there's you were telling me before about you have an injury but you kind of run a little bit differently and and you know we need to listen to our bodies because our bodies are are communicating um but I think if he's kind of little by little magic is is possible and and what I will say is some I also do I've done lots and lots of marathons and I always tell people that the ultra marathons at least the ones that I do and I shouldn't misrepresent myself I mean there are people who do 500 Mile races the ones that I do are 50k Mountain Trail runs which is is 32 miles so it's I do the kind of the easier side of um uh of Ultras but it's actually much easier than a marathon because you know some of the mountain ones some sometimes it's so steep um that you can't uh you you have to walk it because walking is faster than than running and every you know four or five miles in the supported races you stop and eat blintzes and boiled potatoes it's actually quite enjoyable but as I started to tell you when we before we we went live um so I've done for lots of years these 50k Mountain Trail runs and I was going to Taiwan a number of years ago go for something else and I thought wouldn't it be fun to to do an ultra marathon in Taiwan I looked and that you know the weekend after my visit there was a marathon it was called the I mean ultra marathon it was called the Taiwan beast and I figured oh beasts what are they talking about it's 50k Mountain Trail and I've done a million of them and then I went to register and then as part of registration they said you need to have all of this equipment and it was all this like Wilderness Survival equipment and I was thinking God these Taiwanese but what a bunch of ways it's dramatic you have to carry give me a break 50k Mount drone so I get there and the race starts at like 4 30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere and you have to wear headlamps and everyone's carrying all this stuff and you kind of go running out in into the into the rain forest it was the hardest thing I've ever done it took 19 hours there were maybe 15 Cliff faces like a real cliff and somebody had dangled like a little piece of string and so you had to hold on to the string with one hand while it was in the pouring rain climb up these Cliffs there were maybe 20 River Crossings but not just like a little stream like a torrential River there were some things where it was so steep um that everyone was just climbing up and then you'd slide all the way down and climb up and there were people I met on the way out there who are saying oh yeah I did the Sahara 500 kilometer race and and those people were just sprawled out a lot of them didn't finish um so that was the hardest thing I've ever so what how do you get through something like that you just one step at a time was there do you remember is there uh yeah these are dark moments or is it kind of all spread out you know suddenly it wasn't really dark moments the biggest there was one thing where I'd been running so long I thought well I must almost be done and then I found out I had like 15 miles more um but you know I guess with all of these things it's the it's the messages that we tell ourselves and so for me it's like the message I always tell myself is you know quitting isn't an option I mean once in a while you've got to have to quit if like listen to the universe if whatever you're gonna kill yourself or something but for me it was just you know whatever it takes there's no way I'm stopping and if I have to go up this muddy Hill 20 times because I keep sliding I'm sure there's there's a way it's probably a personality flaw what is your love for chocolate come from oh it's a great question and in my both of my Joe Rogan interviews that's the first question that he asked I'm glad that we could we've gotten to that so one I've always loved chocolate and as and I I call it like a secret but now that I keep telling if you keep telling the same secret it's actually no longer a secret that I have a a secret which is not secret because I'm telling you on a podcast um life as a chocolate Shaman and so when I give Keynotes at Tech conference I say I'm happy to give a keynote um but I want to lead a sacred cacao ceremony in the night I'm actually believe it or not the official chocolate Shaman of what used to be called exponential medicine which is part of Singularity University now my friend Daniel Kraft who runs it it's going to be called Next Med and so but I'll have to go back as I was going um to Berlin a lot of years ago and I've always loved chocolate but I was going to Berlin to give a keynote um at a at a big conference called TOA Tech uh Tech open air and so when I got there um the first night I was supposed to give a talk but there had been some mix up they'd forgotten to reserve the room and so the talk got canceled and in the brochure they had all these different events around Berlin that you could go to and one of them was a cacao ceremony and so I went there and actually met some somebody Viviana who is still a friend by me going in there and there was this cacaoism and there are these kind of hippie dudes and then everybody got the cacao and then they said all right as they talked a little bit about the process and then they said all right everyone just stand and kind of we're gonna spin around in a circle for 45 minutes and so I spun around in the circle for like 10 10 minutes but then I had to leave because I had to go to something else and so that I thought that was that but then I saw Viviana the next day and I said how did the cacao money go and she showed me these pictures of all these people mostly naked like it turned into chaos and and it was like on so let me get this straight people drank chocolate then they spun around in a circle and something else happened and anyway so then two days later I was invited to another cacao ceremony which was also actually part of this TOA and that was kind of more structured and it was more sane because it was part of this thing and and at the end of that I had this I thought one how the greatest thing ever a sacred cacao ceremony like you drink chocolate milk and and everybody's free and I love that idea because I I've you know I've never done drugs I don't drink but just part of it is because I think whatever like I was saying with the ultra running um all of the possibilities are within us if we can get out of our own our own way and then I thought well you know I think I can do a better job than what what I experienced in Berlin so I came back and I thought I'm going to get accredited as a a cow Shaman and this will shock you because I know if you're going to be like a rabbi or a priest or something there's some process but shockingly there's no official process chocolate Shaman and so I thought all right well you know I'm just going to train myself and when I'm ready I'm going to declare my chocolate Shamanism so I started studying different things and when I was ready I just said now I'm a chocolate Shaman self-declared self-declared and so but I do these ceremonies and I've I've done them at Tech conferences I did one in in Soho House in New York I've done it at a place Rancho La Puerta in Mexico and every time it's the same thing because it just if people are given a license to be free just it doesn't matter and what I always say is you're here for a sacred cacao ceremony but the truth is there's no such thing as sacred cacao and there's no sacred mountains and there's no sacred people and there's no sacred plans because nothing is sacred if we don't attribute a scribe sacredness to it but if we recognize that everything is sacred then we'll live different lives and for the purpose of this ceremony we're just going to say all right we're going to focus on this cacao which actually has been used ceremonially for 5 000 years it has all these wonderful properties um but is this people who get that license and then they're just free and people are dancing and it's the goal to celebrate life in general is it to celebrate the senses like taste is it to celebrate yourself each other what is their um I think the core is gratitude and just appreciation and all the experiences in life yeah just of being alive of just living in this sacred world where we have all these things that we don't even pay any attention to um my friend AJ Jacobs he had a wonderful book that I I use the spirit of it in the ceremonies and not the exactly but he was in a a restaurant in New York coffee shop and his child said hey where does the coffee come from and he's I mean he's like a wonderful big thinker and he started really answering that question well here's where the beans come from but how did the beans get here and who painted the yellow line on the street so the truck didn't crash and who made the cup and he spent a year making a full spreadsheet of all of the people who in One Way or Another played some role in that one cup of coffee and he traveled all around the world thanking them like it's like thank you for painting the yellow line on the road yeah and so for me with the cacao part of when I do these ceremonies is just to say like you're drinking this cacao but there's a person who planted the seed there's a person who watered the plant there's a person and and I just think that level of awareness and it's true with anything like you have in front of you a stuffed Hedgehog so somebody made that I love it it's great but like if you if we just said all right where does this stuffed Hedgehog come from we would have a full story of globalization of the interconnection of people all around the world doing all sorts of things of human imagination it's beyond our capacity and our daily we go insane if every day like we're speaking into a microphone well you know what are the hundreds of years of technology that make this possible but it's just once in a while we just focus on one thing and say this thing is sacred and because I'm recognizing that and I'm having an appreciation for the world around me it just kind of makes my life feel more sacred it makes me recognize my connection to others so that's that's the gist of it yeah it's funny I often look at foreign things in this world and moments and just uh I mean awe of the full universe that brought that to be um in a similar way as you're saying but I don't as often think about exactly what you're saying which is the number of people behind every little thing we get to enjoy I mean yeah this Hedgehog this microphone is it like directly like thousands of people involved million and then indirectly is millions like uh yeah and they're all like this microphone that there's like artists essentially like people who made it their life's work all the cross like from the factories to the manufacturer there's families that the production of this microphone and this Hedgehog are fed because of the skill of this human that helped contribute to that that development yeah it's um and like Isaac Newton and John Von Newman are in this are in this microphone they're standing on the shoulders of the giant so we're standing on their shoulders yeah and uh somebody will be standing on ours yeah you mentioned uh one shared world yeah what is it well thanks for asking and by the way what I will say is the people who are listening this is so incredible and I'm so thrilled to have this kind of long conversation person who's listening past the five hour mark thanks mom um the uh I salute you yeah somebody was like sleeping for the first four hours it just was like now's the good stuff I've been saving it um but and I have to say that so much of our Lives is is forced into these short bursts that I'm just so appreciative to have the chance to have this this conversation so thank you people would say five hours is short so you know let's let's go um and um yeah that's a that's what uh my girlfriend uh says that like if if I was like um captured and tortured and they were gonna interrogate me it's like at the end they'd say all right enough we're sick of this guy we quit let him go I love it um so background on on one shared world I mentioned I'm on a faculty for Singularity University in the earliest days of the pandemic I was invited to give a talk on whether the tools of the genetics and biotech revolutions were a match for the uh the outbreak and my view was then as now that the answer to that question is yes but I woke up that morning and I felt that that wasn't the most important talk that I could give there was something else that was more pressing for me and that was the the realization they were asking the question well why weren't we prepared for this pandemic because we could have been we weren't um and why can't and because of that why can't we respond adequately uh to this this outbreak um and then there was the thing well if we even if we respond somehow miraculously overcome this pandemic it's a peric victory if we have if we don't prepare ourselves to respond to the broader category of pandemics particularly as we enter the age of synthetic biology but if somehow miraculously we solve that problem but we don't solve the problem of climate change well kind of who cares we didn't have a pandemic but we wiped everybody out from climate change and let's just say um you get where this is going that we organize ourselves and we solve climate change and then we have a nuclear war because everybody's particularly China now but U.S the former Soviet Union are building all these nuclear weapons who cares that we solved climate change because we're all gone anyway and the The Meta category bringing all those things together was this mismatch between the increasingly Global and shared nature of the biggest challenges that we face and our inability to solve that entire category of problems and there's a a historical issue which is that prior to the 30 years war in the 17th century we had all these different kinds of sovereignty and religious and and different kinds of organizational principles and everybody got in this war and in this the series of treaties that together are called the Peace of Westphalia the the framework for the modern What We Now understand is the modern nation state was late and then through colonialism and other means that idea of a state is what it is today spread throughout the the world then through particularly the late 19th and early 20th century we realized how unstable that system was because you always had these jockeying jocking between sovereign states and some were rising and some were falling and you ended up in in war and that was the genius of the generations who came together in 1945 in San Francisco and the planning had even started before then who said well we can't just have that world we need to have an overlay and we talked about the UN and the who of systems where are which transcend our national sovereignties they don't they don't get rid of them but they transcend them so we can solve this category of problems but we're now reaching a point where our reach as humans even individually but collectively is so great that there's a mismatch between as I said the nature of the problems and the the ability to solve those uh those problems and unless we can address that broader Global Collective action problem we're going to extinct ourselves and and we see these different what I call verticals whether it's climate change or trying to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation or anything else but none of those can succeed and frankly it doesn't even matter if one succeeds because all of them have the potential to lead to extinction level events so anyways I gave that talk and and that talk went viral I stayed up all night the next night and I drafted I think it was like an insanity but I think a lot of us were manic in those early days of the pandemics wanting to do something and so I stayed up all night and I drafted what I called a declaration of global interdependence and I posted that on my website my Jamie russell.com and still there and that went viral um and so then I called a meeting just on the people on my personal email list and so we had people from 25 countries there were all of these people who were having the same thing there's something wrong in the world and they wanted to be part of of a process of fixing it and so it was a crazy 35 days where we broke into eight different working groups we had an amazing team that helped re-draft what became the Declaration of interdependence which is now in in 20 languages we laid out a work plan we founded this organization called one shared world the URL is oneshared.world and it's just been this incredible journey we now have people who are participating in one way or another from 120 different countries we have our public events exploring these issues get millions of viewers we have world leaders who are participating so the vision the the the vision is to work on some of these big problems arbitrary number of problems that present themselves in the world that face all of human civilization and to be able to work together well that is but there's a there's a macro a meta problem which is the global Collective action problem and so the idea is even if we if we just focus on the verticals on the manifestations of the global Collective action problem um there will be an infinite number of those things so while we work on those things like climate change pandemics wmd and other things we also have to ask the bigger questions of why can't we solve this category of problems and the idea is at least from my observation is um that whenever big decisions are being made are national leaders and corporate leaders are doing exactly what we've hired them to do they're maximizing for National interest even or corporate interest even at the expense of everybody and so it's not that we want to get rid of States states are essential in our world system it's not we want to undermine the UN which is also essential but massively underperforming what we want to do is to create an empowered Global constituency of people who are demanding that their leaders at all levels just do a better job job of balancing broader and narrower interests I see so this is more like a uh make it more symmetric in terms of power it's uh holding uh accountable the the Nations the leaders the problem is nations are powerful we talked about China quite a bit how do you have an organizations of of citizens of Earth they can solve the the this Collective problem that holds China accountable it's difficult because U.N you could say a lot of things but to call it effective is hard yeah you know the internet almost is a kind of representation of um a collective force that holds Nations accountable you know Twitter not to give Twitter too much credit but social networks broadly speaking so you have hope that this is possible to build such organ such collections of humans that resist China not necessarily resist China but human I mean our cultures change over time I mean the idea of the modern nation state would would not have made sense to people in the 13th or 14th century the idea that became the United Nations I mean it had its its earliest days in in the philosophies of Kant it took a long time for these ideas um to be to be realized um and so the idea and and you know we're we're far from successful I mean we've had little minor successes which we're very proud of we got the G20 leaders to incorporate the language that we provided on addressing the needs of the world's most vulnerable populations into the um final Summit communicate from the G20 Summit in Riyadh this year we're just on the verge of having our language pat on the same issue ensuring everyone on Earth has access to Safe Water basic sanitation and hygiene and essential pandemic protection by 2030 passed as part of a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly and it's we're primarily I mean it's young people all around the world and when I told them that in the beginning of this year this is our goal we're going to get the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution with our language in it I mean first I think they all thought it was insane but they were too young and inexperienced to know how insane it was but now these these young people are just so excited that it's actually happening so what we're trying to do is is really to create a movement which we don't feel that we need to do from scratch because there are a lot of movements like right now we just had the Glasgow G20 I mean I'm sorry the Glasgow climate change cup 26 and then Greta thundberg who has a huge following and who's an amazing young woman but I was kind of disappointed in what she said afterwards it became like a meme on Twitter which was blah blah blah and basically it was like blah blah blah these old people are just screwing around and it's it's a waste of time and and definitely the critique is merited but young people have never been more empowered educated connected than they are now and so that's what what we we've had a process with uh with uh one shared World um where we partnered with the model United Model United Nations the Aga Khan foundation the India sanitation Coalition and what we did is say all right we have this goal Water Sanitation hygiene and pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030. and we had debates and consultations using the model un framework All Around the World in multiple languages languages and we said come up with a plan for how this could be achieved and these brilliant young people in every country not every country most countries um they all contributed then we had a plan then I recruited friends of mine like my friend Hans Carell in Sweden who's the former Chief counsel of the the whole United Nations and asked him and others to work with these young people and representative to turn that into what looks exactly like a UN resolution it's just written by a bunch of kids all around the world we then sent that to every permanent representative every government represented at the UN and that was why working with the German and Spanish governments why the language essentialized from that document is about to pass the UN and that doesn't mean that just passing a U.N General Assembly resolution changes anything but we think that there's a model of engaging people just like you're talking about these people who are are outside of the traditional power structures and who want to have a voice but I think we need to give a little bit of structure because just going I'm a big fan of global citizen but just going to a global citizen concert and waving your iPhone back and forth and tweeting about it isn't enough to drive the kind of change that's required we need to come together even in untraditional ways and articulate the change we want and build popular movements to make that happen and popular means scale and then movements at scale that actually uh like where at the individual level do something and that's uh that's then magnified with the scale to actually have a significant impact I mean uh at its best you hear a lot of folks talk about the various cryptocurrencies as as possibly helping you have young people get involved in challenging the power structures by challenging the monetary system and there's uh you know some of it is um number go up people get excited when they're they can make a little bit of money but that's actually almost like um entry point because then you almost feel empowered and because of that you start to think about some of these philosophical ideas that I as a young person have the power to change the world all of these senior folks in the position of power they were like first of all they were once young and Powerless like me and uh I could be part of the Next Generation that makes a change well the things I see that are wrong with the world I can make I can make it better and it's very true that the overly powerful nations of the world could be a relic of the past that's a that could be a a 20th century and before idea that was tried to create a lot of benefit but we also saw the problems with that kind of world extreme nationalism we see the benefits and the problems of the Cold War arguably Cold War got us to the Moon um but there could be other a lot of other different mechanisms that inspired competition especially friendly competition between nations versus adversarial competition that resulted in the response to covid for example with China and the United States and Russia and the secrecy the censorship um yeah and all the things that are basically against the the spirit of science and resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars in the cost of countless lives what gives you hope about the future Jamie well one of the things you mentioned um cryptocurrency and then as you know better than most there's cryptocurrency and then underneath the cryptocurrency there's the blockchain and the distributed Ledger and then like we talked about there are all these young people who were able to connect with each other um to organize in in new ways and I work with these young people every single day through one shared World primarily but also other things and there's so much optimism there's so much hope um that I just have a lot of faith that we're going to figure something out I'm an optimist by nature and that doesn't mean that we need we need to be blind to the dangers there are very very real dangers but just given half the chance people want to be good people want to do the right thing and I do believe that there's a role I mean there's a role for the at least near term for governments but there's always a role for leadership and I'm I guess like a gramsian in in the sense that that I I think that we need to create Frameworks and and structures that allow leaders to emerge and we need to build Norms so that the leaders who emerge our leaders who call on us Inspire our best instincts and not drive us toward our our worst but I really see a lot of Hope and I mean you say this all the time in your in your podcast and you may even be more optimistic to me because you look at the darkest moments of human history and see hope but we're kind of a crazy wonderful species I mean yes we figured out ways to slaughter each other at scale but we've come up with these wonderful philosophies about love and and all of those things and and yeah maybe the bonobos have some love in in their cultures but this we're kind of a wonderful magical species and if we just can create enough of an infrastructure it doesn't need to be and shouldn't be controlling just enough of an infrastructure so that people are stakeholders feel like they're stakeholders in contributing to a positive story I just really feel the the sky is the is the limit so if there's somebody who's young right now or somebody in high school somebody in college listening to you you've done a lot of incredible things you're respected by a lot of the elites irrespected by the people so you're both able to sort of vote you know uh speak to all groups walk through the fire like you like you mentioned with this lab leak what advice would you give um to young kids today that are inspired by your story well thank you I mean I think there's one there's lots of I'm honored if anybody is inspired um but it's the same thing as I said with the science that it's all about values the core of everything is knowing who you are and so yes I mean there's the broader thing of you follow your passions um a creative mind and an inquisitive mind is the core of everything because the knowledge base is constantly sharing so learning how how to learn but at the core of everything is investing in knowing who you are and what you stand for because that's that's the way that's the uh the path to Leading a meaningful life to contributing to not feeling alienated from your life as you get older and just like like you live um it's an ongoing process and we all make mistakes and we all kind of travel down wrong paths and just have some love for yourself and recognize that just at every like I was saying with the Iron Man um just when you think there's no possibility that you can go on there's a 100 percent possibility that you can go on and just when you think that nothing better will happen to you there's a 100 percent chance that something better will happen to you you just gotta keep going Jamie this I've been a a fan of yours I've I think first heard you're on uh Joe Rogan Experience but been following your work your bold Fearless work with the speaking about the lab leak and everything you represent from your Brilliance to your kindness and the fact that you spend your valuable time with me today and now I officially made you miss your flight and the fact that you said that whether you're being nice or not I don't know that you would be okay with that means the world to me and I'm really honored that you will spend your time with me today well really it's been such a great pleasure and and thank you for creating a forum to have these kinds of of long conversations so I I really enjoyed it and and thank you and if anybody has now listened for uh what's it been five and a half hours yep thank you for listening five-hour Club thank you Jamie thanks awesome thanks for listening to this conversation with Jamie Metzel to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Richard Feynman about science and religion which I think also applies to science and geopolitics because I believe scientists have the responsibility to think broadly about the world so that they may understand a bigger impact of their inventions the quote goes like this in this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another the old problems such as the relation of Science and religion are still with us and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization thank you for listening and hope to see you next timethe following is the conversation with Jamie Metzel author specializing in topics of genetic engineering biotechnology and geopolitics in the past two years he has been outspoken about the need to investigate and keep an open mind about the origins of covid-19 in particular he has been keeping an extensive up-to-date collection of circumstantial evidence in support of what is colloquially known as lab leak hypothesis that covid-19 leaked in 2019 from the Wuhan Institute of virology in part I wanted to explore the idea in response to the thoughtful criticism to parts of the Francis Collins episode I'll have more and more difficult conversations like this with people from all walks of life and with all kinds of ideas I promise to do my best to keep an open mind and yet to ask hard questions while together searching for the beautiful and the inspiring in the mind of the other person it's a hard line to walk gracefully especially for someone like me who's a bit of an awkward introvert with barely the grasp of the English language or any language except maybe Python and C plus plus but I hope you stick around be patient and empathetic and maybe learn something new together with me this is a lux Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now here's my conversation with Jamie Metzel what is the probability in your mind that covid-19 leaked from a lab in your write-up I believe you said 85 percent I know it's just a percentage we can't really be exact with these kinds of things but it gives us a sense where your mind is where your intuition is so as it stands today what would you say is that probability I would stand by what I've been saying since really the middle of last year it's more likely and not in my opinion that the pandemic stems from an accidental lab incident in Wuhan is it 90 is it 65 percent I mean that's kind of arbitrary but when I stack up all of the available evidence and all of it on both sides is circumstantial it weighs very significantly toward a lab incident origin so before we dive into the specifics at a high level what uh types of evidence what intuition what ideas are leading you to uh to have that kind of estimate is it possible to kind of condense when you when you look at the wall of evidence before you where's your Source the the strongest source of your intuition yeah and I would have to say it's just logic and deductive reasoning so before I make the case for why I think it's most likely a lab incident origin let's just say why it could be and still could be what we natural origin all of this is a natural origin in the sense that it's a bat virus backbone horseshoe bat virus backbone okay I'm Gonna Keep pausing you yeah to find stuff so maybe it's useful to say what do we mean by lab leak what do we mean by natural origin what do we mean by virus backbone okay great questions um so viruses come from somewhere viruses have been around for 3.5 billion years and we they've been around for such a long time because they are adaptive and they're growing and they're always changing and they're morphing and that's why viruses are I mean they've been very successful and we are are victims sometimes we're beneficiaries we have viral DNA has morphed into our our genomes but now certainly in the case of covid-19 we are victims of the success of viruses and so when we talk about a backbone so the SARS cov2 virus um has a it has a history and these viruses don't come out of whole cloth there are viruses that that morph and so we know that at some period maybe 20 years ago or whatever um the the the virus that is SARS cov2 existed in horseshoe bats it was a horseshoe bat virus and it evolved somewhere and there are some people who say there's no evidence of this but it's a plausible Theory based on how things have happened in the past maybe that virus jumped from the horseshoe bat through some intermediate species so it's like let's say there's a bat and then it infects some other animal let's say it's a pig or a raccoon dog or a civet cat they're all Pangolin they're all sorts of animals that have been considered and then that virus adapts into that new host and it changes and grows and then according to the quote-unquote Natural Origins hypothesis it jumps from that animal into humans and so what you could imagine and some of the people who are making the case all of the people actually who are making the case for a natural origin of the virus what they're saying is it went from bat to some intermediate species and then from that intermediate species most likely there's some people who say it went directly Back To Human but through some intermediate species and then humans interacted with that species and then it jumped from that whatever it is to to humans and that's a very plausible Theory it's just that there's no evidence for it and the nature of the interaction is do most people kind of suggest that the like What markets so the interaction with the humans the animal is in the form of it's either a live animal that's being sold to be eaten or uh recently live animal but newly dead animal being sold that's certainly one very possible possibility a possible possibility I don't know if that's a word but the people who believe in the wet Market origin that's what they're saying so they had one of these animals they were cutting it up let's say in a market and maybe some of the blood got into somebody maybe had a cut on their hand or maybe it was aerosolized and so somebody breathed it and then that virus found this new host and that was the the human host but you could also have that happen in let's say a farm so it's happened in the past that let's say that there are farms and because of human encroachment into Wild Spaces we're pushing our our farms and our Animal Farms further and further into what used to be the the just natural habitats and so it's happened in the past for example that there were bats roosting over pig pens and the bat droppings went into the pig pens the viruses in those droppings infected the pigs and then the pigs infected the the humans and and that's why it's a plausible Theory it's just that there's basically no evidence for it if it was the case that SARS cov2 comes from this type of interaction um as in most of the at least recent past outbreaks we'd see evidence of that viruses are messy they're constantly undergoing darwinian Evolution and they're changing and it's not that they're just ready for Prime Time ready to infect humans on day one normally you can trace the viral Evolution prior to the time when it infects humans but for SARS cov2 it just showed up on the scene ready to infect humans and there's no history that anybody has found so far of that kind of a viral Evolution with the first SARS you could track it by the The genome sequencing that it was experimenting and uh SARS cov2 was very very stable and meaning it had already adapted to humans by the time it interacted with us fully adapted so with SARS there's a rapid Evolution when it like first kind of hooks onto a human yeah because it's trying like a virus its goal is to survive and replicate yeah no it's true it's like oh we're going to try this oh that didn't work we'll try exactly like it like like a startup and so we don't we don't see that and so there are some people who say why well one hypothesis is are you have a totally isolated group of humans maybe in in southern China which is more than a thousand miles away from uh from Wuhan and maybe they're doing their animal farming um right next to these uh where these areas where there are these horseshoe bats and maybe in this totally isolated place that no one's ever heard of they're not connected to any other place one person gets infected and it doesn't spread to anybody else because they're so isolated they're like I don't know I mean I can't even imagine that this is is the case then somebody gets in a car and drives all night more than A Thousand Miles through crappy roads to get to Wuhan doesn't stop for anything doesn't infect anybody on the way no one else in that person's village infects anyone and then that person goes straight to the the juanan seafood market according to this in my mind not very credible Theory and then unloads his stuff and everybody gets infected and they're only delivering those animals to the Wuhan Market which doesn't even sell very many of these kinds of animals that are likely intermediate species and not anywhere else so that's it's a little bit of a straw man um but on top of that the Chinese have sequenced more than 80 000 animal samples and there's no evidence of this type of a viral Evolution that we would otherwise expect Let's uh try to at this moment steal man the argument for the natural origin of the virus so just uh to clarify so Wuhan is actually despite what it might sound like to people is a pretty big city there's a lot of people that live in it 11 million so not only is there the Wuhan Institute of virology there's other centers that do work on viruses yes but there's also a giant number of markets and everything we're talking about here is pretty close together so when I kind of look at the geography of this I think when you zoom out it's all Wuhan but when you zoom in there's just a lot of interesting dynamics that could be happening and where the cases are popping up and what's being reported all that kind of stuff so I think the people that argue for the natural origin and there's a few recent papers that come out arguing this it's kind of fascinating to watch this whole thing but I think what they're arguing is that there's this Hunan Market that's one of the major markets uh the wet markets in Wuhan that uh there's a bunch of cases that were reported from there so if I look at for example the Michael Warby perspective the hero in science he argues he wrote this a few days ago the the predominance of early covet cases linked to Hunan market and this can't be dismissed as ascertainment bias which I think is what people argue that you're just kind of focusing on this region because a lot of cases came but there could be a huge number of other cases so people who argue against this say that this is a later stage already right um so he says no he says this is this is the epicenter and uh this is a clear uh evidence that uh circumstantial evidence but evidence nevertheless that this is where the jump happened to humans the big explosion maybe not k0 I don't know if he argues that but with the early cases so what do you make of this whole idea Can you steal man it yeah before yeah and my goal here isn't to attack people on on the other side and and if my feeling is if there is evidence that's presented um that that should change my view I I hope that I'll be open-minded enough to change my view and certainly Michael Warby is a thoughtful person a respectful a respected scientist and and I think this work is is contributive work but I just don't think um uh that it it it that it's as significant as has been reported in in the press and so what his argument is is that there is an early cluster in December of 2019 around the the Juan on seafood market and even though he himself argues that the original break through case the original case the index case where the first person infected happened earlier happened in October or November so not in December his argument is well what are the odds that you would have this number this cluster of cases in the huanan seafood market and if the origin happened someplace else wouldn't you expect other other clusters and it's not an entirely implausible argument but there are reasons why I think it's uh that it's this is not nearly as determinative as has been reported and I certainly had a lot of I and others had tweeted a lot about this and that is first uh the the people who were infected in this cluster it's not the earliest known uh virus of the SARS cov2 it began mutating so this is it's not the original SARS cov2 there so you it had to have happened someplace else too the people who were infected in the market um weren't infected in the part of the market where they had these kinds of animals that are considered to be candidates um for as an intermari intermediary species and third there was a bias actually I'll have four things uh third there was a bias in the early assessment in China of what what they were looking for they were asked did you have exposure to the market because I think in the early days when people were figuring things out that was one of the questions that uh that was asked and fourth and probably most significantly we have so little information about those early cases in China and that's really unfortunate and we'll talk about this later because the Chinese government is preventing access to all of that information which they have which could easily help us get to the bottom at least know a ton more about how this pandemic started and so this is it it's like grasping at straws in the dark with gloves on that's right but to steal man the argument we have this evidence from this market and yes the Chinese government has turned off the lights essentially so we have very little data to work with but this is the data we have so who's to say that this data doesn't represent a much bigger data set that a lot of people got infected at this Market where it even at the parts or especially at the parts with the the meat the infected meat was being sold so that could be true and it probably is true the question is is this the source is this the place where this began or was did this just a place where it was Amplified and I certainly think that it's it's extremely likely that the Juan on seafood market was an at point of amplification and that's it's just answering a different question basically what you're saying is it's very difficult to use the market as evidence for anything because it's probably not even the starting point so it's just a good place for it to continue spreading that's certainly my view what Michael warby's argument is um is that well what are the odds of that that we're seeing this amplification at this particular in the market and if we if let's let me put this way if we had all of the information if if the Chinese government hadn't blocked access to all of this because there's blood bank information there's all sorts of information uh and based on a full and complete understanding we came to believe that all of the early cases um were at this Market I think that would be a stronger argument than what this is so far but everything leads to the fact that why is it that the Chinese government which was frankly after a slow start the gold standard of doing viral tracking for SARS one why have they apparently done so little and shared so little I think it asks it it begs a lot of questions okay so let's uh then talk about the Chinese government uh let's there's several governments right so one is the local government of Wuhan and not just the Chinese government let's talk about government uh no let's talk about human nature it just keeps zooming out yeah let's talk about planet Earth yeah no uh so there's the Wuhan local government there's the Chinese government uh led by Xi Jinping and uh there's governments in general I'm trying to empathize so my father was involved with Chernobyl I'm trying to put myself into the mind of local officials of people who are like oh shit there is there's a potential catastrophic event happening here and uh it's my ass because I we there's incompetence all over the place the human nature is such that there's incompetence all over the place and you're always trying to cover it up and so so given that context I want to lay out all the possible incompetence all the possible malevolence all the possible geopolitical tensions here all right where in your sense did the cover-up start so uh there's this suspicious uh fact it seems like that the Wuhan Institute of virology at a public database of thousands of uh sampled bad coronavirus sequences and that went offline in September 2019. what was that about so let me talk about that specific and then I'll also follow your path zooming out and it's really important is that a good start it's a great starting point yeah yeah so but there's there's a a bigger story and but let me talk about about that so the Wuhan Institute of virology um and we can go into the whole history of the Wuhan Institute of virology either now or later because I think it's it's very relevant to this story but let's focus for now on this database they had a database of 22 000 viral samples and sequence information about the viruses that they had had collected some of which the collection of some of which was supported through funding from the NIH not a huge NIH through the Eco Health Alliance it's a relatively small amount 600 000 but but not nothing um the goal of this database um was so that we could understand viral Evolution so that exactly for this kind of moment where we had an unknown virus we could say well is this like anything that we've seen before and that would help us both understand what we're facing and be better able um to to respond so this was a an act a password protected public access database in 2019 um it was in September 2019 um it became inaccessible and then the whole a few months later the entire database uh disappeared the Chinese have said is that because there were all kinds of computer attacks on this on this database but why would that happen in September 2019 before the the pandemic at least as far as as we know so so just to clarify yes it went down to September 2019 just so we'll get the year straight January 2020 is when the virus really started getting um the Press so we're talking about the December 2019 a lot of early infections happened September 2019 is when this database goes down just to clarify because you said it quickly the Chinese government said that uh their database was getting hacked right therefore the director of this part of the Wuhan Institute of virology said that oh sh oh she was the one that said it she was the one who said oh yeah boy I did not even know that part yeah okay well she's an interesting character we'll talk about her yeah uh so so the excuse is that uh that's getting cyber attacked a lot so we're gonna take it down without any further explanation which seems very suspicious and then this virus starts to emerge in October November December there's a lot of argument about that but after sorry to interrupt like but some people are saying that the first outbreak could have happened as early as September I'm not I think it's more likely it's October November but for the people who are saying that the first outbreak uh the first incident of a of a known outbreak at least to somebody happened in September they make the argument well what if that also happened in mid-september of of 2019 I'm not prepared to go there but there are some people who make that argument but I think if again if I were to put myself in the mind of officials whether it's officials within the Wuhan Institute of virology or Wuhan local officials um I think if I notice some major problem like somebody got sick some sign of uh oh shit was screwed up that's when you kind of uh do this slow there's like a Homer Simpson meme where you slowly start backing out and I would probably start um hiding stuff cya yeah yeah and then coming up with really shady excuses it's like you're in a relationship and your girlfriend wants to see your phone and you're like I'm sorry I'm just getting attacked by the Russians now that's that courteous I can't yeah I wish I wish I could I wish I could it's just I'm unsafe right now so so would it be okay if I give you my kind of macro view of the whole information space and and why I believe this has been so contentious it's it's it's so here's here's if I had to give my best guess and I underlined the word guess um of of what happened and and your background your family background with Chernobyl I think is highly relevant here so after the first SARS there was a recognition that we needed to distribute knowledge about virology and epidemiology around the world that people in China and Africa in Southeast Asia they are were the front line workers and they needed to be doing a lot of the the viral monitoring and assessment so that we could have an early alarm system um and that was why there was a lot of investment in in all of those places in building capacity and training people and helping to build institutional capacity and the Chinese government they recognized that they needed to ramp uh ramp things up and then the World Health Organization in the world Health assembly they had their their International Health regulations that were designed to create a stronger infrastructure so that was that was the goal there were a lot of Investments and and I know we'll talk later about the Wuhan Institute of virology and I won't go into that into that right now so there was all of this distributed capacity and so in the early days there's a breakout in Wuhan we don't know is it September October November uh maybe uh December is when the the local authorities start to recognize that something's happening but at some point in late 2019 uh local officials in Wuhan understand that something is up and exactly like in Chernobyl these guys exist within a hierarchical system and they are going to be rewarded if good things happen and they're going to be in big trouble if bad things happen under their watch so their initial instinct is to squash it uh it's and they my guess is they think well if we squash this information we can most likely beat back this outbreak because lots of outbreaks happen all the time including of SARS one where there was a multiple lab incidents out of out of the lab in in Beijing and so they start their cover-up on day one they they start screening social media they send nasty letters to to different doctors and others who are starting to speak up but then it becomes clear that there's a bigger issue and then the the national government of China again this is just hypothesis the national government gets involved they say all right this is getting much bigger they go in and they realize that we have a big problem on our hands they relatively quickly know that it's spreading human to human and so the right thing for them to do then is what the South African government is doing now is to say we have this outbreak we don't know everything but we know it's serious um we need help but that's not the Instinct of people in in most governments and certainly not in authoritarian governments like China and so the the national government they have a choice at that point they can do option one which is what we would hear called the right thing which is total transparency they criticize the local officials for having this cover up and they say now we're going to be totally transparent but what does that do in a system like the former Soviet Union like China now if local officials say wait a second I thought my job was to cover everything up to support this alternative reality that authoritarian systems need in order to to survive well now I'm going to be held accountable for if I'm not totally transparent like your whole system um would would collapse so the the national government they have that choice and they their only choice according to the logic of their system is to be all in on a cover-up and that's why they block the World Health Organization from sending its team to Wuhan for over three weeks they overtly Lie To The World Health Organization about human to human transmission and then they begin their cover-ups so they begin very very quickly destroying samples hiding records they start imprisoning people for uh asking basic questions soon after they establish a gag order preventing Chinese scientists from writing or saying anything about pandemic Origins without prior government approval and what that does means that there isn't a lot of data there's not nearly enough data coming out of China and so lots of responsible scientists outside of China who are data driven say well I don't have enough information to draw conclusions and then into that vacuum step a relatively small number of largely virologists but also others respected scientists and I know we'll talk about the I think Infamous Peter daisak who who say well with without any real foundation in in the evidence they say we know pretty much this comes from nature and anyone who's raising the possibility of a lab incident origin is a is a conspiracy theorist so that message um starts to to percolate and then in the United States we have Donald Trump and he's starting to get criticized for America's failure to respond prepare for and respond adequately to the outbreak and so he starts saying well I know first after praising Xi Jinping he starts saying well I know that China did it and the who did and he's kind of pointing fingers at everybody uh but uh but himself and then we have a media here that had shifted from the from the traditional model of he said she said journalism so and so said X and so and so said why and then we'll present both of those views but with Donald Trump he would make outlandish starting positions so he would say Lex is an Ax Murderer and then in the early days they would say Lex is an Ax Murderer you know Lex's friend says he's not an expert and we'd have a four-day debate is he or isn't he and then at day four someone would say why are we having this debate at all because the original point is is just is baseless and so the media just got in the habit here's what Trump said and here's why it's wrong it's very complicated to figure out what is the role of a politician what is the role of a leader in this kind of game of politics but certainly in um when there's a tragedy when there's a catastrophic event what it takes to be a leader is to see clearly through the fog and to make big bold decisions and to speak to the truth of things and even if it's unpopular truth to listen to the people to listen to all sides to the opinions to the controversial ideas and to see past all the bullshit all the political bullshit and just speak to the people speak to the world and make bold big decisions that that's probably what was needed in terms of leadership and I'm not so willing to criticize whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump on this I think most people cannot be great leaders but that's why when great leaders step up we write books about them yeah and I and I agree and and even though I mean I I think of myself as a progressive person I certainly was a Critic of a lot of of what uh president Trump did but on this particular case even though he may have said it in an uncouth way Donald Trump was actually in my view right I mean when he said hey let's look at this lab he said I have evidence I can't tell you I don't think he even had the evidence but his intuition that this probably comes from a lab in my view was a correct intuition and certainly I started speaking up about pandemic Origins early in 2019 and my friends my Democratic friends were brutal with me saying what are you doing you're supporting Trump in an election year and I said just because Donald Trump is saying something doesn't mean that I need to oppose it if he's if Donald Trump says something that I think is correct well I want to say it's correct just as if he says something that I don't like I'm going to speak up about that good you walk through the fire so that's a that's you laid out the story here and uh I think in many ways it's a human story it's the story of politics it's a story story of human nature but let's talk about the story of the virus and let's talk about the Wuhan Institute of virology so maybe this is a good time to try to talk about his history about its Origins about what kind of stuff it works on about biosafety levels and about Batwoman yeah so what what is the honesty of our algae when did it start yeah so it's a great question so um after SARS one which was in the early 2000s 2003 2004 um there was this effort to um to enhance as I mentioned before Global capacity including in China so the Wuhan Institute of virology had been around for decades before then but there was an agreement between the French and the Chinese governments to build a the largest bsl4 lab so biosafety level four so in these what are called high containment Labs there's level four which is the highest level and people have seen that and on TV and elsewhere where you have the the people in the different in suits and all of these protections and then there's level three which is still very serious uh and uh but not as much as as level four and then level 2 is just kind of goggles and and some gloves and maybe that and maybe a face mask much less so the French and the Chinese governments agreed that France would help build the first and and still the largest bsl4 plus some mobile bsl3 labs and they were going to do it in Wuhan and Wuhan is kind of like China's Chicago and I had actually been it's a different story I'd been in Wuhan relatively not that long before the pandemic broke out and that was why I knew that Wuhan is it's a it's not some Backwater where there are a bunch of yokels eating bats for dinner every night this is a really sophisticated wealthy highly educated and and cultured City and so I I knew that it wasn't like that even the Juan and seafood market wasn't like some of these seafood markets that they have in southern China or in Cambodia where I lived for uh for two years I mean this it was a totally open thing I'm gonna have to talk to you about some of the including the Wuhan Market just some of the wild food going on here because you've traveled that part of the world yeah well let's not get there yes let's not get distracted good as I was telling you Lex before and this is maybe an advertisement yes um is having now listened to to a number of your your podcasts when I'm doing long Ultra training runs or driving in the mountains like the really because in the beginning we have to talk about whatever it is is the topic but the really good stuff happens later so so friends if you listen to the end I you know I I have to say as I was telling you before like when I heard your long podcast with Jeron Lanier and he talked about his mother at the very end I mean it was just beautiful stuffs I don't know whether I can I can match beautiful stuff but I'm gonna I'm gonna gonna do my best you're gonna have to find out exactly stay tuned um so um so France had this agreement um that they were going to help design and help build uh this bsl4 lab in Wuhan and um it was going to be with French standards and there were going to be 50 French experts who were going to work there and supervise the the work that happened even after the Wuhan Institute of virology um uh in in the new location um uh started started operating but then when they started building it uh the the French contractors the the French overseers were increasingly appalled um that they had less and less control that the Chinese uh contractors were swapping out new things they it wasn't built up to French standards so much um that at the end when it was finally built uh the the the person who was the vice chairman of the project and a leading French industrialist named maryah refused to sign off and he said we we can't um support we have no idea um what this is whether it's safe or not and when this this lab opened remember we were supposed to have 50 French experts it had one French expert and so the the French were really disgusted and actually when the Wuhan Institute of virology in its new location opened in in 2018 um two things happened one French intelligence privately approached U.S intelligence saying we have a lot of concerns about the Wuhan Institute of virology about its safety and we don't even know who's operating there is it being used as a dual use facility and also in 2018 the U.S embassy in Beijing uh sent some people down to Wuhan to go and look at well at this laboratory and they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogan from The Washington Post later got his his hands on saying um this is really unsafe they're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses in conditions where a leak is is possible and so then you mentioned shujang Li and I'll connect that to the these virologists who I was was was talking about so there's a very credible thesis that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen in other parts of the world having Partnerships with experts in those parts in those parts of the world must be a foundation of our of our efforts we can't just bring everything home because we know that that viruses don't care about borders and boundaries and so if something happens there it's going to come here so very correctly and we have all kinds of Partnerships with experts in in these labs and shujang Lee was one of those partners and her closest relationship was with Peter dazek who's a British I think now American but the the president of a thing called Eco Health Alliance which was getting money from NIH and basically Eco Health Alliance was a pass-through organization and and you know over the years it was only about six hundred thousand dollars so almost all of her funding came from the Chinese government but there's a little bit that came from the United States and so she became their kind of leading expert and the the point of contact between the Wuhan Institute of virology and certainly Peter dazick but also uh also with with others and that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak I didn't mention that um I did mention that there were these virologists who had this fake certainty that they knew it came from nature and it didn't come from a lab and they called people like me conspiracy theorists just for raising that that possibility but when Peter dazek was organizing that effort in February of 2020 what he said is we need to Rally behind our Chinese colleagues and that the basic idea was um these International collaborations are under threat and I think it was because of that because Peter dazek's basically his his major contribution as a scientist was just tacking his name on work that xujang Lee had largely done um he was defending a lot certainly for himself and his organization so you think equal Health Alliance and Peter is less about money it's more about kind of um almost like Legacy because you're so attached to this work it's just not a human life so I I think so I mean I've been criticized for being actually I'm certainly a big critic of Peter daisig but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient I mean it's so easy to say oh somebody they're like an evil ogre and just trying to do evil and and cackling in their in their closet or whatever but I think for most of us even those of us who do terrible horrible things the story that we tell ourselves and we really believe is that we're doing the thing that we most believe in I mean I did my PhD dissertation on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia they genuinely saw themselves as idealists they they thought well we need to make radical change to build a better future and what they described as what they felt was Radical change was was a monstrous atrocities by us so the criticism here of Peter is a uh is that uh he was uh part of an organization that was kind of um well funding an effort that was an unsafe implementation of a biosafety level for laboratory well a few things so what he thought he was doing um was and and what he thought he was doing is itself highly controversial because there's one there that in 2011 um there were I know you've talked about this with other guests but in in 2011 uh there were the first published papers on this now Infamous gain of function uh research and and basically what they did both in in different labs and certainly in the United States in in Wisconsin and in in the Netherlands was they had a bird flu virus that was that was very dangerous but not massively uh transmissive and they they had a gain a function process through what's called serial passage which means basically passing advice like natural selection but forcing natural selection by just passing a virus through a different cell cultures and then selecting for what it is that you want so relatively easily they took this deadly but not massively transmissive virus and turned it into in a lab a deadly and transmissive virus and that showed that this is really dangerous and so there were at that point there was a huge controversy there were some people like Richard ebright and Mark lipsich at Harvard who were saying that this is really dangerous we're in the the idea that we need to create monsters to study monsters I think maybe even you have said that in the past it doesn't make sense because there's an unlimited number of monsters and so what are we going to do create an unlimited number of monsters and if we do that eventually the monsters are are going to get out then there was the Peter daisik camp and he got a lot of fun funding particularly from the United States who said well and and certainly Collins and fauci were supportive of this and they thought well there's a safe way to go out into the world to collect the world's most dangerous viruses and to poke and prod them um to figure out how they might mutate how they might become more dangerous with the goal of predicting future pandemics and that certainly never happened with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments and that largely never happened but that was so Peter daisak kind of epitomized that that second second approach um and as as you've talked about in the past in 2014 there was a funding moratorium in the United States and then in 2017 that was lifted it didn't affect the funding that went to the to the Eco Health Alliance um so when this happened in in the beginning and again coming back to Peter's motivations I don't think here's the best case scenario for for Peter I'm going to give you if what I imagine he was thinking and then I'll tell you what I actually think so I think here's what he's thinking um this is most likely a natural origin outbreak it it just like SARS won and again in Peter's hypothetical mind just like SARS one this is most likely a natural outbreak we need to have an International Coalition in order to fight it if we allow these political attacks to undermine our Chinese counterparts and the Trust In This release relationships that we've built over many years we're really screwed because they have the most local knowledge of these outbreaks and even though and and this guy gets a lot more complicated even though there are basic questions that anybody would ask and that shojang Li herself did ask about the origins of this pandemic even though Peter dazak and I'll mention this describe this in a moment had secret information that we didn't have that in my mind massively increases the possibility of a lab incident origin I Peter daisak would like to guide the public conversation in the direction where I think it should go and in the in support of the kind of international collaboration that I think is necessary that's a strong positive discussion because it's true that there's a lot of political BS and a lot of uh kind of just the bickering and lies as we've talked about and so it's very convenient to say you know what let's just ignore all of these quote unquote lies and my favorite word misinformation uh and then because the way out from this serious pandemic is for us to work together so let's strengthen our Partnerships and everything else is just like noise yeah so let's and so then now I want to do my personal indictment of Peter dazek because that that's my view but I wanted to fairly because I think that that you know we all tell ourselves stories and and and I and and also when you're a science Communicator um you can't in your public Communications give every doubt that you have or every Nuance you kind of have to summarize things and so I think that he was again in this this benign interpretation trying to summarize in the way that he thought the the conversations should go here's my indictment of Peter daisak and I I I it's I feel like uh Brutus here but I I um I've not come here to praise um uh Peter daisak because um while Peter dazek was doing all of this and making all of these statements about well we pretty much know it's a natural origin and then there was this February 2020 Lancet letter where it turns out and we only knew this later that he was highly manipulative so he was recruiting all of these people he drafted the the infamous letter calling people like me uh conspiracy theorists he then wrote to people like Ralph Barrick and linfa Wang who are also very high profile virologists saying well let's not put our names on it so it doesn't look like we're doing it even though they were doing it he didn't disclose a lot of information that they had it was a strategic move so just uh in case people are not familiar Feb year 2020 Lance a letter was tldr is a lab leak hypothesis is a conspiracy theory essentially yes so like with the authority of science not saying like it's highly likely saying it's obvious duh it's uh it's natural origin everybody else is just uh is everything else is just misinformation and look there's a bunch of really smart people that sign this therefore it's true yeah not only that so there were um the people whose 27 people signed that letter and then after president Trump cut funding uh to Eco Health Alliance then he organized 77 Nobel laureates to to have a public letter criticizing that but what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know is that in March of 2018 Eco Health Alliance in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of virology and others had applied for a 14 million dollar Grant um too DARPA which is kind of like the the VC side of the Venture Capital side of the of the defense department they're kind of where they do kind of Big Ideas uh by the way as a tiny tangent I've gotten a lot of funding from DARPA they fund a lot of excellent robotics research and darp is incredible and among the things that they applied for is that we meaning Wuhan Institute of Urology is going to go and it's going to collect the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in southern China and then we as this as this group are going to genetically engineer these viruses to insert a furin cleavage site so I think when when everyone's now seen the image of the SARS cov2 virus it has these little Spike proteins these little things that that stick out which is why they call it a coronavirus within that Spike protein are these if you're on cleavage sites which basically help with the virus getting access into our cells and they're going to genetically engineer these furion cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses the cervical viruses and then and so then a year and a half later what do we see we see a bat Coronavirus with if you're in cleavage site unlike anything that we've ever seen before in that category of SARS like coronaviruses that well yes I mean it the the DARPA very correctly didn't support that application well that's actually let's like pause on that so for a lot of people that's like the Smoking Gun yeah okay let's talk about this 2018 proposal to DARPA so I guess who's drafted the proposal is it yeah ego Health but the proposal is to do so Eco health is technically uh a U.S funded organization primarily and then the idea was to do work at Wuhan Institute of virology with yeah so it was with equal Health yes so Eco Health basically that um the one Institute of biology was going to go and they were going to collect these viruses and store them at we wanted to do but they're also going to do the actual test recording it's a really important Point according to their proposal the actual work was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barrick at the University of North Carolina who's probably the world's leading expert on uh Corona coronaviruses and so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work um we know I think quite well that Ralph Barrack's lab in part because it was not funded by by DARPA they didn't do that specific work what we don't know is well what work was done at the Wuhan Institute of virology because wiv was part of this proposal they had access to all of the plans they had done they had their own capacity and they had already done a lot of work in genetically engine genetically altering this exact category of viruses they had created a chimeric mixed viruses they had done they had mastered pretty much all of the steps in order to achieve this thing that they applied for funding with ecohealth to do and so the question is did the Wuhan Institute of virology go through with that research anyway and in my mind there's that's a very very real possibility it would certainly explain why they're giving no information and as you know I've been a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing which Dr Tedros created in the aftermath of the announcement of the world's first crispr babies and and it was just basically the exact same story so ho John Quay Chinese scientist it was not a first-tier scientist but a perfectly adequate second-tier scientist came to the United States learned all of these capacities went back to China and said well there's a much more permissive environment I'm gonna you know be a world leader I'm going to establish both myself and China so in every scientific field we're seeing this this same thing where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China so is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of virology with this exact game plan was doing it anyway do we possible we have no clue what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of virology it seems extremely likely that at the Wuhan Institute of virology and this is certainly the U.S government position there was the work that was being done in Dr shu's lab but that wasn't the whole wiv we know at least a coin in the United States government that there was the Chinese military the pla was doing work there were they doing this kind of work not to create a bio weapon but in order to understand these viruses maybe to develop vaccines and treatments it seems like a very very logical possibility and then so we know that the the one instead of virology had all of the skills we know that they were part of this proposal and then you have Peter dazak who knows all of this that at that time in February of 2020 we didn't know but then he comes swinging out of the gate saying anybody who's raising this possibility of a of a lab incident origin is a conspiracy theorist I mean it really makes him look in my mind very very bad and yeah not to at least be somewhat open-minded on this because he knows all the details he knows that it's not zero percent I mean there's no way in his mind could you even argue that so it's potential because of the bias because of your focus I mean it could be the Anthony fauci masks thing whereas he knows there's some significant probability that this is happening but in order to preserve good relations with our Chinese colleagues we want to make sure we tell a certain kind of narrative so it's not really lying it's doing the best possible action at this time to help the world not that this already happened yeah but that's how like yeah I I think it's quite likely that that was the story that he was telling himself but it's that that lack of transparency in my mind is fraudulent um that the word that we were struggling to understand something that we didn't understand and that I just think that people who possess that kind of information especially when um the existence like his the entire career of Peter daisak is based on U.S taxpayers there's a debt that comes with that and that debt is honesty and transparency and for all of us and our you talked about your girlfriend checking your phone for all of us being honest and and transparent in the most difficult times is really difficult if it were easy everybody would do it and that's I just feel that that uh Peter was the opposite of transparent and then went on the offensive and then um uh had the gall of joining I know we can talk about this this um highly compromised joint study process with the the international experts and their Chinese government counterparts and used that as a way of furthering this um in my mind fraudulent narrative um that it almost certainly came from natural Origins and um and the lab origin was extremely unlikely just to stick briefly on the proposal to wrap that up because I do think in a in a kind of John Stewart way if you heard that uh a bit he yeah sort of kind of like common sense way the 2018 proposal to DARPA from equal Health Alliance and wuhanistan virology just seems like a bit of a Smoking Gun to me like that um so there's this excellent book that people should read uh called viral the search for the origin of covid-19 Matt Ridley and Alina Chan I think Alina is in MIT should probably look at the broad yeah at Broad Institute yeah yeah so she I heard her in an interview give this analogy of unicorns yeah and uh where basically somebody writes a proposal to add horns to Horses The Proposal is rejected and then a couple of years later a year later a unicorn shows up and then I was like yeah I is not your lord yeah it's like it's possible it's natural origin like we haven't detected a unicorn yet and this is the first time we've detected a unicorn or it could be this massive organization that was planning is fully equipped has like a history of being able to do this stuff as the world experts to do it has the funding has the motivation to add horns to horses and now unicorn shows up and they're saying nope yeah definitely definitely natural that connects to the to what you your first question of how do I get to my 85 percent and here's here's a summary of that of that answer and so it's what I said in my 60 Minutes uh interview a long time ago of all the Gin joints and all the towns in all the world the quote from from Casablanca and so of all the places in the world where we have an outbreak of a sars-like bat coronavirus it's not in the area of the natural habitat of the Horseshoe bats it's the one city in China with the first and largest level 4 virology lab which actually wasn't even using it they were doing level three and level two for this work where they had the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses um where they were doing aggressive experiments designed to make these scary viruses scarier where they had been part of an application to insert a fury cleavage site able to infect human cells and where when the outbreak happened we had a virus that was ready ready for action to infect humans and to this day better able to infect humans than any other species including including bats and then from day one there's this massive cover-up and then on top of that in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people there's basically no evidence for the natural origin hypothesis everything that I've described just now is circumstantial but there's a certain point of where you add up the circumstances and you see this seems pretty pretty likely I mean if we're getting to a hundred percent we are not at a hundred percent by any means there still is a possibility of a natural origin and if we find that great but from everything that I know that's how I get to my 85. and we'll talk about the why this matters in the political sense in the human sense in a science in the realm of science all of those factors but uh first as Nietzsche said let us look into the abyss and the games will play with monsters that is uh colloquially called gain of function research let me ask the kind of political sounding question which is how people usually phrase it did Anthony fauci uh fund gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of virology so it depends I mean I've obviously been very closely monitoring this I've spoken a lot about it I've written about it and it depends on I mean not to quote Bill Clinton but to quote Bill Clinton it depends on what the definition of is is and so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function and by gain a function there are lots of things like Gene therapies that are going to function but here what we mean is gain a function for uh pathogens able potentially able to create human pandemics but if you use the kind of Common Sense language and well then he probably did if you use the technical language from a 2017 NIH document and you read that language very narrowly I think you can make a credible argument that he that he did not there's a question though and and Francis Collins talked about that in his in his interview with you but then there's a question that we know from now that we have the information of the reports submitted by equal Health Alliance to the the NIH and some of which were late or not even delivered that some of this research was done on MERS Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome virus and if that was the case um there is a I think a colorable argument that that would be considered gain of function research even by the narrow language of that 2017 document but I but I I definitely think and I've said this repeatedly that Rand Paul can be right and Tony fauci can be right and the question is um what how are we defining gain a function and that's why I've always said the question in my mind isn't was it or wasn't it gain of function as if that's like a binary thing if if not grade and if yes guilty the question is just what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of virology what role if any did U.S government funding play in supporting that that work and what rights do we all have as as as human beings and as American citizens and taxpayers to get all of the relevant information about them so let's try to kind of dissect this so who frustrates you more Rand Paul or Anthony falchini's discussion or the discussion itself so for example gain a function is a term that's kind of more used uh just to mean making uh playing with viruses in the lab to try to develop more dangerous viruses is this uh kind of research um a good idea is it also a good idea for us to talk about it in public in the political way that has been talked about is it okay that um us may have funded gain of function research elsewhere I mean it's kind of assumed uh just like with Bill Clinton there was very little discussion of uh I think correct me if I'm wrong but you know whether it's okay for a president male or female to have extramarital sex okay or is it okay for a president to have uh extramarital sex with people on their on his staff or her staff it was more the discussion of lying I think it was did you did you lie about having sex or not and in this gain of function discussion what frustrates me personally is there's not a deep philosophical discussion about whether we should be doing this kind of research and what kinds like what are the ethical lines research on animals at all those are fascinating questions instead it's a gotcha thing did you or did you not fund research and gain a function and did you fund it's almost like a bio weapon did you give money to China to develop this bio weapon that now attacked the rest of the world so I mean all all those things are pretty frustrating but is there um I think the thing you can untangle about Anthony fauci and gaining functional research in the United States and equal Health Alliance and Wuhan Institute virology that's kind of um that's clarifying what were the mistakes made sure so on gain function there actually has been a lot of of debate and I mentioned before in 2011 these first papers uh there was a big debate uh Mark lipsich who's formerly at Harvard now with the the US government working the president's office um he led a thing called the Cambridge group uh that was highly critical of this work but basically saying we're we're creating monsters they had the funding pause in 2014 and they spent three years putting together a framework and then they they lifted it in 2017. so we had a thoughtful conversation unfortunately it didn't work and I think that's where where we are now so I absolutely think um that there are real issues with the relationship between the United States government and Eco Health Alliance and through that Eco Health Alliance with the Wuhan Institute of virology and one issue is just essential transparency because as I see it it's most likely the case that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things to the Wuhan Institute of virology and again I'm sure that shojiang Li is not herself a monster I'm sure of that even though I've never met her but there are just a different set of pressures on people working in an authoritarian system than people who are working in other systems that doesn't mean it's entirely entirely different and so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give one dollar um to an organization and certainly a virology Institute where you don't have full access to to their records to their databases we don't know what work is is is happening there and I think that we need to have um that kind of full examination and that's why so I understand what what Dr fauci is doing is saying Hey What I Hear Dr fat you think what I hear from you Rand Paul is you're accusing me of starting this pandemic and you're using gain of function as a proxy for that and we have in when there are Senate hearings every Senator gets five minutes and the name of the game is to translate your five minutes into a clip that's going to run on the news and so I get that there is that kind of game gotcha um but I also think that uh the Dr fauci and the Nia the National Institute of allergy and infectious diseases and the NIH should have been more transparent um because I I think that in this day and age where there are a lot of people poking around and this whole story of coveted Origins uh we would not be where we are if it wasn't for a relatively small number of people and and I'm I'm part of there are two as I know two groups one is these internet sleuths known as drastic and a number of them are part of a group that I'm part of called it's it's not our official name but called the Paris group it's about two dozen experts um uh around the world but centered around some some very high level French academics so we've all been digging uh and meeting with each other regularly since uh since last year and our governments across the board certainly China but including the United States haven't been as transparent as they as they they need to be so there's definitely mistakes were made on all sides and that's why for me from day one I've been calling for a comprehensive investigation into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China but we have to look at ourselves we did not get this right so to you I'm just gonna put Rand Paul aside here he politician playing political games it's very frustrating but it is what it is on all sides Anthony fauci you think should have been more transparent and um maybe more eloquent in expressing the the complexity of all of this the uncertainty in all of this yeah and and I get that it's really hard to do that because let's say you you have one you speak a paragraph and it's got four sentences and one of those sentences is the thing that's going to be turned into Twitter and let me put it back I'll get really so um I'll try not to be emotional about this but I I've heard uh Anthony fauci a couple of times now say that he represents science I know what he means by that he means in this political bickering all that kind of stuff that for a lot of people he represents science but words matter and this isn't Just Clips I mean maybe I'm distinctly aware of that doing this podcast like yeah I talked for like hundreds of hours now maybe over a thousand hours but like I'm still careful with the words like I'm trying not to be an asshole and I'm aware when I'm gonna ask when I'll apologize for it uh like if the words I represent science left my mouth which they very well could I would sure as hell be apologizing for it and not enough because I got in trouble I would just feel bad about saying something like that and even that little phrase I represent science no Dr fauci you do not represent science I love science the the millions of scientists that inspired me to get into it is to fall in love with the scientific method in the exploration of ideas through the rigor of science that Anthony fall she does not represent he's one I believe great scientist of millions he does not represent anybody uh he's just one scientist and I think the greatness of a scientist is best exemplified in humility because the scientific method basically says like you're you're like standing before the fog the mystery of it all and like slowly chipping away at the mystery and the it's it's like it's embarrassing it's uh humiliating how little you know that's the experience so the the great scientists have to have humility to me and especially in their communication they have to have humility and I mean I don't know and some of it is also Wars matter because you have to like great leaders have to have the Poetry of action they have to be bold and Inspire action across millions of people but you also have to uh through that poetry of words Express the complexity of the uncertainty you're operating under be humble in the face of not being able to predict the future or understand the past or really know what's the right thing to do but we have to do something and through that you have to be a great leader that inspires action and some of that is just words and he chose words poorly I I mean I so I I'm all torn about this and then there's politicians they're taking those words and magnifying them and playing games with them and of course that's a disincentive for the people who do the the scientific leaders that step into the Limelight to say any more words so they kind of become more conservative with the the words they use I mean it just becomes a giant mess but I think the solution is to ignore all of that and to be transparent to be honest to be vulnerable and uh the the express the full uncertainty of the what you're operating under to present all the possible actions and to be honest about the mistakes they made in the past I mean there's something even if you're not directly responsible for those mistakes taking responsibility for them is uh as a way to win people over like I don't think leaders realize this often in in the modern age in the internet age they can see through your bullshit and it's really inspiring when you take ownership so to do the thought experiment like in public do a thought experiment if there was a lab leak and then lay out all the funding the equal Health Alliance all the incredible signs going on at the uh Wuhan Institute of virology and the NIH lay out all the possible ethical problems lay out all the possible um mistakes that could have been made and say like this could have happened and if this happened here's the best way to respond to it and to prevent it in the future and just lay all that complexity out I mean I wish we would have uh seen that and I have hope that this conversation conversations like it your work and books on this topic will inspire young people today when they become in the Anthony fauci's role to be much more transparent and much more humble and all all those kinds of things that this is just a relic of the past when there's a person no offense to me in a suit that has to stand up and speak with Clarity and certainty I mean that's just the relic of the past is uh it is my hope but do you mind if I ever agree with a great deal of of what you said and I and I it's it's really unfortunate uh that our certainly the Chinese government as I said before our government um wasn't as transparent as I feel they should have been particularly in the early days of the pandemic and particularly with regard to the issue of pandemic Origins I mean we know that that Dr fauci was on calls with people like um Christian Anderson and Scripps and others in those early days raising questions is this an engineered virus there were a lot of of questions and it's kind of sad I mean as I mentioned before I've I've been um one I mean and certainly there were were others but there weren't a lot of us of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic were raising questions about hey not so fast um here and I and I launched my web website on pandemic origins in April of last year April 2020 it got a huge amount of attention and actually my friend Matt pottinger who is the Deputy National Security advisor when he was reaching out to people in the U.S government and in Allied government saying hey we should look into this the what he was sending them was my website it wasn't some U.S government information and so by the way people should still go to the website you keep getting keep updating it and it's it's an incredible resource well thank you thank you jamiemensel.com um and it's really unfortunate that our governments and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020 weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue people were hiding behind this kind of false uh consensus and and I'm critical of many people even when I heard Francis Collins uh interview with you I just felt well he wasn't as balanced on the issue of of covet Origins certainly Dr fauci could have in his conversation with Rand Paul it wasn't even a conversation but in some process in the aftermath could have laid things out a bit better he did say in Francis Collins did say that we don't know the origins and that was a shift um uh and we need to have an investigation so now um but having said all of that I do kind of one I have tremendous respect for Dr fauci for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS I mean I have been vaccinated with the moderna vaccine uh Dr fauci was a big part of the story of getting us these vaccines that have saved millions and millions of of lives and so I I don't think I mean there's a lot to this story and then the second thing is it's really hard to be a public health expert because you have your mission is public health and so and you have to if you are leading with all of your uncertainty um it's a really hard way to do things and so like even now like if I go to CVS and I and I get a Tylenol somebody has done a calculation of how many people will die from taking Tylenol and they say well we can live with that and that's why we have regulation and so all of us are doing kind of summaries and then we have people in public health who are saying well we've summed it all up and you should do X you should get your kids you know vaccinated for measles you should not drive your car at 100 miles an hour you you should don't drink lighter fluid whatever these these things are and we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines and yet now our information world is so fragmented that if you if you're not being honest about something that something material someone's going to find out and it's going to undermine your credibility and so I agree with you that that there is a greater requirement for transparency now maybe there always has been but there's an even greater requirement for it now because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly and that you're saying well here's what I know and this is based on what I know here are the conclusions that I draw but if it's just and and again I I don't I don't think the words I'm science or whatever it was are are the right words but if it's just you know trust me because of who I am I don't think that that flies anywhere anymore can I just ask you about the Francis Collins interview that I did if you got a chance to hear that part I think in the beginning we talk about the loud leak um what are your thoughts about his response basically saying it's worthy of an investigation but I mean I don't know how you would interpret it I see it's funny because I I heard it in the moment as is great for the head of NIH to be open-minded on this yeah but then the internet and uh Mr Joe Rogue and a bunch of friends and colleagues told me that yeah well that's too late and too little yeah so first let me say I've been on Joe's podcast twice and I love the guy which doesn't mean that I agree with everything he does or says um and on this issue and I'm normally a pretty calm and measured guy and when you're just out running with your airpods on and you start yelling into the wind in Central Park nobody else knows why you're yelling but whether you had such a moment I had a moment with Collins and again Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously I mean I live a big chunk of My Life um living in in the world of genetics and biotech and my book hacking Darwin is about the future of human genetic engineering and his work on the Human Genome Project and so many other things have been fantastic and I'm a huge fan of the work of uh of NIH and he was right to say that the Chinese government hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it but then you asked him well how will we know and then his answer was we need to find the intermediate host remember I said before and so that made it clear that he thought well we should have an investigation but it comes from nature and we just need to find that whatever it is that intermediate animal host in the wild and that'll tell us the story so here we had the conclusion in mind and they're just waiting for the evidence to support the conclusion that was my feeling I felt like he was and that was frustrating in general but he was tilting and I again I used my your first question was where do I fall he was like I'm 85 uh percent or whatever it is 80 75 90 whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident it made it feel that he was 90 10 in the other direction which is still means that he's open-minded about the possibility and that's why in my view every single person who talks about this issue meaning the right answer in my view is we don't know conclusively um in my then this is my personal view the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor of a lab incident origin but that could immediately shift with additional information we need transparency but we should come together and absolutely condemning the outrageous cover-up carried out by the Chinese government which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation into pandemic Origins we have if you use the The Economist numbers 15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic and I believe that the actions of the Chinese government are disgracing the memory of these 15 million dead they're insulting the families and the billions of people around the world who have suffered from this totally avoidable uh pandemic and whatever the origin the fact the criminal cover-up carried out by the Chinese government which continues to this day but most intensely in in the first months following the outbreak that's the reason why we have so many uh so many dead and certainly as I was saying before I in a small number of others have been carrying this flame since early last year but it's kind of crazy uh that our governments haven't been uh demanding it and we can talk about the World Health Organization uh process which was deeply compromised in the beginning now it's become much much uh better but again it was the pressure of Outsiders who that played such an important role in shifting our national and international institutions and while that's better than nothing it would have been far better if our governments and and international organizations had done the right thing from the story if I could just uh make a couple of comments about uh Joe Rogan so uh there's a bunch of people in my life who have inspired me who have taught me a lot who I even look up to the many of them are alive most of them are dead I I want to say that uh so Joe said a few critical words about the conversation with Francis Collins most of it offline with a lot of great conversations about it uh some he said publicly and um he was also critical to say that me asking hard questions in an interview is not my strong suit and I really want to kind of respond to that which I did privately as well but publicly to say that uh Joe is 100 right on that but that doesn't mean that always has to be the case and that is definitely something I want to work on because most of the conversations I have I want to see the the beautiful ideas in people's minds but there's some times where you have to ask the hard questions to bring out the beautiful ideas and um it's hard to do it's a skill and and Joe is very good at this he says the way he put it in in his criticisms and he does this in his conversations which is whoa whoa whoa stop stop stop stop stop there's a kind of sense like did you just say what you said let's let's make sure we get to the bottom we clarify what you mean because sometimes really big negative or difficult ideas can be said as a as a quick aside in a sentence like it's nothing but it could be everything and you want to make sure you catch that and you you talk about it and not the not as a gotcha not as a kind of way to destroying other human being but to reveal something profound and that's definitely something I want to work on I also want to say that uh as you said you disagree with Joe on quite a lot of things so for a long time Joe was somebody that I was just a fan of listened to he's now a good friend and I would say we disagree more than we agree and I love doing that and uh but at the same time I learned from that so it's like a duel like nobody in this world can tell me what to think but I think everybody has a lesson to teach me I think that's a good way to approach it like I whenever somebody has words of criticism I assume they're right and walk around with that idea to really sort of empathize with that idea because there's a lesson there and oftentimes my understanding of of a topic becomes uh is altered completely or it becomes much more nuanced and much more a much richer for the that kind of empathetic process but definitely I do not allow anybody to tell me what to think whether it's Joe Rogan or Theodore Dostoevsky or Nietzsche or my parents or um the the like the proverbial girlfriend which I don't actually have like all but she's still busting my balls exactly exactly in my imagination I have a girlfriend in Canada yeah that I have to imagine it exactly uh imagining conversation I still want to mention that but also I I don't know if you've gotten a chance to see this I'd love to also mention this um Twitter feud between two other interesting people which is uh Brett Weinstein and Sam Harris or Sam Harris and others in general and uh it kind of breaks my heart that these two people I listen to that are very thoughtful about a bunch of issues let's let's put covet aside because people are very emotional about this topic I mean I think they're deeply thoughtful and intelligent whether you agree with them or not and I always learn something from their conversations and they are legitimately or have been for long time friends and it's a little bit heartbreaking to me to see that they basically don't talk in private anymore and there's occasional Jabs on Twitter and um I hope that changes I hope that changes in general for covid that covet brought out the the I would say the most emotional sides of people the worst in people and um I think there hasn't been enough love and empathy and compassion and to see two people from whom I've learned a lot whether it's Eric was time Brett Weinstein Sam Harris you can criticize them as much as you want their ideas as much as you want but if if you're not sufficiently open-minded to admit that you have a lot to learn from their conversations um I think you're not being honest and so I I do hope they have those conversations and I hope we can kind of I think there's a lot of repairing to be done post covid of of relationships of conversations and I think empathy and love can help a lot there and this is also just a I I talked to uh Sam privately but this is also a public call out to to put a little bit more uh love in the world um yeah and and for these difficult conversations to to happen because um Brett Weinstein could be very wrong about a bunch of topics here around covid but he could also be right and the only way to find out is to have those conversations because there's a lot of people listening to both Sam Harris and Brett Weinstein and uh if you go into these uh silos where you just keep telling each other the uh that you're the possesses of Truth and nobody else is the possessor of Truth what starts happening is you both lose track or the capability of arriving at the truth because nobody's in the possession of the truth so anyway there's just a call out that we should have a little bit more conversation a little bit more love totally agree and and both of those guys are guys who I uh who I respect and as you know uh Brett and again as I mentioned they're just a handful of us who were the early people raising questions about about the origins pandemic right he was there also talking yeah so people have heard him speak quite a bit about any viral drugs and all that kind of stuff but he was also raising concerns about lab leak early on yeah exactly and so but I completely agree with you that we don't have to agree with everybody but it's great to have healthy conversations that's how how we grow and absolutely um we live in in a world where we're kind of if we're not careful pushed into these little information pockets and certainly on social media I have different parts of my of my life one is focusing on issues of um of coveted Origins and then I have genetics and biotechnology and then I have which maybe we'll talk about later one shared World which is about how do we build a safer future and when I say critical things like the Chinese government we have to demand a full investigation into pandemic Origins this is an outrage then it's really popular when I say let's build a better future for everyone in peace and love it's like wow three people liked it and one was one was my mother and so I just feel like we need to build we used to have that connectivity just built in um because we had these Town squares and and you couldn't get away from them now we can get away from them so the I so engaging with people who are of a different background is really essential I mean I'm on Fox News sometimes you know three four times a week and I wouldn't in my normal life I'm not watching that much of um uh Fox News or even television more more generally but I just feel like if I just speak to people who are very similar to me it'll be comfortable um but what what have I contributed so I think we really have to have those those kinds of of conversations and and recognize that at the end of the day most people want to be happy they want to live in a better world they maybe have different paths to get there but if we just break into camps that don't even connect with each other that's a much more dangerous world let's dive back into the difficult pool yes just like you said in the English-speaking World it seems popular almost easy to to uh demonize China the Chinese government I should say but even China like there's this kind of gray area that people just fall into and I'm really uncomfortable with that perhaps because in my mind in my heart and my blood or Echoes of the Cold War and that kind of tension it it feels like we almost desire conflict so we see demons when there is none so I'm a little like cautious to demonize but at the same time you have to be honest so it's like uh it honest with the demons that are there and honest when they're not um this is kind of a geopolitical therapy session of sorts so let's keep talking about China a little bit from different angles so let's return to um the director of the center of emerging infectious disease at the Wuhan Institute of virology XI jangli colloquially referred to as Batwoman so do you think she's lying yes do you think she's being forced to lie yes I've known a bunch of virologists in private and public conversation that respect her as a human being as a scientist human being um sorry as a scientist yeah not a human being because I think they don't know the human they know the scientists and they respect for a lot of the scientists yeah I respect her I've never met her and we had one exchange which I'll mention in a second in a virtual Forum but I I do respect her I actually I think that she is somebody who has tried to do the right thing she was one of the heroes of tracking down the origins of of SARS one and that was a major uh contribution um but as we we talked about earlier it's it's a different thing living being a scientist or really kind of anything it's different being one of those people in an authoritarian Society um than it is being in a different type of society and so when shujang Lee said that the reason the uh the wiv database was taken offline in September 19 was because of computer hacks I don't think that's the story I don't think she thinks that's uh that's the story when I asked her in March of 2021 March of this year in a Rutgers online Forum when I asked her whether the Chinese military had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of virology in any way and she said absolutely not paraphrasing I think she was lying do I think that she had the ability to say well either one yes but I can't talk about it it or I know there are a lot of things that are happening at this institute that I don't know about and that could be one uh could she have said um that the uh the Personnel at the 100 Institute of virology have all had to go through classification training um to so that they can know about what can and and can't be said like she could have said all those things but she couldn't say all of those things and so um and I think that's why so many at least in my view so many people uh in the certainly in the Western World got this story wrong from the beginning because if you're only prism was the science and you just assumed this is a science question to be left to the scientists shujang Lee is is just like any scientist working in Switzerland or Norway the Chinese government isn't interfering in in any way and we can trust them that would lead you down One path uh in my view the reason why I I progressed as I did is I felt like I had two keys I had one key as I live in this in the Science World through my work with who and my books and and things like that but I also have another part of my life in the world of geopolitics as a an Asia quote-unquote expert and former National Security Council official and other things and I felt for me I needed both keys to open that that door uh but if I only had the science key I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion that I have but if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion well it's coming from China it must be that the government is guilty like that wouldn't help either I wonder what's in her mind whether it's fear or habit because I think um a lot of people in the former Soviet Union sector Noble it's not really fear it's almost like a momentum it's like um it's like the reason I I showed up to this interview wearing clothes as opposed to being naked it's like all right it's like it's just all of us are doing the right the clothes thing although you there was a startup years ago called Naked News did you ever hear about that they just would read the exact news but naked no they would after each story they'd take something off until the end they were they were I don't think it's a good idea for a podcast they have an IPO stay tuned next time I'm with uh Michael Mouse yeah okay um so what do you think I mean because the reason I asked that question is how do we kind of take steps to improve without any kind of revolutionary action you could say we need to uh Inspire the Chinese people to elect uh to to sort of revolutionize the system from within um but like who are we to suggest that because we have our flaws too we should be working on our flaws as well and so but at the individual scientists level what are the small acts of rebellion that can be done how can we improve this well I don't know about small acts of of rebellion but I'll try to answer your question from a few a few different perspectives so right now actually as we speak um there is a special session of the World Health assembly going on in the world Health assembly is the governing authority over the World Health Organization where it's represented by States and territories 194 of them tragically not including Taiwan because of of the Chinese government's assistance but they're now beginning a process of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty to try to have a better process for responding to crises exactly like like we're in but unfortunately for the exact same reasons that we have failed I mean we had the a similar process after the first SARS we set up what we thought was the best available system and it has totally failed here and it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies of the Chinese government system we are suffering from a pandemic that exists because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese State and that's why on one hand I totally get this impulse what we do it our way they do it their way who's to say that that one way is better and certainly right now in the United States we're at each other's throats we have a hard time getting anything meaningful done um and I'm sure there are people who are saying well that model looks looks appealing but just as people could look to the United States and say well because the United States has such a massive reach what we do domestically has huge implications for the rest of the world they become stakeholders in our in our politics and that's why I think for a lot of years people have just been looking at U.S politics not because it's interesting but because the decisions that we make have big implications for their lives the same is true for ours you could say that the lack of of civil and political rights in China is the the I mean it's up to the Chinese not even people because they have no say but to their uh their government and they weren't democratically elected but that they are recognized as as the government but some significant percentage of the 15 million people now dead from covid are dead because in the earliest days following the outbreak whatever whatever the origin the voices of people sounding the alarm were suppressed that the Chinese government had an just like in Chernobyl the Chinese government had a greater incentive to lie to the International Community than to tell to tell the truth and everybody was incentivized to pretty much do the wrong thing and so that's I mean that's why I think one of the big messages of this pandemic is that all of our Fates are tied to everybody else's Fates and so while we we can say and should say well let's focus on our own communities and our and our countries we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere Gasco a weird uh question so I'm gonna do a few podcast interviews with uh interesting people in Russia in the Russian language because I could speak Russian and a lot of those people have you know are not usually speaking in these kinds of formats um do you think it's possible to interview XI Jin Li do you think it's possible to interview somebody like her or anyone in the Chinese government I think not um and I think the reason is because I think they would one be uncomfortable being in any environment where really unknown questions will be uh will be asked and I actually I was so as you know on this topic the Chinese as I mentioned earlier the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists they can't speak without prior government approval xujing Lee has been able to speak and she's spoken in a number of forums I mentioned uh this Rutgers event what was the nature of that Forum it was it was it was all of them were kind of science conversations um about about the pandemic including the uh the origins issue um but I think that she in in her response to my question it was kind of this funny thing so they had this event for uh for organized by Rutgers and I went on there was an online event on Zoom um but I got on there and I just realized it was very poorly organized like normally the controls that you would have about who gets to chat to who who gets to ask questions none of them were were set and so I kind of couldn't believe it I was just sitting at home in my in my neon green fleece and I just started sending sending chat messages to shojang Lee so you could anybody could anybody could it was insane and so I but I thought wow this is incredible and so then it was unclear who got to ask questions and so I was like posting questions and then I was sending chats to the organizers of the event saying I really have a question um and first they said well you can submit your questions and we'll have um submitted questions and then if we have time we'll open up so I just I mean I just thought what the hell I just sent messages to everybody and then the event was already done they were 15 minutes over time and then they say all right we have time just for one question and it's uh Jamie Metzel and like I'm sitting there in my running clothes like I wasn't I was like multitasking and I heard my name and so I I went diving back and I asked this this question um about did you know all of the work that was happening at the Wuhan Institute of uh virology not just uh your work um and can you confirm um that U.S intelligence has said that the military um played a role uh it was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Urology do you deny that the Chinese military was involved in any way with the Wuhan Institute of virology and as I said before she said this is you know crazy absolutely not it got it actually got that one question got covered in the media because it was like I think an essential question but I just think that since then to my knowledge she's not been in any public forums but that's why most people would be shocked that to date there has been no comprehensive International investigation into pandemic Origins there is no whistleblower provision so if you're a my guess is there are at least tens maybe hundreds of people in China who have relevant information about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified and don't dare share it and let's just say somebody wanted to get that information out to send it somewhere there's no official address the who doesn't doesn't have that nobody has that and so I would love him you may as well ask I don't think it's likely that they'll be a yes but it could well be that there are defectors who will will want to speak so let me also push back as I do so one I want to ask if the language barrier is a thing because I've uh talked so that I've understand Russian culture I think or not understand this is this uh I don't I don't understand basically anything in this world but I mean I I hear the music that uh that is Russian culture and I enjoy it I don't hear that music for Chinese culture it's just not something I've experienced so it's a beautiful Rich complex culture and uh from my sense it seems distant to me like I it like whenever I look even like we mentioned offline Japan and so on I probably don't even understand Japanese culture I believe I kind of do because I did martial arts my whole life but even that it's just so distant people who've lived in Japan Foreigners for like 20 years say the exact same thing yeah it makes you sad it makes you sad because I can't I will never be able to fully appreciate the literature the conversations the the people the little humor and the subtleties and those are all essential to understand even this cold topics of science because all of that is important to understand so that's a question for me if you think language barrier is a thing but the other the other thing I just want to kind of comment on is um the is the criticism of Journalism that uh somebody like uh XI jang li or even XI Jiang Pang so just anybody in China is very skeptical to have really conversations with anybody in the western media yeah because it it's like what are the odds that they will uh try to bring out the beautiful ideas in the person and honestly just this is a harsh criticism I apologize but I kind of mean it is the journalists that have some of these high profile conversations often don't do the work they come off as not very intelligent and I know they're intelligent people they have not done the research they have not come up and like read a bunch of books they have not even read the Wikipedia article meaning put in the minimal effort to empathize to try to understand the culture of the people all the complexities all the different ideas in the spaces all do all the incredible not all but some of the incredible work that you've done initially like that you have to do that work to earn the right to have a deep real conversation with uh with some of these folks and it's just disappointing to me that journalists often don't do that work yeah so on that just first I completely agree with you I mean there is just an incredible beauty in Chinese culture and I think all cultures but certainly China has such a deep and Rich history amazing literature and art and and just human human beings I mean I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government I'm very vociferous about the really genocide and xinjiang the absolute effort to destroy a Tibetan culture the the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong um incredibly illegal efforts to seize basically the entire South China Sea and I could go on and on and on but Chinese culture is fantastic and I can't speak to every technical field but just in terms of having journalists and I'll speak to American journalists people like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time to live in China to learn the language learn the culture Peter himself who's maybe one of our best journalists covering China from a soul level he was kicked out of of China so it's it's very very uh difficult so yeah it's really and so for me you talked about about my website on pandemic origin so when I launched it I had it I'm not a Chinese speaker but I had the entire site translated into Chinese and I have it up on my uh on my on my website just because I felt like well if if somebody I mean the the the great firewall makes it very very difficult for people in China to access access that kind of of information but I figured if somebody gets there and they want to have it in their own their own language but it's hard because the Chinese government is is represented by these quote-unquote wolf Warriors which is it's like these basic Ruffians and I personally was condemned by name um by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign Ministry from the podium in Beijing and so it's it's really hard because I I absolutely think um the American people and the Chinese people I mean maybe all people but we have so much in common I mean yes China is an ancient civilization but they kind of wiped out their own civilization in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution they burned their Scrolls they smashed their artworks and so it's a very young Society kind of like America is a is a young Society so we have a lot in in common um and if we just kind of got out of our own ways we could have a beautiful relationship but there's a lot of things that are happening certainly the United States feels responsible to defend the post-war International order that that past Generations helped build and I'm a certainly a certain believer in that and China is challenging that and the Chinese government and and they've shared that with that view with the Chinese people feel that they haven't been adequately respected and now they're building a massive nuclear nuclear Arsenal and and all these other things to try to position themselves in the world with an articulated goal of being the lead country in the world and that puts them at odds with the United States so there's there are a lot of real reasons that we need to be honest about for division but if that's all we focus about focus on if we don't say that there's another side of this story that brings us together we'll put ourselves on an inevitable Glide path to a terrible outcome what do you make of uh Xi Jinping what uh so two questions so one in general and two more on lab leak and his meeting with uh our President Biden uh in discussion of uh lab leak yeah so I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal of articulated of establishing China as the lead country in in the world um by the 100th anniversary of the the founding of the of the modern Chinese State and it's ruthless and it's strategic there's a great book called The Long game by Rush Doshi who's actually now working in the in the White House about this goal and and are pretty clearly articulated goal to subvert this the post-war International order and and in China's interest in every maybe every leader wants to organize the world around their interests but I feel that his vision of what that entails um is not one that I think is shareable for the rest of the world I mean the strength of the United States with all of our flaws is particularly in that that post-war period we we put forward a model that was desirable to a lot of people certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea um doesn't mean it's perfect the United States is is deeply flawed as articulated to date I don't think um most people and countries and would like to live in a sino-centric world um and so I certainly as I mentioned before I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing the incredible brutality in xinjiang in Tibet and um and and elsewhere yeah the censorship one is it gives me a lot of trouble on the science realm and just in journalism and just the world that prevents us from having conversations with each other do you know about the the Winnie the Pooh thing yes I mean it's ridiculous it's so so to me that's such a good illustration of a censorship being petty but censorship has to be Petty because the goal of censorship maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union is to get into your head like if it's just censorship like you you say down with the state and like you can't say that but you can say all the other things up to that point eventually people will feel empowered to say down with the state and so I think the goal of this kind of authoritarian censorship is to turn you into the sensor and so the the self-censorship because they almost have to have you think well if I'm going to make any criticism um maybe they're going to come and get me so it's it's safer to not do I mean I've traveled through North Korea pretty extensively and I've seen that in its ultimate form but well that's what they're trying to do in China too yeah so it's for people who are not familiar such a clear illustration of just the pettiness of censorship and leaders the corrupting nature of power but uh there's a meme of Xi Jinping with I guess uh Barack Obama and uh the meme is that he looks like Winnie the Pooh in that picture and that was uh the presidency champagne looks like Winnie the Pooh and I guess that became because that got censored or like mentions of Winnie the Pooh got censored all across China Winnie the Pooh became the unknowing revolutionary hero that represents freedom of speech and and so on but it's just such a absurd because because we spent all so much time in this conversation talk about the censorship that's a little bit more understandable to me which is like we messed up and it wasn't maybe it's almost understandable errors that happen in the progress of science I mean you could always uh argue that uh there's a lot of mistakes along the way and the censorship along the way caused the big mistake you can argue that same way for the Chernobyl but those are sort of understandable and difficult topics and Winnie the Pooh but in your message it shows both sides of the story I mean one how Petty authoritarian censors have to be and that's why the messaging from the Chinese government is so consistent no matter who you are you have to be careful what you say and that's why it's the story of uh feng shui the tennis player she dared raised her voice in an individual way Jack ma the richest man in China had a minor criticism of the Chinese government uh he had you know basically disappeared from the public eye Fon bing bing who's like one of the the leading Chinese movie stars um she was seen as not loyal enough and she just vanished and so the message is no matter who you are no matter what level if you don't mind everything you say and you could lose everything I'm pretty hopeful optimistic about a lot of things and so for me if the Chinese government stays with his current structure I think what I hope they start fixing is the the freedom of speech but they can't I mean the thing is if they open up freedom of speech really in a meaningful way they can't maintain their current form of of government and it's it's connected as I was saying before to the origins of the pandemic and if my hypothesis was right that was the big choice that they that the the national government had do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic do we deliver a message that transparency is required public transparency is required from local officials if they do that the entire system collapse pretty much everybody in China has a relative who has died as a result of the actions of the Communist Party particularly in the Great Leap Forward it's nearly 50 million people died as a result of Mao's disastrous policies and yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square and it's on the money me because maintaining that fiction is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state if people were allowed just say what you want do you really think Mao was such a great guy even though your own relatives are dead as a as a result do you really buy even on this um this uh this story that China did nothing wrong even though in the earliest days of the pandemic um these two at least Chinese scientists themselves courageously um issued a a pre-print paper that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted saying well this looks like this comes from one of the Wuhan Labs that we're studying like if you if you opened up that window I think that the the Chinese government would would not be able to continue in its current forms and that's why they crack down at Tiananmen Square that's why with Feng Shui the tennis player if they had let her accuse somebody from the Communist Party of sexual assault and they said okay now people you can use social media and you can have your metoo moment and let us know who in the Chinese Communist party May or your boss in a business has assaulted you just like in every society I'm sure there's tons of women who've been sexually assaulted manipulated abused by by men and so I I certainly hope that there can be that kind of opening um but if I were an authoritarian dictator that's the thing I would be most afraid of yeah dictator perhaps but uh I think you can gradually increase the freedom of speech so I think you can maintain control over the freedom of press first so control the Press more but let the the lower levels sort of open up YouTube Right open up like where individual citizens can make content I mean there's a lot of benefits to that and then uh you know from an authoritarian perspective you can just say that's misinformation that's uh conspiracy theories all those kinds of things but at least I think if you open up that freedom of speech at the level of the individual citizen that's good for entrepreneurship for the development of ideas of exchange of ideas all that kind of stuff I just think that increased the GDP of the country yeah but I think there's a lot of benefits I feel like you can still play we're playing some like dark thoughts here but I I feel like you could still play The Game of Thrones still maintain power while giving freedom to the citizenry like I think just like with North Korea is a good example of where cracking down too much can completely destroy your country I think there there's some balance you can strike in your evil mind and still maintain authoritarian control over the country obviously I'm uh it's not obvious but I'm a big supporter of freedom of speech I mean it seems to work really well I don't know what the failure case is for freedom of speech are probably we're experiencing them with Twitter and like where the nature of Truth is being completely kind of uh flipped upside down but it seems like on the whole ability to uh uh defeat lies with more in not through censorship but through uh more conversations more information is is the right way to go can I tell you a little story true stories about North Korea so a number of years ago I was invited to be part of a small six-person delegation advising the government of North Korea on how to establish special economic zones because other countries have used these these secs as a way of of building their economies and when I was invited I thought well maybe there's an opening and I certainly believe in in that so we flew to China across the border uh into North Korea and then we were met by our our partners from the North Korean development organization and then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks visiting all these sites for um where they were intended to create these special economic zones and in each site they had their their local officials and they had a a map and they showed us where everything that was going to be built and the other people who were like really technical experts on how to set up a special economic zone they were asking questions well like should you put the entrance over here or shouldn't you put it over there and what if there's flooding and I kept asking just these basic questions like what do you think you're going to do here why do you think you can be competitive do you know anything about who you're competing against are you empowering your workers to innovate because everybody else is going to be so at the end of the trip they flew us to Pyongyang and they put us in this it looked kind of like the United Nations they probably had 500 people there and I was and I gave a speech to them I obviously it was in English and it was translated and I and I figure you know they I've come all this way I'm just going to be honest if they arrest me for being honest that that's on them and I said you know I'm here because I believe we can never give up hope that we always have to try to connect I'm also here because I think that um you can North Korea connecting to the world economy is an important first uh First Step but having visited all of your special economic zone sites and having met with all of your or many of your officials I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding because you're you're trying to sell into a global market but you need to have Market information um that and I gave examples of GE and other their others that the Innovation can't only happen at one place and if you want Innovation to happen um from the people who are doing this you have to empower them they have to have access they have to have voice I mean nobody um uh I mean they they the people after they kind of had to condemn me because what I was saying was was challenging so I certainly agree with you and then just one side story of them that night um and it was just kind of bizarre because North Korea is it's so desperately poor but they were trying to impress us and so we had these I mean embarrassingly uh Sumptuous Banquets and so for our final dinner that night it really it looked like something from Beauty and the Beast in the I mean it was like China and waiters and tuxedos and they had this beautiful dinner and then afterwards because we'd now spent two weeks with these our North Korean Partners they brought out this karaoke machine and then our North Korean counterparts they sang songs to us in in Korean and so I said well we want to reciprocate do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine it's North Korea obviously they they didn't but there was I said well I have an idea and so there was one of the women who'd been part of the North Korean delegation um she was able just to to play the piano just like you could hum a tune and she could play it on the piano and so I um I said all right here's this tune which I whispered in her ear when I give you the signal just play this tune over and over and so I got the these I mean there were the six of us and maybe 20 North Koreans and I we are all in the circle Sarah everybody hold hands and then put your right just try put your right foot in front of your left and then left foot in front of the right going sideways and I said all right hit it and she played a North Korean version of Hava Nagila and I think it was the first and only Hora that they've ever done in in North Korea I survived was this reported or no it was not oh no yeah that huge if they had free YouTube yeah let's return to the beginning and it just patient zero it's kind of uh always incredible to think that there's one human at which it all started who do you think was patient zero do you think it was uh somebody that worked at uh Wuhan Institute of virology do you think it was um there was a leak of some other kind that uh led to the infection like what do we know because there's this December 8th slash December 16th case of um maybe you can describe what that is and then there's like uh what uh what's his name uh Michael willby has has a has a nice timeline I'm sure you have a timeline but here's a nice timeline that puts the average at like November or something um like 18th and November 16th that's the average estimate for uh when the patient zero got infected when the first human infection happened yeah so the just two points one is it may be that there's infecty zero and patient zero like it could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic because we know there's a lot of people who are asymptomatic and then there's the question of well who is patient zero meaning the first person to present themselves in some kind of health facility where that diagnosis could be made so can we actually look on that definition yeah so is that to you a good definition of patient zero what okay there's a bunch of stuff here because this virus is weird uh so one is who gets infected one who is infectious or the first person infect others yeah so so I think who shows up to hospital yeah so I think that's why that's why I'm calling the first person to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with covid-19 I'm calling that person patient zero um there's also the there's somewhere the first person to be infected and that person maybe never showed up in a hospital because maybe they were symptomatic and and never get sick so got sick so let me start with what I'm calling infect t zero here are some options I talked before about you know some person who was a villager in some remote Village it's it's almost impossible to imagine but possible to imagine because strange things happen um and that person you know somehow gets to Wuhan by the way just the steel man that argument there's not an argument it's a statement but strange things happen yeah all the time no I agree it doesn't mean that logic doesn't apply and probabilities don't apply but we also I mean in general principle everyone if we were honest should be agnostic about everything like I think I'm Jamie but is there a 0.01 chance or 001 chance that I'm not but could be I mean there's a large number of people arguing about the meaning of the word I in that eyes Jamie so exactly what is conscious exactly exactly so we I mean we could spend another three hours going into that one so one possibility is there's some remote villager another possibility is there's some somehow bizarrely uh there are these infected animals that come from Southern China most likely they all maybe there's only one of them that's infected which how could that possibly be um and it's only sent to Wuhan it's not sent anywhere else uh to any of the markets there or whatever and then maybe somebody in the market is infected that's one remote possibility but a possibility another is that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of virology go down to Southern China we didn't we haven't talked about it yet but in 2012 um there were six miners were sent into a copper mine in southern China and Yunnan Province all of them got very sick with what now appear like covid-19 like symptoms half of them died um blood samples um from them uh were taken to the Wuhan Institute of virology and elsewhere and then after that um there the there were multiple uh site visits to that mine collecting viral samples that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of virology including included among those samples were was this now Infamous ratg-13 virus which is among the genetically closest viruses to SARS cov2 there were other nine other or eight other viruses that were collected from that mine that were presumably very similar to that and again we have no access to the information about those and many of the other most almost all of the other viruses so could it be that one of the people who was sent from the one is to the virology or the Wuhan Center for Centers for Disease Control they went down there to collect and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back could it be that they were working on these viruses in the laboratory and there was an issue with waste disposal we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem with waste disposal and just before the pandemic one they they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal and in early 2019 they moved to their new site which was basically across the street from the Juan on seafood market um so could there have been issue of somebody infected in the lab of waste disposal could a laboratory animal their experiences in China actually China just recently passed a law saying it's illegal to sell laboratory animals in the market because there were scientists or once scientist who was selling laboratory animals in the market and people would just come and and buy they'd say so there's so many there are so many scenarios but if I again connect it to my 85 number I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents whether it's collection waste something connected to the lab I think that's um that's the most likely but there are other credible people um who would say they think it's not the most likely and I I welcome their views and and we need to have this conversation so in your write-up um but what's the URL because I always find it by doing Jamie Marshall uh lab leak yeah that's probably the idea no no but if you just go to jamymymetzel.com j-a-m-i-e-m-e-t-z-l.com then there's just a thing it's covered Origins or you could just Google Jamie Metzel oblique uh um Google's search engine is such a powerful thing you mentioned in that write up that you don't think this could be just me misreading it or it was just slightly miswritten but you don't think that the virus is from that 2012 mind which is fascinating could be the backbone for SARS cov2 so what I mean just the specific virus which I mentioned ratg 13 and there's a whole history of that because it had a different name and it looked and and should jang li provided wrong information about when it had been sequenced I mean there was a whole issue connected uh to that uh but the genetic difference even though it's um it's 96.2 percent similar to the SARS cov2 virus that's actually a significant difference even though that and and a virus called banal 52 that was collected in Laos are the two most similar there still are are differences so I'm not saying ritg 13 is the backbone um but is there I believe there is a possibility that other viruses that were collected either are in that mine in in Yunnan in southern China or in Laos or Cambodia because that was with the Eco Health Alliance um proposals and documents their plan was to collect viruses in Laos and and Cambodian elsewhere and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of virology so that there are people as a matter of fact just when I was sitting here before this message I got before this interview I got a message uh from somebody who was saying well Peter dazak is telling everybody uh that the that the viral sample the banal 52 from Laos proves that there's not a lab incident origin of the pandemic and it's actually doesn't prove that at all because these viruses were being collected in places like uh Laos and and Cambodia and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of virology so those are like early early uh like the the prequel so these are they're not sufficiently similar to be a to serve as a backbone but they kind of tell a story that they could have been brought to the lab through uh through several processes including genetic modification or throughout the Natural Evolution processes accelerated Evolution they could have arrived as something that has the the the spike protein and the cleavage the fern cleavage side and all that kind of stuff so what I'm saying is the the essential point is if we had access if we knew everything that was being every virus it was being held at the the Wuhan Institute of virology and the Wuhan CDC we had full access we had full access to everybody's lab notes and we did just the kind of forensic investigation that has been so desperately required since day one we'd be able to say why what what did you have because if we knew if it if it should come out that the Wuhan Institute of virology had in its repository I prior to the outbreak either SARS cov2 or a reasonable precursor to it that would prove the lab incident hypothesis in my mind that's almost certainly why they are preventing any kind of meaningful meaningful investigation so my hypothesis is not that our that what ritg-13 says is because as I mentioned earlier the the genetics of virus are are constantly recombinating um so that what that means is if you have you don't have very many total outlier viruses in a bat Community because these viruses are always mixing and matching with each other and so if you have rotg 13 which is relatively similar to SARS cov2 there's a pretty decent likelihood there was other stuff that was collected at this this mine called Mojang mine in Yunnan Province maybe in Laos and Cambodia and that's why we need to we need to have that information do you think somebody knows who patient zero is within China so do you think that is well there's two there's two things one is I think some somebody and people probably know and then two it's been incredibly curious that the best virus Chasers in the world are in China and they are in Wuhan and when I mean we can talk about this this deeply compromised now vastly improved World Health Organization process um but when they went there uh the Chinese the local and National Chinese authorities say oh we haven't done we haven't tested the samples in our blood center we haven't done any of this tracing and these these deeply compromised people who were part of the the international um part of the joint study uh tour um when they came out with their they had their visit earlier this year and came out with their report they had in my mind just an absurd um uh letter to the editor in in nature saying well if we don't hurry back we're not going to know what happened assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins who on their own aren't don't know how to trace the origin of a virus and the opposite is is the case so I think there are people in China who at least know a lot they know a lot more uh than they're saying uh and at the best case scenario is the Chinese government wants to prevent any investigation including by them the worst case scenario is that there are people who already know and that's why again my point from day one has been we need a comprehensive International investigation in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records samples and Personnel when this again deeply flood can I give you a little history of this uh who process okay who are the that's funny um that's I'm sorry who's on first who's on first I'm just so funny with the jokes yeah look at me go uh who are the who so what's what is this organization what is this purpose what role did it play in the pandemic uh it certainly was demonized in the realm of politics um this is an institution That was supposed to save us from this pandemic a lot of people believe it failed has it failed why did it fail and you said it's improving how is it improving great all right I hope you don't mind I'm gonna have to talk for a little bit of extra I love this oh I love this good good good so the who is an absolutely essential organization created in 1948 in that wonderful period after the second world war when the United States and Allied countries asked the big bold questions how do we build a safer world for everyone and so that's the The Who if we although there are many critics of the who if we didn't have it we would need to invent it because the whole nature of these uh big public health issues and certainly for uh pandemics but all sorts of things is that they are transnational in nature and so we cannot just build moats we cannot build walls we are all connected to us so that's the the idea um there's a political process because the United Nations and the who is part of it um is it there it exists within a political context and so the the current director general of the World Health Organization who was just uh re-elected for his second five-year term is Dr Tedros ardenome Gabriel who is from Ethiopia to grahan from Ethiopia and in in full disclosure I have a lot of respect for uh for Tedros Tedros got his job uh he was not America's candidate he was not Britain's candidate our candidate was a guy named David nabaro who I also know and have tremendous respect for China led the process of putting Tedros in this in this position in this position and in the earliest days of the pandemic Tedros in my view even though I have tremendous respect for him I think he made a mistake the who doesn't have its own independent surveillance Network it's not organized to have it and the states have not allowed it so it's dependent on member states for providing it information and because it's a poorly funded organization dependent on its bosses who are these governments it's not its natural instinct isn't to condemn its bosses it's to say well let's quietly work with with everybody having said that the Chinese government knowingly lied to Tedros and Tedros in repeating uh the position of the Chinese government which incidentally I'll say Donald Trump also did the exact same thing I mean Donald Trump had a private conversation with Xi Jinping and then repeated um she what she had told him both of them were wrong um Dr Tedros I think when it took when Chinese government was lying knowingly lying saying there's no human to human transmission uh Dr tedro said that and even though within the World Health Organization there was there were private critiques saying China is now doing exactly what it did in SARS one it's not providing access it's not providing information Tedros is Instinct because of his background because of his uh his role and wrongly um was uh to have a more collaborative relationship with China particularly by making assertions based on the information that was just don't call people Liars they're not going to be happy with you they're not going to have you and the job of the who isn't to condemn States it's to do the best possible job of addressing problems and I think that the culture was well let's let's do the most that we can if we totally alienate China on day one yes we're in even worse shape than if we call them out for for not exactly sure by the way that maybe you can also steal men that argument like it's it's not completely obvious that that's a terrible decision like if uh you or and I were in that role we would make that decision it's complicated because like you want China and your side to help solve this so I would have made a different decision which is why I never would have been selected as the Director General there's a selection criteria that everybody kind of needs to support you and so but let me let me just this is just the beginning can you also just uh elaborate or kind of restate what were the inaccuracies that you you quickly mentioned so human to human transmission what were the things that was so the the most important um where there were a few things um one um China didn't report the outbreak two they had the sequenced Genome of the Stars cov2 virus and they didn't share it for two critical weeks and um and when they did share it it was inadvertent I mean there was a very very courageous scientist who essentially leaked it and was later punished for leaking it even though the Chinese government is now saying we were so great by by releasing it's really confusing really so I I'm I'm so clueless about this as most things because I thought because there's a celebration of isn't this amazing that we got the the sequence like like that's amazing and then the scientific Community across the world stepped up and were able to do a lot of stuff really quickly with that sharing because I thought the Chinese government shared no no they did so they sat on it for two weeks when they shared it against their will it was incredible moderna 48 hours later after getting the the information getting the sequence genome they had the formulation for what's now the moderna covid-19 vaccine but that's two critical weeks in those uh that or those early days they blocked the World Health Organization from sending its experts to Wuhan for more than three weeks I said they lied about human to human transmission during that time they were aggressively enacting their cover-up destroying records hiding uh samples imprisoning uh people who were asking uh tough questions they soon after established their uh their gag order they fought internally in the World Health Organization to prevent and the Declaration of a global emergency so China definitely I mean I couldn't be stronger in my critique of of China particularly what it did in those early days but it really it's what it's doing even to today is is outrageous so that was so then there was the question of well how do we examine what actually happened and the Prime Minister of Australia then and now Scott Morrison was incredibly courageous and he said we need a full investigation and because of that the Chinese government attacked him personally and and imposed trade sanctions on Australia to try to not just to punish Australia but to deliver a message to every other country if you ask questions we're going to punish you ruthlessly and and that certainly was the message that was that was delivered um the Australians brought that idea of a full investigation to the World Health assembly in May of 2020 as I mentioned before the wha is the governing Authority above of States above um the World Health Organization and so but instead of passing a resolution calling for a full investigation what ended up ironically and tragically passing with Chinese support was a mandate to have essentially a chinese-controlled joint study where half of the team a little more than half of the team was Chinese experts government Affiliated Chinese experts and half were independent International experts where but organized by the The Who and then it took six months to negotiate the terms of reference and again while China was doing all this cover-up They delayed and delayed and delayed and by the terms of reference that were negotiated China had veto power over who got to be a member of the International Group and um the that group was not entitled to access to Raw data the Chinese side would give them conclusions based on their own analysis this of the raw data which was totally outrageous so then and I was a big eye and and others now A friend of mine although we've never met in person Gil de Manoff in New Zealand he did a great job of chronicling just the letter by letter of the terms of uh of reference so then it took now it's it's the January of this year January 2021 this deeply flawed deeply compromised uh International group is sent to Wuhan this is so what's the connection between this group in the joint study so the joint study it had the Chinese side and the international side so the these International experts then part of their examination was going for one month to Wuhan and the nature of the flaws of this International Group has it's it's okay really important point and I'm sorry I was I wasn't clear on that they were rather the Mandate of what they were doing was not to investigate the origins of the pandemic it was to have a joint study into the zoonotic origins of the virus which means which was interpreted to mean the natural Origins hypothesis for a single hypothesis not so that they weren't empowered to to examine the lab incident origin they were there to look at the natural origin how to shop for some meat it's a market yeah that was so then they were there for a month yeah of the makeup up of the team um guess who was so the United States government proposed three experts for this team people who had a lot of background this was the Trump Administration people who had a lot of background including in investigating lab incidents none of those people were accepted the one American who was accepted Peter Peter dasek who had this funding relationship for many years with the Wuhan Institute of virology whose entire basically professional reputation was based on his collaboration with shojang Lee who had written the February 2020 Lancet letter saying it comes from natural origin and anybody who's suggesting otherwise is a conspiracy theorist and who at least according to me had been at very very least the opposite of transparent and at most engaged in a massive disinformation campaign he is the one American who's who's on this so they go there they have one month in Wuhan two weeks of it are spent in quarantine um just in their hotel rooms so then they have two weeks but really it's just 10 working days one of the earliest and so then they're kind of we've all seen the pictures they're traveling around Wuhan in in little buses um one of the first visits they they have is to this Museum exhibition on the it's a basically a propaganda exhibition on the success Xi Jinping and the success in fighting covet and they said well we had to show respect to our Chinese host I think what the Chinese hosts were saying is let's just I'm just going to rub your noses and this you're gonna go where we tell you you're going to hear um what what we want you to what we want you to hear so they have that little short time they spend you know a few hours they weren't in control of where the bus goes no I mean they made recommendations um many of their recommendations were accepted but they like when they went to the Wuhan Institute of virology and some of them of them did they had a they weren't able to do any kind of audit when they had asked for access to Raw data they weren't provided uh they weren't provided that they were it was a it was as I said in my 60 Minutes interview it was a chaperoned study tour it was not even remotely close to an investigation and the thing they were looking at wasn't the origins of the pandemic it was the single hypothesis of a quote-unquote natural uh natural Origins then I mean it was really so shocking for me on February 9 of this year in Wuhan the Chinese government sets up a joint press event where it's the Chinese side and the international side and during that press event a guy named Peter Ben and Barack and it's a little confusing he was basically the head of this delegation and he works for the who even though this was an independent uh committee it was organized by The Who so Peter Ben imbaric gets up there and and says we think it's most likely it comes from nature then he says we think it's possible it comes through frozen food which is absolutely outrageous I mean it's basically Preposterous Elena Chan calls this Popsicle Origins um but it's it's really really unlikely and but then most significantly um he says that we've all agreed uh that a lab incident origin is quote unquote extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated we later learned that the re the way they came up with that determination was by a show of hands vote of the the international experts and the Chinese experts and the Chinese of experts had to do their vote in front of the Chinese government officials who were constantly there so even if whatever they thought there was no possibility that someone raises their hands oh yeah I think it's a it's a lab origin so that was outrageous thing number one outrageous thing number two which I mean I which and I'll come back to my response in in February outrageous thing number two is months later Peter Ben and Barak does an interview on Danish television and he says actually I was lying about extremely unlikely because the Chinese side they didn't want any mention of a lab incident origin anywhere in including in the report that later uh that later came out and so the deal we made even though he himself thought that at least some manifestation of a lab incident origin was likely um and that there should be an investigation particularly he said well that's kind of weird that the Wuhan CDC moved just across from the Juan on seafood market just before the beginning of the pen of the pandemic but he said as a horse trading deal with the Chinese authorities it shouldn't be it should uh that he he agreed to say it was extremely unlikely and shouldn't be investigated so I I was in actually in Colorado staying with my parents and I stayed up late watching this um uh this press event and I was appalled because I knew after two weeks there was no way they could possibly come to that conclusion so I immediately sent a private message to Tedros The Who director General essentially saying there's no way they had enough access to come to this conclusion if the who doesn't distance and distance itself from this the who itself is going to be in danger because it's going to be basically institutional capture by the Chinese this was repeating the Chinese government's propaganda points and and tedro sent me a really again why I have so much respect for Tetris send me a private note saying don't worry we are determined to do to do the right thing and so I got that private message and again I really like Ted Rose but I thought well what are you going to do three days later um Tedros makes a public statement and he says um I've I've heard this thing I don't think that this is a final answer we need to have a full investigation uh into this process he then released two more statements um saying we need to have a full uh we need to have a full investigation with access to Raw data and we need a full audit of the of the Wuhan labs so and that that part was was really really great but then this saga continues because so I was part of a group as I mentioned before this Paris group um it was about you know two dozen or so experts and we'd been meeting since 2020 um having regular meetings and we just present papers present data debate to try to really get to the bottom of things and it was all private so I went to this group and I said look this this playing field is now skewed these guys they've put out this thing labins didn't origin extremely unlikely it's in every newspaper in the world we can't just be our own little private group talking uh to each other so I led the political process of drafting what became four open letters that many of us signed um most of us signed um that saying all right here's why this investigation not in this study group and the report are not credible here's what's wrong here's a TR here's what a full investigation would look like here's a treasure map of all the resources where people can look and we demand a comprehensive investigation so those um four open letters were in pretty much every newspaper in the world and it played a really significant role along with some other things there was later there was a letter a short letter in science Making basically similar points in a much more condensed way there were some Prof higher profile articles by Nicholas Wade and and um and Nick Baker and others and those collectively shifted the the conversation and then really impressively um The Who and with Ted Rose's leadership did something that was really incredible and that is earlier this year uh they meaning the leadership of the who not the World Health assembly but the leadership of the of the of the who announced the establishment of what's called Sago the scientific Advisory Group on the origins of Novel pathogens and basically what they did was overrule their own governing board and say we're going to create our own entity and so it basically dissolved that International deeply flawed International joint study group and all and a lot of those people they um have become very critical like the Chinese of of Tedros so then they had an open call for nominations to be part of Sago and so a lot of people um put in their uh their uh nominations they selected 26 people but our group we had a meeting and we were unhappy with that list of 26. it it still felt it felt skewed toward the natural origin hypothesis so again I drafted and we worked on together an open letter which we submitted to the who saying we think this list it's a step in the right direction but it's not good enough and we we call on these three people to be removed and we have these three people who we think should be added incredibly and I was in in private touch with the who after announcing the 26 people the who said we're reopening the process so send in more and so then they added two more people one of whom is an expert in the audit auditing of lab incidents and then one of the of the so they added those two and then when they just released the list of people who are part of Sago this one woman a highly respected Dutch virologist named Marion coopmans who had been part of that deeply flawed and compromised international study group who had called who has consistently called a lab incident origin quote unquote a debunked conspiracy theory as of now her name is not on the list we haven't seen any announcements so I summary and I'm sorry to go on for so long and to be so animated about this I genuinely feel that the who is trying to do the right thing but they exist within a political context and they're they're kind of it's like you know they're they're pushing at the edges but there's only so far that they can can go and that's why we definitely need to have full accountability for the who we need to expand the mandate to who but we need to recognize that states have a big role and China is an incredibly influential State that's doing everything possible to prevent the kind of full investigation into pandemic Origins that so desperately required well it sounds like the leadership made all the difference in the who so like the way to change the momentum of large institutions is through the leadership if leadership and and empowerment as I mentioned the World Health assembly is meeting now and I think that it shouldn't be that we require super humans and there are some people who are big critics of of who the the leader um of the who in SARS one um was definitely more aggressive she had a different set of of powers at that time um but it can't be entirely I mean we should we definitely need strong-willed aggressive independent people in these kinds of of roles we also need a more empowered who like when the Chinese government in in the earliest days of the pandemic um said we're just not going to allow you to send a team to collect your own information and we're not and and we're not going to allow you to to have any kind of independent surveillance there was very little that the who could do because of the limitations of its mandate and we can't just say we're going to have a who then only compromises Chinese sovereignty if we want to have a powerful who we should say you have emergency teams when you when the the director General says an emergency team needs to go somewhere if they aren't allowed to go there that day you could say there's an immediate referral to the security Council there needs to be something but we have all these demands rightfully so of the who which doesn't have the authorities The Who itself only controls 20 percent of its own budget so the governments are saying we're going to give you money to do this or or or that so we need a stronger who to prevent to protect us but we also have to build that so looking a little bit into the future let's first step into the past sort of the philosophical question about um China if you were to put yourself in the shoes of the Chinese government if they were to be more transparent how should they be more transparent because like it's easy to say we want we want to see this but from a perspective of government and not just the Chinese government but a government on Whose Geographic territory uh say it's a lab leak a lab leak occurred that has resulted in trillions of dollars of loss uh countless of lives just just all kinds of damage to the world if they were to admit or show data that could serve as evidence for a lab leak that's something that people uh could like in the worst case start wars over or uh in the most likely case just constantly bring that up at every turn making you like uh powerless in negotiations it's like whenever you want to do something in a geopolitical sense the United States will bring up oh remember that time you cost us trillions of dollars because of your fuck up yeah so how what is the incentive for the Chinese government to transfer to be transparent and if it is to be transparent how should it do it so like there's a bunch of people like the reason I'm talking to you uh as opposed to a bunch of other folks because you are kind-hearted and thoughtful and open-minded and really respected there's a bunch of people that are talking about lab League they're a little bit less interested in uh building a better world and more interested in pointing out the emperor has no clothes they want step one which is saying like a basically tearing tearing down the bullshitters they don't want to uh do the further steps of building and so as a Chinese government I would be nervous about being transparent with anybody that just wants to tear our power centers our power structures down anyway that's a long way to ask like how how should the Chinese government be transparent now and in the future so maybe I'll break that down into a few sub questions the first is what should in an Ideal World what should the Chinese government do and and that's pretty straightforward they should be totally transparent the South African government now there's an outbreak of this uh Omicron variant and the the South African government has done what we would want a government to do is say hey there's an outbreak we don't have all of the information we need help we want to alert the world and in some ways they're being punished for it through these travel bans but it's a separate topic but I actually think short-term travel bans actually are not a terrible idea um they should have in on day one if they uh they should have allowed uh who experts in they should have shared information uh they should have allowed a full and comprehensive investigation um with uh International Partnerships to understand uh what went wrong they should have shared their raw data they should have allowed their scientists to speak and write publicly because nobody knows more about this stuff certainly in the early days than their scientists do so it's relatively easy to say um what they what they should do it's a hard question to say well what would happen let's just say um let's just say tomorrow we prove for certain that this pandemic stems from an both from an accidental lab incident and then from what I've consistently called a criminal cover-up because if the cover-up has done in many ways as much or more damage than than and the incident Mo what happens you could easily imagine Xi Jinping has had two terms as as the the leader of of China and he can now have unlimited turns they've changed the rules for that but he's got a lot of enemies I mean there are a lot of people who are waiting in line to to step up so it is there a chance that Xi Jinping could be deposed if it was proven that this comes from a lab is it I think there's a real possibility um would uh people in the United States Congress for example demand reparations from China so we've had four and a half a trillion dollars of stimulus all of the economic losses and we owe a lot of money to China from our our debt I'm quite certain that members of Congress would say you know we're just going to wipe that out it would destroy the Global Financial system but I think they would be extremely likely would other countries like India that have lost millions of uh of people and had terrible economic damages would they demand reparations so I I think from a Chinese perspective starting from now it would have major geopolitical implications and and go back to to Chernobyl like there was a reason why the Soviet Union went to such length to cover things up and when it came out I mean there are different theories but certainly uh Chernobyl played some role in the end of communist power in in the Soviet Union so the the Chinese are very very aware of that but but the difference of course with Chernobyl the damage to the rest of the world was not a nearly as significant exactly with covid so you you say that the cover-up is a crime but everything you just described the response of the rest of the world is uh I could say unfair if it's a so okay if we say the best possible version of the story you know lab leaks happen they shouldn't happen right but they they happen and how is that on the Chinese government I mean what was a good example well the Union Carbide Union Carbide there was this American company operating in India they had this Lake all these people were were killed the company admitted responsibility I was working in in the white house when the United States government in my view which I know to be the case but other people in China think differently a bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and so the United States government allowed a full investigation then we paid reparations to the family the families and so to your question if I were let's just say I were the Chinese government not I mean in kind of an idealized version of the Chinese government and let's just say that they had come to the conclusion that it was a lab incident and let's just say they knew that even if they continued to cover it up eventually this information would would come out I mean maybe there was a whistleblower maybe they knew of some evidence that we didn't know about or something what would I do starting right now um what I would do is I would um hold a press conference and and we would say and I would say we had this terrible accident the reason why we were doing this research in Wuhan and elsewhere is that we had SARS one and we felt a responsibility to do everything possible to prevent now that kind of terrible thing happening again for our country and for the world that was why we collaborated with France with the United States in building up those those capacities we know that nothing is is perfect but we're a sovereign country and we have our own system and so we had to adapt our systems um so that they they made sense um internally when this outbreak began we didn't know how it started and that was why um we wanted to look into things when the process of investigating became so political it gave us pause and we were worried that our enemies were trying to use this investigation in order to undermine us having said that now that we've Dig Dug deeper we have recognized because we have access to additional information that we didn't have then that this pandemic started from an accidental lab incident and we feel really terribly about that and we know that we were very aggressive in covering up information in the beginning but the reason we were doing that is because we thoroughly we fully believed that it came from a natural origin now that we see otherwise we feel terribly therefore we're doing a few different things one is we are committing ourselves to establishing a stronger who a new pandemic treaty that addresses the major challenges that we face and allows the World Health Organization to pierce the veil of absolute sovereignty because we know that when these pandemics happen they affect everybody we are also so pudding and you can pick your number but let's start with five trillion US Dollars some massive amount into a fund that we will be Distributing to the victims of covid-19 and their uh and China would do that this is a fantasy speech but I disagree with your I mean okay so you think China has a responsibility so it's not the like just a lab leak like if China on day one had said we have this outbreak we don't know where it came from we want to have a full investigation we call on International responsible International Partners to join us in that process and we're going to do everything in our power to share the relevant information because however this started we're all victims that's a totally different story than punishing Australia preventing the who blocking any investigation condemning people who are trying to look and so so cover up for a couple weeks you can understand maybe because there's so much uncertainty you're like oh let's hide all the Winnie the Pooh pictures yeah while we figure this out but the moment you really figure out what happened you you always as a joker says always find like a like blame the Jews kind of situation a little bit just a little bit like all right it's not us yeah I'm just kidding but uh be proactive proactive and saying but the joke about that is uh there's a big problem uh because a lot of people have to leave the Jewish socialist conspiracy to make it for the Jewish capitalist conspiracy meeting I love it so I would uh say not 5 trillion but some large amount and I would really focus on the future it was just every time we talk about the lab League the unfortunate thing is I feel like people don't focus enough about the future to me the lab leak is important because we want to construct the kind of uh framework of thinking and a global conversation that minimizes uh the Damage Done by Future lab leaks which will almost certainly happen and so to me though any lab league is about the future I would launch a giant investment in saying we're going to create the testing infrastructure like all of this kind of infrastructure Investments that help minimize the damage of a lab leak here in the rest of the world so the challenge with that is one it's hard to imagine a fully in accountable future system to prevent these kinds of terrible pandemics that's built upon obfuscation and cover-up regarding the origins of this worst pandemic in a century so it's just like that that Foundation isn't strong enough second um China across the fields of science is looking to LeapFrog the rest of the world so China has current plans to build BSL for labs in every of its Province yeah they're scaling up they're scaling up everything and with the plan on leading and that's why again I was saying before I think there's a lot of similarity between this story at least as I see it at least the most probable case and these other areas where China gets knowledge and then tries to LeapFrog it's the same with with AI and autonomous Killer Robots it's the same with human genome editing with animal experimentations with so many basically all areas of advanced science um so the the question is would China stop in that process and then third um and there's it's a little bit of a historical background but defending national sovereignty is one of the core principles of certainly of the then of the Chinese State and the historical issue is for those of us who come from the West I mean one of the lessons of the post-war planners was that absolute National sovereignty was actually a major feeder into the first and second world wars that we had all these conflicting States and therefore the logic of the post-war system is we need to in some ways pool sovereignty that's like the uh the EU and have transnational organizations like the UN organizations and the Britain Woods organizations for most Asian States and and also even for some African the people who are kind of on the colonized side of History sovereignty was the thing that was denied them that was the thing that they want the European power is denied and so the idea of giving up sovereignty was that the absolute opposite and so that's why China is and again I mentioned this Rush Doshi book it's not that China is trying to destroy strengthen this rules-based International order which is based on the the principle that well there are certain things that we share and how do we build a governance system to protect those things what it seems to be doing is trying to advance its own sovereignty and so I think I agree with you but I don't I don't think that just we can just go forward without some accountability for the so the cover-up was a big problem it's like I I often I find myself Playing devil's advocate because I'm trying to sort of empathize and then I forget that like two or three people listen to this thing and then they're like look Lex is the pain the Chinese government with their cover-up no I'm not you know I'm just trying to understand I mean it's the same reason how I'm reading mineconf now it's like you have to you have to really understand the minds of people as if I too could have done that you know you have to understand that we're all the same to some degree and uh that kind of empathy is required to figure out solutions for the future it's just in empathizing with the Chinese government in this whole situation I'm I'm still not sure I I understand how to minimize the chance of a cover-up in the future whether for China or the United States if the virus started in the United States I'm not exactly sure we would be with all the emphasis we put on freedom of speech with with all the emphasis we put on um freedom of the press and uh access to the press the sort of all aspects of government I'm not sure the US government wouldn't do the similar kind of cover-up let me let me put it this way so we're in Texas now doing this interview imagine there's a kind of horseshoe bat that we'll call the Texas horseshoe bat and the Texas a lot of bats in Austin but it's true the whole thing it's true it's true and so let's just say that the Texas horseshoe bats only exist in Texas but in Montana um we have a thing they it's called the Montana Institute of virology and at the Montana Institute of virology they have the world's largest collection of Texas horseshoe bats including horseshoe bats that are associated um with a previous Global pandemic called the Texas horseshoe at pandemic and let's just say that people in Montana in the same town where this Montana Institute of virology is start getting a version of this Texas horseshoe bat syndrome that is genetically relatively similar to the outbreak in Texas there are no horseshoe bats there and the government says it's your same point Alina's point about the unicorns like nothing to see here just move along you know I and Brett Weinstein and Josh Rogan and and I mean when they say oh I guess I mean I just think that no no but the point is the government going to say it so uh Joe Rogan is a comedian Brett Weinstein is a podcaster uh the point is what we want is not just those folks to have the freedom to speak that's important but you want the government to have the transparent like like I don't think Joe Rogan is enough to hold the government accountable I I think they're going to do their thing anyway but I but I I think that's our system and that was the genius of the the founding fathers that the government probably is going to have a lot of instincts to do the wrong thing that was the experience in in our in in England before and so that's why we have free speech to hold the government accountable I mean I'm a kind of broadly a gun control person but the people who say well we need to have broad gun rights um as somebody who's now in Texas yeah offended but their argument is look we don't we don't fully trust the government if the government just like we you know fought against the the British if if the government's wrong we want to at least have some some Authority so that's our system is to have that kind of voice and that that is the public voice actually balances because every government as you correctly said every government has the same instincts and and that's why we have and it's it's imperfect here but kind of these ideas of separation of powers of inalienable rights so that we can have it's almost like a vast Market where we can have balance so you think if a lab leak occurred in the United States what probability would you put some kind of public report led by Rand Paul uh would come out saying this was a lab leak you have good confidence decent comment and the reason I said I mentioned that I'm a I might think of myself I'm sure I'm not anymore because as I get older but as a progressive person I'm a Democrat and I worked in in Democratic administrations worked for President Clinton on the National Security Council um but my kind of best friend in the United States Senate who I talked to all the time is a senator from Kansas named Roger Marshall and uh Roger I mean if you just lined up our positions on all sorts of things we're radically different um but we we have a great relationship we we talk all the time and we and we share a commitment to saying well let's ask the tough questions about how this started and again if we had like what is the United States government yeah it's the executive branch but there's also Congress and Congress you talk about Rand Paul and and as a former executive branch worker when I was on the National Security Council and I guess Technically when I was at the at the state department all of this stuff all of this process it just seems like a pain in the ass it's like these you know efforts they're just attacking us we tried to do this thing with we had all the best intentions and now they're holding hearings and they're trying to box Us in and whatever but that's our process and it there's like a form of accountability as chaotic as crazy as as it is and so it makes it really difficult I mean we have other problems of just chaos and everybody doing their own thing but it makes it difficult to have the kind of systematic cover-up and again all of that is predicated on my hypothesis not fully proven although I think likely that this is a lab incident origin of this of this pandemic well I mean we're having like several layers of conversation but I think whether lab leak hypothesis is true or not it does seem that the likelihood of a cover-up if it leaked from a lab is high well that's the more important conversation to be having uh well you could argue a lot of things but to me arguably that's the more important conversation is about what is the likelihood of a cover-up 100 like in my mind there is a legitimate debate about the origins of the pandemic there are people who I respect who I don't necessarily agree with people like Stuart Neal who's a virologist in the UK who's been very open-minded engaged in in productive debate about the origin and and you know where I where I stand there is is and can be no debate about whether or not there has been a cover-up there has been a cover-up there is in my mind no credible argument that there hasn't been a cover-up and and I mean we can just see it in the regulations in the lack of access there's an incredible woman named Zhang Zhang who is a Chinese we have to call her a citizen journalist because everything is controlled by the state but in the early days of the pandemic she went to Wuhan started taking videos and posting them she was imprisoned for picking quarrels which is kind of a catch-all and now she's engaged in a hunger strike and she's near death and so there's no question that there has been a cover-up and there's no question in my mind that that cover-up is responsible for a significant percentage of the total deaths due to covet 19. in a pivot can I talk to you about sex let's roll okay so you're the author of uh book hacking Darwin yeah so humans have used um sex allegedly as as I've read about to uh to mix genetic um information to produce Offspring and sort of through that kind of process um adapt to their environment Lex you mentioned earlier about you're asking tough questions and people pushing you to ask tough questions this is is it okay if I just so um you said have done this as I've read about as I've read about on the internet yeah all I'm saying as a person sitting with you to people who would uh be open-minded in experimenting of as I've read about to reality what I would say is Lex Friedman is handsome charming he's I'm gonna open it really a great guy I'm sorry to interrupt that I appreciate that thank you so I was reading about this last night I was going to Tweet it but then I'm like this is going to be misinterpreted but uh it it's this is why I like podcasts because I can I could I could say stuff like this um is kind of incredible to me that the average human male produces like 500 billion plus sperm cells in their lifetime like each one of those are genetically unique like they can produce like unique humans each one of the 500 billion there's like a hundred billion people who's ever lived 100 maybe like 110 whatever whatever the number is so it's like five times the number of people who ever lived is produced by each male of genetic information so those are all possible trajectories of lives that could have lived like those are all little people that could have been and like all the possible stories all the Hitlers and Einsteins that could have been created and all that I mean I I don't know this kind of you're painting this possible future and we get to see only one little string of that I mean that I suppose the magic of that is also captured by the uh in specific physics or having like multiple dimensions in the uh the many worlds hypothesis quantum mechanics that the the interpretation that were basically just at every Point there's an infinite uh offspring of universes that that are created but I don't know that's just like a magic of um this game of genetics that we're playing and the winning sperm is not the fastest the winning sperm is basically the luckiest has the right timing so it's not um I was also gotten into this whole uh I started reading papers about like is there something to be said about who wins the race right genetically so it's fascinating because there's studies and in animals and so on to dance to that question because it's interesting because like because I'm a winner right I want I want to race yes and so you want to know like what what does that say about me in this uh in this fascinating genetic race against I think what is it 200 200 million others I think so one uh you know pool of uh sperm cells is uh is about something like 200 million it could be yes so but that Millions yeah I thought it was much much lower than that so like that those are all brothers and sisters of mine and I beat them all out yeah I won and so it's interesting to to know um there's a temptation to say I'm somehow better than them right and now that goes into the next stage of something you're or deeply thinking about which is um if we have more control now over the the winning genetic code that becomes Offspring if we have first not even control just information and then control what do you think that world looks like from a biological perspective and from an ethical perspective when we start getting more information and more control yeah great great question so first on the sperm there can be up to about 1.2 billion sperm cells in a male ejaculation so as I mentioned in hacking Darwin male sperm it's kind of a dime a dozen with all the all the guys in all in all the world just doing whatever they do with it um and it's an open question um how competitive I mean there is an element of luck and there is an element of competition and it's an open question how much that competition impacts the the outcome or whether it's just luck but my guess is there's some combination of of fitness and luck but you're absolutely right that all of those other sperm cells in in the ejaculation if that's how the union of spermine egg is is happening all of them represent a different future and it's there's a wonderful full book called Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and he even talks about a city as something like this where everybody you have your life but then you have all these alternate lives and every time you make any decision you're kind of and so but in this Invisible Cities there's a little string that goes toward that alternate life and then the city becomes this weaving of all the strings of people's real lives and the alternate lives that they could have taken had they made any other any other different steps so that part it's like a a deep philosophical question it's not just for us it's for all of it's It's baked into evolutionary biology is this what are the different strategies for different species to achieve Fitness and there's some of the different corals or other fish where they just kind of release the eggs into the water and there's there's all different kinds of of ways and then you're right in my book um hacking Darwin and into the full titles hacking Darwin genetic engineering and the future of humanity um I I kind of go deep into exploring the big picture implications of the future of human reproduction um we are already participating in a revolutionary transformation not just because of the Diagnostics that we have things like ultrasound um but because now an increasing number of us are being born through in vitro fertilization which means the eggs are extracted from the mother they're fertilized by the father's sperm in vitro in a lab and then re-implanted in the mother on top of that there's a somewhat newer but still now you know older technology called pre-implantation genetic testing and so as everyone knows from high school biology you have the the fertilized egg and then it goes one cell to two cells to four to eight and whatever and after around five days in this PGT process a few cells are extracted so let's say you have 10 fertilized eggs early stage embryos a few cells are extracted from each and those cells if they would the ones that are attracted would end up becoming the placenta but every one of our cells has other than a few has our full genome and so then you sequence those cells and with pre-implantation genetic testing now what you can do is you can screen out deadly uh single gel a single gene mutation disorders things that could be deadly or life ruining and so people use it to determine which of those 10 um early stage embryos to implant in a mother as we shift towards a much greater understanding of genetics and that is part of our just the broader genetics Revolution um but within that in our transition from personalized to Precision Healthcare more and more of us are going to have our whole genome sequenced because it's going to be the foundation of getting personalized health care we're going to have already Millions but very soon billions of people who've had their whole genome sequenced and then we'll have big databases of people's genetic genotypic information and life or phenotypic information and using coming into your area are tools of machine learning and data analytics we're going to be able to increasingly understand patterns of genetic expression even though we're all so predict how that genetic information will get expressed correct yeah never perfectly perhaps but more and more always more and more and so with that information we aren't going to just be in the even now um we aren't going to just be selecting based on which of these 10 early stage embryos is carrying a deadly genetic disorder but we can we'll be able to know everything that can be partly or entirely predicted by genetics and there's a lot of our Humanity that that fits into that category and um certainly simple traits like height and eye color and and things like that I mean height is not at all simple but it's it's in if you have good nutrition it's it's entirely or mostly genetic but even personality traits and personality Styles there are a lot of things that we see just as the experience the beauty of life that are partly have a genetic foundation and so whatever part of these traits are definable and influenced by genetics we're going to have greater and greater predictability within a range and so selecting those embryos will be informed by that kind of of knowledge and that's why in hacking Darwin I talk about embryo selection as being a key driver of the future of human evolution then on top of that there is in 2012 yamanaka a Japanese amazing Japanese scientists won the Nobel Prize for developing a process for creating what are called induced pluripotent stem cells IPS cells and what IPS cells are is you can induce an adult cell to go back in evolutionary time and become a stem cell and a stem cell is like when we're when you're when we're a fertilized egg like our entire blueprint is in that one cell and that cell can be anything but then it starts to spend our cells start to specialize and that's why we have skin cells and blood cells and all the different types of things so with the yamanaka process we can induce an adult adult cell to become a stem cell so the relevance to this story is what you it can do and it works now in animal models and as far as I know it hasn't yet been done in humans but it works pretty well in animal models you take any adult cell but skin cells are probably the easiest you induce this skin cell into a stem cell and if you just take a little skin graft it would have millions of of cells you induce those skin cells into stem cells then you induce those stem cells into egg precursor cells then you induce those egg precursor cells into eggs egg cells then because we have this massive over abundance of male sperm it's then you could fertilize let's call it ten thousand of the mother's egg so you have 10 000 eggs which are fertilized sounds like a party yeah then you have an automated process um for what I what I mentioned before in pre-implantation genetic testing you grow them all for five days you extract a few cells from each you test them and that's I had a piece in the New York Times a couple of years ago imagining what it would be like to go to a fertility clinic in the year 2050 and the choice is is involved yeah well no no there are but the choice is not do you want a kid who does or doesn't have let's call it um Tay Sachs um it's a whole range of possibilities including very intimate um uh traits like height IQ personality style it doesn't mean you can predict everything but it means there will be increasing predictability so if you're if you're choosing from 10 000 eggs fertilized eggs early stage embryos that's a lot of choice um and on top of that then we have the new technology of human genome editing many people have heard of crispr but what I say is if you think of human genome editing as a pie human I'm sorry Human Genome engineering as a pi genome editing is a slice and crispr is just a sliver of that slice it's just one of our tools for genome editing and then things are getting better and better better then you can go in and change let's say I mean again it starts simple a small number of genes let's say you've selected from among the one of ten or the one of ten thousand but there are a number of changes that you would like to make to achieve some kind of outcome and biology is incredibly complex and it's not that one gene does one thing one gene does probably a lot of things simultaneously which is why the decision about changing one gene if it's causing deathly harm is easier than when we think about the complexity of of biology whether the machine learning gets better and better predicting the full complexity biology so exactly as one gets better than your editing uh your ability to uh reliably edit such that the conclusions are predictable gets better and better so those are two are coupled together exactly and then so that's why and and people would say well that I mean I I wrote about that in my my two science fiction novels Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata years ago especially with Genesis Code I wrote about that and and as a Sci-Fi and and I had actually testified before Congress but now 15 years ago saying here's what the future looks like um but even I and and in my first edition of hacking Darwin um uh when it was it was already in production uh and then in November 2018 this scientist who John Quay announced uh in Hong Kong um that the world's first two and later three crispr babies had been born which he had genetically altered in and misguided in my view and and dangerous view a dangerous goal um of making it so they would have increased resistance to uh to HIV and so I called my publisher and I said I've got good news and bad news I'll start with the bad news is that the world's first crispr babies have been born and so we need to pull my book out of production because you can't have a book on the future of human genetic engineering and have it not mentioned the first crispr babies that have been born but the good news is in the book I had predicted that it's going to happen and it's going to happen in China and here's why and all we need to do is add a few more sentences and now that was the hardback and then I updated it more in the paperback saying and it happened and it was announced on on this diff yeah well then let's fast forward given your predictions are slowly becoming reality let's talk about some philosophy and ethics I suppose so I can I'm not being too self-deprecating here and saying if um my parents had the choice uh I I would be probably less likely to come out the winner uh we're all weird and I'm certainly a very um distinctly weird specimen of the human species I can give the full long list of flaws and we can be very poetic of saying like those are features and so on but they're not if you look at the menu again for for these uh women who are listening apropos of your thing they're all kind of charming individualities yes it's beautiful that's one yes thank you but anyway but on on the full sort of individual let's say IQ alone right that um what do we what do we do about a world where um IQ could be selected in a menu when you're having children foreign what concerns you about that world what excites you about that world are there certain metrics that excite you more than others IQ has been a a source of um I don't know I'm not sure IQ as a measure flawed as it is has been used to celebrate the successes of the human species nearly as much as has been used to divide people to say negative things about people um to make negative claims about people and in that same way it seems like when there's a selection a genetic selection based on IQ you can start now having classes of citizenry and like further divide you know the rich get richer you know it'll be very rich people they'll be able to do kind of uh fine selection of IQ and then um they they will start forming these classes of super intelligent people and those super intelligent people in their minds would of course be the right people to be making Global authoritarian decisions about everybody else all the usual aspects of human nature but now magnified with with the the new tools of Technology anyway all that to say is what's exciting to you of what's concerning to you it's a it's a great question and just stepping into the the IQ we'll call it a quagmire for now it raises a lot of big issues um which are are complicated um maybe you've listened to Sam Harris's uh interview with Charles Murray and then that that spawned a kind of a whole industry of of debate so first just the background of of IQ and it's it's from the early 20th century and there was the idea that we can measure people's general intelligence and and there are so many different kinds of intelligence this was measuring a specific thing so it's my feeling is that IQ doesn't is not a perfect measure of intelligence but it's a perfect measure of IQ like it's measuring what it's what it's measuring but that thing is correlates to a lot of of things which are rewarded in our society so the the every study of IQ has shown that people with higher IQs they make more money they live longer they have more stable relationships I mean that that could be something in the in the testing but as Sam Harris has has talked about a lot you could line up all of the all of these kind of IQ and IQ like tests correlate with each other so the people who score high on one score high on all of them and and people think that IQ tests are like um a you know a thing like you know the Earl of Dorchester is coming for dinner does he have two forks or Three Forks or something like that it's it's not that a lot of them are are things that that I think a lot of us would recognize are relevant just like how much stuff can you memorize if you see some shapes how can you position them and and things like that and so IQ I mean it really hit its stride in certainly in the second world war when we were just our governments were processing a lot of people and trying to figure out who to put in what in what in what job so that's the starting point let me start first with the negatives um that our societies that when we talk about diversity in Dar darwinian terms it's not like diversity is from darwinian terms oh wouldn't it be nice if we have you know some moths of different colors because it'll be really fun to have different colored moths diversity is the sole survival strategy of our species and of every species and it's and and it's impossible to predict um which what diversity is going to be rewarded and I've said this before if you went down and you had if you spoke T-Rex and you spoke to the dinosaurs and said hey you can select your kids um what criteria do you want and they say oh yeah yeah sharp teeth cruel things Roar whatever it is that makes you a great T-Rex um but the answer from from an evolutionary perspective from an earth perspective was always much better to be like a cockroach or an alligator or some little nothing or a little shrew um because the dinosaurs are going to get wiped out when the asteroid hits and so there's no better or worse in evolution there's just better or worse suited for a given environment and when that environment changes the best suited person from the old system could be the worst suited person for the new one so if we start selecting for the things that we value the most including things like IQ but even disease resistance I mean this is well known but if you um people who are recessive carrier of of sickle cell disease have increased resistance to malaria which is the biggest reason why that that trait has hasn't just disappeared given how deadly sickle cell disease is the biology is incredibly complex we understand such a tiny percentage of it that we need to have in your words just a level of of humility there are huge Equity issues as you've articulated let's just say that it I mean it is the case that in our society IQ and IQ like traits are highly rewarded there isn't an equity issue but it works in both ways because my guess is let's just say that we had a society where we were doing genome sequencing of everybody who was born and we had some predictive model to predict IQ and we had decided as a society that IQ was going to be what we were going to select for we were going to put the highest IQ people in these these different roles I guarantee you the people in that in those roles would not be the people who are legacy admissions to Harvard they would very likely be people who are born in slums um people who are born with no opportunity or in refugee camps who have are just wasting away because we've we've we've thrown them away and so it's it's an easy like it's it's the idea of just being able to look under the hood of our humanity is really scary for everybody and it should be I mean I'm also an Ashkenazi Jew my father was born in Austria my father and grandparents came here as refugees after the war most of that side of the family was killed so I get what it means to be on the other I mean you said you're reading Mein Kampf on the other side of the story when someone said well here's what's good and you're not good and therefore you're so I I totally get that having said that um I do believe that we're moving toward a new way of procreating and we're going to have to decide what are the values that we would like to uh to realize through that process is it Randomness which is what we currently have now which is not totally random because we have a sort of mating through colleges and and other things like you go to Harvard yeah or whatever and your wife also goes to Harvard it's like it's this location based uh meeting well it's not location it's selection it's like there are selections that are made about who gets to a certain place and when like it's like Harvard admissions is a filter so so we're going to have to decide what are the values that we want to realize through this process because diversity has it's just baked into our biology we're the first species ever that has the opportunity to make choices about things that were otherwise baked into our biology and there's a real danger that if we make bad choices even with good intentions it could even drive us toward Extinction and certainly undermine our our humanity and that's why I always say and like I said I'm deeply involved with who and other things that these aren't conversations about science there are conversations science brings us to the conversation but the conversation is about values and ethics as you described that world is wide open it's not even uh a subtly different world that world is fundamentally different from anything we understand about life on Earth because um natural selection this random process is so fundamental how we think about life being able to program I mean it has the chance to I mean it'll probably make my question about the ethical concerns around IQ based selection um just meaningless because it'll change the nature of identity like it's possible it will dissolve identity because we take so much pride in all the different characteristics that make us who we are whenever you have some control over those characteristics those characteristics start losing meaning and what may start gaining meaning is the ideas inside our heads for example versus like the the details of like is it a Commodore 64 is it a PC is it a Mac it's going to be less important than the software that runs on it so we can more and more be operating in the digital space and the identity could be something that borrows multiple bodies like it the the legacy of our ideas may become more important than the details of our physical embodiment like it I mean I'm saying perhaps ridiculous sounding things but they the point is it will bring up so many new ethical concerns that are narrow-minded thinking about the current ethical concerns will not apply so it's uh but it's important to think about all this kind of stuff like actively what are the right conversations to be having now because it feels like it's um it's an ongoing conversation then continually evolves like with an NIH involved like do you do experiments with animals do you build these brain organoids do you still like through that process you describe but the stem cells like do you experiment with a bunch of organisms to see how genetic uh material what uh what form that actually takes how to minimize the chance of cancer and all those kinds of things what are the negative consequences of that what are the positive consequences yeah it's a fascinating world it's a really fascinating world yeah and then but those conversations are just so essential like we have to be talking about ethics and then that raises the question of who is the we and coming back to to your conversation about science communication maybe there was a time earlier when these conversations needed to be were were held among a small number of experts who made decisions on behalf of every everybody else but what we're talking about here is really the future of our species and I think that conversation is too important to be left just to experts and and government officials so I mentioned them that I'm a member we just ended our our work after two years of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing and my big push in that process was to have education engagement and empowerment of the broad public to bring not just bring people into the conversation with the tools to be able to engage but also into the decision-making process and that's it's a real shift and there are countries that are doing it better than others I mean Denmark is obviously a much smaller country than the United States but they have a really well developed infrastructure for public engagement around really complicated scientific issues and I I just think that we have to like it's great that we have Twitter and all these other things we need structured conversations that where we can really bring people together and and listen to each other which feels like it's it's harder than than ever um but even now in this process where all these people are shouting at each other at least there are a bunch of people who are in the the conversation so it's we have a foundation but we just really need to do more work and again and again and again it's about ethics and values because we're at an age and this has become a cliche of exponential technological change and so the rate of change is faster going forward than it has been in the past so in our minds we under appreciate how quickly things are changing and um and will change and if we're not careful if we don't know who we are and what our values are we're going to get lost and we don't have to know technology we have to know who we are I mean our values are hard won over thousands of years no matter how new the technology is we shouldn't and can't jettison our our values because that is the our primary navigational tool absurd question because we were saying that uh sexual rep reproduction is not the best way to define The Offspring you think there'll be a day when humans stop having sex I don't think we'll stop having sex because it's so enjoyable um but we may significantly stop having sex for reproduction even today most human sex is not for making babies it's for other things whether it's pleasure or love or pair bonding or or whatever intimacy intimacy I mean some people do it for intimacy some people do it for for pleasure with strangers I feel like the people that do it for pleasure I feel like there will be better ways to achieve that same chemical pleasure right you know there's just so many different kinds of people there I mean they're I just saw this on I just saw this on television but there are people who put on those big bunny outfits and go and have sex with other people I mean they're just like an unlimited number of different kinds of people and I think they're called so I remember hearing about this I think Dan Savage is a podcast um I think they're called furries first like furry yeah exactly so they're just I love people yeah but it's you know that's like the thing it's like whenever you hear these words like humans yeah what would I think of next um so but I do think that and I write about this in in hacking Darwin that as uh people come to believe that having uh that making children through the application of science is safer and more beneficial than having children through sex um we'll start to see a a shift over time toward reproduction through through science we'll still have sex for all this the the same great reasons that we that we do it now it's just reproduction less and less through the act of sex man it's such a fascinating future because as somebody I value flaws I think uh it's the uh Goodwill Hunting that's the good stuff the flaws the the weird quirks of humans that's what makes us who we are the the weird the weirdest the beautiful and I yeah there's a fear of optimization that I you should have it I mean it's very healthy I mean and I think that's the same word that's the danger of all of this selection is that we make selections just based on social norms that are so deeply internal that they feel like their Eternal truths and so we we talked about selecting for IQ what about selecting for a kind heart like there are lots of people you talked about Hitler and Minecon pillar has certainly had a high IQ I guess is higher than average IQ um if we just select I mean that's why I was saying before diversity is baked into our biology but the the key lesson and I've said this many times before the key lesson of this moment in our history is that after nearly four billion years of evolution are one species suddenly has the unique and increasing ability to read write and hack the code of life and so as we apply these god-like powers that we've now assumed for ourselves um we better be pretty careful uh because it's so easy to make mistakes uh particularly mistakes that are Guided by our best intentions to jump briefly back onto lab league and I swear there's a reason for that um what did you think about the Jon Stewart this moment I forget what it was maybe a few months ago in the summer I think of 2021 where he went on Colbert Report or Not The Colbert Report sorry the you know Stephen Colbert's whatever his show is uh but again Jon Stewart reminded us how valuable his wit and Brilliance within the humor was for our culture and so he uh did this whole bit that highlighted the common sense nature about what was the metaphor he used about the Hershey factory in Pennsylvania so what'd you think about that whole bit I loved it and so not to be overly self-referential but it's hard not to be overly self-referential when you're doing a whatever however long we are five hour interview about yourself which it reminds like when you had Brett Weinstein on he said I have no ego but these 57 people have screwed me over here so it's hard so yeah no so you know I am a person I will confess I it's enjoyable some people feel different I kind of like talking about all this stuff and and talking period um so for me in the earliest I remember those early days of when the pandemic started I was just sitting down it was late January or early February 2020 and I just was laying out all of the evidence just as I that I could collect trying to say make sense of where does this come from and it just it was just logic I mean I it was all the things that Jon Stewart said which in some you know overly wordy form were all at that time on my website like what are the odds of having this this outbreak of a bad coronavirus of more than a thousand miles away from where these bats have their natural habitat where they have the the largest collection of these bad coronaviruses in the world and they're doing all these very aggressive research projects to make them more aggressive and then you have the outbreak of a virus that's that's primed for a human to human transmission um it was just logic was my first step and I you know kept Gathering Gathering the the information but Jon Stewart distilled that in a way that just everybody got and I think that like I loved it and I just think that there's a way of reaching people it's the reason why I write science fiction in addition to thinking and writing about the science is that we kind of have to reach people where they are and and I just thought it was just there was a lot of depth I thought and I mean maybe that's too self-serving but like in the analysis but he he captured that into the in in into those things about it's like the the whatever the chewy the outbreak of chewy goodness near the Hershey factory I wonder where that came from yeah this the humor this metaphor also the like sticking with the joke when the audience is uh um in the audience that Stephen Colbert he was like resisting it he was very uncomfortable with it maybe that was part of the bit I'm not sure but it didn't look like it so Stephen in that moment kind of represents the discomfort of the scientific Community I think it's kind of interesting that whole dynamic and I think that was a pivotal moment that just like highlights the value of Comedy the value of um like when Joe Rogan says I'm just a comedian I mean that's such a funny thing to say it's like saying I'm just a podcaster or I'm just a writer I'm just a you know that ability in so few words to express what everybody else is thinking um it's so refreshing and I wish the scientific communicators would do that too a little humor a little humor I mean that's why I love uh Elon Musk very much so like the way he communicates is like us it's it's so refreshing for for a CEO of our major company several major companies to just have a sense of humor and say ridiculous shit every once in a while that's so there's something to that like it shakes up the whole conversation to where it gives you freedom to like think publicly if you're always trying to say the proper thing you lose the freedom to think to uh to reason out to be authentic and genuine when you say when you allow yourself the freedom to regularly say stupid shit have fun make fun of yourself I think you give yourself freedom to really be a great scientist with it again honestly I I I think science and stuff a lot to learn from comedians well for sure I think we all do about just distilling and communicating in ways that people can hear like a lot of us say things and people just can't hear them yes either because of the way we're saying them or or where they are but and and like I said before I I'm a big fan of Joe Rogan I've been on his show twice and whatever but when Francis Collins was in his conversation with you he said um which I think makes sense is that when somebody has that kind of platform and people rightly or wrongly who follow them and look to them for guidance I do think um that there is some responsibility for people in those roles to make whatever judgment um that they make and to share that and as I mentioned to you when we are off mic uh Sanjay Gupta is a very close friend of mine we've been friends for many years and I and I fully supported uh Sanjay's instinct to go on the on The Joe Rogan show I thought it was yeah it was great at the end of that whole conversation Joe said well I'm just a comedian what do I know and I just felt that um yes Joe Rogan is a comedian I wouldn't say just a comedian among among other things but I also felt that he had a responsibility for just saying whatever he believed even if he believed or believed as I think is the case that Ivermectin should be studied more which I certainly agree um and that you know healthy people shouldn't get vaccinated healthy young people which I don't agree I just felt at the end of that conversation to say well I'm just a comedian what do I know I feel like it it it it didn't fully integrate the power that a person like Joe Rogan has to set the agenda so I think the reason he says I'm just a comedian is the same reason I say I'm an idiot which I truly believe I can explain exactly what I mean by that but like it's it's it's more for him or in this case for me to just keep yourself humble and you know because I think it's a slippery slope when you think you have responsibility to then think you actually have an authority because a lot of people listen to you you think you have an authority to actually like speak to those people and you have the enough authority to know what the hell you're talking about and I think there's just a humility to just kind of making fun of yourself that's extremely valuable and saying I'm just a comedian um I think is a reminder to himself that uh you know he's often full of shit so are all of us and so that's a really powerful way for himself to keep himself humble I mean I I think that's really useful to in some kind of way for people in general to um yeah make fun of themselves a little bit in whatever way that means and saying I'm just a comedian is just one way to do that now that that coupled that with the responsibility of doing the research and really having your open mind and all those kinds of stuff um I think that's something Joe does really well on a lot of topics but he can't do that and everything and so that it's it's up to the people to decide how well he does it on on certain topics and and not others um but how do you think uh Sanjay did in that conversation so I know I'm going to get myself into trouble here um because Sanjay is a very close friend Joe my personal interaction with him has been our two interviews but it's like my interview with now sit down with somebody for four hours it's it's a lot and and great and then and then private uh communication so I am personally more sympathetic now to the arguments that Sanjay was making or trying uh trying to make I believe that the threat of the virus is greater than the threat of the vaccine that doesn't mean that we can guarantee 100 safety um for the vaccine but these are really well tolerated vaccine and we know for all the reasons we've been talking about this is a really scary virus and particularly the MRNA vaccines what they're basically doing is getting your body to replicate a tiny little piece of the virus the spike protein and then your body responds to that and so that's a much less much less of an insult to your body than being infected by the virus so I'm I'm more sympathetic to the people who say well everybody should get vaccinated but people who've already been infected we should study whether they need to be vaccinated or not having said all of that I felt that that Joe Rogan won the debate I mean it was and the reason that I felt that he won the debate was there if they were kind of had they had two different categories of arguments so Sanjay what he was trying to do which I totally respect was was saying there's so much animosity between the on these different sides let's lower the temperature let's let's model that we can have a respectful dialogue with each other we can actually listen and Sanjay again I've known him for many years he's a very empathic humble just a all-around wonderful human being and I really love him and so he was making cases that were based on kind of averages studies and things like that and Joe was saying well I know a guy whose sister's cousin had this experience and I'm sure that it's all true in the sense that we have millions of people who are getting vaccinated and and different things and what Sanjay should have said was I I know that's anecdote here's another anecdote of like when Francis Collins was with you and he talked about the World Wrestling guy who was like six six and a big muscly guy and then he got kovid and he was anti-vaccine and then he got coveted and almost died and he said I'm gonna by the way yeah I don't know if you know this part no oh this is funny Joe's gonna listen to this is he's gonna be laughing does Joe listen like to the four hours of this in addition to the three hours of his interviews every day no not every day but he listens to a lot of these and we talk about it and we argue about it hi Joe we love you Joe but he uh so that particular case I don't know why Francis said what he said there but that's not accurate oh really so the wrestler never he didn't almost die he was no big deal at all for him and he said that to him I think I'm not sure I think something got mixed up in francis's memory he there was another case he must have been like because I don't imagine he would bring that case up and just like make it up you know because like why but he that was not at all like that was a pretty public case to get an interview with him that uh that wrestler he was just fine so that anecdotal case I mean Francis should not have done that so if I have any so I have a bunch of criticism of how that went people who criticize that interview I feel like don't give enough respect to the full range of things that Francis Collins has done in his career here is an incredible scientist and I also think a really good human being but uh yes that conversation was flawed in many ways and one of them was why when you're trying to present some kind of critical like criticized Joe Rogan why bring up an adult events at all and if you do bring up anecdotal evidence which is not scientific if you're scientist you should not be using anecdotal evidence if you do bring it up why bring up one that's not that's first not true and you know it's not true so I know to pretend so you don't know it's not your book so yes that would have been find another case exactly uh where exactly so the basic thing in it coming back to Sanjay and and Joe's uh conversation was that Sanjay was trying to use statistical evidence and Joe was using anecdotal evidence and so I think that for Sanjay and there are all kinds of of things where there are debates where the often the person who's better at debating wins the debate regardless of the topic um so I think what what Sanjay could have done and Sanjay is such a smart a smart guy um is to say why well that's that's an anecdote here's another anecdote and there are lots of different anecdotes and there certainly are people who have taken the vaccine and have had problems that could reasonably be traced to the vaccines and there certainly are lots of people I would argue more people who've not had the vaccine but who've gotten coveted and have either died or our hospitals are now full of people who weren't vaccinated in many ways um I mean our emergency rooms are full of undaccinated people here in the United States so I think what Sanjay could have done but there was a conflict between um wanting to kind of win the debate and wanting to take the temperature down and what he could have done is to say well here's an anecdote I have a counter anecdote and we can go on all day but here's what the statistics show and I think that was the the things I think it's it's a healthy conversation we can't I mean there are a lot of people who are afraid of the vaccine there are a lot of people who don't trust the scientific establishment and lots of them have good reason it's not just people think of like Trump Republicans there are lots of of people in the African-American Community who've had a historical terrible experience variants with the Tuskegee and and all sorts of things so they they don't trust the messages that were being delivered I live in in New York City and they had a we had a piece in the New York Times where in the in the earliest days of the vaccines there were this big movement let's make sure that the poorest people in the city have first access to the vaccines because they're the ones they have higher density in their homes they're relying on public transport so there's this whole liberal effortless and then in the black community in New York according to the New York Times there was very low acceptance of the vaccines and they interviewed people in that article and they said well if the white people want us to have it first there must be something wrong with it they must be doing something right and so we have to listen to each other the like I would never I mean I I have a disrespect for everybody and if somebody is cautious about the vaccine for themselves or or for their children we have to listen to that at the same time public health is about creating public health and there's no doubt I think Joe was absolutely right that older people obese people are at greater risk for being harmed or killed by the by covid-19 than young healthy people but by everybody getting vaccinated we reduce the risk to everybody else and so I feel like like with everything there's the individual benefit argument and then there's the community argument and I absolutely think about expressing that clearly that there's a difference between the individual health and freedoms and uh the community health and freedoms and exp steel Manning each side of this this is one of the problems that people don't do enough of is be able to so how do you just steal men an argument you describe that argument in the best possible way you have to first understand that argument let's go to the non-controversial thing like Flat Earth like most people most colleagues of mine at MIT don't even read about right like the the full argument that the flat earthers make I feel is disingenuous for people in the physics community to roll their eyes at flat earthers if they haven't read their arguments you should you should feel bad that you didn't read their arguments and like like the it's the rolling of the eyes that's a big problem you haven't read it your intuition says that these are a bunch of crazy people okay but you don't get you you haven't earned the right to roll your eyes you've earned your right to maybe not read it but then don't have an opinion don't roll your eyes don't do any of that dismissive stuff and the same thing in this the the scientific Community around covet and so on there's often this kind of saying oh God that's conspiracy theories that's misinformation without actually looking into what they're saying if you haven't looked into what they're saying then don't talk about it like if you're a scientific leader and the communicator you need to look into it it's not that much effort I totally agree and I think that humility it's a it's a constant theme of your podcast and I love that and so after the the uh conversation debate whatever it was between Sanjay and Joe I reached out on Twitter to someone I've never met in person but I'm in in touch privately to a guy named Daniel Griffin who's a a professor at uh at Columbia medical school and just so smart there he's uh he gives regular updates on covid-19 on a thing called twiv this weekend critic of twiv for its its coverage of academic Origins yes um but on this issue and just having regular updates Daniel is great and so I said you know to him I said why don't we um have a an honest process to get the people who are raising concerns about the vaccines in their own words to raise what are their concerns not and then um let's do our best job of saying well here are these concerns and then here is um our evidence making a counter claim and here are links to if you want to look at the studies upon which these claims are made here here they are and Daniel who's incredibly busy I mean he he reads every I mean it seems every paper that comes out every week and it's unbelievable um so but he sent me a link to the CDC q a page um on on the CDC website and it wasn't that it was people who were I mean it was written by people like me who were convinced in the benefit of these um of these vaccines so the questions were framed they were kind of like they weren't really the framing of the people with the concerns they were framing of people who were just kind of imagining something else I mean you always talk about kind of humility and active listening I know you don't mean and it doesn't mean that we don't stand for something like I I certainly am a strong proponent of vaccines and masks and and all of those things um but if we don't hear other people we don't let if we don't let them hear their voice in the conversation if it's just saying well you may think this and here's why it's wrong the argument may be right it'll just never break through by the way my interpretation of Joe and Sanjay I listened to that conversation without looking at Twitter or the internet and I thought that was a great conversation and I thought Sanji actually really succeeded at bringing the temperature down to me the goal was bringing the temperature down I didn't even think of it as a debate I was like oh cool this isn't going to be some weird it's like two friendly people talking and then I look at the internet and then the internet says Joe Rogan slams such like like I said as if it was a heated debate that Joe won and it's like all right it's really the temperature being brought down real conversation with your two humans that wasn't really a debate it was just a conversation yeah and that was a success yeah and I definitely think it was a success but I also felt um that um that a a takeaway and again this isn't because this is something that I don't agree with even though I have great as I've said respect for Joe I think a reasonable person listening to that conversation would come away with the conclusion that um all in all these vaccines are a good thing um but if you're young and healthy um You probably don't need it and I just felt that um that there was a stronger case to be made even though Sanjay made it it wasn't that Sanjay didn't make it it was just that in the flow of that conversation I felt that the case for the vaccines and the vaccines both as an individual Choice and then certainly again as I as I said before I think that well people can be afraid of the vaccines the virus itself is much scarier and we're just we're seeing it now in in real time now with these variations and variants I just felt that that was kind of the the rough takeaway from that conversation um and I felt that that Sanjay again whom I love I felt could have made his case a little bit cheaper uh so the way the thing he succeeded is he didn't come off as uh like uh a science expert looking down at everybody talking down to everybody so he succeeded in that yeah which is very respectful but I also think sort of making the case for taking the vaccine where you when you're a young healthy person when you're sitting across from Joe Rogan is like a high difficulty on the video game level for sure so it's not a it's difficult to do yeah it's difficult to do and also it's difficult to do because it's not like it's not a simple as like look at the data there's a lot of data to go through here yeah and there's also a lot of non-data stuff like the fact that first of all uh questioning the sources of the data the quality of the data because it's also disappointing about covet is that the quality of the data is not great but also questioning all the motivations of the different parties involved whether it's major organizations that develop the vaccine whether it's major institutions like NIH or nyad that that are sort of communicating to us about the vaccine whether it's the CDC and the who whether it's the Biden or the Trump Administration whether it's China and all those kinds of things you have to that's part of the conversation here I mean vaccination is not just a public health tool it's also a tool for a government to gain more control over the populace like there's a lot of Truth to that too things that have a lot of benefit can also be used as a trojan horse to increase bureaucracy and control but those that has to be on the table for a conversation yeah I I think it has to be on the conversation but um I mean your parents and when they were in the Soviet Union and here in the United States and actually it was a big collaboration between US and Soviet Union when the polio vaccine came out but there were people all around the world who had a different life trajectory no longer living in fear and all these people who were paralyzed or killed from polio smallpox has been eradicated it was one of the the great successes in human history and while it for sure is true that you could imagine some kind of fraudulent vaccination effort but here I genuinely think I mean whatever the number 15 million 16 million is the economist number of dead from uh covet 19. many many more people would be dead but for these vaccines and so I get that any activity that needs to be coordinated by a central government has the potential to increase bureaucracy and increase control but there are certain things that Central governments do like the development particularly these mRNA vaccines which it's it's purely a a U.S government Victory I mean it was a huge DARPA funding and then ni the National Institute for allergy and infectious disease NIH funding I mean this was a public-private partnership throughout and that we got a a working vaccine in 11 months was a miracle so it's not purely a victory again you have to be open-minded I mean I'm I'm with you here playing a bit of Devil's Advocate but the people who discuss any viral drugs that got them acting and other Alternatives would say that the extreme focus on the vaccine distracted us from considering other possibilities and saying that this is purely a success is distracting from the story that there could have been other Solutions so yes it's a huge success that the vaccine was developed so quickly and surprisingly way more effective than it was hoped for but there could have been other Solutions and they're completely distracted from us from that in fact it distracted us from looking into a bunch of things like the lab leak and that so it's not a pure Victory and fair enough and there's a lot of people that criticize the overreach of government and all of this that one of the things that makes the United States great is the individualism and the hesitancy to ideas of mandates even if the mandates on mass will have a positive even strongly positive result the Americans many Americans will still say no because in the long Arc of History saying no in that moment will actually lead to a better country and a better world so that's a messed up aspect of America but it's also a beautiful part we're skeptical even about good things I I agree and and certainly um we should all be cautious about government overreach absolutely and it happens in all kinds of scenarios with incarceration with a thousand things and we also should be afraid of government underreach that if there is a problem that could be solved by governments and that's why we have governments in the first place is that they're just certain things that individuals can't do on their own and that's why we we pool our resources and we in some ways sacrifice our rights for this common thing and that's why we don't have hopefully people murderers marauding or people driving 200 miles down the street that we we have a process for arriving at a set of of common rules and so while I fully agree that we need to respect and we need to listen um we need to find that right balance and you've raised the magic I word Ivermectin um and so in Ivermectin like my view has always been um Ivermectin could be effective it could not be effective let's study it through a full process and when you had Francis Collins with you even while he was making up stories about this um this wrestler um he was saying exactly but he was he was saying that they're going to do a full randomized highest level trial of ivermectin and if Ivermectin works then that's another tool in our in our toolbox and I think we we should and and I think that in that Sanjay was absolutely correct to concede the point to Joe um that it was disingenuous for people including people on CNN to say that Ivermectin is is um is for livestock and so I like I definitely think that we have to like we have to have some kind of process that allows us to come together and I totally agree that the great strength of America is that we Empower individuals it's the history of our Frontier mentality in our country so we I 100 agree that we have to allow that even if sometimes it creates messy processes and uncomfortable feelings and all those sorts of things you are an ultra marathon runner yes what what uh what are you running from no uh what is the right it's the funny thing is so I'm an ultra marathoner and I've done 13 Iron Mans and people say oh my God that's amazing 13 Iron Man's and what I always say no one Iron Man is impressive 13 Iron Man answers there's something effing wrong with you we just need to figure out what it is yeah there's there's some demons trying to work through I mean well you're doing the work though most people just kind of let the demons sit in the Attic no um what have you learned about yourself about your mind about your body about life from you know taking taking your body to the limit in that kind of way to running those kinds of distances well it's it's a great question and I know that you are also kind of exploring the limits of the physical and so for me and doing the Iron Mans and the ultra marathons it's always the same kind of lesson um which is just when you think you have nothing left you actually have a ton left there are a lot of resources that are there if you call on them and the ability to call on them has to be cultivated it really and so for me especially in the the Iron Man and Iron Man in many ways is is harder than the the ultra marathons because it'll be it I mean it's 140 miles I'll be at a hundred and mile 120 um having done the swim and then the bike and I'll be whatever six miles into the run and I'll think I feel like shit I have nothing left how am I possibly gonna run 20 miles more but there's there's always more and I and I think that for me these extreme sports are my process of exploring what is what's possible and I feel like it applies in so many different areas of life where you're kind of pushing and it feels like the the limit and and you know one of my a friend of mine who I just have so much respect for who actually be a great guest if you haven't already interviewed him interviewed him is Charlie Engel and Charlie he was a drug addict he was in prison his life was total shit and somehow and I can't remember the full story he just started running around the prison yard and if it's like Forrest Gump and he just kept running and running and then he got out of prison and he kept running and he started doing Ultra marathons started inspiring all these other people now he's written all these books as a matter of fact we just spoke a few months ago uh that he's uh he's planning on running um from the Dead Sea to somehow to the top of Mount Everest from the lowest point to the highest point on Earth and and I said well why why are you stopping there why don't you get whatever Cameron and go down to the lowest part of the ocean go to the lowest part of the ocean and then talk to to Elon Mar uh Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos and go to the kind of the highest place in the stratosphere you can get but it's it's this thing of possibility and I just feel like so many of us and and myself included we get stuck in a sense of what we think is our range and if we're not careful that can become our range and and that's why for me in all of life it's all about like we've been talking about challenging the limits challenging assumptions challenging ourselves and and hopefully you know we do it in a way that kind of doesn't hurt anybody I you know when I'm at the Iron Man they have all these little kids and they'll have these little shirts and it'll say like my dad is a hero and have the little Iron Man logo and and I want to say it's like no your your dad is actually a narcissistic dick who goes on Eight Mile bike rides every Sunday rather than spend time with you and so we shouldn't hurt anybody um but I for me I I and I also I just find it very enjoyable and I hope I'm not disclosing uh too much about our Commerce station before we went live where you're doing so many different things with running and your and your Martial Arts and I encouraged you to do um Ultra marathons in because there's so many great ones in Texas it's actually surprisingly a very enjoyable way to spend a day like how how would you recommend so yeah for people who might not know I I've never actually even run a marathon around uh 22 miles in one time at most I did the 4x4 by 48 challenge with David Goggins where you run four miles every four hours is it different as less to do with the distance and more to do with the sleep deprivation what advice would you give to a first time ultra marathon or like me trying to run 50 or more miles or for um anybody else interested in this kind of exploration of their range what I always tell is the same advice is register pick your timeline of when you think it you can be ready make it depending on where you are now make it six months make a year and then register for the race and then once you're registered just work back from there what's it what's it going to take but one of the things for people who are just getting going you really do need to make sure that your body is ready for it and so particularly and particularly as we get older strengthening is really important so I'll do a plug for my brother Jordan Metzel he's a doctor at hospital for special surgery but his whole thing is functional strength and it then so and people know about and you can actually even go to his website um that you just Google Jordan Metzel iron strength but it's all about like burpees and just building your muscular strength so that you don't get injured as you as you increase and then just increase your mileage with you know in some steady way make sure sure that you you take rest days and listen to your body because people like you who are just very kind of Mind Over Matter like there's you were telling me before about you have an injury but you kind of run a little bit differently and and you know we need to listen to our bodies because our bodies are are communicating um but I think if he's kind of little by little magic is is possible and and what I will say is some I also do I've done lots and lots of marathons and I always tell people that the ultra marathons at least the ones that I do and I shouldn't misrepresent myself I mean there are people who do 500 Mile races the ones that I do are 50k Mountain Trail runs which is is 32 miles so it's I do the kind of the easier side of um uh of Ultras but it's actually much easier than a marathon because you know some of the mountain ones some sometimes it's so steep um that you can't uh you you have to walk it because walking is faster than than running and every you know four or five miles in the supported races you stop and eat blintzes and boiled potatoes it's actually quite enjoyable but as I started to tell you when we before we we went live um so I've done for lots of years these 50k Mountain Trail runs and I was going to Taiwan a number of years ago go for something else and I thought wouldn't it be fun to to do an ultra marathon in Taiwan I looked and that you know the weekend after my visit there was a marathon it was called the I mean ultra marathon it was called the Taiwan beast and I figured oh beasts what are they talking about it's 50k Mountain Trail and I've done a million of them and then I went to register and then as part of registration they said you need to have all of this equipment and it was all this like Wilderness Survival equipment and I was thinking God these Taiwanese but what a bunch of ways it's dramatic you have to carry give me a break 50k Mount drone so I get there and the race starts at like 4 30 in the morning in the middle of nowhere and you have to wear headlamps and everyone's carrying all this stuff and you kind of go running out in into the into the rain forest it was the hardest thing I've ever done it took 19 hours there were maybe 15 Cliff faces like a real cliff and somebody had dangled like a little piece of string and so you had to hold on to the string with one hand while it was in the pouring rain climb up these Cliffs there were maybe 20 River Crossings but not just like a little stream like a torrential River there were some things where it was so steep um that everyone was just climbing up and then you'd slide all the way down and climb up and there were people I met on the way out there who are saying oh yeah I did the Sahara 500 kilometer race and and those people were just sprawled out a lot of them didn't finish um so that was the hardest thing I've ever so what how do you get through something like that you just one step at a time was there do you remember is there uh yeah these are dark moments or is it kind of all spread out you know suddenly it wasn't really dark moments the biggest there was one thing where I'd been running so long I thought well I must almost be done and then I found out I had like 15 miles more um but you know I guess with all of these things it's the it's the messages that we tell ourselves and so for me it's like the message I always tell myself is you know quitting isn't an option I mean once in a while you've got to have to quit if like listen to the universe if whatever you're gonna kill yourself or something but for me it was just you know whatever it takes there's no way I'm stopping and if I have to go up this muddy Hill 20 times because I keep sliding I'm sure there's there's a way it's probably a personality flaw what is your love for chocolate come from oh it's a great question and in my both of my Joe Rogan interviews that's the first question that he asked I'm glad that we could we've gotten to that so one I've always loved chocolate and as and I I call it like a secret but now that I keep telling if you keep telling the same secret it's actually no longer a secret that I have a a secret which is not secret because I'm telling you on a podcast um life as a chocolate Shaman and so when I give Keynotes at Tech conference I say I'm happy to give a keynote um but I want to lead a sacred cacao ceremony in the night I'm actually believe it or not the official chocolate Shaman of what used to be called exponential medicine which is part of Singularity University now my friend Daniel Kraft who runs it it's going to be called Next Med and so but I'll have to go back as I was going um to Berlin a lot of years ago and I've always loved chocolate but I was going to Berlin to give a keynote um at a at a big conference called TOA Tech uh Tech open air and so when I got there um the first night I was supposed to give a talk but there had been some mix up they'd forgotten to reserve the room and so the talk got canceled and in the brochure they had all these different events around Berlin that you could go to and one of them was a cacao ceremony and so I went there and actually met some somebody Viviana who is still a friend by me going in there and there was this cacaoism and there are these kind of hippie dudes and then everybody got the cacao and then they said all right as they talked a little bit about the process and then they said all right everyone just stand and kind of we're gonna spin around in a circle for 45 minutes and so I spun around in the circle for like 10 10 minutes but then I had to leave because I had to go to something else and so that I thought that was that but then I saw Viviana the next day and I said how did the cacao money go and she showed me these pictures of all these people mostly naked like it turned into chaos and and it was like on so let me get this straight people drank chocolate then they spun around in a circle and something else happened and anyway so then two days later I was invited to another cacao ceremony which was also actually part of this TOA and that was kind of more structured and it was more sane because it was part of this thing and and at the end of that I had this I thought one how the greatest thing ever a sacred cacao ceremony like you drink chocolate milk and and everybody's free and I love that idea because I I've you know I've never done drugs I don't drink but just part of it is because I think whatever like I was saying with the ultra running um all of the possibilities are within us if we can get out of our own our own way and then I thought well you know I think I can do a better job than what what I experienced in Berlin so I came back and I thought I'm going to get accredited as a a cow Shaman and this will shock you because I know if you're going to be like a rabbi or a priest or something there's some process but shockingly there's no official process chocolate Shaman and so I thought all right well you know I'm just going to train myself and when I'm ready I'm going to declare my chocolate Shamanism so I started studying different things and when I was ready I just said now I'm a chocolate Shaman self-declared self-declared and so but I do these ceremonies and I've I've done them at Tech conferences I did one in in Soho House in New York I've done it at a place Rancho La Puerta in Mexico and every time it's the same thing because it just if people are given a license to be free just it doesn't matter and what I always say is you're here for a sacred cacao ceremony but the truth is there's no such thing as sacred cacao and there's no sacred mountains and there's no sacred people and there's no sacred plans because nothing is sacred if we don't attribute a scribe sacredness to it but if we recognize that everything is sacred then we'll live different lives and for the purpose of this ceremony we're just going to say all right we're going to focus on this cacao which actually has been used ceremonially for 5 000 years it has all these wonderful properties um but is this people who get that license and then they're just free and people are dancing and it's the goal to celebrate life in general is it to celebrate the senses like taste is it to celebrate yourself each other what is their um I think the core is gratitude and just appreciation and all the experiences in life yeah just of being alive of just living in this sacred world where we have all these things that we don't even pay any attention to um my friend AJ Jacobs he had a wonderful book that I I use the spirit of it in the ceremonies and not the exactly but he was in a a restaurant in New York coffee shop and his child said hey where does the coffee come from and he's I mean he's like a wonderful big thinker and he started really answering that question well here's where the beans come from but how did the beans get here and who painted the yellow line on the street so the truck didn't crash and who made the cup and he spent a year making a full spreadsheet of all of the people who in One Way or Another played some role in that one cup of coffee and he traveled all around the world thanking them like it's like thank you for painting the yellow line on the road yeah and so for me with the cacao part of when I do these ceremonies is just to say like you're drinking this cacao but there's a person who planted the seed there's a person who watered the plant there's a person and and I just think that level of awareness and it's true with anything like you have in front of you a stuffed Hedgehog so somebody made that I love it it's great but like if you if we just said all right where does this stuffed Hedgehog come from we would have a full story of globalization of the interconnection of people all around the world doing all sorts of things of human imagination it's beyond our capacity and our daily we go insane if every day like we're speaking into a microphone well you know what are the hundreds of years of technology that make this possible but it's just once in a while we just focus on one thing and say this thing is sacred and because I'm recognizing that and I'm having an appreciation for the world around me it just kind of makes my life feel more sacred it makes me recognize my connection to others so that's that's the gist of it yeah it's funny I often look at foreign things in this world and moments and just uh I mean awe of the full universe that brought that to be um in a similar way as you're saying but I don't as often think about exactly what you're saying which is the number of people behind every little thing we get to enjoy I mean yeah this Hedgehog this microphone is it like directly like thousands of people involved million and then indirectly is millions like uh yeah and they're all like this microphone that there's like artists essentially like people who made it their life's work all the cross like from the factories to the manufacturer there's families that the production of this microphone and this Hedgehog are fed because of the skill of this human that helped contribute to that that development yeah it's um and like Isaac Newton and John Von Newman are in this are in this microphone they're standing on the shoulders of the giant so we're standing on their shoulders yeah and uh somebody will be standing on ours yeah you mentioned uh one shared world yeah what is it well thanks for asking and by the way what I will say is the people who are listening this is so incredible and I'm so thrilled to have this kind of long conversation person who's listening past the five hour mark thanks mom um the uh I salute you yeah somebody was like sleeping for the first four hours it just was like now's the good stuff I've been saving it um but and I have to say that so much of our Lives is is forced into these short bursts that I'm just so appreciative to have the chance to have this this conversation so thank you people would say five hours is short so you know let's let's go um and um yeah that's a that's what uh my girlfriend uh says that like if if I was like um captured and tortured and they were gonna interrogate me it's like at the end they'd say all right enough we're sick of this guy we quit let him go I love it um so background on on one shared world I mentioned I'm on a faculty for Singularity University in the earliest days of the pandemic I was invited to give a talk on whether the tools of the genetics and biotech revolutions were a match for the uh the outbreak and my view was then as now that the answer to that question is yes but I woke up that morning and I felt that that wasn't the most important talk that I could give there was something else that was more pressing for me and that was the the realization they were asking the question well why weren't we prepared for this pandemic because we could have been we weren't um and why can't and because of that why can't we respond adequately uh to this this outbreak um and then there was the thing well if we even if we respond somehow miraculously overcome this pandemic it's a peric victory if we have if we don't prepare ourselves to respond to the broader category of pandemics particularly as we enter the age of synthetic biology but if somehow miraculously we solve that problem but we don't solve the problem of climate change well kind of who cares we didn't have a pandemic but we wiped everybody out from climate change and let's just say um you get where this is going that we organize ourselves and we solve climate change and then we have a nuclear war because everybody's particularly China now but U.S the former Soviet Union are building all these nuclear weapons who cares that we solved climate change because we're all gone anyway and the The Meta category bringing all those things together was this mismatch between the increasingly Global and shared nature of the biggest challenges that we face and our inability to solve that entire category of problems and there's a a historical issue which is that prior to the 30 years war in the 17th century we had all these different kinds of sovereignty and religious and and different kinds of organizational principles and everybody got in this war and in this the series of treaties that together are called the Peace of Westphalia the the framework for the modern What We Now understand is the modern nation state was late and then through colonialism and other means that idea of a state is what it is today spread throughout the the world then through particularly the late 19th and early 20th century we realized how unstable that system was because you always had these jockeying jocking between sovereign states and some were rising and some were falling and you ended up in in war and that was the genius of the generations who came together in 1945 in San Francisco and the planning had even started before then who said well we can't just have that world we need to have an overlay and we talked about the UN and the who of systems where are which transcend our national sovereignties they don't they don't get rid of them but they transcend them so we can solve this category of problems but we're now reaching a point where our reach as humans even individually but collectively is so great that there's a mismatch between as I said the nature of the problems and the the ability to solve those uh those problems and unless we can address that broader Global Collective action problem we're going to extinct ourselves and and we see these different what I call verticals whether it's climate change or trying to prevent nuclear weapons proliferation or anything else but none of those can succeed and frankly it doesn't even matter if one succeeds because all of them have the potential to lead to extinction level events so anyways I gave that talk and and that talk went viral I stayed up all night the next night and I drafted I think it was like an insanity but I think a lot of us were manic in those early days of the pandemics wanting to do something and so I stayed up all night and I drafted what I called a declaration of global interdependence and I posted that on my website my Jamie russell.com and still there and that went viral um and so then I called a meeting just on the people on my personal email list and so we had people from 25 countries there were all of these people who were having the same thing there's something wrong in the world and they wanted to be part of of a process of fixing it and so it was a crazy 35 days where we broke into eight different working groups we had an amazing team that helped re-draft what became the Declaration of interdependence which is now in in 20 languages we laid out a work plan we founded this organization called one shared world the URL is oneshared.world and it's just been this incredible journey we now have people who are participating in one way or another from 120 different countries we have our public events exploring these issues get millions of viewers we have world leaders who are participating so the vision the the the vision is to work on some of these big problems arbitrary number of problems that present themselves in the world that face all of human civilization and to be able to work together well that is but there's a there's a macro a meta problem which is the global Collective action problem and so the idea is even if we if we just focus on the verticals on the manifestations of the global Collective action problem um there will be an infinite number of those things so while we work on those things like climate change pandemics wmd and other things we also have to ask the bigger questions of why can't we solve this category of problems and the idea is at least from my observation is um that whenever big decisions are being made are national leaders and corporate leaders are doing exactly what we've hired them to do they're maximizing for National interest even or corporate interest even at the expense of everybody and so it's not that we want to get rid of States states are essential in our world system it's not we want to undermine the UN which is also essential but massively underperforming what we want to do is to create an empowered Global constituency of people who are demanding that their leaders at all levels just do a better job job of balancing broader and narrower interests I see so this is more like a uh make it more symmetric in terms of power it's uh holding uh accountable the the Nations the leaders the problem is nations are powerful we talked about China quite a bit how do you have an organizations of of citizens of Earth they can solve the the this Collective problem that holds China accountable it's difficult because U.N you could say a lot of things but to call it effective is hard yeah you know the internet almost is a kind of representation of um a collective force that holds Nations accountable you know Twitter not to give Twitter too much credit but social networks broadly speaking so you have hope that this is possible to build such organ such collections of humans that resist China not necessarily resist China but human I mean our cultures change over time I mean the idea of the modern nation state would would not have made sense to people in the 13th or 14th century the idea that became the United Nations I mean it had its its earliest days in in the philosophies of Kant it took a long time for these ideas um to be to be realized um and so the idea and and you know we're we're far from successful I mean we've had little minor successes which we're very proud of we got the G20 leaders to incorporate the language that we provided on addressing the needs of the world's most vulnerable populations into the um final Summit communicate from the G20 Summit in Riyadh this year we're just on the verge of having our language pat on the same issue ensuring everyone on Earth has access to Safe Water basic sanitation and hygiene and essential pandemic protection by 2030 passed as part of a resolution in the United Nations General Assembly and it's we're primarily I mean it's young people all around the world and when I told them that in the beginning of this year this is our goal we're going to get the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution with our language in it I mean first I think they all thought it was insane but they were too young and inexperienced to know how insane it was but now these these young people are just so excited that it's actually happening so what we're trying to do is is really to create a movement which we don't feel that we need to do from scratch because there are a lot of movements like right now we just had the Glasgow G20 I mean I'm sorry the Glasgow climate change cup 26 and then Greta thundberg who has a huge following and who's an amazing young woman but I was kind of disappointed in what she said afterwards it became like a meme on Twitter which was blah blah blah and basically it was like blah blah blah these old people are just screwing around and it's it's a waste of time and and definitely the critique is merited but young people have never been more empowered educated connected than they are now and so that's what what we we've had a process with uh with uh one shared World um where we partnered with the model United Model United Nations the Aga Khan foundation the India sanitation Coalition and what we did is say all right we have this goal Water Sanitation hygiene and pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030. and we had debates and consultations using the model un framework All Around the World in multiple languages languages and we said come up with a plan for how this could be achieved and these brilliant young people in every country not every country most countries um they all contributed then we had a plan then I recruited friends of mine like my friend Hans Carell in Sweden who's the former Chief counsel of the the whole United Nations and asked him and others to work with these young people and representative to turn that into what looks exactly like a UN resolution it's just written by a bunch of kids all around the world we then sent that to every permanent representative every government represented at the UN and that was why working with the German and Spanish governments why the language essentialized from that document is about to pass the UN and that doesn't mean that just passing a U.N General Assembly resolution changes anything but we think that there's a model of engaging people just like you're talking about these people who are are outside of the traditional power structures and who want to have a voice but I think we need to give a little bit of structure because just going I'm a big fan of global citizen but just going to a global citizen concert and waving your iPhone back and forth and tweeting about it isn't enough to drive the kind of change that's required we need to come together even in untraditional ways and articulate the change we want and build popular movements to make that happen and popular means scale and then movements at scale that actually uh like where at the individual level do something and that's uh that's then magnified with the scale to actually have a significant impact I mean uh at its best you hear a lot of folks talk about the various cryptocurrencies as as possibly helping you have young people get involved in challenging the power structures by challenging the monetary system and there's uh you know some of it is um number go up people get excited when they're they can make a little bit of money but that's actually almost like um entry point because then you almost feel empowered and because of that you start to think about some of these philosophical ideas that I as a young person have the power to change the world all of these senior folks in the position of power they were like first of all they were once young and Powerless like me and uh I could be part of the Next Generation that makes a change well the things I see that are wrong with the world I can make I can make it better and it's very true that the overly powerful nations of the world could be a relic of the past that's a that could be a a 20th century and before idea that was tried to create a lot of benefit but we also saw the problems with that kind of world extreme nationalism we see the benefits and the problems of the Cold War arguably Cold War got us to the Moon um but there could be other a lot of other different mechanisms that inspired competition especially friendly competition between nations versus adversarial competition that resulted in the response to covid for example with China and the United States and Russia and the secrecy the censorship um yeah and all the things that are basically against the the spirit of science and resulted in the loss of trillions of dollars in the cost of countless lives what gives you hope about the future Jamie well one of the things you mentioned um cryptocurrency and then as you know better than most there's cryptocurrency and then underneath the cryptocurrency there's the blockchain and the distributed Ledger and then like we talked about there are all these young people who were able to connect with each other um to organize in in new ways and I work with these young people every single day through one shared World primarily but also other things and there's so much optimism there's so much hope um that I just have a lot of faith that we're going to figure something out I'm an optimist by nature and that doesn't mean that we need we need to be blind to the dangers there are very very real dangers but just given half the chance people want to be good people want to do the right thing and I do believe that there's a role I mean there's a role for the at least near term for governments but there's always a role for leadership and I'm I guess like a gramsian in in the sense that that I I think that we need to create Frameworks and and structures that allow leaders to emerge and we need to build Norms so that the leaders who emerge our leaders who call on us Inspire our best instincts and not drive us toward our our worst but I really see a lot of Hope and I mean you say this all the time in your in your podcast and you may even be more optimistic to me because you look at the darkest moments of human history and see hope but we're kind of a crazy wonderful species I mean yes we figured out ways to slaughter each other at scale but we've come up with these wonderful philosophies about love and and all of those things and and yeah maybe the bonobos have some love in in their cultures but this we're kind of a wonderful magical species and if we just can create enough of an infrastructure it doesn't need to be and shouldn't be controlling just enough of an infrastructure so that people are stakeholders feel like they're stakeholders in contributing to a positive story I just really feel the the sky is the is the limit so if there's somebody who's young right now or somebody in high school somebody in college listening to you you've done a lot of incredible things you're respected by a lot of the elites irrespected by the people so you're both able to sort of vote you know uh speak to all groups walk through the fire like you like you mentioned with this lab leak what advice would you give um to young kids today that are inspired by your story well thank you I mean I think there's one there's lots of I'm honored if anybody is inspired um but it's the same thing as I said with the science that it's all about values the core of everything is knowing who you are and so yes I mean there's the broader thing of you follow your passions um a creative mind and an inquisitive mind is the core of everything because the knowledge base is constantly sharing so learning how how to learn but at the core of everything is investing in knowing who you are and what you stand for because that's that's the way that's the uh the path to Leading a meaningful life to contributing to not feeling alienated from your life as you get older and just like like you live um it's an ongoing process and we all make mistakes and we all kind of travel down wrong paths and just have some love for yourself and recognize that just at every like I was saying with the Iron Man um just when you think there's no possibility that you can go on there's a 100 percent possibility that you can go on and just when you think that nothing better will happen to you there's a 100 percent chance that something better will happen to you you just gotta keep going Jamie this I've been a a fan of yours I've I think first heard you're on uh Joe Rogan Experience but been following your work your bold Fearless work with the speaking about the lab leak and everything you represent from your Brilliance to your kindness and the fact that you spend your valuable time with me today and now I officially made you miss your flight and the fact that you said that whether you're being nice or not I don't know that you would be okay with that means the world to me and I'm really honored that you will spend your time with me today well really it's been such a great pleasure and and thank you for creating a forum to have these kinds of of long conversations so I I really enjoyed it and and thank you and if anybody has now listened for uh what's it been five and a half hours yep thank you for listening five-hour Club thank you Jamie thanks awesome thanks for listening to this conversation with Jamie Metzel to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you some words from Richard Feynman about science and religion which I think also applies to science and geopolitics because I believe scientists have the responsibility to think broadly about the world so that they may understand a bigger impact of their inventions the quote goes like this in this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another the old problems such as the relation of Science and religion are still with us and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization thank you for listening and hope to see you next time\n"