On this episode of the podcast, we have a special guest on the show, Dr. Ben Shapiro. He is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who has been involved in the anti-police movement since the early days of the protests at Evergreen State University. He has been a long-time critic of the tactics used by the police in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and has been on the ground floor of the protest movement since its inception. He's been a frequent guest on CNN and NPR, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He's also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the Weekly Standard, and he's one of the most influential people in the pro-police and anti-racist movements in the country. He joins us to talk about the Evergreen protests, and what we should do about them. We also talk about why we should be concerned about them, and how to deal with them in the real world, and their impact on our daily lives, and the impact they have on our political discourse, and whether or not we can stop them from spreading across the U.S. and the rest of the world. We also discuss what to do about it, and why we need to do anything about it. If you like the episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! and share it with a friend who needs to know about the episode. . Thanks to Ben Shapiro's work and Ben's work on the podcast. and the work of Ben Shapiro did on this episode! Thank you Ben's podcast, Ben's amazing work on this week's episode on Evergreen, and much more! Ben's great work, Ben is a must listen! - Ben's words of wisdom, and we hope you enjoy this episode, Ben s words, Ben and Ben s thoughts on this podcast, and his advice on what you can do to stop the madness in the world, too. -Ben's words about the evergreen protests in the streets, and more! - Tom's words on the future of the black lives matter, and so much more. -- Ben's thoughts on the black-ish movement, including his thoughts on it's impact on the police brutality in general, and our own thoughts on what we can do in the future, and a lot more! -- - Ben & Ben's tweets,
00:00:26.000I said it in several different places and pretty clearly, you know, it could have been a tiny bit more precision, but it was highly accurate.
00:00:33.000You were highly accurate and often maligned and mocked.
00:00:37.000People didn't think it was a big deal.
00:00:39.000They think you're much ado about nothing.
00:00:41.000You're making a big deal about some kids that are voicing their opinions on things.
00:00:45.000But what you recognized early on was that there was an authoritarian aspect of it, a forced compliance aspect of it that's very dangerous.
00:00:56.000And I've started to get calls in the last week or two.
00:01:01.000The people who mocked me and others, including you, for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses – Some of them have started to call and say, I got it wrong.
00:01:35.000The people who are catching up to the fact that Evergreen has now spilled over into the world have not caught up to the fact that this is unstoppable at this point with the current configuration.
00:01:49.000The absence of leadership is going to prevent us from doing what we should do.
00:01:54.000And that means that the next set of predictions are far more dire.
00:02:31.000What do you think the people that are What do you think they want?
00:02:38.000Well, I think there's some danger in casting them as one thing, because I think we have several things fused together, and that until you understand what has joined forces with what, there's no way to answer the question.
00:03:07.000Originally, Occupy made a lot of sense.
00:03:10.000It was a complaint about the TARP program and too big to fail and the fact that the American public was not protected when those who had created the financial collapse And that was a legitimate gripe and it was also a legitimate gripe at the beginning of the Tea Party movement.
00:03:26.000Occupy then morphed into an anarchist movement that was just simply hostile to civilization and it became absurd.
00:03:35.000And so when I say this is Occupy 2.0, this is the anarchist version of Occupy that has now reemerged and it has fused with Black Lives Matter, which As I've said, lots of different places.
00:03:48.000If Black Lives Matter just simply meant what those words imply, I'd be on board with it.
00:04:30.000It's a dishonest presentation and I'm concerned that there – as I've also said in many places, the proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish.
00:04:42.000The strategy is incredibly smart and so that is confusing to people because when you hear folks in the street demanding that we abolish the police, you think, well, OK, that's never going to happen.
00:04:53.000If it even started to happen, it would be so complex to make it happen that it can't possibly be.
00:04:59.000They just need to blow off some steam.
00:05:02.000The fact is the police in some places can effectively be halted in their tracks.
00:05:07.000And really, if there's one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it's that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we're also seeing in Seattle.
00:05:30.000And I will say that the thing that is trotted out as the example that tells us that defund the police, which doesn't really mean defund the police.
00:05:39.000We are told that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example.
00:05:43.000Well, Camden just – they sort of broke the police down but then built up a new version of the police, right?
00:05:50.000Yeah, they shifted it to a different jurisdiction.
00:05:52.000And look, I'm not arguing that we don't need massive police reform and frankly, I'd be up for a discussion of a total rethink of the way we do policing.
00:06:00.000But the idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.
00:06:08.000Mark Lamont Hill had a very good point about the guy who was killed.
00:06:14.000What is the gentleman's name that was killed in the drive-thru fast food place?
00:06:20.000Richard, is that how you say his name?
00:06:23.000Who was just drunk and compliant and peaceful until they were telling him they were gonna arrest him.
00:06:32.000And what his point was, it was a very good point, why were the police even called for that?
00:06:37.000This is a non-violent person who just happened to be drunk.
00:06:40.000Was he doing something he shouldn't have been doing?
00:06:42.000Yes, but obviously compliant, polite, Speaking just like very reasonably until it escalated into this tussle and then he lost his life.
00:06:55.000If they had just had some sort of a program where they could, we're going to park your car, sir, or we'll have someone drive your car to your house, we're going to call you an Uber, or we're going to take you home, and we're going to just write you a ticket and work this out in court.
00:07:09.000You're not going to go to jail, you don't have to be arrested, you don't have to be handcuffed, you're going to be treated like a monster.
00:07:14.000You fucked up, you made a mistake, but you're not a bad person.
00:07:17.000You're not a person who's trying to hurt people.
00:07:19.000The police should be there for robbers, murderers, rapists.
00:09:06.000It should be de-escalation drills, simulation drills, We're good to go.
00:09:33.000Higher qualified police officers, better trained police officers, better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this.
00:09:43.000And these people are Nobody wants to be a cop right now.
00:10:31.000The part that I'm worried about is that I also – I think I hear you grasping at straws and frankly they're familiar.
00:10:37.000I hear everybody grasping at straws here.
00:10:39.000And what I think is not getting said is that brutal policing is a feature, not a bug, right?
00:10:46.000This is part of a system that is about something else.
00:10:49.000And to the extent that I think we can all recognize that there is something absolutely organic about the anger that has caused people to spill into the streets in large numbers.
00:11:01.000That anger is the result of a process that does not begin with policing.
00:11:05.000It begins with economic phenomena and political phenomena.
00:11:09.000And one of the things that spooks me is this movement in part because it is leaderless and I would argue rudderless.
00:11:18.000It is not correctly addressing the actual problem.
00:11:22.000It is lashing out at things that it can see.
00:11:26.000But the only solution here, the only proper solution that actually saves the Republic is a solution that addresses the core problem.
00:11:36.000Economic despair, communities that are filled with crime and violence and gangs, and the people that come out of these communities with very little hope, and all the models that they operate under, what they model themselves on, is what they see around them, which is all this crime.
00:11:52.000And they don't have this sense that there's a very clear path out of this.
00:11:57.000Well, let's – I want to step back to something that will sound too remote to be useful but I'm sure it isn't.
00:12:03.000I would claim that this actually goes back to a shift in the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration.
00:12:11.000During the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party effectively switched.
00:12:17.000It took up the Republican Party's business model, moving away from defending the interests of common people as its reason for gaining power.
00:12:28.000So during the Clinton administration, we saw the end to aid to families with dependent children.
00:12:36.000We saw NAFTA. We saw basically an abandonment of the core raison d'etre for the Democratic Party.
00:12:44.000Now, the Republican Party at that point was the party of business, but that doesn't really mean the party of business.
00:12:51.000What the Republican Party was was the party of well-established large businesses, which frequently meant, as it was catering to their interests, that it was preventing small businesses from rising up that would threaten its constituents.
00:13:04.000Now, the Democrats took up this model.
00:13:06.000They went into influence peddling as well during the Clinton administration.
00:13:09.000And they became the party of other businesses.
00:13:13.000So now you have two parties that are basically dealing with competing business interests, vying for power.
00:13:18.000But what that does is it excludes the interests of regular folks.
00:13:23.000And so regular folks have been getting the shaft ever since.
00:13:25.000Nobody is representing their interests.
00:14:11.000And our system basically has two things that it accomplishes.
00:14:17.000It basically keeps real change from happening and the reason it keeps real change from happening is because people who are winning in the present system will continue to win if the system continues to do what it does and they may lose if the system changes and starts doing something else.
00:14:33.000So it creates what I would argue is a kind of Organic conservatism.
00:14:38.000Those with power don't want change because it threatens them.
00:14:41.000And the other thing that our system does is it reproduces present patterns of distribution into the future.
00:14:50.000And what that means is racism that has almost died out is still alive and well in a sense because all you have to do is take people who are born into a neighborhood that is Devoid of opportunity and continue that pattern.
00:15:05.000If no opportunity shows up then people who were oppressed are now going to continue to be oppressed and so it feels personal but it isn't.
00:15:12.000It's just reproducing an existing pattern.
00:15:15.000And a lot of that emanates from these communities that have been disenfranchised and economically distraught from slavery.
00:15:25.000Like, literally, from where we're dealing with the echoes of slavery, and it doesn't get addressed.
00:15:31.000And when people do bring it up and they start talking about reparations, people roll their eyes and people go, oh, that was so long ago.
00:15:39.000But the results of that are still alive today in the South.
00:15:42.000They're still alive today in many communities that were redlined as recently as the 1960s.
00:15:50.000And so we basically have set ourselves up for a confused response because there is a subtlety.
00:15:57.000The fact that ancient racism, people who are dead, their racism still haunts us today through mechanisms of the reproduction of patterns of distribution.
00:16:06.000And mind you, when people hear distribution, they freak out because they think you're talking about wealth.
00:16:11.000I'm not talking about wealth and we can talk about why I wouldn't bother.
00:16:15.000What we're talking about is opportunity.
00:16:27.000The patterns of slavery moved into Jim Crow and now they've moved into a phase where they are very subtly infused into our system.
00:16:37.000And so it is causing people to have the sense that There is an enemy and it is out to get me when it's not exactly an enemy that's out to get you.
00:16:47.000It's a pattern that definitely needs to be addressed.
00:16:49.000And so the natural place would have been the Democratic Party.
00:16:53.000But the Democratic Party, because it has taken up with big business, is not going to do it even though it would be a winning party.
00:16:59.000The Democratic Party is more interested in serving the economic interests of its actual constituents than it is serving the interests of its nominal constituents.
00:17:12.000Why are you seeing something that looks like a communist revolution beginning in the streets?
00:17:19.000For the natural reason, which is that people are feeling excluded from their share and they are being excluded.
00:17:28.000This revolution that is beginning in our streets is no more coherent or desirable than Maoism and it's going to be brutal in the Maoist way or possibly the way that it unfolded in the French Revolution or maybe it'll be some unique version and it'll get its own name.
00:17:47.000But if we want the republic to survive, we're going to have to prevent this from happening.
00:17:51.000And because it's a leaderless movement, who do you even talk to?
00:18:06.000And in many ways, I think it's probably because, love it or hate it, America sort of takes the cultural lead for the world in a lot of ways.
00:18:15.000When it comes to movements and particularly art and, you know, expression.
00:18:24.000And I see this leaderless movement and it seems so attractive to young people that do feel disenfranchised by the system.
00:18:35.000I mean, I've seen so many videos of these people out there screaming and cheering and chanting and they feel like they're a part of something.
00:19:23.000I don't know what you're saying, but you feel very passionate about what you're saying and I think if you pulled one of those kids aside and said, what's your message and what are you trying to do?
00:19:34.000I think a lot of them Would have nothing to say.
00:19:40.000I'm very concerned about that because it seems like they're very enthusiastic and passionate about an invisible enemy.
00:19:47.000An enemy that they can't put on a scale.
00:19:50.000They can't tangibly describe it in a way that I understand it completely.
00:19:54.000It just seems like the structure of things they feel like is unjust.
00:20:02.000It is unfortunately a zombified collective fighting a boogeyman that they have invented, which again doesn't mean that their frustration is not about something very real that does require a solution.
00:20:17.000But to the extent that these people have de-individuated and they've become a true mob and they are pushing policies that make no sense and endanger us all, I mean, there is no neighborhood in the U.S. that is going to be safer for the absence of the police.
00:20:33.000And it really doesn't even matter how corrupt the police are.
00:20:35.000The absence of the police is going to create a power vacuum and we're going to get warlords, as we're already seeing in miniature in Seattle, as we already saw at Evergreen.
00:20:44.000So it's not a coherent proposal, but...
00:21:08.000And it has trapped them in the gig economy.
00:21:11.000And so we have a lot of people who would be in an excellent position to steer this justifiable anger at an enemy that is actually worth attacking to curb the violence and to make this a moment of useful and necessary change.
00:21:29.000But those people are, instead of being leaders, What they are is influencers and influencers don't have the kind of power necessary to shape a movement and they don't have the position to negotiate on its behalf and this is very dangerous.
00:21:45.000Trevor Burrus Where do you think this escalates to?
00:21:48.000Do you have a map in your mind of where the territory is?
00:21:54.000I mean, I would say there are several ways it could go.
00:21:58.000But unfortunately, the dynamics look almost unresolvable if somebody does not speak for the movement.
00:22:07.000And with it being unresolvable, you've got a conflict between Rural people and urban people.
00:22:15.000You have a conflict between blacks and those who are self-declared allies.
00:22:23.000And ally doesn't really mean ally, but foot soldiers on behalf of this movement and people who won't go along with it.
00:22:31.000And what I'm trying to raise people's awareness of right now is that There's something in us, being raised in the U.S., there's something in us that thinks that the great leap forward in China cannot happen here,
00:22:49.000that what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here, that Nazi Germany cannot happen here.
00:22:55.000And, you know, the Soviet Union couldn't happen here.
00:22:58.000I don't know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible.
00:23:04.000I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure.
00:23:10.000It is the Constitution, which I would argue is showing its age.
00:23:15.000But nonetheless, the values that America aspires to, the reason that the world does pay attention to us and still, even with all of our brokenness, allows us to lead it.
00:23:25.000That reason is that the values that were described were honorable, even if we didn't meet them.
00:23:36.000And I resent Trump's Make America Great Again because there are populations for whom it has simply never been great, right?
00:23:43.000So I think that last A in MAGA is just a finger in the eye for people and it was designed to be.
00:23:49.000But the structure, what it aspires to be is great and heading in the direction in which it could be great for everybody is obviously the right thing to do.
00:23:58.000But what we are now doing and the thing that troubles me most about this movement is that if you listen to it closely and I have listened to it very closely.
00:24:07.000It is explicitly about disassembling the very things that make the West marvelous, right?
00:25:44.000Thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism in STEM. More than 5,000 scientists in two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the day to address racial inequalities in science.
00:25:57.000The strike follows two weeks of demonstrations spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer.
00:26:05.000People on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag shut down academia, shut down STEM. And strike for black lives.
00:26:35.000So, this is so sad because truly, if you really wanted to raise black people out of the economic quagmire they find themselves in, if you wanted to do it en masse, you would arm them with the most powerful tools.
00:26:54.000The most powerful tool and the tool that is best positioned to address biases, especially subtle biases, is science.
00:27:03.000That's what the scientific method does.
00:27:05.000It's one reason for existing, is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is wrong.
00:27:11.000It takes your biases and forces you to see what's wrong with them.
00:27:16.000Now, the reason that this movement is attacking STEM It has to do with the connection of this movement to critical theory.
00:27:24.000And critical theory didn't come from the sciences.
00:27:26.000The word theory is basically pilfered.
00:27:31.000It's being used in a most ironic fashion.
00:27:34.000Critical theory is a narrative that's now becoming a religious movement And it is anti-STEM on the basis that it claims that STEM itself, science itself, is racist inherently.
00:27:47.000What do they mean when they're saying critical theory?
00:27:51.000Well, my understanding is that critical theory was born as an honorable investigation of biases that exist inside of our court system, racial biases.
00:28:01.000And that it has now morphed into something that its originators don't recognize and don't respect.
00:28:43.000It's an uninteresting process when it's hiding away in some corner of your university where you don't have to listen to it.
00:28:49.000But what has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public.
00:28:54.000And the nonsense that you hear about shutting down academia, shutting down STEM, abolishing the police, all of this is standard fare in those phony departments.
00:29:03.000When you say uninvents progress, what do you mean by that?
00:29:07.000Well, I mean that we have a system and I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody but we have a system that accomplishes a great deal and this style of thought that all of these departments that end in theory That don't actually function by normal rules of logic or the scientific process.
00:29:35.000They're like an autoimmune disease of the academic culture.
00:29:39.000And by and large, the scientific part of the academy keeps its head down and it stays away from people who believe in this stuff and it tries to do its work.
00:29:48.000But what has happened is that the dynamics, the demographics have changed such that these departments which weren't taken seriously by the sciences are now dictating terms to the sciences which couldn't possibly be more dangerous because to the extent that The argument,
00:30:06.000more or less, is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of those who are currently successful and that that bias is actually preventing people who are not succeeding under current conditions from getting there.
00:30:20.000And therefore, we need to hobble these disciplines to level the playing field.
00:30:27.000That America surrendered its advantage in the sciences in order to – even if you could level the playing field inside of the US by doing that, which you can't.
00:30:39.000But even if you could, this would so hobble us in the world that it would be an insane policy to pursue.
00:30:46.000Is there any debate going on about this?
00:30:49.000Clearly what they're saying is if you're looking at the vast majority of the scientists, they represent – What is it?
00:31:19.000It is – well, it's evidence of a number of things and I find myself in two places on a lot of these arguments.
00:31:26.000On the one hand, somehow I'm sitting here on your podcast defending academia when on any normal day I would be telling you academia was so incredibly broken and science has been so incredibly corrupted by its contact with the market that we have to fix these things because that is in and of itself a threat to the West.
00:31:45.000Here, I find myself saying, wait a second.
00:31:47.000These people are actually telling you what they think.
00:32:01.000Unfortunately, they're not tremendously interesting.
00:32:04.000They're sort of dry inside baseball stuff.
00:32:06.000But I think we have to cover them, though, just to sort of take the legs out from under this racism argument when it comes to representation.
00:32:13.000So first of all, let me just say academia is tremendously liberal and that – I mean that in both senses.
00:32:24.000Let's take the honorable part of it, right?
00:32:26.000Inside of a university, there is every desire to bring people who do not look like the old white guys that have done so much of the past work in science.
00:32:42.000It is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them and then behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color.
00:32:53.000There is a desire to have those people show up.
00:32:57.000And get the job because for one thing it takes the pressure off to the extent that departments don't look like the demographics of the country in which these departments are housed.
00:33:06.000You know, that raises questions and so there's a desire to bring in anybody who makes it clear that that's not going on.
00:33:13.000Let's say that you were black and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you and you made it.
00:33:22.000Let's say that you had people who said wise things to you and they got you to focus on the right stuff and you managed to dodge the stuff that captures so many and you made it, right?
00:34:00.000Because there's only so many positions and every year you're graduating hundreds and hundreds of people with those degrees.
00:34:07.000Well, but there's also a very good reason for this.
00:34:09.000I mean, it's a terrible reason, but there's a very easily comprehended reason.
00:34:14.000So universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grants.
00:34:19.000So if you get a million dollar grant, Half or more will go to your university, right?
00:34:24.000So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place.
00:34:26.000So the university has an incentive to get as many people file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small.
00:34:36.000So this, for example, is one of the reasons That science has taken up arms against theory, that is to say proper scientific theoreticians like me, and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments because big expensive experiments have big grants and those big grants bring in money.
00:34:53.000But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, I think we're good to go.
00:35:20.000And they do most of the teaching and they do a lot of the work of the university for incredibly low amounts of money.
00:35:28.000They live under poor conditions and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense.
00:35:36.000But this means that we overproduce PhDs.
00:35:39.000We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university in order that the people who are capable of getting the grant spend almost full time doing that job.
00:35:54.000And the person you should talk to, the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother.
00:36:00.000So what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit Conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep the system running that in fact effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market to drive the wages down.
00:36:20.000But all of these things mean that if you are coming from circumstances that have been challenging and you make it, you don't want to go to graduate school in the sciences because it's a dumb move.
00:36:34.000You're going to take having gotten your head above water and then you're going to voluntarily drown.
00:36:53.000So basically what we see is that there are lots of reasons that a rational person from certain demographics is less likely to go into the sciences.
00:37:17.000So these people that want to – that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it, what do they propose?
00:37:27.000Like what do they propose in replacement of STEM and academia?
00:37:34.000So, what they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it.
00:37:41.000I will answer your question, but I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous.
00:37:46.000The only reason that I'm so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly, and I watched this happen at every time.
00:37:52.000You've talked to them directly, so you know this is actually what they want.
00:37:55.000Well, I can't say they because undoubtedly there's variation, but I can say that to the extent that I've actually had these conversations with people, I was left completely shocked by, you know, there was an example at Evergreen.
00:38:12.000Where we were in a faculty meeting and I said that the proposals that we're moving through were a threat to the enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution.
00:38:26.000And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the enlightenment, but on the idea of enlightenment.
00:38:37.000I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.
00:38:48.000What did they mean by enlightenment as a problem?
00:38:50.000Well, so here's what I say to people who ask me about this, students in particular.
00:38:58.000The enlightenment was a European project, right?
00:39:06.000It definitely had a light skin tone, right?
00:39:38.000The thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible.
00:39:42.000But if you're in critical theory, first of all, if you end up in critical theory, any one of these fields, women studies, queer studies, whatever it is, you have already foregone this option.
00:39:56.000You don't end up in critical theory if you have the chops to do science.
00:40:01.000So, in effect, you have people who don't stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider because they wouldn't go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.
00:40:18.000When you're talking about gender studies or queer studies, why do you think those are not valid avenues for people to pursue?
00:40:26.000Well, because the method is non-existent.
00:40:31.000If you were to do these things properly, you would study them with the tools of STEM, right?
00:40:37.000But we know that's not what goes on inside of these departments, and we also know that the product doesn't add up from the point of view of science.
00:40:46.000You can't take the claim, for example, That if a man decides that he is a woman, then he is a woman.
00:41:28.000One of the most telling incidents that happened during the Evergreen riots is now, finally, it's been covered by PBS. I've talked about it on my podcast.
00:41:40.000A student of Heather and mine, an excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette.
00:42:53.000I don't know how you can get a degree from that.
00:42:55.000Well, so what I've heard of late, and it may be James Lindsay who is the originator of this phraseology, but there's a term, racism of the gaps.
00:43:06.000And racism of the gaps is a reference to the God of the gaps hypothesis.
00:43:11.000Anything we can't explain in science is explained by God, which is obviously nonsense.
00:43:15.000But racism of the gaps says any place where that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism.
00:43:24.000So if we see an absence of black people in math, obviously the answer is racism.
00:43:30.000Do they apply that in areas where black people excel?
00:43:35.000No, because this is a self-serving modality.
00:44:05.000You've got a mob that's actually physically confronting you for studying science.
00:44:09.000If she was not a person of strong character, she might have signed up with them.
00:44:15.000If she had signed up with them, then A, now they have a potentially powerful ally, right?
00:44:22.000A black person, former student of, or at that point, I guess, current student of Heather and mine, who would say, yes, in fact, science is racist, evolutionary biology particularly, so I was in that class, yada, yada, yada.
00:44:33.000And people are easily influenced, and that being bullied by that would probably cause a lot of people to cave into that and give into that just for conformity, just so that people accept them.
00:44:45.000And so thank goodness that Odette is somebody who is of incredibly strong character, who really got the message of evolutionary biology very deeply.
00:44:54.000And there's nothing that they could have said or threatened her with that would have caused her to make the move that they wanted her to make.
00:44:59.000But processing it tactically is important.
00:45:09.000They were able to get the most important scientific institutions to broadcast a demand to shutdown STEM. That's an amazing level of power.
00:45:18.000And actual scientists that are in disciplines that are legit, like evolutionary biology, went along with them?
00:45:28.000Well, you know, I contacted Richard Dawkins as this was happening because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested, you know, he hadn't made a statement and I thought it would be powerful for him to do it.
00:45:39.000He was totally unaware it was going on.
00:47:10.000Massive investment in communities that have been systematically frozen out and I would put American blacks and American Indians at the top of the list because I believe they have a special claim And Native Americans are particularly distraught because they've been subjugated to this weird position when they're stuck on these reservations.
00:47:28.000So we'll come back to this in a second maybe, but I think that there's something very special that happened with blacks and with Indians.
00:47:35.000It's not exactly alike, but it has to do with their different origin stories, that these two populations have both suffered a parallel, I don't even know what to call it, an obstacle that makes them unlike blacks.
00:49:04.000Even people who support the idea of monetary reparations as a solution, if they understood the dynamics of trying to infuse it into every interaction, there is no way it could possibly work.
00:49:15.000And it invalidates all of the most important principles on which So we are really talking about uninventing America and substituting a reparations program for it, which it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard.
00:49:39.000There's a process called jury nullification and Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what it has to do with race as we have because effectively, you can instantly create a situation in which the law doesn't apply to certain folks because of the color of their skin.
00:51:51.000People that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country, that there is a situation in this country, and to voice any sort of disagreement with this movement that seems to represent the idea that there is a problem,
00:52:35.000But what I ran into was somebody describing what had happened to American POWs in the Korean War, who were being administered by the Chinese.
00:52:45.000The Chinese had a very sophisticated mechanism for basically brainwashing.
00:52:52.000And the mechanism was something that I have seen in this movement, but didn't understand, had a formal history.
00:53:00.000One always imagines brainwashing to be this very aggressive But the incrementalness of the move that was arranged for these POWs was the key feature.
00:53:14.000So the first thing that apparently POWs were asked to do was to write essays.
00:53:20.000And it was really important that they write it rather than just say it.
00:53:24.000But they write essays on topics that any reasonable person would think was fair.
00:53:44.000That doesn't strike me as a bridge too far.
00:53:48.000Communism has lots of problems, but maybe that's not one of them.
00:53:51.000So people were marched from these very tiny concessions where really the concession was just you're going to write what I tell you rather than any part of the content to an absolutely massive shift in their understanding.
00:54:05.000And along the way, they were, for example, induced to write more substantial concessions with some very tiny reward like a piece of fruit or something.
00:54:18.000Something that's actually desirable and if things are scarce you can understand wanting it, but it's not such a big concession that you can say to yourself, oh yeah, I said something I didn't believe because I got a lot out of it.
00:54:28.000So you actually talk yourself into imagining that you really do believe the thing you wrote.
00:54:32.000You must, otherwise you wouldn't have written it.
00:54:36.000Is all sorts of excellent people making the first concessions onto – or the first steps onto the slippery slope and it's spooking the hell out of me.
00:54:48.000So I must say I saw Dave Chappelle's 846 thing and like you, I thought, wow, do I get what he's saying.
00:54:59.000On the other hand, I really thought he got it wrong.
00:55:03.000Well, what he effectively – What he effectively suggested was that he was on board with the movement and it was clear that this was based on his massive frustration at how deaf the white population has been to black suffering,
00:55:45.000I mean, I think he's got the same problem tuning into the world that everybody else does, which is he gets some slice that's fed to him.
00:55:52.000Or maybe, like you, he is not tuned into these things, and so he gets whatever crosses the threshold some other way.
00:56:00.000And maybe he's not seeing that this movement is, A, spouting nonsense about getting rid of science, and he's not seeing that it's behaving in a Maoist way.
00:56:11.000And he is seeing the videos that we all see that suggest to us that there is a very serious problem with race-based police brutality.
00:56:21.000And the problem with that, of course, is that you can't do that analysis with anecdotes, no matter how egregious they seem.
00:56:28.000Is it weird to connect all those things together, though?
00:56:31.000When you're saying the movement, if this movement doesn't have any leaders, and you're talking about police brutality, but you're also talking about Maoist ideology that weasels its way into academia.
00:56:45.000Well, I don't, you know, I don't think it is one thing, but I think it's like a coalition of things.
00:56:53.000And I think each of those things is comprehensible, you know, in isolation, and we can understand what happens when you fuse them together.
00:57:02.000And all I can say is, We did see this in miniature at Evergreen, and people did say, you're making too much out of it, and they were wrong.
00:57:15.000The problem with seeing it from a distance is you can minimize many things when you don't experience the emotions, you don't see the fear, you don't see people running through the parking lot with baseball bats looking for you like they were doing.
00:57:28.000You know, it's a different thing when you're actually there and you realize that this mass hysteria does lead to pretty despicable acts and that there is sort of a mob mentality that grips people and it allows people to be capable of some pretty heinous shit.
00:57:43.000And what we see here in America is such a combination of factors, right?
00:57:48.000You have COVID, which shuts everything down, so people are stuck at home for all these months.
00:57:54.000Then you have this George Floyd thing, which is one of the worst cases of police brutality I've ever seen, because it was so torturous.
00:58:03.000I mean, if you really know how long 8 minutes and 46 seconds is with someone leaning on your neck, you would know how fucking horrific that is.
00:58:35.000One of the things we were talking about with Occupy Wall Street back in the day was we were saying they don't seem to know exactly what's going on, but it's like the immune system surrounding something that's wrong.
00:58:55.000But we're like, they don't necessarily know what to do or what it is, but they want to camp out around that area and figure out what the fuck's going on.
00:59:04.000Yeah, and like I said, at first I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it.
00:59:09.000And I even thought the leaderlessness of it was great for two weeks.
00:59:36.000The problem is we are all in danger of being marched in the direction of things that are anti-American, that are in fact anti-black, because we are trying to grant the right concessions on the right points.
00:59:54.000And it's a case in which you can't track what's really happening well enough to do it surgically.
01:00:01.000So I'm so afraid to actually go down this next road, but you raised the case of George Floyd and what we saw on that tape.
01:00:12.000I want you to think about the question of what you actually saw on that tape and what it actually tells you, what you actually know and what you don't know.
01:00:23.000Look, best possible thing from the point of view of the well-being of the world would be that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder and he is convicted of murder and he is sentenced for the maximum allowable time.
01:00:56.000Presumably, there was a lot of complaint about the fact that Chauvin wasn't charged with first-degree murder, right?
01:01:03.000But he didn't – what story would make it sensible that he wanted to kill George Floyd, that that was his purpose?
01:01:10.000Well, you know – do you know that he knew him?
01:01:13.000You know, he knew him in advance and that they had had words and they had had problems when they worked together because Derek Chauvin was a shithead to customers and he was violent to customers.
01:01:24.000And he and George Floyd worked as bouncers in the same establishment.
01:01:31.000Well, from the point of view of the well-being of the world and from the point of view of us all processing this in some sense, I mean, you know, with the understanding that there is nothing that could possibly happen in an investigation or in a court that's going to bring George Floyd back.
01:01:45.000So with that in mind, the best thing that could happen is that he is actually guilty of something egregious.
01:02:21.000That he may have been having a heart attack before he was on the ground.
01:02:25.000Now, again, even if that's true, I would think...
01:02:30.000He obviously was deserving of immediate medical attention.
01:02:34.000And so I am not arguing that it would not be criminal if he was dying of a heart attack and that's ultimately what killed him.
01:02:40.000But what I'm saying is that were it the case that he was having a heart attack, he had apparently methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system at the time.
01:02:49.000Were it the case that he was having a heart attack...
01:02:51.000But when you say in his system, was it just because he tested positive for it, or was it active in his system?
01:02:57.000Was it something that he had taken fairly recently, but the effects of it were no longer active?
01:03:03.000I'm not an expert, and maybe I misunderstood what I read, but I thought that these things were recently in his system rather than just detected at trace labs.
01:03:20.000The reason why I bring that up is coming from someone who works very closely with the UFC and USADA. One of the things that I'm finding out is that their methods of detection now are insanely sensitive.
01:03:32.000And you can detect incredibly small, non-psychoactive amounts months and months and months after use.
01:03:42.000Okay, well then it's obviously not relevant.
01:03:45.000The possibility that he was having a heart attack is clearly relevant.
01:03:49.000I mean, if he did say he can't breathe, it also could be that he was struggling and that there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe.
01:03:57.000Or that reports that he said he couldn't breathe before he was on the ground are erroneous.
01:04:02.000When you look at what that man did, when you look at what Derek did to George Floyd with his knee on that man's neck, I could 100% kill a man that way.
01:04:16.000Apparently, that technique is a technique that is authorized by the police department in question under some circumstances and apparently those circumstances were present.
01:04:32.000It may be that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department needs to radically change.
01:04:38.000No, it may be that the policy killed George Floyd.
01:04:41.000Because the policy allowed him to do that?
01:04:44.000Well, maybe it even required him to do it.
01:06:48.000I believe we saw something that may well have been murder and may well not have been murder and that the way that we determine whether it is murder is in a courtroom with due process.
01:09:09.000The center of what we are as Americans is a country in which you are entitled to due process in a court of law that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
01:09:24.000And if we are going to start sacrificing people because there is a mob in the street threatening to turn the place upside down, then I mean, you know what that is, right?
01:10:41.000If your neck, one side of your neck is on the concrete and the other side is 200 pounds of my body, all focused on my knee, and I'm balancing my weight on your neck, you're a dead man.
01:11:15.000But in exchange for that, I want the agreement that the American thing to do is to convict him by the evidence in a court of law.
01:11:24.000And if the evidence is not sufficiently compelling, that's not what's supposed to happen, that that would be un-American for that to be the way he was convicted.
01:11:32.000I agree, and we are convicting him in the court of public opinion, but we're doing it based on a video of a man putting all his weight on this guy's neck for 8 minutes and 40. That's, I mean, when you roll in jujitsu class, generally a roll is between 5 minutes,
01:11:47.000maybe 10 minutes or something like that, and the idea of a man being on my neck the entire time is fucking terrifying.
01:11:54.000Oh, I believe I saw a tremendous miscarriage of justice.
01:11:58.000What I don't know and what I don't think any of us understand is what is the policy?
01:12:07.000I just can't imagine any cop would think that that was the way to do it.
01:12:10.000It's one thing if someone is resisting arrest and they're very dangerous and you're handcuffing them and you put your knee on their neck to hold them down in place.
01:12:21.000If you have a guy and he's got a gun or he's wired on PCP and he's very strong and there's a bunch of you trying to hold on to the guy and someone leans on his neck, I'm all for that.
01:12:31.000But then when you're done, when you got him cuffed, let him go.
01:12:35.000He was just begging for his I wanted George Floyd to be taken to a hospital.
01:12:39.000It seems clear to me that he needed to be taken to a hospital, but I don't know.
01:12:46.000Officer can also use two type of neck restraints in less severe circumstances.
01:12:51.000One is called a conscious neck restraint, which is an officer applies light to moderate pressure to the side of a person's neck, but does not intend to knock a person unconscious.
01:13:01.000That could be used against people who are actively resisting.
01:13:04.000So that alone Just dismisses this whole idea.
01:13:07.000Because that's not what was going on there.
01:13:43.000I am feeling the need to emphasize I do believe I saw a miscarriage of justice, but I know that the American thing to do is to have all of this out in a court of law where all of the appropriate arguments are on the table.
01:14:30.000Like, what kind of world we're living in where you grab a guy by his neck because he's selling loose cigarettes?
01:14:35.000And when those guys did tackle him and take him down to the ground and held on to him when he said he can't breathe, he also appeared to be in poor health.
01:14:43.000And it was likely that the altercation, which probably wouldn't have killed you, killed him.
01:15:13.000So what I mean by that is if you are going to freeze people out of their share of the well-being that is generated by society – You are going to have to keep them from revolting.
01:15:26.000And so what you do is you set up some sort of arbitrary administrator of authority that people run in contact with that they fear, right?
01:15:35.000You set up some force that disincentivizes misbehavior.
01:16:28.000You've got a monster who just wants to fucking shoot people.
01:16:32.000And I think it points to what Jocko was saying.
01:16:35.000A lack of training, a lack of quality people, and a lack of a process of weeding out people that would be More inclined to use police brutality.
01:16:46.000And that process, I think, should be similar to BUDS, like what Navy SEALs have to go through, or Rangers have to go through.
01:16:54.000It should be something that weeds out people of weak character.
01:16:57.000So the police should be something that's a very difficult job to get, where you only get the cream of the crop of human beings, of character, of emotional stability, people that would not do something like that.
01:17:09.000Who would recognize that man on the ground as being a father and a husband and a human being who's a part of our community.
01:17:16.000And you don't gun him down just because you're a fucking piece of shit.
01:18:08.000Putting a badge on somebody and giving them a weapon and giving them all of that power, it brings the worst out in many people and it's very, very – it's very dangerous.
01:18:19.000But I still see something systemic here that isn't being discussed.
01:18:48.000The farther you get down the economic ladder, the less opportunity there is and the greater the danger of your falling off the bottom, right?
01:18:55.000In some communities, you start off off the bottom, right?
01:19:47.000It has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being.
01:19:52.000So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software reworked for different habitats.
01:20:04.000The reason that human beings are I'm able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right?
01:20:14.000You can have a software program for hunting in the Kalahari.
01:20:18.000You can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes.
01:20:21.000You can have any one of a number of software programs.
01:20:25.000Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had and it did its best to erase that program and to render that program non-functional.
01:20:39.000It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language.
01:20:44.000So there was not one culture available.
01:20:46.000And it sort of forces The bootstrapping of a new culture which was composed of various things but of course there was a prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that.
01:20:58.000So there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had who were in the New World and a substituting of a version that was not as much of a threat to the slave holding population,
01:21:14.000And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even – we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms.
01:21:25.000There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all.
01:21:30.000So the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different I would argue – Is the systematic hobbling of the onboard, the inherited evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture.
01:21:53.000And in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others whom they had the right language to talk to and all.
01:22:06.000So in any case that carries through to the present it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully bring To fully update software.
01:22:28.000You're speaking about this almost purely from like an evolutionary biology perspective.
01:22:32.000Yes, and I'm afraid that it's not properly going to come through.
01:22:36.000What I'm saying is that when you have one population in control of how another population accesses the shared culture, that it's never fair, right?
01:23:09.000Let's go back to the question of how opportunity is distributed.
01:23:12.000So for some populations, you have very little opportunity and you have a tremendous hazard of falling off the bottom of the ladder and there's not enough mechanism to allow you to get back to it.
01:23:26.000Let's say that those who control or who write the rules of the system do not want a revolt even though this scenario would set them up for it.
01:23:38.000So one thing that happens is you create a tendency to incarcerate.
01:23:45.000You have rules that free certain people out of opportunity and then you have a system that is capable of incarcerating massive numbers of them.
01:23:55.000We incarcerate a much larger fraction of our population than any comparable nation and a very disproportionate fraction of people in that system are black.
01:24:05.000So here's the part that I don't hear discussed.
01:24:12.000When you take men out of a population, it has a very predictable effect.
01:24:18.000You take men out of a population, it undercuts the bargaining position of women in mating and dating.
01:24:25.000So if you take men out of the population, it means that those men who are still present in that population are in very high demand.
01:24:33.000Now, men being men, if they're in high sexual demand, it is hard to get them to settle down.
01:24:39.000A man who has lots of options is much harder to persuade to become monogamous and participate in traditional family raising.
01:24:50.000So what that does is it creates an environment in which you have many more single parent homes, many more children growing up without their fathers present, which of course hobbles the kids who are raised in that situation because humans are so difficult to raise.
01:25:07.000They're so costly in terms of time and energy and resources that one person has a much harder time doing it than a team of two people.
01:25:15.000And this sets in motion all of the things for which white society imagines that there's some cause inside of being black when in fact it's a demographic process, a demographic process that unfolds very naturally if you remove a disproportionate number of men from a population and undermine women's bargaining position.
01:25:40.000Okay, so why are we not having that discussion and why are we instead talking about shutting down STEM? STEM is exactly what you need in order to understand how that process works and to figure out what you would have to do to fix it.
01:25:55.000Well, I think those things are in many people's eyes so distantly connected.
01:26:00.000You know, when they look at the economic disparity and the crime and the gang problem and the prison problem and the incarceration problem and They look at that and then they look at STEM as being a completely different thing.
01:26:15.000Your connection and what you're saying about the fact that the hobbling of these communities is so systemic.
01:26:25.000It's so a part of how they're established and set up and it's repeating itself over and over and over again, generation after generation.
01:26:34.000That, in many people's eyes, doesn't seem related.
01:27:01.000So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on.
01:27:11.000And what this movement is doing is it is advancing a phony explanation, bad policy, and then on the other side, everybody who's not going along with this You know, a vast majority of those who are not going along are thinking, okay, those people are just crazy.
01:27:27.000They're complaining about something that doesn't exist.
01:27:32.000And so, anyway, the truth is neither of those things.
01:27:36.000The movement is advancing wrong ideas, but the energy that fuels the movement is about real legitimate complaints.
01:27:45.000And the people who are against the movement because they don't buy what's being said or don't understand the actual unfairness in our system are being emboldened by this.
01:28:18.000I feel that always when I hear people discuss jobs like when I hear presidential candidates discuss jobs and unemployment and you know and boosting up the economy and like when Trump discusses the fact that you know when the economy was doing well before COVID that there was black unemployment was at an all-time low and that you know he was all these great things were happening it's like addressing You're
01:28:51.000You're only addressing like the windows of a house.
01:28:54.000We keep the windows shut and this house is solid.
01:28:57.000But if the foundation is rotten because of termites and you're just ignoring it and you just keep stacking boards up to level it out when one side sinks because the rotten wood gives way, you're not fixing that.
01:29:16.000One of the ways I've looked at it, and this is a very simplistic way that I sort of say, if you really wanted to help America, if you're really patriotic, what's the best way to help America?
01:29:53.000If not the same advantage, a far superior advantage than they have now in terms of their ability to make it through, navigate the terrifying waters of being a young adult and getting through the system without going to jail and without making terrible mistakes and then having some sort of an economic opportunity that it gives you hope that you actually strive for something and you get rewarded for your effort and you see other people get rewarded for that effort as well and that becomes the model That you're using.
01:30:23.000You use this model of, you know, the model that we see in a lot of upper middle class communities.
01:30:35.000And you see that and you just emulate that.
01:30:38.000Whereas in these communities that have been established, they've had this problem for decade after decade and nothing's been done about it.
01:30:47.000And so they hear all this This talk from politicians about black unemployment and this and that.
01:30:53.000But meanwhile, the fucking neighborhood is exactly the same.
01:31:07.000I don't understand how it could be done.
01:31:10.000But I do understand that there's not work being put into doing it.
01:31:14.000Other than through the people in the community and community activists and some people that are philanthropists that have tried to figure out a way to do their best to put a dent in it, it's never been addressed on a national level.
01:31:27.000It's not addressed like no president has ever made an address, even Obama, where they've sat down and said, here's the areas of this country where it's really hard to make it, and this is what we're going to do to fix that.
01:31:40.000Yeah, I agree, but I still don't think you're at the root.
01:32:00.000If you actually wanted to solve this problem, you have to solve it at the causal level.
01:32:05.000You can't have a system in which people are choosing between candidates from two corrupt parties, both of which are hell-bent on stealing well-being from them and transferring it to their actual constituents.
01:32:39.000We are facing rioting in the streets, a movement that's showing signs of a Maoist challenge to the most fundamental aspects of the West, right?
01:32:52.000And we're going to have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden?
01:33:16.000If November comes and we are choosing between those two, then that means we're putting off any solution at least four years because the president, the president would be essential to changing our course.
01:33:51.000So what we've got is parties that decide what we get to choose from and the game is to prevent us from having any choice that could possibly solve the problem.
01:36:51.000And we draft them with the following plan that they will govern as a team.
01:36:58.000That is to say, every important decision will be discussed and they will decide what to do as a team and only in cases where they cannot reach agreement or whether something has to be – whenever something has to be decided on a very short time scale like a military decision.
01:37:16.000Does the person who inhabits the role of the president govern alone?
01:37:22.000We draft these folks and then four years down the road, they switch and the one who had run for president now runs for the vice presidential spot and the one who was vice president now runs for president and they continue this way until one of two things happens.
01:37:37.000Either we vote someone else in or one of them has inhabited the office of president twice and is no longer eligible and then that person has to be replaced.
01:37:46.000So we have a patriotic team governing together from center left and center right.
01:37:52.000But when you say drafted, that's the problem.
01:37:55.000Like someone has to be motivated to ruin their fucking lives to try to run this country because that's what happens to everybody that does it.
01:39:42.000And I know that the job of president is a sucky one.
01:39:46.000I'm sure the job of vice president is even worse.
01:39:49.000But please consider this plan because the republic is in jeopardy.
01:39:56.000Now, we already know that Andrew Yang is up for the job because he ran for office and faced appallingly stupid obstacles that, in my opinion, may be the reason that he's not the nominee.
01:41:01.000Which is that we Americans have to get over the idea that when somebody runs for office, especially the office of the president, that the right reaction is to ask them a million questions about what they will do in office, what policies they advocate.
01:41:20.000They certainly influence what policy is made.
01:41:22.000But the important thing about a president is that they listen to the right sorts of people and that they have a mind capable of processing what they hear so that they can I think?
01:41:52.000I think it's bound to be far more informative than dogging them about, you know, what they're going to do about health care and how they're going to pay for it.
01:42:01.000The thing about asking someone what they're going to do, though, is it does influence people whether or not they're willing to vote for that person.
01:42:09.000I know what you're saying is a reasonable person who understands the system, but for the average American, they do want to see a plan to how to get out of a lot of the messes that we see.
01:42:19.000Well, you know, the funny thing is we think a lot of things are true about what people want.
01:42:25.000For one thing, we've been told that people are stupid and that, you know, they're hopeless.
01:42:30.000And if, you know, I mean, you're really one of the earliest innovators here.
01:42:36.000You have found that people that we've been told have an attention span so short that they can only deal with a sitcom are interested in a three-hour conversation about complex topics with people from all over the map, right?
01:42:49.000And what I'm trying to say is we have a wrong idea in our sense of what elections are.
01:42:57.000And really that wrong idea isn't even about the fact that we think we want to hear the plan.
01:43:01.000It's about the fact that we know that our power in the system is so limited that the only way we could possibly exert any influence on the policy that gets made is if we can get somebody to promise us something into a camera enough that they're embarrassed not to do it when they get in office.
01:43:17.000As soon as they get in the office, they just do whatever they're going to do in the first place.
01:43:21.000So my point would be, look, I will literally vote for any competent, courageous patriot.
01:43:28.000I actually don't care in what direction they're ruling.
01:43:31.000Yes, I would prefer that they were progressive because I believe we need to make progress or we will perish.
01:43:37.000But any courageous, capable patriot is good enough because a courageous, capable patriot will do way better than we are doing with the current method.
01:43:46.000Yeah, and I'm seeing this one thing that I keep hearing over and over again from people on the left that really disturbs me.
01:43:53.000It's this concession that what you're voting for is the cabinet.
01:45:01.000And the idea that as you get older, you become less comfortable with the media, less comfortable with speaking publicly, that doesn't jive with me.
01:45:57.000I don't think they thought it was going to happen the way it happened.
01:46:02.000I feel like they felt that if they got Joe Biden in there, if none of this stuff had happened, you would just be dealing with one solution to the problem that is Donald Trump.
01:46:14.000But even if we are – if we bend over backwards to be generous to the Democratic Party, yes, it did this in a moment when we didn't know that COVID-19 was going to spread, right?
01:46:25.000And we didn't know that there was going to be massive riots in the streets over who knows how many cities.
01:46:32.000We did – we should have known that this was building.
01:46:37.000The possibility of a pandemic was always on the table.
01:46:40.000The fact that we have a pandemic and that that makes it clear why we need a cogent leader.
01:46:47.000It was obvious that this could happen under any presidency.
01:46:50.000Yeah, but there's a lot of other things.
01:46:51.000I mean, it's hard to say that the possibility of a pandemic is on the table, so we should have been prepared for it.
01:46:56.000I mean, the possibility of an asteroid impacts on the table, the possibility of a solar flare that wipes out the power grid, always on the table.
01:47:21.000You know, I mean, people would say, his ego's, yeah, he's got an ego problem, but look, he's getting the job done, he's doing great things.
01:47:27.000But then, in the face of this pandemic, when he's being criticized, like, almost to the point where he can't handle it anymore, you know, like, some people can run at a pace of five miles an hour, but when you force them to run at a pace of seven miles an hour, things get slippery.
01:48:14.000But it's an issue that your ego is so fragile that you have to address the fact that they're criticizing the way you walk down a ramp with fucking slippery dress shoes on.
01:49:27.000And to my friends who are still believers in the Democratic Party at some point, of which I have many...
01:49:35.000If you hate Trump, right, if that's really your cause and you're not going to be able to see clearly anything until we have removed him from office, that is also on the Democratic bill.
01:49:50.000Hillary Clinton advanced Trump's candidacy because she wanted to run against him.
01:49:56.000So if you have Trump derangement syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.
01:50:03.000Yeah, she legitimately thought he'd be the easiest to beat, so she wanted him to run.
01:50:07.000She thought she was going to humiliate him.
01:50:09.000She severely underestimated people that were upset at the current system and that his rhetoric, this idea of draining the swamp, would actually resonate with so many people.
01:50:19.000And also that People look at things in a very two-dimensional way.
01:50:23.000They're not looking at it in this really complex, nuanced way.
01:50:26.000And if you can paint a couple of good slogans together, build that wall, make America great again, all that kind of shit, that's a brilliant way of manipulating people.
01:50:37.000Because that's the stuff they remember.
01:50:56.000Well, a manipulative genius in the sense that he understands how to use the media because he's been in it forever.
01:51:02.000These fucking people have been in it in this Bush League way.
01:51:06.000Like, you don't even know what it's like to have a real master communicator in that role.
01:51:12.000Have you had someone that was a master public speaker in that role who really knew how to give a blistering takedown of someone like Trump or someone like Biden?
01:54:07.000So in my opinion, we should have locked down severely for six weeks or something along those lines and we should have driven it to extinction.
01:54:18.000And the problem is that that runs afoul of all kinds of things including civil liberties concerns which I also hold.
01:54:26.000I hate the idea of a government crackdown in which they're dictating with whom you associate and all of the rest, right?
01:54:50.000Initially, I thought that this was a bat-borne virus that had been transmitted to people from the wild, probably through the bushmeat trade, probably through the seafood market in Wuhan.
01:55:03.000In fact, Heather and I were in the Amazon where we had no connectivity to anything for a couple weeks.
01:55:10.000And when we came out, what was then called novel coronavirus was just beginning to be discussed.
01:55:16.000And so we became aware of it as we came out of the Amazon.
01:55:19.000I was like, oh, what the heck is that?
01:55:21.000And I looked into it and immediately I saw the story adds up.
01:55:26.000You know, it's a coronavirus of a kind that's known to circulate in bats.
01:55:29.000There's a seafood market, and I thought, okay, I know what the story is, and I tweeted.
01:55:34.000I don't know enough about the story yet, but it looks to me like the Wuhan seafood market is the source, that the virus comes from bats, and we have to talk about the bushmeat trade, which has always been a terrible idea.
01:55:46.000And immediately people tweeted back at me, so you think it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety lab level 4 in Wuhan where this started?
01:56:06.000And I went down the rabbit hole because as much as we have been assured by a huge range of experts that this has to have been a bat-borne coronavirus transmitted to people, possibly through pangolins,
01:56:23.000maybe through some intermediate host that we don't yet know, That story looks less and less likely.
01:56:30.000And the story that is looking more and more likely, what I would call the lab leak hypothesis, is looking ever stronger.
01:56:38.000And anyway, I've been in contact with other people who have reached that conclusion.
01:56:46.000But in a sense, again, we still don't know.
01:56:50.000It is possible that this came from the wild without human meddling.
01:56:54.000But the The virus itself has several components that suggest that it is actually the result of manipulation in the lab and that it escaped probably from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
01:57:14.000It may well have escaped and we may be dealing with consequences of the fact that it was manipulated in a lab.
01:57:25.000So one of the techniques that labs who study viruses like this use is something, so the research is called gain of function research.
01:57:33.000Gain-of-function research means you are taking a virus and you are adding a capacity to it in order to study how it works.
01:57:41.000And then one of the things that is done to study how it works is something called passaging, where a virus is infected, a creature is infected with the virus and then...
01:57:51.000The virus is allowed to pass between individuals of that species.
01:57:56.000It can also be done in tissues, in cellular tissues, where tissues are infected and the virus is allowed to spread from one cell to the next.
01:58:08.000So there's a strong possibility that this virus was under study, that it was enhanced in the laboratory, and that we are dealing with consequences that are the result of that enhancement that make it more dangerous than it would otherwise be.
01:58:25.000And what do you believe those enhancements are?
01:58:28.000Well, so one of the enhancements, there is something called a furrin site, a furrin site in the genome of this virus.
01:58:57.000That's one thing, which could happen naturally, but it may well not have.
01:59:02.000And it has a flanking sequence, which has – this is probably going to be hard for people to follow, but – Nucleotides, that is DNA, code for proteins which are made out of amino acids.
01:59:17.000There's an amino acid called arginine, and there are two arginines coded for in the genome of this virus.
01:59:23.000But because there are so many possible codes, triplet codes, and only 20 or so amino acids, there's redundancy.
01:59:32.000And so which code is used to trigger the production of an The inclusion of an arginine is variable and the two arginines are coded for in a way that is not seen in nature in this way very frequently.
01:59:48.000So let's just say there are elements of the genome that are conspicuous and suggest possible laboratory manipulation.
01:59:57.000The fern site that I referred to that has been inserted either by a natural process or by a laboratory process Greatly increases the transmissibility of this virus, which means various things.
02:00:12.000It could be the explanation for why this virus is infecting so many different tissues in people who get sick, right?
02:00:20.000The list of symptoms is huge here, and that's a very troubling thing from the point of view of treating it medically, is all of the things that can go wrong with the body once you're infected.
02:00:31.000It also means that the virus is very good at jumping between people and that high transmissibility is obviously one of the things that makes COVID-19 such a difficult pandemic to control, right?
02:00:46.000It's hopping between people so readily that it just runs away.
02:00:51.000So in any case, and then there's a third question that I have, which is maybe that there's something about the virus.
02:00:59.000I don't want to say fact as if it is a fact.
02:01:02.000But if this was an escape from the laboratory, then the virus – I mean just as maybe we'll end up talking about the telomere problem in mice, which you spoke to Eric about when he was on your podcast last.
02:01:18.000Evolution to the lab, evolution in the lab takes place and changes that the people in charge want to happen occur and then things they're not even thinking about occur.
02:01:28.000There's adaptation to the laboratory environment that people who work in labs are unaware of.
02:01:34.000And so one of the questions I have is this virus is highly transmissible.
02:01:45.000I mean, for one thing, bats live outdoors, right?
02:01:48.000So is it possible that this virus has adapted to the laboratory environment, an indoor environment, and that it has forgotten how to get transmitted outdoors?
02:01:59.000And if we are casual about the outdoor environment, That actually it could relearn that trick, that we should take it.
02:02:06.000A, we need to be outdoors for various reasons.
02:02:08.000One, it appears that vitamin D is very protective in the case of COVID-19, prevents the transmission, and you end up way less sick if you have proper vitamin D. So in the northern hemisphere here, while the sun is shining, we should be outdoors.
02:02:22.000We should not be locking down those environments at all.
02:02:26.000We should also be very careful outdoors, right?
02:02:29.000Because anytime we allow it to be transmitted outdoors, that is going to, it creates an evolutionary signal, a selective signal that's going to retrain the virus to be transmitted outdoors, which is not something we want at the moment.
02:02:44.000This might be an advantage that we have.
02:02:46.000And we're going to lose it if we're not careful, which is why I'm very careful and why I wear this thing around so that, you know, I can pull it up at a moment's notice if I'm going to talk to somebody.
02:02:58.000Because even though I think the virus is very difficult to transmit outdoors, which is something we've seen in the data of South Korea, for example, it could learn that trick.
02:03:09.000Why is it easier for it to – do we know?
02:03:19.000Because it could be that it's UV light.
02:03:21.000UV light is very powerful, destructive stuff.
02:03:25.000But if it's UV light, then that suggests it's difficult to transmit outdoors during the day and it should be easy to transmit outdoors at night.
02:03:32.000If it's not UV light, then that's not likely to be it.
02:03:37.000So there is something weird going on with viral load.
02:03:39.000Maybe it's not weird, but it's weird for those of us who learned how viruses work from the usual textbook diagrams where a virus gets into a cell and triggers an infection.
02:03:49.000But here it seems like if you talk to someone briefly, your chances of picking it up from them even if they're sick is pretty low.
02:03:57.000But if you talk to somebody for an extended period of time where you're constantly breathing air that they're exhaling, then your chances go up, up, up and up.
02:04:05.000So there's a possibility that just exposure to UV light, even if they're outside talking for the same amount of time, just the fact that these particles are going through the air in the sunlight, that it kills the virus's ability to transmit.
02:04:32.000If you've ever seen one, it doesn't even take that long.
02:04:34.000You take this wand, you put it in like a bottle, a water bottle, and you spin it around in this creek water, and it kills all the bad stuff.
02:04:51.000Well, you know what happened when Trump said something about getting UV light into the body.
02:04:56.000Well, there was an actual publicly traded biotech company that had an invention for when people are intubated taking this tube with UV light and inserting it into the lungs of these people.
02:05:10.000And they were actually pulled off of Twitter.
02:05:14.000Twitter actually banned their account because they thought there was some wacky Trump supporter who was trying to substantiate the president.
02:05:22.000He's basically like, maybe we get the light and put it in the body somehow, put it in the body, disinfect the cleansing.
02:05:27.000You remind me of Sarah Cooper when you did that.
02:05:29.000He was on to something, though, in a weird way, that this publicly traded biotech company had an idea that when people – they are on an – when they have been intubated, when they are on – This ventilator, this tube will go down the same tube that the air is coming through and actually flood the lungs where they're infected with COVID-19 with UV light and kill it.
02:05:51.000Well, the thing is, I don't think he got lucky.
02:05:54.000I think he did something that he's routinely doing, which isn't very high quality in terms of leadership.
02:06:07.000There was discussion about how UV light might be used to treat a COVID-19 infection.
02:06:13.000And I was actually alerted by this discussion to the fact that there was apparently a lot of work on this technique previously, that actually UV light had been successfully used in various ways.
02:06:25.000Where it could be used to purify blood and things.
02:06:28.000And I was sort of surprised to discover it.
02:06:30.000And then I heard the president say this.
02:06:31.000I thought that that's what he was talking about.
02:06:33.000My guess is something crossed his feed.
02:06:36.000Somebody in a briefing said, well, Mr. President, there is a promising theory, promising therapy, blah, [...
02:06:44.000And he just walks out the door and riffs on it, which is why Sarah Cooper is so funny because basically she exposes the...
02:08:47.000One of those fake artists who takes, you know, they use the face swap technology, and they put Trump's face on this baby, and then they change the words.
02:08:57.000Someone caught a baby doing something, and they talked to the baby, and the baby was trying to lie and get their way out of it.
02:09:03.000It's like an old video, but then they put Trump's face on it, and then they change...
02:09:45.000If you can find it, folks, anybody who's listening to this, you should see it because it's really disturbing seeing a baby with Trump's face.
02:09:52.000It almost looks like Sam Kinison has a baby.
02:10:07.000What I would say is first of all, I do think I am very much in favor still of driving this thing to extinction by being properly sober about it briefly.
02:10:21.000Can I pause and address this one issue that seems to be an issue when someone says that it might have come out of a lab.
02:10:32.000This is a right-wing, left-wing thing.
02:10:34.000For whatever reason, you get labeled a right-wing conspiracy theorist if you think it came out of a lab.
02:10:41.000People on the left are so, they're so willing to dismiss that without any real evidence.
02:10:48.000We've been poisoned by these ideologies when it comes to conspiracy or whether or not something is actually true but we've been fed the wrong information.
02:10:59.000That stuff is, if you don't believe the official narrative that's being discussed on CNN, you must be some sort of a right-wing nut.
02:11:39.000One of the things that is, in my opinion, the strongest piece of evidence that the lab leak hypothesis may be correct is that there is a missing phase in the evolution of this virus.
02:11:54.000When a virus jumps from one species to another, it is not well positioned.
02:12:00.000It is typically very poor at its job because it doesn't have any evolutionary experience with that host.
02:12:08.000So it's not good at leaping between that host cells, which means that it's always in very small numbers, and it's not good at leaping from one individual to the next.
02:12:43.000Now, how it got that experience, we don't know.
02:12:47.000There are evolutionary ways this could have happened.
02:12:50.000It could be that we have not found the initial population that it circulated in.
02:12:57.000Or it could be that it circulated in a creature that we haven't found either.
02:13:01.000But The fact that there is no evidence that it shows up in Wuhan and immediately spreads tells us that this virus was well adapted to our cells and well adapted to transmit between individuals.
02:13:20.000One way you could get there is if somebody, A, had added components to a virus in order to make it transmissible to humans.
02:13:30.000So the research in question would be research that was interested in discovering what a pandemic in humans of a bat-borne coronavirus would be like so that we could do something about it.
02:13:41.000Maybe we could create a vaccine ahead of time.
02:13:43.000But if you're creating a virus that has enhanced capacity to infect humans in order to study what will happen if a virus ever escapes into the human population, then you are running the risk that the virus you are studying will escape.
02:13:57.000Would they have added something like a fern site?
02:14:01.000It is established in the literature that the addition of a fern site makes the virus much more transmissible in human tissue.
02:14:08.000So if you were going to study it, this would be high on your list of things to do.
02:14:14.000You could also passage it through human tissue in order to effectively train it on the infectious pathway inside of people, which again, we might be suffering the downstream consequences of that if it escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
02:14:34.000So these things have an amazing impact and I hear a lot that what does it matter?
02:14:39.000We just have to deal with it, which is nonsense because A, we need to have it never happen again.
02:14:43.000B, there may be things that we could understand about what its nature is that would help us fight it.
02:14:50.000But see, we have a really serious problem now because all but a few of the world's leading virologists, the experts in coronaviruses in particular, have sworn that this must have come from nature and couldn't have come from the lab,
02:15:16.000We need our scientists to be empowered to tell us what we need to know and we need them, therefore, to be freed from a system where they are fighting for grant money in order to continue their work.
02:15:29.000This entire group of people is now in jeopardy because if this turns out to have been a leak from the lab, Then we are all suddenly going to become aware that gain of function research puts humanity in jeopardy.
02:15:42.000That one accident in gain of function research can cause the evaporation of who knows how many trillion dollars.
02:15:49.000It could cause, and this is one of the other things I wanted to say to you about the danger of letting this virus run its course.
02:15:57.000If we don't stamp it out, We, A, don't know that people who have been infected are not going to continue to have outbreaks.
02:16:08.000We don't know whether or not people who've had it are going to be immune to it in the future.
02:16:12.000That's probable, but it's not certain.
02:16:15.000And we don't know that it's not going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humanity the way flu is.
02:16:22.000And even if this thing evolved to become flu-like, if it became as unserious as the flu, the flu is very serious.
02:16:33.000And the cost that humanity pays for having flu circulate every year is immense.
02:16:40.000So even if the only thing that has happened in the long term, if we let it go and it evolved into another flu-like pathogen, then we have increased the number of flu-like pathogens that we have to deal with annually substantially.
02:16:56.000And that would be a major loss to humans.
02:17:00.000My sense that we should be much more aggressive about dealing with this is really about the fact that I think we have a short time horizon in which to deal with it, that it will learn new tricks and it will become harder to defeat the longer that we play around with it.
02:17:18.000And so an aggressive short-term move, it's really – it's the lesson of pulling off the Band-Aid.
02:17:25.000We're not doing ourselves any favors by pulling it off slowly.
02:17:29.000So what do you think we should do right now?
02:17:32.000Well, I would say – I mean the problem is this is a much harder argument to make now than it was at the beginning because we're all so freaking sick of lockdown.
02:17:41.000I mean Portland is still under full lockdown.
02:17:57.000Not only that, de Blasio in New York City won't allow people, when they're asking people that have tested positive for COVID-19, you're not allowed to ask them whether or not they've been in a protest.
02:18:08.000So they're doing contact tracing without valuable data because they want to be progressive.
02:18:20.000I would – and again, I don't want to be in this position months in here.
02:18:25.000I want to be in this position months ago of saying the right thing to do is a six-week lockdown that will be unbearably painful but hopefully it will be short and then intense contact tracing.
02:18:37.000But we've done a lockdown with essential businesses open.
02:18:43.000We've done a half-assed lockdown and the thing that we've done that I find the most troubling is that we have not bootstrapped a mechanism for high-quality, ubiquitous testing.
02:19:00.000Because if you want to do, if you did a six-week lockdown, A real lockdown, right?
02:19:08.000And then you open back up with testing that's so high quality and so universal that you can spot anything that happens and you can treat it locally, right?
02:19:19.000You don't come into work if you don't pass this test and if your work puts you in contact with other people who are going to test you regularly.
02:19:24.000If you did that, we could have driven it to very low levels and then we could have dealt with the flare ups.
02:19:31.000But what we're doing now is we're just gambling and it's insane.
02:19:36.000We're gambling and there is no, that I can detect, there is no movement that says open back up and be very aggressive about things like masks.
02:19:49.000My feeling is if you're pushing open back up, you ought to be pushing things that would make opening back up as safe as possible.
02:19:59.000Because one of the things that the CDC was saying was that you should really only wear a mask if you're treating a person with COVID. Yes, except that we can effectively know that what they were really...
02:20:11.000I don't even want to give them credit for really saying it.
02:20:14.000The motivation for saying that nonsense Was that they were trying to preserve masks for people who needed it most.
02:20:57.000But the fact is the bandana, all right, maybe I look like a goofball, but the fact is it's more fashionable in my opinion than a medical mask.
02:22:01.000Lanai is a very interesting place to hunt because it's one of the few places where you could say it's mandatory to hunt animals because they have an invasive species called Axis deer.
02:22:54.000Like the mass populations and it happens to be one of the most insanely delicious animals as well.
02:23:00.000Also super switched on because they evolved to avoid tigers.
02:23:06.000I've got videos of these things where an arrow is coming at them from 80 yards, and as the arrow is about, you know, 15 yards away, they hear it and they get out of the way.
02:24:49.000But anyway, my point would be Hawaii is a tropical landmass.
02:24:55.000You would think it would have high diversity because it's tropical, right?
02:24:59.000Tropical places tend to have very high diversity.
02:25:01.000Hawaii has very low diversity because it's so far from everywhere, right?
02:25:05.000So the thing is, almost nothing can make it over the gap.
02:25:09.000That big saltwater gap is very hard for anything to cross.
02:25:13.000So what that means is that everything that's in Hawaii...
02:25:17.000It's very well adapted for things like crossing huge gaps and not very well adapted for everything that would compete with that capacity.
02:25:26.000So that sets Hawaii up for being invaded By any creature that you transport there, if you can solve the how do you jump the gap question by transporting on an airplane or a ship, then the species that are there are not in a position to fend it off competitively because they're not adapted to compete.
02:25:47.000It's a low diversity environment where everything had to cross some amazing gap to get there.
02:25:52.000So it's a sitting duck for invasive species like the one you're describing.
02:25:59.000Now here's the connection to the viruses.
02:26:02.000If it is true that this virus originally came from a bat, was being studied in probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was enhanced and then escaped, was enhanced for the infection of human tissue and then escaped,
02:26:19.000it is the equivalent of us having transported something very dangerous over a gap it couldn't have crossed on its own.
02:26:28.000And we are sitting ducks for this thing.
02:26:33.000So this is why I'm really on high alert about this.
02:26:38.000Now what are your feelings when it comes to the high number of people that are asymptomatic or the high number of people that get it and it's a very small deal to them.
02:26:51.000They just cough for a couple days and then it's no big deal.
02:27:13.000I want to see that carrier used to study the virus.
02:27:18.000It's too bad that it docked in Guam because they ruined a circumstance.
02:27:22.000And it's not that I wanted to see people infected and it's not that I didn't – I wanted to see them get the highest quality treatment possible.
02:27:27.000But it was an isolated population in which you could have studied the spread of this virus.
02:27:32.000And because it's an aircraft carrier, you could also get anything you needed.
02:27:35.000You could have built hospitals on the deck.
02:27:37.000You could have given them the finest possible care.
02:27:39.000And we could have learned a lot about how the thing is transmitted, what the symptoms mean, who is actually shedding live virus based on what symptoms they have, rather than studying this haphazardly amongst infected people in hospitals where you don't really know who they've been in contact with and all of that.
02:29:04.000Yeah, I would like them to be studied because they're peak physical specimens, you know, the professional athletes and it's such a cardiovascular sport.
02:29:14.000You know, you're constantly sprinting and moving and you have to be in tremendous shape to play professional basketball at the highest level.
02:29:21.000I would think I would want to know what's going on with their lungs.
02:29:24.000What is it like when you get an elite athlete and you give them this disease?
02:31:30.000So what I'm really telling you is that, yes, we have to deal with COVID-19, but we also have to bootstrap our way out of a predicament where our whole system has been overrun by perverse market incentives that is causing everybody to turn into a liar or a dupe.
02:31:50.000We've got too many high-tech problems to be dealing with anything other than high-quality information about the nature of those problems and what the possible solutions look like.
02:32:00.000But how do we mitigate all these errors?
02:32:03.000How do you eliminate all the bullshit that we're dealing with?
02:33:20.000I studied tent-making bats, which was great.
02:33:22.000And by the way, I think the danger of viruses leaping from bats to people Is actually less than we are being told.
02:33:29.000The people who are selling the idea that we have to study these viruses with gain-of-function research are leading us to believe a virus is going to leap out of a cave at any moment and infect us.
02:33:39.000And the large number of people who study bats regularly and are not catching these diseases suggest that that's not really true.
02:33:46.000Were they the ones that were skeptical about this idea that it came out of this wet market?
02:34:13.000Just because I know it's going to deviate us off topic.
02:34:15.000There was a story that I read a long time ago, and I think I read it in the New York Times, and it was a story about these people that were studying bats, and they had parked themselves out in front of this gigantic cave to sort of film these bats coming out of the cave,
02:34:32.000and they didn't anticipate that the bats were going to shit on them.
02:34:36.000And they got insanely sick from some hemorrhagic virus and wound up dying, like, shortly afterwards.
02:35:18.000I just remember them getting really sick and dying shortly afterwards and them not being able to identify exactly what it was that killed them.
02:35:26.000So let me say a couple things on this front.
02:35:29.000One, there is a pathogen that people who study bats in caves, my bats didn't roost in caves, but people who study bats in caves sometimes get histoplasmosis, which is a fungus.
02:35:40.000It's a fungus that also afflicts people in the poultry industry.
02:36:29.000Now there is also, the lab leak stuff is extensive, but there is one of the pieces of evidence in that story is that there were some miners in Yunnan who came down with a pneumonia.
02:36:44.000There were something like six miners who came down with a pneumonia who had worked in a cave that had these horseshoe bats.
02:36:50.000So to the extent that the lab in Wuhan was known to be working on bat coronaviruses, For the purpose of preventing a pandemic, they were getting their bat coronaviruses from this cave in Yunnan Province, long way from Wuhan.
02:37:05.000And the cave was identified because these miners had come down with this pneumonia, of which I think three of them died.
02:37:13.000So it's again a case in which something jumped, but it didn't spread.
02:37:18.000So what we're looking at is the strong possibility That we were looking to prevent a pandemic at some place where something had jumped but had not spread.
02:37:27.000And then we took viruses from there and imbued them with the characteristics that allowed them to spread, solving its second problem.
02:37:38.000And is it particularly frightening that it's coming out of China because we're not getting really good information from them because their propaganda is so strong?
02:37:49.000They have not informed us in the way we need to be informed.
02:37:52.000On the other hand, one of the reasons that this is a political football rather than a scientific question is that there is a perception, and in fact this perception has been amplified by the president, that this is potentially, if this leaked from the lab,
02:38:11.000This lab in China was part of an international community of virology researchers The grant that they would have been working from came from the NIH or at least one of them did.
02:38:23.000So this is really – if this is a lab leak, still not saying it is, but that's a strong possibility.
02:38:29.000If this is a lab leak, the failure is one of the international scientific community.
02:38:34.000In this particular lab, didn't they get admonished for something that happened within the last two years?
02:38:45.000Yes, and there was a 2015 paper concerned about gain-of-function research and the potential for exactly this sort of thing to happen.
02:38:54.000So anyway, there was concern, but like so many things, I think it hovers outside of most of our awareness.
02:39:00.000So we discover You know, after the Deepwater Horizon accident, we discover that we're drilling these really deep deposits that we can't plug a leak when it happens.
02:39:10.000After the financial crisis, we discover that we're using leverage in a way that can cause one of these catastrophic economic meltdowns.
02:39:18.000The Aliso Canyon disaster reveals that we're storing, you know, natural gas in these old oil deposits and that it can leak and not be plugged.
02:39:29.000Fukushima reveals to us what we've been doing with nuclear reactors and spent fuel.
02:39:34.000We always find out after the accident that we're engaged in some really dangerous thing.
02:39:39.000Now, people inside these industries know, but they also have a conflict of interest.
02:40:10.000And there was a very good piece of work from a guy I knew, George Williams, great evolutionary biologist, about the evolution of senescence, that is to say, the process by which we grow feeble and inefficient with age, what most people call aging.
02:40:25.000And basically that's classic paper explained why it is that creatures like us get old and die.
02:40:34.000And the answer was basically this, that you have a genome that's complex.
02:40:56.000And in the case when a gene does something that's very good for you when you're young, at some cost when you're old, selection tends to favor it because you may not live long enough to suffer the cost.
02:41:08.000And so if you have the trait that makes you powerful when you're young, and you've got some cost that you're going to pay when you're old, but you're not going to live to get it, it may be a freebie, right?
02:41:20.000So selection sees early life much more clearly than it sees late life, and it prefers things that help you early, even at a cost of harming you late.
02:42:47.000And I saw a talk given by somebody who was talking about telomeres.
02:42:54.000And he was talking about telomeres and their relationship to cancer.
02:42:58.000So telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes.
02:43:03.000And they grow shorter every time a cell divides, right?
02:43:07.000So it's like a fuse or a counter that ticks down each cell division and it drops to zero.
02:43:15.000Or not zero, but it drops to a number that the cell refuses to divide after that.
02:43:21.000And some people were working in one set of labs on the possibility that this was causing us to grow feeble with age because if your cells can't divide anymore, then they won't replace themselves and your tissues won't be able to maintain, right?
02:43:36.000Another group was studying this question of telomeres with relation to cancer and they were saying Eureka Every time we look in a cancer, it has this enzyme called telomerase turned on, which elongates telomeres.
02:43:50.000And these two groups were not talking to each other.
02:43:53.000They were each claiming that they were about to cure their respective disease.
02:43:58.000One group was saying, if we can activate telomerase, then we can lengthen your life.
02:44:03.000And the other group was saying, if we can turn off telomerase, we can cure cancer.
02:44:08.000And I put two and two together and I said, this is the missing pleiotropy.
02:44:12.000Here we have something that is protecting us, that's helping us in youth.
02:44:16.000We have a counter that is limiting the number of times a cell can divide and presumably preventing cancer, right?
02:44:22.000And the cost is you can't maintain your tissues forever, so you grow feeble and inefficient.
02:44:28.000That made a hell of a lot of sense to me.
02:44:30.000I couldn't convince anybody else that this was sensible.
02:44:35.000I couldn't even get them to understand what I was saying because in evolutionary biology, there has traditionally been a bias against mechanism, the study of cellular biology.
02:44:44.000Not because there's anything wrong with studying cellular biology.
02:44:48.000As an evolutionary phenomenon, but because early in the study of evolution, we just didn't have the tools to look into the cells.
02:44:56.000So evolutionary biologists got used to thinking about the form of creatures and the behavior of creatures, but not thinking about the internal mechanisms because there just wasn't a lot that could be said.
02:45:06.000Anyway, I retained an interest in the cellular biology.
02:45:09.000I saw these two things that needed to be connected, and I started to work on the puzzle.
02:45:15.000It turned out that that hypothesis would answer a great many questions that were otherwise very difficult to answer with respect to how aging functions.
02:45:29.000The obstacle was that a fact that was well known about mice did not fit with the idea that telomeres were fundamental to the aging process.
02:45:39.000And the fact that was known was that mice had It's extremely long telomeres and yet they live short lives.
02:45:47.000So if it were true that the length of your telomeres dictated how quickly you were going to age, then a tiny creature with very long telomeres ought to be able to replace its tissues really well and it should age very, very slowly.
02:46:04.000So I thought there's got to be something wrong with this.
02:46:06.000The hypothesis answers too many questions for that obstacle to be real.
02:46:10.000And I thought maybe one person has run a test and everybody else is just parroting it.
02:46:17.000And I went and I looked and that wasn't the case.
02:46:22.000I finally realized that all of the mice that had been looked at were coming from one source, that there was a laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine called the JAX Lab that was the source for all of the mice being used in all of the laboratories in the country.
02:46:40.000I started to wonder, is there something going on at that lab?
02:47:19.000I think mice have long telomeres, but it's interesting if you order Mus spritus rather than Mus musculus and you order them from Europe, then how long their telomeres are depends on what supplier you get them from.
02:48:05.000But it also raised a bunch of really difficult problems.
02:48:11.000One was, if it is true that all the mice that are being used to study physiology are broken in this way, then how are we blinding ourselves?
02:48:21.000Is it possible that we are using all of these mice that would be terrible models for wound healing, for senescence, for cancer, for a whole number of things?
02:48:33.000How is it that we are allowing ourselves to take these mice who have been altered and using them as models for normal physiology?
02:48:42.000The other problem, maybe even more serious, was that we use these animals in drug safety testing.
02:48:49.000And the way we use them is, if you think about, if you'd come up with a drug that you thought was useful and you wanted to test whether it was safe to administer it to people, You can't really afford to give people a drug and then wait 40,
02:49:05.00050 years to figure out whether you've shortened their lives, right?
02:49:09.000So at the point that you start testing these things on humans, you're really in the final stage.
02:49:13.000The way we test whether a drug is safe for long-term use or whether it is safe for your long-term life based on short use is we give large doses of it to small animals that live short lives on the assumption That if it's going to shorten your 80 or 90 year life by 10 or 20 years,
02:49:33.000that it'll shorten a mouse's life long enough to see it.
02:49:39.000If you've altered a mouse in the laboratory environment by favoring the radical elongation of its telomeres, then it has the ability to replace its tissues indefinitely.
02:49:51.000A toxin that will harm you by killing tissue may not harm that mouse.
02:49:57.000In fact, it may actually help it because these mice are very cancer prone.
02:50:01.000So when we give a toxin that will damage you to a mouse that is highly resistant to tissue damage, you may slow down its tumors.
02:50:10.000And in fact, we've seen this a number of times where a drug is given to mice and we get back the paradoxical result.
02:50:17.000Not only is it not toxic, it actually makes the mice live a little longer.
02:50:22.000So my contention is that we had a problem where we were testing drugs to see if they were safe on animals that were predisposed to tell us that they were.
02:50:32.000And then when those drugs were released into the human population, it turned out they were not safe and people died.
02:50:39.000Now the problem is I was absolutely unable to alert the world to this problem for reasons that still elude me.
02:50:50.000I went through – I don't think we need to bore your audience especially if they've been through Eric's description with the details of what happened in the attempt to bring this to public attention.
02:51:00.000But – The world of scientists working on the question was unwilling to respond to the discovery that their model organism had this fatal flaw that was going to predispose us to see certain things and not other things in the laboratory environment.
02:51:33.000The Vioxx scandal, which was a drug for arthritis, correct?
02:51:41.000And so anyway, heart damage is actually probably not heart damage.
02:51:47.000And by that, what I mean is if you take a drug, a substance that damages tissues in the human body...
02:51:55.000It will show up as heart damage because of the special nature of the heart.
02:52:00.000So let's say that you took some drug that killed every 10,000th cell or every 1,000th cell.
02:52:06.000That would be destructive all over your body.
02:52:08.000The heart, though, is a special tissue.
02:52:11.000The heart has a very low capacity for self-repair at a cellular level, very low, for reasons we could go into if you wanted.
02:52:19.000But because it has a low capacity for self-repair, it is also very vulnerable to something that does some kind of general tissue damage.
02:52:28.000And it's also an organ that when it fails, it's absolutely conspicuous.
02:52:32.000So you would expect that if we had substances that were body-wide toxins and we released them into the public having tested them on mice and not discovering that they were dangerous, That you would see relatively young people die from heart conditions which is where we would detect that there's a problem before we would detect it anywhere else.
02:52:53.000So anyway, the government studied this problem after Vioxx and it put together a report.
02:53:59.000And then they come back to me and they either – they go silent or they say, well, I talked to some people and they said it's been taken care of.
02:54:08.000Well, I don't know what it's been taking care of means.
02:54:10.000I published a paper that said, here's a hypothesis about what's going on.
02:54:16.000I proposed a mechanism whereby telomere elongation would have happened in the breeding colonies in question.
02:54:23.000It's been taken care of is a very strange way to describe something that could be an enormous problem.
02:54:29.000Well, not only, let's say that it was taken care of, right?
02:54:32.000Let's say that they have altered the breeding protocol and they've fixed the problem.
02:54:37.000You still have all those drug tests that they've done for...
02:54:40.000You've got all those drug tests, you've got all of the papers, you've got my paper which proposes a hypothesis and I have a right to say actually it turns out to be correct or it wasn't, right?
02:54:51.000But so anyway, we got back all of these weird answers.
02:54:54.000It's been taken care of or even more curious is the argument, well, everybody knows that the mice are bad models.
02:55:03.000Which is insane because this telomere problem...
02:55:37.000It's a general systemic failure of reason.
02:55:41.000So what I encountered as a young, somewhat naive graduate student was an instance which frankly woke me up to the fact that my colleagues, even when human life was on the line, were going to pretend they didn't know what was going on.
02:55:58.000It's quite possible they didn't know until I had put out my hypothesis and Carol Greider, who later pretended she didn't know what I was talking about, published the empirical work that revealed that indeed lab mice are unusual in having long telomeres.
02:56:15.000After that work was out, there's no excuse for not investigating what the consequences were.
02:56:23.000I cannot explain it except to say that the culture of science has become so rotten that this sort of thing Is maybe standard operating procedure.
02:56:35.000Just protecting their ass and protecting the ass of those who give them jobs and all the work that's been done that sort of establishes that they should be doing these tests in the first place.
02:56:48.000I'm sure they tell themselves some story in which they are the heroes and they are protecting us from something.
02:56:56.000But I look at my own medicine cabinet and even though I am aware of what likely happened, I am in no position to protect myself or my family.
02:57:07.000The only way to be protected from the downstream consequences of this error is to just not take pharmaceuticals.
02:57:17.000Yeah, it's a really huge problem and The response of the system generally to shut down the lone individual trying to point out a serious problem is just breathtaking.
02:57:32.000When you've seen it, when you've lived it, you never go back.
02:57:38.000You've looked into the eye of something that is willing to ignore.
02:57:41.000I mean it's willing to ignore not only Human life, but it is willing to ignore the Requirements of good science How could you leave an error like that?
02:57:56.000Undescribed and how is this being discussed on a fucking comedians podcast?
02:58:00.000Why is this not front page the New York Times?
02:58:04.000Leading on the news when you're talking about the safety of pharmaceutical drugs How is this not something that's an enormous story?
02:58:10.000Well, this raises another question, something I actually wanted to set the record straight about.
02:58:15.000By and large, I thought Eric did a fantastic job of describing this.
02:58:19.000In fact, we're here at the tail end of this podcast, and we're both tired, and I feel like I've done a much worse job than he did describing the science.
02:58:28.000But I wanted to correct one thing, and I think it will help answer the question you just asked me.
02:58:34.000You asked Eric why I had not pursued this and you said maybe was he afraid and Eric indicated that that was some part of it.
02:58:46.000It's no part of it and I think Eric has actually forgotten what happened.
02:58:51.000So I was dogged about this for a decade.
02:59:07.000I wrote – when Carol Greider who refused to acknowledge my contribution got her Nobel Prize, I wrote – What I think was a generous op-ed to the New York Times saying that her Nobel Prize was deserved but that we had this serious problem related to mouse telomeres and that maybe now this Nobel Prize would give us the courage to look at it.
02:59:32.000So I tried everything I could think of.
02:59:35.000And at one point, a good friend of ours, a guy named Mike Brown, who used to, he was the former CFO of Microsoft, really good guy, made a ton of money because he was at Microsoft on the ground floor, and he used to hold something he called Science Camp.
02:59:49.000And Science Camp involved gathering a bunch of really high-quality people to talk privately where nobody was aware that we were even gathered, right?
02:59:57.000It really gave us the room to be frank.
03:00:00.000And I was there and I gave a talk on telomeres.
03:00:03.000I gave a talk about the science and I talked about the politics that I had run into.
03:00:12.000It was, you know, it's jaw-dropping stuff.
03:00:14.000And afterwards, Eric and Mike took me aside and they said, you know, We understand why this is having the effect on you that it's having, but you're wrapped around the axle.
03:01:42.000My experience trying to get the topic addressed anywhere for more than a decade was that it was like having a big hammer and there's a bell and you keep running at the bell and slamming it with the hammer and there's no sound.
03:02:00.000There's nothing that you can do to make it ring.
03:02:04.000Now, maybe, maybe at this higher profile, there is now enough firepower to get that bell to ring.
03:02:11.000But Eric's podcast, which is probably among the best places if you want to know the scientific story to go to, you can listen to the portal number 19 and you can hear him.
03:03:37.000What do we do about this and how many other thises are they?
03:03:39.000I happened on this completely by accident.
03:03:42.000I happened on this because I was a generalist who was interested in interesting things and I was interested in evolution and this just happened to show up.
03:03:54.000There were features of my character that caused me to pursue it when others would have let it go.
03:04:00.000It still indicates that there may be many such things lurking that we have no awareness of and that the fact that systems are so good at shutting down a story like this means that it would be very unlikely that you would have heard that there was a flaw like this.
03:04:21.000So I don't know the answer to your question.
03:04:24.000I do think Your point about the foundation being the important place that dealing with the rotten structure above is not where this has to go.
03:04:37.000What we are finding out is that in system after system, something has gone wrong.
03:04:42.000I think there are a small number of themes that explain why these systems go wrong.
03:04:47.000I think we have taken the magic of market forces, which really are magic for certain things, and we have infused them where they do harm rather than good.
03:05:00.000In my opinion, markets are excellent at figuring out how to do things and they are terrible at deciding what to do.
03:05:09.000And we have put them in charge of both jobs.
03:05:12.000So we are so in love with the magic of what they can accomplish that we don't realize that they, you know, science, for example, is too delicate to allow market forces to govern it.
03:05:23.000If you let market forces govern it, it becomes like any other market and it turns scientists into salesmen.
03:06:08.000Thanks, and I really appreciate you, too.
03:06:11.000If it is not clear, your podcast, which you have built, is one of the few things of its magnitude that is not corrupt, which is why I think you have so many good people willing to come here at the drop of a hat and talk to you.