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00:00:29.000You know, every single morning I have hot chocolate and it takes about 45 minutes of preparation time, has about four different ingredients, so I start that and then I have some chocolate over the course of the day.
00:01:18.000Dark chocolate, especially, has all kinds of very positive health benefits.
00:01:23.000I'm not saying that everyone should just eat chocolate bars all day and you're going to live forever, but actually, the woman who lived longest of everyone in recorded history ate two pounds of chocolate a week, Jean Calment in France, so at least...
00:01:40.000It's a lot, but she lived to 122. But chocolate's different in terms of, like, some chocolate is, like, really sugar-based, and some chocolate is more of, like, kind of...
00:01:51.000I really like dark chocolate and peanut butter together.
00:02:55.000I doubt there's something that's chemical about chocolate, but I think there's probably an association with chocolate and happiness and everybody's...
00:03:03.000Lots of people's grandmothers gave them little chocolates.
00:03:07.000I think that there's a little bit of that.
00:03:41.000That was the idea that I had read, that some people like chocolate when they're depressed, when they're heartbroken.
00:03:48.000They like chocolate, sort of a replacement for love.
00:03:51.000Yeah, I mean, definitely, if you're feeling bad and you eat chocolate, you're probably going to feel better.
00:03:57.000So maybe it is a replacement in a little way.
00:03:59.000So you were a part of this open letter recently about COVID-19, where you want to get to the bottom of the origins of it.
00:04:09.000And this is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and a lot of people have been talking about it lately.
00:04:14.000Now that Trump's out of office, it's sort of freed up the discussion.
00:04:17.000For the longest time, discussing that in terms of it not being just some sort of a random mutation from bats, And coronaviruses, that it may have been a lab leak, was so taboo because it was what Trump was pushing.
00:04:33.000And it's so crazy that something, which is science, it's a scientific discussion and inquiry, that it could be stunted by these political ideas when someone is so polarizing, like Trump,
00:04:48.000that people just completely want to reject very plausible and possible ideas just because of him.
00:04:56.000I was the lead drafter with a community of other people and lead scientists around the world of this letter.
00:05:04.000And since the beginning of last year, 2020, I had maybe the leading website in the world that was just stating what is the evidence about the origins of COVID-19, particularly the evidence for a lab leak.
00:05:20.000And the evidence is actually really strong.
00:05:23.000It's all circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any evidence of the other hypotheses of where COVID comes from, like this series of jumps through different animals in the wild.
00:05:36.000And so I, for a long time, more than a year, have been saying, hey, we need to look really seriously at this.
00:05:42.000Not because we know or certainly I don't know for sure that's where COVID comes from, but in my view, it's the most likely hypothesis worthy of a full investigation.
00:05:53.000And so there was a World Health Organization organized an independent advisory committee Yes.
00:06:17.000In that press event, what they said was, we don't support investigating the possibility of a lab leak any further, but we should investigate what seems like a much less likely hypothesis that COVID started with frozen foods being shipped to Wuhan.
00:06:33.000And so we already had a community of scientists and others who'd been meeting virtually For a while, trying to really say, where does this come from?
00:08:02.000He logs off and then comes back on, and then she asks him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19, and he says, well, China's done an amazing job, and let's just change subjects.
00:08:13.000The woman keeps getting back to Taiwan, and he won't recognize Taiwan because China doesn't recognize Taiwan.
00:08:20.000And China has some sort of strange, I don't know what it is, but there's some sort of political influence on the World Health Organization.
00:10:11.000So WHO is in a really, really difficult position because on one hand, we're asking them to investigate and call out a member state.
00:10:20.000On the other hand, their governing body essentially is made up of member states, including China.
00:10:27.000Yeah, it's just so strange to see scientific inquiry and analysis Well, that's the whole story here.
00:10:38.000Unfortunately, the story of COVID is that.
00:10:42.000I mean, it was politics that made it so that you could have this outbreak.
00:10:47.000And we can talk more about where the outbreak started.
00:10:50.000But wherever it started, whether it was a lab leak or something else, if you had had a fully functioning system, if it hadn't been Chinese politics and the national instinct or the natural instinct, Hadn't been to cover up, to silence the whistleblowers, to lie essentially to the World Health Organization and the international community.
00:11:09.000It could well have been possible to suppress COVID in the first few weeks, and we wouldn't be having any of this.
00:11:17.000And then it was politics that made China...
00:11:20.000Again, whatever the origin, carry out this massive cover-up over the course of the last year where they destroyed samples, eliminated or removed databases, imprisoned Chinese journalists asking tough questions and put a universal gag order on their scientists,
00:11:37.000making it impossible for them to speak about any of this stuff.
00:11:41.000That's pretty incredible that that's not really well known.
00:11:46.000So for me, it's been more than a year, and I have it on my Jamie Metzl website, and I've been trying to tell everybody, not to point fingers, but to say, like, we have a real problem here.
00:11:57.000Unless we can just be really honest about what's the problem that we're facing, how are we possibly going to address it?
00:12:03.000Now, what is the circumstantial evidence?
00:12:06.000So let me start from the beginning of this.
00:12:10.000We know we have a long history of these pathogenic outbreaks and they tend to happen in more tropical parts of China and Southeast Asia and just tropical parts of the world.
00:12:23.000So when SARS, when this outbreak began, For me, I had a little bit of background.
00:12:30.000One of the reasons why I started to get suspicious very early on is I'd recently, before then, been in Wuhan.
00:12:38.000And I knew Wuhan wasn't a place where a bunch of yokels are eating bats.
00:13:13.000Because there was a paper that came out in The Lancet in January of 2020. And in that paper, it made clear that around a third of the first COVID cases had no exposure to that market.
00:13:28.000And so if everything started in the market, you would have expected all of the early cases to have had a market exposure.
00:13:36.000And so that was known—their government knew that in January, but they didn't admit it until May of last year.
00:13:41.000Was there a common denominator for all the people that were exposed?
00:13:46.000Now, so the finding patient—so-called patient zero, that's the essential— The essential question.
00:13:53.000If the lab leak hypothesis is true, then either patient zero would be someone who works at one of these Chinese virology institutes, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or it would be someone who was exposed to a virus that had somehow escaped from that,
00:14:13.000whether it was through waste or maybe an animal escaped or something like that.
00:14:18.000If the alternative story that many scientists believe and could well be true, that the patient zero, it comes from a series.
00:14:29.000There was animal to animal, what are called intermediate hosts.
00:14:32.000It started with a bat and then went back to a pangolin or whatever and eventually to a human.
00:14:37.000Then you would find a patient zero somewhere that was that first human.
00:14:43.000I think this is a really important point.
00:14:47.000If that's the case, you'd have to say, well, what are the chances that that patient zero from this series of animal-to-animal-to-human transmissions?
00:14:56.000It just happens to be it shows up in Wuhan, which is the only city in China with a level 4 virology institute.
00:15:06.000That has the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that is doing gain-of-function research trying to make those viruses more virulent, particularly by making them more able to infect human cells.
00:15:25.000If patient zero is just somebody who had an exposure to an animal, you have the mathematical odds of that person just showing up in Wuhan would be actually kind of absurd.
00:15:38.000There's also an issue with the actual structure of the virus itself, right?
00:15:43.000Well, this is a virus that is ready-made for getting to humans.
00:15:50.000For the first SARS, we were able to track how it jumped, and you could see, in retrospect, how you could see it got closer and closer, and as the virus mutated, it became more able to infect humans.
00:16:05.000This virus showed up As a matter of fact, in the comparative studies of different animals, including humans, humans are the most susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
00:16:21.000So somehow, you have to explain how this virus shows up, kind of seemingly out of nowhere, in Wuhan, ready for action, ready to fully infect humans.
00:16:32.000Now, this level 4 virology lab that's in Wuhan, what are they doing those studies for?
00:16:39.000Yeah, it's a really important question because there are a lot of people who are saying things that I don't agree with, that, oh, this is some kind of military bioweapon.
00:16:51.000Say what you want about Chinese government.
00:16:55.000And so for them, I truly believe, if you had to ask me what's the most likely story, I believe that they recognized that these kinds of pathogens are a big threat to humans and that we're getting more and more,
00:17:11.000the frequency of these kinds of outbreaks is growing.
00:17:13.000And rather than being behind the curve and waiting for some terrible outbreak, the idea was, well, can we predict how these viruses will evolve?
00:17:24.000Can we get ahead of the game in developing treatments and vaccines for what we think may be coming?
00:17:31.000And that's what this gain-of-function research is about.
00:17:34.000And so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing We're good to go.
00:18:01.000How the most dangerous pathogens might develop.
00:18:04.000And if my hypothesis is true, I think there was an accident.
00:18:09.000And there's a whole history of people who are warning, saying, well, we're trying to prevent some kind of future threat.
00:18:15.000But in our effort to prevent it, we're actually increasing the likelihood of it happening.
00:18:20.000Wasn't that lab cited in 2018 for safety violations as well?
00:18:48.000Have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this Level 4 lab, are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in?
00:19:13.000And now he's started to be more open and actually has been quite vocal.
00:19:18.000What was his motivation for being on the other side?
00:19:22.000It's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high-profile There were scientists, virologists, who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild,
00:19:44.000that was going to lead to a kind of a positive outcome where we'd say, hey, let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces, climate change, all those things that we should be very mindful of.
00:20:11.000There was a process where a series of scientists did two things.
00:20:15.000One, they came out with a letter in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests.
00:20:27.000And there was an academic paper in a journal called Nature Communications, and both made the case, oh, this isn't a lab leak.
00:20:34.000And then there was a concerted effort to label Anybody else as a conspiracy theorist.
00:20:40.000I spent last year in that uncomfortable space.
00:20:46.000I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist.
00:20:49.000I try to be data-driven in everything that I do, but I really felt that this was a very real possibility and it deserved a full investigation.
00:20:57.000And it was only in the beginning of this year, 2021, that that started to turn.
00:21:45.000Sent messages to my friends at the World Health Organization and saying, look, this is being misreported.
00:21:52.000The World Health Organization hasn't said this, and the position of the WHO must be we have to investigate all hypotheses.
00:22:02.000And I was very pleased that three days later, so the press event was on a Tuesday, that Friday, Tedros Adhanom, who's the director general, he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated, which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis.
00:22:20.000And then our letter came out, which was just last week.
00:22:25.000I mean, it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then.
00:22:29.000And that's been picked up in I think we're good to go.
00:22:51.000It's a thorough, unrestricted, unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records, all the samples.
00:23:00.000There's tons of scientists in China who were working on these issues.
00:23:05.000Very, very few of them have been interviewed.
00:23:15.000The people that were initially very vocal and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak, and you said they were highly motivated and they labeled all the folks a conspiracy theorist.
00:23:33.000And so there's been a lot of controversy around a guy named Peter Daszak.
00:23:39.000And Peter is an interesting figure, because if you had asked me a year ago, A year and a half ago, who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology?
00:23:52.000He would be really at the top of my list.
00:23:54.000He was one of the heroes of understanding where the first SARS came from.
00:23:59.000He has an organization called EcoHealth Alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these But he also, through EcoHealth Alliance, was a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically the gain-of-function research that was being done there.
00:24:17.000And I truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious.
00:24:20.000The idea was, well, if we want to understand dangerous pathogens, we have to do it in the place where those dangerous pathogens are.
00:24:29.000Then, under the Obama administration, there was a moratorium on this kind of gain-of-function research, and then it was lifted in the Trump administration.
00:24:42.000And so for Peter, I understand that his whole experience of his life has been, well, this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from.
00:24:54.000But this could be just a very different story.
00:24:57.000And for me personally, that's, I think, one of the reasons why I was able to see this a little earlier, perhaps, than other people, is that part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science, but another big chunk of my life has been in the world of understanding China.
00:25:12.000And so I think if you're just in the world of science, you don't understand China, you think, well, the Chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak.
00:25:21.000But I know That in the Chinese government, they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of Mao and all the millions of people who died under Mao.
00:25:29.000When they got their speed trains going, the first train had this terrible crash, and they just buried the whole train and pretended like it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to dig it up.
00:26:03.000And his influence shaped the way the entire world was addressing this outbreak?
00:26:10.000I wouldn't say it's one guy, but it was, I think, a relatively small number of people.
00:26:15.000Because they certainly, the Lancet letter, and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it, that really shaped things.
00:26:26.000Definitely, if the story in the beginning had been, maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump, maybe it comes from a lab leak, we need to look at both options, I think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on China.
00:26:43.000It wasn't just one guy, but Peter certainly was very influential.
00:26:47.000Then, in spite of this conflict of interest, He actually was selected as a member of this World Health Organization Independent Advisory Committee.
00:26:58.000So one of the people who went on this mission to China was Peter.
00:27:02.000He also is the chairman of The Lancet, the same British journal that I mentioned.
00:27:12.000And I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong.
00:27:15.000I'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of interest, you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles.
00:27:20.000It's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data when you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with and That scares the shit out of me.
00:27:46.000Well, you know this better than most anybody, Joe, because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche and people are people, even scientists.
00:27:54.000And everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and why.
00:28:01.000And so I'm sure that you could, maybe even should, have Peter on the show and he'll give you his story.
00:28:07.000But at least from the outside looking in, the way I would see it is, well...
00:28:12.000He's invested his entire life into doing the right thing, trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak.
00:28:22.000He correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats.
00:28:30.000Wherever COVID-19 SARS-2 comes from, still those are good things to do.
00:28:38.000He has a longstanding relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a friendship with the people who work there.
00:28:50.000My guest, and I can't speak for him, he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story.
00:28:58.000I mean, there are lots of very prominent scientists.
00:29:01.000I would say there are more prominent scientists Who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild than there are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab leak.
00:29:15.000But what I will say, I'm in touch with lots of people who are world-famous scientists, scientists who many, many people will know who are privately telling me We think that there's a 90% chance that it comes from a lab, but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck.
00:29:42.000It's like, oh, oops, they don't have it.
00:29:44.000So people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things.
00:29:48.000And as scientists, I mean, the problem is the scientists rely on data, and there wasn't data because China was covering it up.
00:29:55.000And the journalists require scientists to legitimate claims about the origins.
00:30:03.000And so there was this weird thing that's lasted for a year, and our hope is, and we're starting to see, that our letter...
00:30:11.000Has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer.
00:30:20.000What has started to be discussed mainstream, like Newsweek had the cover where it talked about the lab leak hypothesis and people were talking about it more often.
00:30:29.000Brett Weinstein, who was very vocal about it very early on, And Heather Hying were just on Bill Maher talking about- I loved it.
00:30:36.000I mean, I thought that was a fantastic interview.
00:30:39.000And that's why I'm so happy to be here with you, Joe, because it's one thing where people have a gut feeling, like, oh, I don't trust China.
00:30:45.000I feel it was a lab leak, or I want to protect the environment.
00:30:50.000I feel like, well, this is the kind of thing of nature fighting back.
00:30:53.000And we don't know, but we have to follow the data and be fearless in asking tough questions.
00:30:59.000Yeah, that's a problem that we have with our culture today is that we've fallen into this very strange situation where we really have two sides of America.
00:32:30.000But it's really unfortunate exactly what you're describing is that people, we live in these kind of information cul-de-sacs where we just are stuck.
00:32:39.000And it seems to me we should just say, well, let's try to be open-minded.
00:32:44.000And that doesn't mean we don't have views.
00:32:45.000We all exist on some kind of spectrum kind of for everything.
00:32:49.000But if we're just stuck there and we can't even look, we can't even hear what other people are saying, we're going to drive ourselves to not just to ignorance but terrible decisions.
00:32:59.000We just have such a tendency to buy into narratives, and I think now more than ever, because there's almost, not almost, there's too much information out there to pay attention to everything.
00:33:08.000So we find the information that fits our narrative, we lock into it, we hold onto it, and then we just stick with it and argue against anything that opposes it.
00:33:18.000And I'm mindful of it because especially with all of this conversation about the origins of the pandemic, I'm now on Twitter more than I was before all of this because there's a lot that's...
00:33:33.000I mean, it's great in a way, but now every time when I go on Twitter, it's like all these people who I really respect, who agree with me, I see their feeds.
00:34:31.000Now, moving forward from here out, what do you think needs to be done in terms of opening up inquiry, being able to completely figure out the origins of this virus,
00:34:46.000and what could be done to So the next step is going to be when this joint committee that I mentioned, made up of the Independent Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization and their Chinese government counterparts,
00:35:06.000they are going to be issuing their preliminary report within a couple of weeks.
00:35:13.000As I said very publicly, I hope that the report is much better than just the really just atrocious press event that they had on February 9th.
00:35:23.000In the best case scenario, they'll say, just exactly like we did in our open letter, that one, This wasn't a full investigation.
00:35:35.000I mean, they essentially had four weeks on the ground in Wuhan, two weeks in quarantine, and two weeks a fully chaperoned, highly curtailed study tour.
00:35:45.000But if they were to say, here is what a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation, the origins of the pandemic, with full access, To all samples, records, and personnel would look like, that would be a start.
00:35:59.000But they're in a real bind because it's going to be a joint report.
00:36:04.000If they say what needs to be said, just in total honesty and fearlessness, this is the full investigation, examining all hypotheses, including the possibility of a lab leak, it's very likely the Chinese government isn't going to sign off on that letter,
00:36:23.000But if they do another compromise, like they tried to do in the February 9 press event in Wuhan, where they try to throw out some tidbits, have a little more information, but not too much upset their Chinese counterparts, then that process is going to be delegitimated.
00:36:42.000So I don't know how they're going to get out of that bind, but I certainly hope that they're honest.
00:36:47.000But let's just say, hypothetically for now, that they're honest.
00:36:51.000The Chinese government is unlikely to say, oh, sorry about that.
00:36:56.000We've been doing this full cover-up for a year.
00:37:00.000We've destroyed the samples, eliminated the records, imprisoned the journalists, gagged the scientists.
00:37:28.000To tell you the truth, I don't know whether we're going to be able to have the full investigation that we need to get to the bottom of this, but at very least, we should articulate what that is.
00:37:41.000And if China wants to tell the rest of the world, essentially, screw you, we have millions of people dead from this totally avoidable pandemic, the future of our species depends on understanding where it comes from,
00:37:58.000But we don't want you to look deeply at what happened.
00:38:03.000At least, at very least, there should be a political cost for that.
00:38:07.000But at most, we'll get as much information as we possibly can.
00:38:12.000I was reading that if China had been honest about it from the beginning and let everybody know about the pandemic, like the moment they knew about it, it would have saved 95% of the lives.
00:38:44.000The earlier you intervene, the greater the possibility to stop it.
00:38:50.000This is certainly a highly contagious virus.
00:38:54.000But in those early critical days, I mean, China, they silenced the whistleblowers, they started destroying the materials they didn't share immediately, even the genomic sequence of the virus.
00:39:12.000China was absolutely atrocious and there's a percentage, not the full percentage, but every single person who dies from COVID, part of that is attributable to the failure of the Chinese government, particularly in the first month.
00:39:28.000There's other parts of it that are attributable to the massive failures that we had here in the United States and elsewhere.
00:39:34.000It's such a fascinating country, you know, because they have this weird mix of the government and business.
00:39:45.000And they have influence over the media, they have a full lockdown on the internet, and if anybody promotes anything that's negative about the Chinese government, whether it's bloggers or journalists, they just arrest them and make them vanish.
00:40:00.000Well, so what I would say is it's the Chinese government.
00:40:03.000Even business is subject to the Chinese government.
00:40:17.000But never one as sophisticated as these guys.
00:40:21.000And it's not like, you know, I traveled in former Eastern Europe in the old days.
00:40:26.000We talked about it last time I was on the show.
00:40:28.000I've traveled all through North Korea.
00:40:30.000And there's one thing when you go to an authoritarian, or in this case a totalitarian system, when it's totally dysfunctional.
00:40:36.000And you see that when you see people pulling plows on their backs in North Korea.
00:40:40.000It's another thing to go to a place like China where it's an incredible level of sophistication.
00:40:46.000I mean, one of the reasons why we're even having this conversation is their level of scientific acumen and artificial intelligence and genomics is incredible.
00:41:45.000You know, a virus that starts somewhere and spreads, it affects all of us.
00:41:48.000So our fate is dependent in this and in many other ways on the behavior of governments like China's.
00:41:56.000And so when they have these kinds of terrible I don't even want to call it a breakdown because maybe the government was working as designed to prevent the Communist Party from losing face.
00:42:13.000And so this idea that, well, what happens in your country is your business, it doesn't really make sense when we're talking about highly contagious viruses and lots of other things.
00:42:24.000I want to talk about, is there anything else you want to say about coronaviruses or about...
00:42:32.000I have a very strong view that not just that I think lab leak hypothesis is the most likely, but that what we need is a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into all of this.
00:42:49.000But I would certainly encourage your listeners not to take my word for it, but to really read the evidence.
00:42:55.000And that's why on my website, on jamiemetzel.com, I've just laid out the evidence.
00:43:34.000It's like, we don't have to think about politics all the time.
00:43:37.000He's so polarizing, unfortunately, because if he did a lot of the things that he did in terms of policy but didn't have this sort of polarizing personality, we'd have a very different discussion about all these different things.
00:43:52.000I mean, I don't agree with a lot of the policy things, but there was a style.
00:43:58.000And I think people have always had a sense, I think, for a long time, that if you don't pay attention to government, by and large, at least in the United States, you know, Some good things are going to happen.
00:44:13.000And I think that when you don't have the faith that your government is going to do things right, or just what to expect, or just that when you hear the voice of the president, it should kind of soothe you a little bit.
00:44:25.000Like Joe Biden, my former boss, when he speaks, I mean, he's an exciting enough guy, but you think, like, all right, I'm going to listen before bed, and then I'll fall asleep.
00:44:34.000You'll fall asleep halfway through this conversation.
00:45:19.000But to get back to my point, data, we have to be able to look at these situations like the pandemic outbreak and look at it.
00:45:30.000And not have rhetoric, not have these polarizing conversations, not have a vested interest in it being one way or the other.
00:45:38.000It has to be just looking at it and analyzing it and experts looking strictly at the evidence and discussing the evidence without any bias, without a need for one conclusion or the other to be...
00:46:00.000I mean, there was an article written about Brett Weinstein after he came on my podcast about how I was having this guy on to promote this conspiracy theory that's been widely debunked.
00:46:10.000And I remember reading that, and there was no data in that article, but it was basically a smear article.
00:46:16.000Yeah, and you're going to get it after this podcast.
00:46:19.000You'll get it more, and I guarantee you people— I think less.
00:46:23.000I think the tide's turned on that theory.
00:46:25.000But I think that even in the response to our letter—I mean, we've had the media response has been great, but there are a lot of people who've been saying, well— There are more prominent scientists who are saying that the zoonotic theory is more likely.
00:46:39.000And my feeling is they may even be right.
00:46:41.000And I welcome the conversation, but we have to have the conversation.
00:46:46.000So is there a possibility of getting those prominent scientists that do have this opinion and matching them up with prominent scientists that believe the lab leak hypothesis and having some sort of an actual scientific debate?
00:47:00.000Yeah, so it's funny that you mentioned that because there was a private thing, but I will now make public in our conversation.
00:47:07.000So I sent a note a few days ago to Peter Ben Imbaric, who is the person who leads the World Health Organization Organized Independent Advisory Committee.
00:47:21.000And when I said to Peter in that note, and I haven't yet heard back, but I imagine I will now, I said, why don't we have a private Zoom dialogue between the members of your committee and the signatories of our open letter, and let's just have this conversation.
00:47:38.000And I think that's the kind of thing that we need to do.
00:47:43.000And I hope it's possible, certainly in writing this letter, our goal wasn't to shut down conversation, but to open space for it.
00:47:53.000The best case scenario is scientific inquiry is supported and this becomes something we could all look at and say, okay, these guys are acting rationally now and let's figure out where this came from and how does this stop?
00:48:09.000How do we make sure that this doesn't happen again?
00:48:12.000The Level 4 Virology Lab in Wuhan, are they still operational?
00:48:17.000They've been taken over by the military.
00:48:19.000I mean, the first thing that happened after the outbreak is that the Chinese military came and took over.
00:48:25.000And it's not only that, there are lots of other virology institutes around China and around the world.
00:48:31.000Right now, Singapore, for example, is building A level four virology institute.
00:48:35.000So there's a real conversation to be had.
00:48:38.000One is how should we think about safety in these kinds of virology institutes, these kinds of biolabs?
00:48:45.000Second, should we have them at hub cities like Wuhan or Singapore?
00:48:50.000Or should we just put them out in the middle of Siberia or someplace like we put nuclear waste?
00:48:56.000And those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have.
00:49:00.000And that's why, coming back to your earlier point, This issue of polarization is so significant because, again, if we can't have the conversation, we're screwed.
00:49:10.000Well, here's another question, rather.
00:49:13.000What did they learn in studying these super dangerous viruses that was applicable in this pandemic?
00:49:21.000Because you would hope that if you're going to study these super dangerous viruses, You're going to have some solutions.
00:49:29.000But it didn't seem like there was any solutions on the table when the pandemic initially started.
00:49:34.000And there are people, like there's a scientist, Mark Lipsitch at Harvard, who have been traditionally one of the big opponents of gain-of-function research.
00:49:42.000And they said, you have the danger of realizing the thing that you're trying to prevent.
00:49:48.000So there were academic papers that, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, that said, oh, hey, it is possible to make coronaviruses more able to infect human cells.
00:50:02.000That was, I guess, it's useful information.
00:50:04.000Now we have lots of evidence that coronaviruses can mutate in ways that make them more able to infect human cells.
00:50:12.000We have hundreds of Millions of examples and more than 100 million examples.
00:50:16.000But was there any research on how to combat that?
00:50:19.000So that was what they were trying to do.
00:50:22.000But I think that they made progress in identifying the problem.
00:50:29.000As far as I know, there wasn't any significant, like, were we that far ahead in developing vaccines?
00:50:40.000And that's why I'm a little more sympathetic to the people who are critics of this aggressive gain-of-function research than to the people who are its proponents, like Peter Daszak, another scientist at University of North Carolina named Ralph Daszak.
00:50:54.000Barrick and others, because I just think that there are almost an infinite number of viruses that can threaten us.
00:51:02.000If we are going to try to push these viruses to make them more dangerous, I mean, we have to question, is that the right thing to do?
00:51:11.000And if we do it, we just need to make sure, do we have all of the safeguards in place?
00:51:16.000And that seems to me as an international question.
00:51:19.000I mean, if China, with all of its problems and all of its Insufficient safeguards and this culture of pushing science ahead as a vehicle for national greatness.
00:51:30.000If they're just making their own decisions about safety for these viruses that have the potential to kill as many people as they've potentially now killed, that's not just a Chinese issue.
00:52:07.000That's why in the earliest days of the pandemic, The right response from the Chinese would be to say, all right, this terrible thing has happened.
00:52:47.000There could be scientists in China who actually have known a lot from the beginning about this virus, how it functions, how we might respond to it.
00:52:57.000Those people have no access to the international community.
00:53:02.000There are these pathologies of the Chinese state, which are bad enough if you're living in China.
00:53:07.000But we're all, whatever the origins of the pandemic, we're all, I think, being victimized by those pathologies now.
00:53:16.000Has China offered any information about how to combat the virus?
00:53:22.000Have they contributed to the development of the mRNA viruses or vaccines?
00:53:28.000First, in terms of a public health response, I mentioned that China was absolutely atrocious, particularly in the first month or two of the virus.
00:53:38.000They also mounted the most aggressive and, in many ways, highly successful We're good to go.
00:54:16.000They've been even more aggressive with this, in my view, somewhat nutty, but maybe worthy of exploration idea, that it came from frozen foods shipped from someplace else.
00:54:26.000I mean, there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case.
00:54:29.000But not helpful with this, and certainly not helpful with providing access to the scientists who've been studying, just to your point, who've been studying this for years.
00:54:42.000The access to those people has mostly vanished.
00:54:45.000So they didn't really contribute to treatments.
00:54:48.000They basically figured out a way to lock people in their homes and isolate.
00:54:53.000They had more power over the population in terms of stopping their movement.
00:54:57.000But in treatments, they also have their own vaccine.
00:55:37.000And so that one, it's called a Trojan horse vaccine.
00:55:40.000And basically, you get a virus that is basically a non-harmful virus.
00:55:45.000You kind of neutralize it by taking out its kind of delivery package.
00:55:50.000And then put the gene that's delivered through that other virus into the body.
00:55:55.000Whereas the mRNA vaccine, what that's doing, it's hijacking the machinery of your cells and saying, hey cells, the mRNA is the messenger, messenger RNA. We kind of hijack and say, hey, here's a new message.
00:56:10.000And we say, the message is cells make this spike protein, which is something it's not part of normal human body, but we make this little protein.
00:56:20.000And then our body says, our immunological system says, hey, this is an alien thing, and it mounts a response.
00:56:26.000And that's what gives us our immunity.
00:56:28.000And the problem that I'm reading about the Johnson& Johnson virus is there's religious opposition to it.
00:56:35.000Because it was made from cell lines that were derived from aborted fetal tissue.
00:56:39.000Yeah, aborted fetal tissue in the 1980s.
00:56:43.000So I just want to be clear that all of these vaccines, certainly the American ones, I think are very effective, great vaccines, and everybody should be happy to take whatever ones they have access to.
00:56:56.000There were some Catholic bishops, and the Vatican was not fully this way, who said that because the Johnson& Johnson vaccine was derived in part,
00:57:11.000in small part, from a cell line taken from an aborted fetus in the 1980s, if you have a choice, you should avoid that.
00:57:21.000I think, in my view, that was an unfortunate statement.
00:57:26.000I think this is about health and safety.
00:57:28.000If anybody has access to a vaccine, it's my view that they should take it, not just for themselves, or they should do it for themselves, but it's also the faster we can reach herd immunity, the more the people who can't take vaccines will be protected,
00:57:44.000whether it's people in chemotherapy and other things.
00:57:47.000The Johnson& Johnson vaccine, since it's less effective, does it have less side effects?
00:57:56.000I mean, all of these vaccines have, at least the American ones and pretty much all of the vaccines, have very, very minimal side effects as far as we know.
00:58:06.000I mean, these are all vaccines that have been rushed, but I see no reason to—I don't think there's some kind of hidden thing that two years from now we're going to find out that these vaccines are more dangerous than— No, not saying that, but the side effects were some people have been pretty extreme.
00:58:21.000Like Ben Stein was just on television talking about, or on the internet rather, talking about side effects that he experienced.
00:58:32.000I mean, what we're doing is we're getting our body, like if your body, if there's some kind of alien invasion, that's what we've evolved for, And that's why every time you get a fever or whatever, it's your body's fighting something.
00:58:45.000But in that fight, your body is getting stronger.
00:58:49.000So I definitely think that there are – I wouldn't even – maybe you can call them side effects, but it's like your body is mounting this kind of response.
00:59:02.000Let's talk about, because we got into a little bit about China and genetics.
00:59:09.000There was an article that I read recently where there was some sort of program to try to make Chinese men more manly, that the government was instituting some sort of a program.
00:59:23.000And I read that, and see if you can find it, because it was a weird article.
00:59:27.000They were doing these manly exercises and shit.
00:59:51.000It's like if really, really wealthy people Can figure out how to genetically manipulate their children and their bodies before it's available to anyone else.
01:00:00.000They'll have such a massive advantage that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots will grow ever wider.
01:00:53.000But my question is, when does it lead to genetics?
01:00:57.000It says, while Chinese government has signaled concern that the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong athletic figures like, in quotes, army heroes.
01:01:08.000If I had to guess, I do a lot with Korea.
01:01:15.000And in Asia, there's a thing called Korean Wave.
01:01:49.000Anyway, we welcome all Koreans on Twitter to give us your thoughts.
01:01:53.000But my guess is that Chinese modern history, it all comes out of this mythology of the Long March, this kind of fake history that the Chinese government has, that they fought and defeated the Japanese, where in fact the nationalists were the ones who actually fought the Japanese.
01:02:11.000So my guess is that with this story is they're afraid of kind of their society becoming quote-unquote soft like they maybe see the Koreans, the Japanese, and us.
01:03:06.000If you don't mind, I'll just go back a little bit.
01:03:08.000So last year, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, who are scientists who developed the tool that you just mentioned called CRISPR. In 2012, they had their famous paper came out,
01:03:24.000which was essentially describing a basic science tool, something that you would do in a lab.
01:03:28.000Six years later, in 2018, the world's first three genetically modified CRISPR babies were born in China as a result of highly, in my view, unethical human experimentation by a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui.
01:03:45.000As a matter of fact, The World Health Organization Committee on which I serve was created in the aftermath of that.
01:03:52.000So what He Jiankui was doing and trying to do was to change one gene to try to give these two, and then it became three kids, greater resistance to HIV later in life.
01:04:08.000But we've entered the era of genetically modified humans and it's just in this little way and more broadly we're entering this period where our species has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life.
01:04:24.000Wasn't there some sort of—because they were trying to give them resistance to HIV, didn't it impart some sort of cognitive benefit?
01:04:33.000Well, there were stories that it may have from some experiments that were done in mice, and there was some analysis that was later partly debunked from the UK Biobank that had suggested that.
01:04:48.000But the short answer is nobody really knows, and that was why it was— So unethical to do these human experimentations because the outcomes were so unknown.
01:05:00.000Having said that, even though this was a terrible first step, it's my absolute expectation that in the future, and whether that future is 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 5 years from now or 50 years from now— We will begin a process of genetic modification of humans that will start very small.
01:05:19.000It will certainly start with changing single mutations that would otherwise condemn a child to die of a terrible, deadly genetic disorder.
01:05:34.000But over time, as we increasingly understand the complexity, not just of the human genome, but of systems biology more broadly, we will move from that smaller bit of engineering to bigger.
01:05:47.000We'll also use tools of embryo selection.
01:05:50.000Right now, an average woman going through IVF has about 15 eggs extracted.
01:05:55.000Let's say you have 10 viable pre-implanted embryos in in vitro fertilization.
01:06:02.000So now you can screen each one of those 10 embryos, and you can rank order them roughly in the tallest, likely tallest to likely shortest.
01:06:11.000In a small number of years, likely highest genetic component to likely lowest genetic component of IQ. It's all highly, highly controversial stuff, but this is where we're going.
01:06:22.000So I do think that it will be possible that we'll have embryo selection and then very likely we'll be able to use stem cell technology called induced pluripotent stem cells to turn adult cells into stem cells.
01:06:35.000So just to make it practical, let's say...
01:06:38.000A woman has a skin graft and there's millions of skin cells.
01:06:42.000You induce those skin cells into stem cells, stem cells into egg precursor cells, egg precursor cells into eggs.
01:06:49.000Now let's say you have 10,000 eggs and average male ejaculation has hundreds of millions or sometimes little billions of sperm.
01:06:57.000You fertilize those 10,000 eggs, use high-throughput screening to extract a few cells and sequence them from each, and now you have 10,000 options.
01:07:07.000And then you have real possibilities, and you don't even need to use genome editing.
01:07:11.000Our ancestors took chickens laying one egg a month and turned them into chickens laying one egg a day, not knowing anything about genetics, but just through this kind of selection.
01:07:21.000And what does it mean for humans, for agriculture?
01:07:25.000For so many other things when we are the drivers of that evolutionary process.
01:07:29.000That's where people get really uncomfortable, right?
01:07:32.000Because now we're entering into what many people would consider eugenics.
01:07:37.000You're engineering the human race for the most favorable outcomes.
01:07:44.000And maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but Sometimes less favorable outcomes create a different strength.
01:09:08.000That means that something that seems really good now, like being a big T-Rex, in some future environment is actually a disadvantage.
01:09:16.000So if we start making even well-intentioned decisions, even to eliminate terrible diseases, it may be that we limit not just our diversity, but through our diversity, our resilience as a species.
01:09:29.000But there's also, human beings tend to, we like to innovate, right?
01:09:36.000And the more time people spend on innovation and the construction of new methods, technology, new things, the more time they spend on that, the better they're going to get at that.
01:09:50.000If they're more sexually viable, if they're more aggressive, if they're more athletic, there's going to be less time being spent on those things.
01:11:08.000Maybe if you grabbed a monkey or Australopithecus and said, hey man, one day you're going to be flying in a plane and you're going to be floating around in a boat.
01:11:18.000And I think Australopithecus would say, well, I want to sit in business class.
01:12:05.000And that's the work that our World Health Organization committee is trying to grapple with, is how do we try to create a governance system that can transform We try to prevent terrible abuses, because it's clear we can identify what feel like, at least for now,
01:12:22.000And we can identify some things where we think, well, that seems pretty good.
01:12:26.000I mean, if someone's kid is going to die of a terrible genetic disorder and we have the ability to prevent that, well, let's do it.
01:12:33.000And there's a lot of gray area in between, and our sense of what's okay and not okay Changes over time.
01:12:42.000And that's why it's a dynamic process.
01:12:44.000Just like you were saying before on politics, if we kind of force ourselves into one extreme or another, we'll end up with the wrong answer.
01:12:51.000But the challenge is, how do we negotiate this part in the middle that helps us advance the beneficial science but prevent abuses?
01:13:00.000And that's why the ethics are so important.
01:13:03.000But it's really hard to define what the abuses are because people think differently about them.
01:13:08.000And we also don't really know what the consequences of each individual decision will be and how they'll lead to more.
01:13:14.000And if we have ethics, these ethics are not going to be globally accepted.
01:13:18.000There's going to be people or countries that go, you know, we don't like our standing in terms of the world market.
01:13:25.000And this is one way to really elevate our entire nation is to engineer a completely new kind of human.
01:13:32.000It's exactly right that countries, just like in the United States in the Second World War and immediately after, we had all these wise people like Vannevar Bush and others who said American leadership in science and technology is the foundation of American power.
01:13:49.000Right now, that's what the Chinese government is saying.
01:13:52.000When I went to the Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI, which is not in Beijing, it's in Shenzhen, and I saw they have the world's largest collection of sequencing machines, there was a Chinese flag on every one of those sequencing machines.
01:14:06.000When He Jiankui, the scientist who I mentioned before, Manipulated these embryos for the first CRISPR babies.
01:14:14.000When he did his application, it was all about bringing glory to the Chinese state.
01:14:22.000And that's one of the problems that we face is that human beings, we've become this species with a global reach that just like we're seeing with the virus and so many other things.
01:14:33.000Small numbers of us are doing things that have big implications for everybody, but we don't have a system, a global way of solving these kinds of problems.
01:14:47.000The concern is that other countries are going to do what we would consider to be unethical, but through those decisions, they're going to gain some sort of an advantage, whether it's an advantage in terms of intelligence or advantage in terms of athletics.
01:15:01.000I mean, we already know that countries manipulate people's bodies in order to win the Olympics.
01:15:20.000In my book, Hacking Darwin, I have a whole chapter on this, which is called The Arms Race of the Human Race, and I play out some of those scenarios.
01:15:28.000So imagine you are a country That your population has decided, you know, this stuff, it's too scary.
01:15:40.000And there's another country that has made a different decision.
01:15:43.000And let's just say that you start to see evidence and maybe it won't work.
01:15:47.000I mean, maybe you just do nothing and it turns out that these guys are taking too big of a risk and then they've got some kind of big problem.
01:15:58.000Do you just say, all right, we're sticking to our guns, and we recognize that maybe we'll be less competitive than them in the future, and that's a price that we're willing to pay?
01:16:11.000If it's a big, powerful country, you probably can't.
01:16:15.000And if you can't stop them, and you don't want to pay the price of not doing it, do you feel that you have to match them?
01:16:23.000And just like in the Olympics, I mean, there are different societies that make different decisions of how they're going to do Olympics.
01:16:30.000Some say we're just going to let a bunch of kids play sports and the best ones will emerge.
01:16:34.000Some say we're going to measure all these kids and test them when they're five years old.
01:16:40.000And then we have a way of measuring those outcomes, which is gold medals.
01:16:45.000And maybe it's the case that these different collections of societal decisions will lead to different outcomes.
01:16:54.000There's nothing that's set in stone of why we in the United States have a higher standard of living than people in Venezuela or whatever.
01:17:02.000But if there's like a lot of little decisions that add up to these things called national competitiveness and the application of revolutionary science is one of them.
01:17:11.000The concern for a lot of people is that we're going to get to some situation where in order to become more competitive, people are going to do things that are very questionable or very unethical and ultimately very dangerous.
01:19:10.000And if you wanted to look at biological life objectively, you would imagine that there's some sort of – there's these competing elements, right?
01:19:18.000You have disease and you have immune systems that fight off the disease.
01:19:23.000And through this sort of selection and natural selection and mutations, some people develop and – Continue to breed and advance their lines and other genetic lines die off because they weren't able to compete or to handle these environmental stressors or these viruses or these various things.
01:19:49.000On one side you would say, I don't ever want to see someone suffer and die from a disease.
01:19:55.000But on the other side you say, how many people do we need on this planet?
01:19:59.000And that's where people get scared with eugenics.
01:20:01.000When you say, you know, what we need is the strongest, most healthy, most disease-free version of humanity.
01:20:13.000So does that mean people with diabetes should not be allowed to breed?
01:20:21.000So the whole history of eugenics is a terrible one.
01:20:24.000I think everybody recognizes the horrors of Nazi eugenics, but the Nazis actually learned a lot from the eugenicists here in the United States, who in the early 20th century Right.
01:20:53.000We won't always frame these questions as eugenics yes or no.
01:20:59.000I lecture a lot about this stuff and about the future of biology and reproduction, and a lot of people say things like what you've just said, or even say things like, you're saying that in the future there'll be far less incidence of Down syndrome.
01:22:06.000Maybe a better analysis or a better analogy, rather, would be if you gave a person an option and all you have to do is check a box and your child wouldn't have leukemia.
01:22:40.000But if you think that, all right, I believe in God, God is making decisions about my children, and God has for some reason decided that my kid is going to have a deadly genetic disorder, I'd say, well, I'm not down for that.
01:22:55.000But that's why we can't pretend like we don't have these powers that we increasingly have.
01:23:02.000And that's why I call these powers godlike powers in biology and AI and in many other areas.
01:23:09.000It's inevitable that if we survive and we don't blow ourselves up or there's not some sort of a natural disaster, that human beings are going to get better at virtually everything that we do currently.
01:23:20.000We're going to figure out more innovative ways to do things, we're going to invent better technology, and we're going to figure out ways...
01:23:29.000I mean, we already have figured out, if you look at...
01:27:39.000That is one thing that did happen, which was, I think...
01:27:42.000One of the very few positive silver linings of this pandemic is a lot of people realize, like, hey, I don't have to go to an office to work.
01:27:50.000So all this hour-plus time commuting, we can eliminate all that.
01:28:31.000What I said at the start is this isn't a snow day.
01:28:34.000Whatever happens with the vaccines, it's not like we just go back to our old lives.
01:28:39.000Our lives are going to be a hybrid of the kind of physical and virtual lives.
01:28:43.000But also in the realm that we were discussing with the biotech revolution.
01:28:49.000I mean, this mRNA platform isn't just about vaccines.
01:28:53.000It's going to be a whole new delivery mechanism for all kinds of health interventions.
01:28:58.000And the genetics revolution isn't just about human health care.
01:29:02.000It's going to fundamentally transform agriculture and how we think about materials.
01:29:08.000I know you've talked about This precision fermentation, where it's basically the way that we brew beer, we're going to be brewing all sorts of things, this cellular meat, plastics, energy.
01:29:21.000And so it's really, I think we're going to look back at this moment as a quantum leap.
01:29:26.000And some of those changes we'll think as negative, but some of them will actually, I think, end up feeling pretty positive.
01:29:34.000Well, that's oftentimes what happens in history, right?
01:29:37.000There's an event, and through that event, a lot of innovation and a lot of change springs out of it as an adjustment or as a reaction.
01:29:46.000Like World War II, I mean, it was a terrible experience, but...
01:29:50.000The technology of rockets and electronics and space travel were just massively pushed forward.
01:29:57.000I was actually telling somebody the other day when their microwave broke, like, do you know that the microwave comes out of this crash MIT effort to build the radar in the Second World War and the microwave technology was just a side effect?
01:30:14.000The exact what World War II was to electronics and space travel, I think that this pandemic will be to the genetics and biotech revolutions.
01:30:22.000When we were talking before, I showed you the Walter Cronkite clip.
01:30:27.000Do you sit alone sometime and think about all this genetic engineering and the possibility of manipulating human beings and wonder what the human of three, four, five hundred years from now is going to be like?
01:31:01.000And I think we're going to think very differently about how all kinds of biological systems work, about what makes a human, about how we interact with the environment.
01:31:12.000Certainly, we aren't all going to be living on the surface of this planet 500 years from now.
01:31:17.000You think 500 years from now, we'll be traveling to other planets?
01:33:03.000But this space hotel thing, if you see it, Jamie, it looks like what happens is some sort of shuttle-looking thing docks at the end of each one of those little ports, and you let people out.
01:33:25.000I mean, sometimes you see a thing where you think, like, how are they going to do that?
01:33:30.000I mean, looking at that, there's no technology there that you think, well, that whole technology needs to be invented in order to make this vision real.
01:33:40.000Like, we have pretty much every one of those technologies.
01:33:44.000I mean, they can't recreate artificial gravity by spinning like that.
01:33:48.000I don't know, but my guess is it has something, my guess, and I'm not a physicist, but something to do with gravity and holding a position in space, but I really just don't know.
01:33:59.000This is freaking me out just looking at it.
01:34:01.000They got a lot of these little docking ports.
01:34:03.000Yeah, well, there's going to be a lot of people up there.
01:34:30.000But the thing is, with this, like I was saying before, I think that technology is fully realizable.
01:34:35.000But what we learned from the Kelly brothers—I don't know if you've had one or both of them on the show—is that there are biological changes that happen to humans when we're in space for a long time.
01:34:47.000And so let's just say that future generations are going to live their entire lives in that space.
01:34:53.000So we may need to think about, well, what are some biological differences that could be engineered to make that possible?
01:34:58.000There's a guy named Chris Mason at Cornell.
01:35:02.000You've had my friend, our mutual friend David Sinclair on the show, who's thinking about what are the kind of interventions that could be made to reduce the threat of radiation.
01:35:16.000Building this infrastructure is possible.
01:35:18.000Changing who we are to make living there for our full lives possible, I think that's more advanced.
01:35:26.000And the same thing with, I know you recently had Elon Musk on again, and I think that's the same thing with Mars.
01:35:32.000Our human bodies aren't built for Mars.
01:35:36.000If we want to stay, we may need to think differently about how we're constructed.
01:35:39.000Well, that's where it gets spooky, because what if you make a commitment to adapt your body to the environment of Mars, but then you can't go back to Earth and survive, because the gravity is stronger and the radiation...
01:35:50.000Yeah, and it may be, and if I had to guess, it will be that some humans live their entire lives in space.
01:35:59.000That they will have a different, slightly at first, biology than us.
01:36:03.000And that if there are generations of people over many, many millennia who are living in space, eventually our biology will become more different.
01:36:13.000That's the real problem, because then we'll go to war with them.
01:36:18.000If we behave, if all we have that's guiding us is kind of our brains like when we were the Australia Epithecus, it may be the case.
01:36:27.000But we also have these millennia to continue to develop ethical systems because culture is part of our evolutionary inheritance as much or even more.
01:36:50.000So we have to figure out a way to evolve past biological competitiveness, like the primate DNA that we have that wants to dominate and control things and that makes someone want to be the governor of New York.
01:38:18.000Anyway, so chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, and what is it when you see chimpanzees in a community?
01:38:30.000I mean, part of it is curiosity, and part of it is this kind of jostling.
01:38:34.000And I think that both of them are part of the story.
01:38:37.000So if we just had jostling without the essential...
01:38:41.000The impulse of curiosity and learning that you've mentioned, I think that would be bad.
01:38:48.000If we just had that curiosity and there wasn't that competitive drive that made us want to be the fastest runner in the world or win the Nobel Prize, would that take away some of our edge?
01:39:02.000But there's some people that aren't competitive in terms of like they don't enjoy competition, but they do enjoy puzzles and they do enjoy innovation.
01:39:09.000They do enjoy personal challenges to try to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal.
01:39:16.000And then that comes back to your diversity point is that we have all these different kinds of people and we need them.
01:39:20.000If we were only people who were trying to be the alpha chimpanzee, I think our societies would fall apart.
01:39:28.000And so I think that we need those kinds of people.
01:39:32.000I want to say this is my biggest fear, but one of the things that I think about in terms of humans is that one day we're going to realize that one of the things that holds us back is these animal drives to reproduce.
01:39:46.000And that there is this sort of our built-in sexual selection and then emotions and ego and all these different things that have served us well.
01:39:58.000Over the millennia to get to 2021 that ultimately we're going to realize like these are a bottleneck to progress.
01:40:04.000And then we're going to turn ourselves into one of these little guys.
01:40:16.000He's like one of the most famous UFO abduction cases.
01:40:21.000Well, the good news is when everybody looks like that, nobody has hair.
01:40:25.000And so it's like we're all on the equal footing.
01:40:27.000We all have giant heads, too, and no one has any advantages physically because they're all basically the same thing.
01:40:34.000When you look at primates, if you look at a chimp and their small skull and small brains versus our large skull and large brains, and you go extrapolate, you look at the future and you look at like, well, where's this trend?
01:41:17.000I don't know why they have that image.
01:41:19.000I don't know what that is, but all these people that supposedly experienced alien abductions or sightings, it's always the same thing, for the most part.
01:41:29.000There's some variation, but there's a lot of this one thing, which is a small body with a large head.
01:41:35.000And you look at what humans are now versus what ancient primates used to be, If you keep going, that's what happens.
01:41:48.000Again, I write science fiction, so I try to think a lot about these kinds of things, and that's certainly one possibility.
01:41:55.000Or you could say, well, maybe we're going to supplement our brain function through technology.
01:42:02.000And so I know you talked with Elon Musk about this, of whether there's some kind of brain-machine interface so that not all of the activity happens in your brain.
01:42:15.000Maybe the sexual competition and sexual reproduction will be a driver, and maybe it won't.
01:42:22.000We have lots of experience in the past from societies that have tried to restructure the family, restructure the way men and women interact.
01:42:34.000But one of the key points, and I think why this moment in history is so interesting and it's so pregnant, is that for our entire history as a species and in our earlier incarnations,
01:42:49.000about 3.8 billion years, We've evolved through the Darwinian principles of random mutation and natural selection.
01:42:57.000And so all of these decisions weren't decisions.
01:43:00.000They just kind of happened, and you're born with a certain set of attributes.
01:43:04.000Now we have the ability to actually make decisions about our evolution that could push us and will push us in one direction or another.
01:43:13.000And then the big question is, do we have the wisdom to make those kinds of decisions wisely?
01:45:24.000But I think it's a race between exponentially evolving technology and our ability to develop ethical and governance systems.
01:45:35.000When you say that the three CRISPR babies were kind of a disaster, how was it a disaster?
01:45:41.000So here's the ideal scenario of how I would have liked to see, because I'm not opposed to using genome editing tools on pre-implanted human embryos in principle.
01:45:56.000It's just it needs to be done safely addressing a very real need That can't be addressed in any other way.
01:46:06.000And so the reason was, one, it wasn't transparent.
01:46:09.000Two, it wasn't trying to address a need.
01:46:13.000I mean, these were otherwise perfectly healthy babies.
01:46:19.000And the engineering was to try to confer on them an increased resistance to something that they may or may not be exposed to in the future HIV. How did they do that?
01:46:51.000But again, that's very different from saying, all right, this is a pre-implanted embryo that is carrying a single mutation that is almost certain to cause a deadly, untreatable genetic disorder.
01:47:07.000And so if these parents want to have their own biological child and their genetics dictate that either all of the embryos have that same mutation or they just have one embryo that has it, This one intervention will change a child's trajectory from dying young of a terrible disorder to living a full life.
01:47:29.000If that had been the first story Then I think it would have said, all right, how can we build on that?
01:47:36.000It was gonzo science, unregulated, sloppy science, non-transparent, and not addressing a need that couldn't be addressed in some other way, like condoms.
01:47:48.000Well, not just condoms, just medical treatments too, right?
01:47:51.000The death rate for people who have HIV is radically dropped.
01:47:55.000Yeah, but these kids wouldn't have had HIV. They just had a father who had it.
01:48:00.000Now, when you say transparency, do you mean like with the entire scientific community to let them know what they're doing and how they're doing it?
01:48:10.000So our World Health Organization Advisory Committee, one of the things that we're doing is calling for a registry.
01:48:19.000I mean, other than a very small number of people, including some scientists at Stanford and elsewhere, but nobody knew that this was even happening.
01:48:30.000So it was in 2008, in November, I remember this really well, All of a sudden, this story just emerged out of nowhere, and most everyone had no idea.
01:48:41.000And if you had asked me, I was doing a bunch of interviews then, and someone said, well, when will the world's first genome-edited babies be born?
01:48:49.000I would have said in 2018, I'd say maybe about Ten years from now, not because it wasn't possible, because scientists were already doing it in animals, but to go from something that works in animals to humans, especially embryos that are being brought to term,
01:49:07.000you need to be really careful, because otherwise it's like Nuremberg-style human experimentation, which is what I think this was.
01:49:14.000And, you know, it's funny, 2008 seems like it's recently.
01:49:19.000Oh, 2018. I'm sorry, it was 2018. It was just three years ago.
01:49:33.000So in our committee, our WHO committee, we were already meeting, and then there was a report that this scientist, Denis Reprikov in Russia, was planning on doing it.
01:49:45.000And so we issued a statement, and Dr. Tedros, I don't know, the WHO director general, he issued a statement, and then apparently they backed off.
01:50:02.000And again, that's why there are a lot of things that could be done, like even now using synthetic biology to create a pathogen more deadly than SARS-CoV-2.
01:50:12.000It's possible, but that's why we kind of want to try to create cultures and regulations to decrease the likelihood.
01:50:51.000That these people are going to go, well, editing genes to make superior people is just taking it a little too far.
01:50:58.000Well, what I can say is that when the news came out in November 2018 about these first CRISPR babies, in the first hours, there was a lot of crowing in the Chinese media, including state media, saying this is showing that China is leading the world.
01:51:16.000And then there was a massive international backlash, and then China flipped because they realized that if they became a pariah state, especially within the application of this kind of revolutionary science, they would lose more than they would gain.
01:52:15.000So not only that, they had a thing where they were funding, and still are, Funding scientists, especially scientists who were trained outside of China, to come back.
01:52:27.000They're giving them grants to do revolutionary science in all kinds of areas.
01:52:34.000There's a very strong cultural pressure, as I was mentioning before, to really push those limits.
01:52:40.000That brings us back To our original conversation about the origins of COVID, because let's just say that the lab leak hypothesis is right.
01:52:51.000And then let's say, well, how is the lab leak story connected to the CRISPR baby story?
01:52:59.000And you could say, all right, well, so you have this kind of young power.
01:53:04.000China is an ancient civilization, but a young power, and they basically destroyed their whole base in the Cultural Revolution.
01:53:12.000They now have these incredibly powerful tools, and they have a lot of nationalists and other pressures to drive science and scientists to cut corners and leap to the head of the line, but they don't have the governance systems.
01:53:31.000So it could easily be the case that these scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Maybe in the lab of the famous Batwoman, Dr. Xi, but maybe in Chinese military that was doing or commissioning work in the same facility.
01:53:48.000And we don't even know the full extent.
01:53:50.000But I think it's extremely likely, even whatever the origins of the pandemic, that there was all kinds of really aggressive science that's happening there.
01:54:00.000And I think that's happening across the board in AI and In genomics, in many, many different areas.
01:54:07.000Yeah, that's where it gets spooky, right?
01:54:38.000And I think they thought, just as he, in his application...
01:54:41.000He thought that he was going to win the Nobel Prize and his heroes were the British and American scientists who developed IVF, Steptoe and Roberts, and he was going to be like them and bring glory to China.
01:54:57.000So I think that was something that was supported.
01:55:00.000Among the small number of people who knew about it and then it went wrong and then I think China realized they had a PR problem and they had a legal problem so they wrote a stronger law and then they imprisoned this guy to make a point.
01:55:13.000When you say they had a legal problem, who's the legal problem with?
01:55:17.000Well, there wasn't sufficient regulation about whether what He Jiankui did was okay or not okay.
01:55:26.000And so that was what created the space for him to do this.
01:55:32.000And then I think they realized that this was really revolutionary science and that the state wanted to have more control.
01:55:40.000That doesn't mean that the state is against, in principle, human genome editing.
01:55:45.000I don't think ultimately they will be.
01:55:48.000But it does mean that they wanted to have control over what did and didn't happen, which I think they've probably reasserted.
01:55:57.000Wouldn't you think that would be really stifling to the scientific community in China if Hu Zhongkui is imprisoned for something that they most likely asked him to do?
01:56:10.000It's really an interesting thing because China, there are two different messages.
01:56:14.000One message is, to scientists and to entrepreneurs, Race forward as fast as you can.
01:56:21.000The world is a highly competitive place.
01:56:24.000China, the government, has set a goal of being the world's leading power by 2049. Science and technology are a big piece of how we're going to get there.
01:56:55.000But if we decide that we don't like something you're doing, you're going to disappear for a while, and then you're going to come back, and you're going to have to apologize.
01:57:04.000You may think that you're the most famous actress in China.
01:57:08.000But you're just going to disappear one day and then months later re-emerge and apologize and basically assert, oh, the government is in control of everything.
01:57:20.000Is that what happened with an actress as well?
01:57:41.000The media isn't allowed to say what's happening with Jennifer Aniston because people have a pretty good sense.
01:57:48.000And then three months later, Jennifer Aniston reemerges and says, I've realized I was wrong in some little minor infraction, and I pledge my support to the Chinese government,
01:58:41.000If you didn't know anything about Chinese history, it's, oh, isn't that great?
01:58:44.000Mao, it's like their George Washington.
01:58:47.000But if you know anything about Chinese history, you know that through the purges after the Civil War and the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, Mao is responsible for the deaths of about 47 million Chinese people.
01:59:00.000That's more than Hitler and Stalin's And Stalin combined.
01:59:05.000And yet the story has been recast as this is the father of the nation.
01:59:11.000And the reason is because the Communist Party is still in charge.
01:59:15.000And so if you get rid of Mao, what's the origin story of the communists?
01:59:55.000Every average nightly broadcast, let's say you have kind of the entire equivalent of the entire population of the United States watching this guy every night.
02:00:21.000And I think that's It's complicated because you look at the pictures of Shanghai, you see Beijing, and you see a really sophisticated place, and it is.
02:00:31.000But if you're on the wrong side of the Chinese government, you're in trouble.
02:00:34.000And that's why, as I said before, I am extremely confident there are many people in China right now who have highly relevant information about the origins of the pandemic, and they don't dare speak up.
02:00:50.000It's terrifying that that can coexist with what we deal with today in America, which is, you know, we complain about small infringements upon our freedoms.
02:00:59.000And we think that, you know, our rights are being stripped away, which, you know, there's arguments that we are and that we have had some, particularly during the pandemic when governors have grasped massive amounts of power, often without legislative control.
02:01:54.000It's not just speech that you agree with.
02:01:56.000Because as soon as you decide that someone can dictate what someone can and can't say, just because you think it's right, you open up the door to censorship.
02:02:06.000And censorship leads to what you're seeing right now in China.
02:02:14.000And though there's another thing of how do we find a common sense of reality and truth?
02:02:22.000Because it used to be—and you showed Walter Cronkite.
02:02:25.000It used to be everybody in the United States, you watch Walter Cronkite or one of those other guys, and you have a story of the world.
02:02:32.000Now it's not just that we live in different stories.
02:02:35.000We live in a world with entirely different— Factual foundations.
02:02:40.000I don't know the answer to this question.
02:02:42.000How do you avoid the kind of total relativism that they have in China where the government can just create a whole fake reality and then more than a billion people are forced to live in that reality?
02:03:00.000How do you have the kind of openness, but how can you have a center of gravity so that there can be a space where people can find common ground?
02:03:07.000I think we have to really clearly establish the narrative of how dangerous tribalism is and how human beings are inherently tribal because this is how we evolved.
02:03:16.000We evolved to find a tight-knit group of people that you can trust, and you stick with them in these small villages, and you fight against intruders.
02:03:23.000And this tribalism now is extended to 350 million people, or whatever we have here.
02:04:23.000It's just like, you're what New Yorkers look like.
02:04:25.000And it's totally normal and healthy that we'll have our differences.
02:04:31.000But if we don't have a space where we can interact with each other and share ideas and be convinced to do something even just a little bit differently, Then I think you're absolutely right.
02:04:43.000This tribalism is going to harm us, and winning for your tribe, in most cases, is losing for yourself and for your community.
02:04:53.000Yeah, I think we have to reject leaders who enforce tribalism, and I think the real hope of that is young people.
02:05:01.000Young people recognize in this message that censorship is inherently dangerous, and that there's so much reward People are so often rewarded for tribalism online.
02:05:14.000They're rewarded by the likes of the people that agree with you.
02:05:33.000And people are addicted to it and it becomes impulsive.
02:05:39.000It becomes this thing that they search and check all day long to see how their messages are being responded to and what arguments they're in with people.
02:05:50.000Is there division in their clan or is everybody united in this front?
02:05:54.000Even if the front is illogical and foolish as long as it's tribal and there's reinforcement from the other people in the tribe.
02:06:02.000Whether it's the election was stolen or whether it's the virus came from a bat.
02:06:06.000These narratives that people are so assured of that don't make any sense.
02:06:14.000You should be able to talk about stuff.
02:06:17.000And we should reward this kind of free discourse where people are being polite and people are being inquisitive and people are genuinely trying to find out what the actual facts are.
02:06:30.000Without any bias and without any need to flavor things to fit the narrative that their tribe holds onto.
02:06:38.000We've got to abandon all that shit because that's the only way we're going to get past this weird state we're in now where you've got a bunch of fucking morons storming Capitol Hill because they really think that, you know, you know what I'm saying?
02:06:52.000And it's like we're all, if we're not careful, we enter into our own Self-referential realities.
02:06:59.000I mentioned it earlier in the show, even with me, with our community calling for a full investigation, but by definition, we're all sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis.
02:07:08.000But we're all kind of in a world with each other and you get more and more affirmation.
02:07:13.000But you also mentioned something I think is really essential about the role of young people in getting us out of this.
02:07:19.000And I, for one, I actually have a lot of hope in the earliest days of the pandemic I gave a talk about these kinds of problems and how the only way we're going to solve these problems is by recognizing that we have to come together to do it.
02:07:35.000And all of these young people around the world rallied around that call.
02:07:42.000And we've now come together and we've founded an organization called One Shared World.
02:07:46.000It's about finding that common space, solving common problems.
02:07:51.000It's oneshared.world, if anyone wants to Go to the website and learn about it.
02:07:55.000But I think there is a lot of hope in these young people, but we all exist in this context.
02:08:01.000And the superstructure is pushing us in a certain way.
02:08:06.000And I think that while we have to focus on our individual behaviors, We don't look at the superstructure and say, well, what are all the incentives?
02:08:14.000And how are these incentives pushing us toward a certain set of behaviors?
02:08:22.000It's going to be really difficult to get out of them.
02:08:25.000So there's a lot of hope, but we also have a lot of work to do.
02:08:27.000Yeah, that's where we have a lot of work to do.
02:08:29.000These algorithms that have been created and they're generating enormous amounts of money for these social media companies.
02:08:35.000And so they have a vested interest in continuing to sort of, this divide is very valuable.
02:08:42.000Like the divide between us, the more they can find things that piss us off, it turns out that's the stuff that we engage with.
02:08:49.000And so the algorithms are favoring things that are inflammatory and favoring arguments that divide people.
02:08:58.000I had Tristan Harris on the podcast to talk about it, and he paints a very scary picture.
02:09:06.000It's really weird when you consider where this is all going and how there's no breaks.
02:09:12.000Yeah, and so that's the thing is that I think there was a time, as I was talking about this with somebody earlier today, there was a time in the early days of the internet where I think a lot of us, we had this theology, oh, the open systems are going to win.
02:09:27.000And so let's let the internet is going to bring freedom to the world.
02:09:31.000And we've learned out, what we've learned is Is that no technology comes with its own built-in value system.
02:09:38.000Every technology, you think, oh, a stirrup, that seems like a good idea.
02:09:41.000Well, yeah, the Mongols used it and conquered the world and killed a lot of people.
02:09:46.000The plow, every technology can be used for good or for bad, and these technologies are just the same, but they're so powerful that if we don't really try to establish frameworks for how they can be used ethically, we'll just be pushed into all these kinds of behaviors That are antithetical to who we would at least like to be.
02:10:52.000I think that's why I think that message has been spread across China.
02:10:59.000And that means that there are a lot of other people, like these scientists, possibly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere, Who know what the system is.
02:11:08.000And I think it was a way of delivering a message that everybody in China would hear.
02:11:35.000So this is the challenge, is that China is becoming more powerful.
02:11:41.000COVID, even if COVID started with an accidental lab leak, as I believe it most likely did, has in many ways made China relatively more powerful because they got a handle on it.
02:11:55.000The United States antagonized until recently all of our friends and allies.
02:12:02.000And so I think, frankly, it's going to take the rest of the world coming together to balance China and the rest of the world coming together in spite of our differences and saying, here is a vision of the world in which we would like to live.
02:12:22.000We're able to investigate accidents with the kind of free and open access where there aren't shameful land grabs in the South China Sea or in the Himalayas.
02:12:35.000It's where people are free to express their views of how they would like to live and how they'd like to be governed.
02:12:43.000And if you, China, would like to be part of that world, we will welcome you, but here are the rules.
02:12:49.000If you don't want to be part of that world, here are the consequences.
02:13:15.000And not just for them, but also for ourselves, which is why what's happened here in these past years in the United States was such a heartbreak for many people, myself included.
02:13:23.000A world that's not based on standards of ethical behavior is a world that is going to decay.
02:13:32.000And there's nothing that says that we will have the kind of security and stability in the next 76 years That we've had in the last 76 years since the end of the Second World War.
02:13:45.000But when you see all these companies just sort of caving in at China because of the amount of money that China generates them, even the NBA caved into China.
02:14:01.000It's spooky because they have so much money to be made.
02:14:04.000And China, the Chinese government does a great job Of using that kind of pressure, but there's no way that any individual company can stand up to China on its own.
02:14:15.000I have an acquaintance of mine who years ago was on the board for GE. And you think, oh, GE, that's a big company.
02:14:24.000And so somebody in China, this was years ago, went to their representative in China and said, look, you have two big businesses in China.
02:14:34.000One is wind turbines, and the other is medical equipment.
02:14:38.000We're going to steal your wind turbine business.
02:14:41.000We're going to steal all the technology.
02:14:46.000If you don't complain, you get to keep your medical equipment business.
02:14:50.000If you do complain, we'll also steal your medical equipment business.
02:14:55.000And so there's no way that GE on its own could stand up to China.
02:15:01.000And so when it's an individual company, including Apple, our most powerful companies, or the NBA, and it's them versus the Chinese government, this company is going to lose.
02:15:10.000And that's why we need to the United States, Europe.
02:15:14.000Japan, Australia, others, we need to come together and have a united front and to establish standards.
02:15:22.000And that's why we're going to have to compromise with each other in order to make that kind of balancing possible.
02:15:29.000But if we're all competing with each other for access to China, then they're going to play both sides against the middle.
02:15:38.000I just think with the massive amount of control they have over the population, why would they adjust?
02:15:45.000Well, the only reason that they'll adjust is if they face an environment where the benefit of adjusting outweighs the harm of doing what they're doing.
02:15:55.000And I think that we have to try, whether it's possible or not, maybe it's too late, we have to try to make that happen.
02:16:03.000Your friend who was the journalist, the Lou Dobbs of China, what did he do that got them angry?
02:18:25.000You can be under house arrest, under constant surveillance.
02:18:28.000You can be put in prison, as some people are.
02:18:32.000But you certainly know that if you speak up, You're going to be in trouble.
02:18:39.000As a matter of fact, I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with somebody I know who's a professor at, I won't mention the school, but who's an expert in how this whole system works and in touch with all of the Chinese dissidents from the old days from Tiananmen Square.
02:18:58.000And I was asking him, let's just say That there's somebody in China who has some really important information about the origins of the pandemic.
02:19:08.000How could they get that information out?
02:19:13.000And certainly, maybe they could send an encrypted email, but they think it would be a super high risk.
02:19:20.000And the only thing he could come up with was maybe they could get in touch with somebody from the U.S. Embassy.
02:19:28.000And try to sneak in the door and then be able to speak freely once they got there.
02:19:34.000I mean, this was like the world's expert in how people in China who had really highly sensitive information could get that information out in a way that they would not think that they and their family were at risk.
02:19:51.000You have no idea what happened to your friend, the Lou Dobbs of China.
02:21:44.000It's a broader point connected to what we were talking about, about international competition, and that is when we think of a company here in the United States, whoever they are, Apple, we don't really think of them as a state actor.
02:21:58.000When Apple is going and doing deals somewhere else, But in China, if you're a big company, you don't have the ability to buck the Chinese government.
02:22:07.000I mean, the Chinese government mandates that there be a Communist Party sell in all of these big companies.
02:22:13.000And that doesn't mean that every day you have the local political boss telling you, do this, do that.
02:22:20.000But you know that if you do something that is not to the liking of the government, Or if the government says you must do this particular thing, whether it's Huawei making their computer code accessible or anybody else,
02:22:37.000the companies aren't in a position on important things to say no to the government.
02:22:43.000And that's why when we interact with Chinese companies, especially Huawei, The big ones, we need to recognize they aren't companies like the way our companies are companies, like the way most European companies.
02:23:01.000It's just terrifying that a company or that a country, rather, as big as China with over a billion people can operate like that with such an iron fist in this information age in 2021, that they have their internet locked down, that they have their population completely under control, and that they could even expand that to Hong Kong.
02:24:06.000And you see the old movies, and there's like the fat guy with the sweaty hair and the bad suit making decisions.
02:24:12.000They go, that was never going to work.
02:24:14.000These guys, I mean, they have developed a highly competitive system, and they're competing with us, and they have the goal of being the world's leading country by 2049. I'm afraid of living in that world,
02:24:30.000a world that is defined by China's norms.
02:24:35.000And so that's why, for me, The lesson for us is we better make us the best version of ourselves that we possibly can be.
02:24:44.000And that means, like you were mentioning, to think about how do we want to build our culture and our society?
02:24:50.000How do we make sure that our businesses are as competitive as possible?
02:24:55.000How do we build alliances with our partners around the world because we need them?
02:25:50.000And that's why I hope that we can have a renaissance here in the country, because we've certainly taken a bad turn, but maybe there's a positive way.
02:25:58.000But I also think we need to ask, what can we learn from them?
02:26:02.000Because there are things that China is actually doing well.
02:26:06.000What do you think they're doing well that we can learn from?
02:26:08.000One is they've made huge progress in eradicating poverty.
02:26:12.000It's been a national priority and they are achieving it.
02:26:30.000It was through agricultural policy, which wasn't all perfect, but they had a series of policies, especially to improve the livelihoods of rural people through greater access.
02:26:46.000They basically opened up a highly restrictive agricultural sector.
02:26:51.000And this is something they had industrial policies.
02:26:55.000They were very smart of thinking, how do they develop through the different stages of development?
02:27:01.000So they started with this high labor manufacturing.
02:27:05.000So when I compare a country like China, where they had kind of no manufacturing, and then all of a sudden, all this low-quality crap was suddenly made in China.
02:27:16.000And because of that, though, they brought all of these really poor people into the lower middle class.
02:27:22.000And then on top of that, they started to build more of a market economy and they could lever up.
02:27:29.000India, another country that's roughly the same size population, They didn't do that.
02:27:35.000And so India, in a way, has missed that level of high employment manufacturing, and that's why India is stuck with these hundreds of millions of people who are still in abject poverty.
02:27:51.000I mean, we used to have industrial policy in the United States in the war years and post-war years, and we thought, well, it's government and academia and business need to work together.
02:28:01.000Then we went all the way to the other end of the spectrum.
02:28:04.000We think, well, government needs to stay out of the way.
02:28:06.000It's just a bunch of kids in their garage, and they're going to...
02:28:10.000And now, I think in response to the China threat, even people like Marco Rubio are starting to say, well, what's the right relationship between government, business, and academia?
02:28:23.000And I think that if we just said everything that we do is the best, And no one else can compete.
02:28:31.000I think that is going to be a losing hand for us.
02:28:34.000But we also need to say, what are the stuff that we're great at and how can we be better?
02:28:38.000This is not a rosy picture you're painting.
02:28:41.000I don't see, with our current climate, with so much...
02:28:46.000There's so much chaos involved with us socially and politically and so little trust in the actual government.
02:28:55.000Particularly, look what they say they're going to do versus what they actually do.
02:29:01.000You vote in people based on promises that are rarely ever achieved.
02:29:07.000Yeah, there's a real danger, and that's why so many people are looking to the history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, where there were these things.
02:29:16.000You have this big civilization, and it grows, and it's strong, and then it starts to fall apart, and then people are trying to fix it, and then it falls apart.
02:29:24.000Well, that's the analogy that they're making about us right now.
02:29:27.000Yeah, and there is one possible future for us that really sucks.
02:29:32.000And the way I say it, I spend a lot of time, I'm a big fan of Mongolia.
02:29:36.000And if you're in Mongolia in the 14th century, you think, well, yeah, we've had a couple of bad decades, but we're the Mongols.
02:29:45.000We were the biggest land empire in the world.
02:29:48.000Of course, we're going to get everything back.
02:29:50.000And now Mongolia is a big place with very few people, but the whole empire was gone.
02:29:57.000It'd be more shocking if that doesn't happen to us, right?
02:30:47.000But as I was saying before, I have been so inspired by these young people who I've worked very closely with over the last year through our community of OneShared.World.
02:31:01.000And now we have a partnership that we're doing with Model United Nations, called MUN Impact.
02:31:08.000It's kind of this crazy thing that we're doing.
02:31:11.000At the end of March, we're having 10 different debates all around the world in English, French, Spanish, and Russian.
02:31:17.000The goal of every one of these debates is to negotiate a Model United Nations resolution Guaranteeing clean water, basic sanitation and hygiene, and essential pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030. Then we have a small team of experts that are going to take these resolutions negotiated by these kids and turn it into a resolution that looks every bit as professional as a resolution passed by the United Nations.
02:31:46.000Then we're going to have a global advocacy campaign saying, all right, a bunch of kids can negotiate an answer to help not just protect the most vulnerable people on earth, but to recognize that if the poorest people on earth don't have water and sanitation,
02:32:51.000You know, a year and a half ago, we're sitting at home posting pictures of lasagna on Instagram and thinking that was life.
02:32:58.000And I do think that a lot of young generation people have realized that the world that our generation has left them is broken in so many ways, and that if they don't rally to fix it, the future is going to look like this.
02:33:13.000So there's a huge amount of danger, but I also feel hope.
02:33:17.000I think the polarization, though, is stronger now than ever before.
02:33:20.000And I think the problems that people are focusing on in terms of like, in comparison to the threat that we're experiencing, we discussed for the last couple hours about China is relatively trivial, and that we need to stop all that shit and work together.
02:33:35.000And even then, we're behind the curve, because China's government has massive influencing control over their people and complete control over their business.
02:33:46.000Yeah, so we are behind the curve, but we are not out for the count.
02:33:52.000My father came to this country as a refugee.
02:34:18.000So there's a better path and a worse path.
02:34:21.000And the question is, what can each of us and all of us do to fight for the better path?
02:34:25.000Well, for sure, one of the most important things is our ability to communicate openly and freely so that we understand these problems and we realize that our differences are far smaller than the things that we have in common.
02:34:40.000Our differences, we tend to highlight our differences and which is part of the problem with today's social media algorithms is it enhances those differences.
02:34:50.000It makes those differences seem like they're the only thing that matters.
02:34:53.000And that's really the first time ever in my life that it seems like that, that people are concentrating more on our differences than on what we have in common.
02:35:47.000But maybe if we kind of break it down and everybody can, like maybe if everyone who's listening to this podcast can have like one nice tweet right now about some issue.
02:36:00.000Just live your life and go out and meet people.
02:36:03.000If you go out in the rest of the world, in most of the world at least, well, the problem is in a lot of cities, the world has become like Twitter.
02:36:10.000That's the problem in terms of like the pandemic has exacerbated a lot of the financial struggle and crime has risen radically, particularly violent crime.
02:36:22.000And it's become like, I don't have a lot of hope for like Los Angeles.
02:36:29.000When I go back to Los Angeles and I see where I used to live, I'm like, this is not going to get better.
02:36:33.000My good friend is the mayor, Eric Garcetti, and he's in this really tough position because it really is exactly what you say.
02:39:02.000What can he do about Los Angeles that he hasn't done?
02:39:04.000It was certainly one of the challenges that he has is like Chicago has a strong mayor system where the mayor has the responsibility and the power.
02:39:13.000Los Angeles has a weak mayor system where there's the nominal responsibility but not all of the power.
02:39:20.000But I certainly think that in our society more generally, Unless we recognize that we're all in this together, that if we want to address the problems of the poorest people, I mean, there's certain things, I mean, certainly housing,
02:39:37.000health care, mental health, sanitation, I mean, some of the zoning things, like you mentioned.
02:39:44.000There are a lot of things that could be done, but we need to really solve these problems systemically.
02:39:50.000I mean, the new Biden stimulus bill has some things certainly which are welcome to help poorer people, but it has to happen at the federal government, at the state, at the city, and also at the personal level.
02:40:03.000I mean, I think people need to be empowered to solve their own problems.
02:40:09.000And I think that These are holistic things.
02:40:11.000And like I said, I'm not the world's genius on how to solve all of Los Angeles' problems, but I do know that we're the society that we put people on the moon, we've done all of these things.
02:40:22.000If we decided that it was a national priority to massively reduce extreme poverty, for sure, I think it would be achievable.
02:40:33.000It would be wonderful if we put an effort into that, but there's also a massive resistance to doing anything like that because people consider it a form of socialism.
02:41:07.000I mean, when I was in that horrible...
02:41:10.000Shantytown in Los Angeles or when I was in refugee camps all around the world, I always think, well, let's just imagine if we could do a genome sequencing of every single person there, and we have a little more knowledge of how to understand genome sequencing.
02:41:28.000Could we, 20 years from now, say, you see this kid here who's born in this totally crappy place with no access to quality education?
02:41:39.000That person has the ability to be a Mozart, the potential to be a Mozart, to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.
02:41:46.000We kind of see other people in our own society and we don't see potential.
02:41:57.000It's anti-competitive, coming back to this China point.
02:42:00.000If we want to compete with China, let's empower, let's educate everybody in America so that everybody can be part of this engine of making our society better and stronger.
02:42:09.000Well, I've always said that the one way, if you want to make America great again, is to have less losers.
02:42:15.000Well, you've got to take all these areas that have historically been impoverished, like, you know, places like South Side of Chicago that for decades have been riddled in crime and gangs, and do something about it.
02:42:25.000And if we put the kind of effort that...
02:42:27.000Remember the economic stimulus that they first did when the pandemic first hit?
02:42:32.000Because we've got to save these businesses.
02:42:37.000I mean, $2 trillion now, we're up at almost $5 trillion.
02:42:41.000Imagine someone said, all right, here's $5 trillion.
02:42:43.000We're just going to take $1 trillion, and we're going to try to solve this problem, not just by spending money, but by having a systemic approach.
02:42:53.000And then the other thing that we could do that I've always said that we should do is we should tell...
02:42:56.000Every embassy in the world, every US embassy in the world, we've got a new job for you.
02:43:01.000We're going to give you, and just pick a number, let's say 500 green cards a year, 1,000 green cards a year.
02:43:08.000And your mission is to search this country for the smartest, most creative, most ambitious people you can find.
02:43:16.000Give them a green card and say, we want you to move to the United States to help build our country.
02:43:22.000We could just, I mean, this is such a great country.
02:43:27.000Instead, what we're doing is keeping those people out or some of those people are coming here, they're getting educated here, and then we kick them out after they graduate.
02:43:39.000So I think that if we're If we really want to grow our economy, our competitiveness, we should do it.
02:43:47.000In one of my novels, I have a thing called the Department of National Competitiveness, and it was in the story.
02:43:57.000You know, it does, but here's the basic premise, is that the two parties can't agree with each other, and so finally there's a breakthrough, and they create this Department of National Competitive that comes out and says, all right, if the United States wants to be the most competitive country in the world, here are the things that we're going to do,
02:44:14.000and then everybody has to vote on it, kind of like with the old base closings, in an up or down vote.
02:44:21.000But I do think it doesn't have to be the government.
02:44:22.000Like, we should say, well, what do we have to do to make America the most vibrant, most competitive country in the world as we've been for the better part of a century?
02:44:34.000And I think we need to come together around building that.
02:44:37.000I think the way you're looking at it, though, is looking at it like a country.
02:44:42.000And most people look at it like, how can I get ahead?
02:45:29.000I mean, like I said before, I'm from Kansas City.
02:45:32.000And in places like Kansas City, there are people who have a really strong sense of community, but somehow community has stopped being the whole country.
02:45:42.000It's been a little piece of the country.
02:45:45.000And I don't know how we get that back.
02:45:48.000I mean, but again, this is a country that has civil war.
02:46:12.000They had a massive show of force the other day where they showed over the last, I forget how many years, they've built their navy to be the largest force in the ocean in the world.
02:46:24.000And they're doing that with everything.
02:47:05.000But I definitely think, I mean, I don't talk about this stuff about China just to scare people.
02:47:11.000What I really want people to hear is...
02:47:14.000There's a competition in the world, and that competition is to define what are the norms under which we all live.
02:47:25.000One of the reasons why it was great that America, with our allies, won the Second World War is we set the rules.
02:47:32.000For a big part of the world, and then more of the world, and all of our lives have played out in the context of those rules.
02:47:41.000And now people don't like globalization, but the ideas of international law and all those things that allow us, have allowed us to live as we have, were in many ways created by the United States.
02:47:53.000We thought we had a peer competitor in the Soviet Union, and then it turned out that they were less of a peer than we thought.
02:48:03.000They have a very different vision of the world than what we have.
02:48:09.000If we don't want to live in a world that is defined by China's rules, now is the time to start strengthening our society, building our relationships, doubling down on our best values,
02:48:26.000whether it's democracy, inclusion, Human rights, because it won't be that we just don't do enough.
02:49:10.000Yeah, well, there's a stability that comes with the two-party system that was a reaction in some ways against the multi-party parliamentary systems that other countries have.
02:49:20.000I see it a lot in Afghanistan, where they have an era where it was the political party system.
02:49:28.000And so all the parties were fighting each other.
02:49:32.000And then they said, all right, we don't want political parties.
02:49:34.000So it's Any one of these systems can work, but a lot of these systems pick up bad habits over time and pathologies over time.
02:49:45.000And if we don't have some kind of process of rejuvenation and renewal, we become kind of caricaturish versions of ourselves and our systems change.
02:49:59.000And that was one of the reasons why we had such a hard time under President Trump is that previous presidents had said, well, all right, the system is breaking down.
02:50:08.000Let's put more power into the presidency so the president can rule by executive order, essentially by decree.
02:50:16.000And then when we had presidents from both parties who seem like a reasonable person and they're making executive orders to fix problems that Congress couldn't solve, it's like, all right, that's okay.
02:50:28.000Then all of a sudden, we have somebody else who's making executive orders that maybe some of us didn't agree with.
02:50:36.000And so it seems like the right answer is to think, well, how can we build a system that works better?
02:50:42.000And that's the challenge that we're facing now as I see it.