On this week's episode of the Watch and Ramen Show, we have our first guest on the show, David Lee Roth. We talk about space travel, watches, and ramen. We also talk about David's time in Japan and his time in the UFC. And, of course, we talk a lot about ramen and watches. It's a good one, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it! Watch the Ramen is a show about Japanese food and Japanese watches. The ramen is called ramen, the watches are called watches, the time is the time. This episode was recorded in Los Angeles, California. We are working on transcribing this episode and putting it on a website and podcast, so stay tuned for that in the future. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your stuff. Thanks for listening, and Good Luck Out There! Timestamps: 1:00 - What's your favorite ramen dish? 4:30 - What s your favorite Japanese meal? 6:00 7:00- What is your favorite thing to eat in Japan? 8:00s - What do you like about Japanese ramen? 9:20 - What are you looking forward to eating in Japan right now? 11:30s - How do you want to go to Japan next? 12:40 - What would you like to travel to Japan in the next week? 13:40s 15:30 16:20s - Is your favorite restaurant? 17: What are your favorite kind of ramen place? 18:00 Is there something you're looking for? 19:00 + 17:40 22:50 - What kind of meal you would like to order from a restaurant you're going to try? 21:00+ 26:30 + 27:00 // 26:50 27:20 28:00 & 27:15 29:00 What sao? 32: What s a good ramen 30:00? 35:00 / 32:00/35: What is a good place to start a new time 36:00 | 33:00 @ what s your ramen podcast? 37:30 | 36:30 // 35:40 + 35:30 / 36:50 + 39:00 ? 40 + 40?
00:00:54.000Okay, the story is that Admiral Pogue...
00:00:56.000On his moon mission was supposed to take the first chronograph into space, and the Omega people had a branding agreement with NASA, so they gave him an Omega moon watch.
00:01:40.000It's not automatic, but I thought that was the problem with the watch in space, was that with no gravity, that the moving of the gears wouldn't be the same.
00:01:48.000Admiral Pogue would dare to disagree with you because he just did it, and that was like 1973. Maybe he didn't give a fuck about the time, he just loved that watch.
00:02:05.000So he was like, I'll take this watch for the pictures, but then I'm going to get my old trusty Seiko out of my pocket because I can't die on this mission right now.
00:02:13.000And that's obviously not as prestigious of a watch, but now it's like amongst watch freaks and geeks considered to be like one of the ones you want to collect.
00:02:20.000That's so weird because a watch expert was explaining to me the reason why the moon watch from Omega is a wind-up is because you can't rely on gravity because the automatic movements, you know, there's these little things and they swing back and forth depending upon, like, your watch.
00:02:35.000I don't know if that guy was full of shit or...
00:03:59.000I didn't get to see much, but we went to some great sushi restaurants.
00:04:03.000Got a chance to, and the Fight fans there are really, it's really interesting because they're super, super polite.
00:04:09.000And they're really quiet, and then when something happens, like they applaud, like a guard pass or something that's like real technical, they all applaud, they get very excited about it.
00:04:20.000I once went to Slipknot Festival, Knotfest Tokyo, because my brother-in-law is the drummer for Slipknot, Jay Weinberg.
00:04:27.000And so he, I'd never been to a Slipknot concert before, so we just went.
00:04:31.000And 25,000 Japanese fans, Slipknot fans, in rows, standing politely, perfect rows, and then the song would come on, and they'd be like, you know, doing this, and then the song would come off, and they'd politely wait for the next song.
00:06:40.000It could go either way, but they see each other as a community and as a family and they act as such.
00:06:51.000There is a Confucius element to that, but there's also sort of like a community element to that that, again, I like for the most part, but also can get in the way sometimes if you just want to buck the system or do something interesting.
00:07:02.000Yeah, they also have an ancient system of discipline and respect that comes from feudal Japan and also just martial arts in general.
00:07:13.000They're known for being the birthplace of many styles of martial arts, and also where many styles of martial arts that maybe came from China were refined and changed in Japan.
00:07:24.000Well, you know more about that than me, but I do remember going to a Pride In 2002, do you remember Pride?
00:07:56.000And it was the envy of the martial arts world because of the fact that they did have – and it's what's strange is that like it went away.
00:08:05.000I mean, they had the biggest martial arts scene in terms of the ability to have 90,000 people in a super arena.
00:08:13.000At the time, America was not like that.
00:08:15.000As a matter of fact, it wasn't even that popular in America at the same time.
00:08:19.000It wasn't really popular in America until 2005. When the Ultimate Fighter was on television, on Spike TV, in the finals between Stephen Bonner and Forrest Griffin became this huge event because it was just this wild fight that was just perfect timing and the worlds collided in this perfect way and then it became this emerging sport.
00:08:57.000They're just very, you know, particular about the way that they interact.
00:09:01.000And they appreciate if you go to their country that you learn some of these things, which I tried to endeavor to do in my two years of living there.
00:09:07.000I don't think I Really got to the bottom of it.
00:09:09.000I know that when my parents showed up, they did not follow any of the practices.
00:09:19.000So it takes a while to learn, but if you do the work and you learn the language, and again, I'm what they call functionally illiterate.
00:09:25.000I can speak and understand Japanese, but I can't read or write anything.
00:09:28.000Well, that's cool that you can speak it.
00:09:30.000To get around, to communicate with people.
00:09:32.000So they super appreciate that, and Japan is actually a very diverse place in a sense in that if you go west to Kyoto and then you keep going to Kyushu or you go north to Sapporo, you will find crazy nuances and differences in the culture and the food and the people there that will blow your mind.
00:09:52.000I started my career working for the Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shinbun, in their D.C. office.
00:09:57.000That's how you started, as a journalist.
00:10:08.000Yeah, so I wanted to work in U.S.-Japan relations and eat ramen and travel back and forth and work at a think tank or something like that.
00:10:15.000Nobody wanted to hire me for that because, you know, Japan's like one of those countries that's like basically OK. Like if you study a problem country like Russia or Iran or something like that, there's industry for that.
00:13:01.000Iraq this, insurgency that, where's Osama bin Laden?
00:13:04.000Is the insurgency stronger or weaker than it was yesterday?
00:13:07.000And he's just like the master of this stuff.
00:13:10.000I'm not endorsing his policies, I'm just saying he was the best.
00:13:13.000So he calls on me randomly and I ask him something about Japan and his face lights up and he talks about the US-Japan relationship for 35 minutes.
00:13:20.000He drained the entire press conference until the bell rang.
00:13:23.000All we were talking about was like Okinawa basing or whatever.
00:13:26.000And all the other reports, now they were super pissed because I had wasted their chance to ask 20 more times, where's Osama bin Laden?
00:13:57.000So for three years, I was Rumsfeld's foil in that room.
00:14:01.000And I didn't know if the fix was in until one time I didn't ask anything and he stopped me in the hallway and I didn't even think he knew my name and he said, Josh, what are you tired today?
00:14:38.000Anyway, eventually I had to get a job in the American media, because if you're the white guy at the Japanese newspaper, there's no upward mobility for you.
00:14:45.000So again, I tried to get a bunch of Japan jobs, consulting jobs, think tank jobs, didn't get any.
00:14:50.000But I got a job working for a trade publication writing about the Pentagon because I knew how to cover the Pentagon.
00:14:55.000And then, you know, those Japanese journalists who I had worked with, because, you know, people don't understand, it's like young journalists these days get thrown onto the heap, right?
00:15:20.000But I had something that these people didn't have, which is I was trained by these people.
00:15:23.000Top, top, top Japanese journalists who taught me the things that they never teach, which are like how to source, how to dig, how to pour through documents, how to use data, how to understand budgets, how to understand how these agencies work on the inside.
00:15:38.000And that takes years and years and years to learn.
00:15:40.000That's the work of covering the government that a lot of people still do, but not as much as they used to.
00:15:47.000And I used those skills to break stories.
00:15:48.000So I became a scoop master, and I just started breaking stories.
00:15:51.000And the more I broke stories, the better jobs I got.
00:15:53.000I went to Federal Computer Week magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Foreign Policy magazine.
00:16:54.000I just want to figure it out for myself.
00:16:57.000And, you know, so that led to like a few bad life choices in terms of like studying for exams when I was actually probably at the improv, you know.
00:18:35.000She worked at NBC. She worked at ABC. This is what she wanted to do.
00:18:38.000In the end, I think, in part for that reason also because she looks better on TV than me, she's going to end up being a lot more successful than I am.
00:18:49.000I just want to work in this business, have a career, and make a living, and at the point where Doing what I love and getting people to pay me for it doesn't work out, I'll do something else.
00:19:15.000But if I get cancelled, if I say, like, fuckabee on TV instead of Huckabee or something like that, then I'll go get a real estate license or whatever.
00:23:34.000And if you don't know who Dan Nynan is out there, he was first made famous because he's like the Silicon Valley tech guy who decided to toss it all and become a stand-up comedian because that was his true calling.
00:23:45.000And he would do all these corporate gigs for these Silicon Valley companies.
00:23:49.000He made a bunch of money, performed for Obama.
00:24:59.000And there's like, oh, by the way, there's like seven journalists who are there covering the thing.
00:25:03.000We're not covering the thing, we're just going for the free drinks.
00:25:05.000And they're all like, did that just happen?
00:25:08.000So I start tweeting, Dan and I had just punched me in the face.
00:25:11.000And then he starts like, you know, these jokes are terrible, like election, erection, you know, like weirdly, vaguely problematic jokes for an Indian guy to make, right?
00:25:21.000And then he sees me tweeting about him and he comes back and he swings at me again.
00:25:49.000And, you know, it became a big story because of the seven journalists who were there to cover, they didn't want to cover Joe Lieberman's black, you know, whatever.
00:27:51.000They're like, you better steer clear of him.
00:27:53.000And then, you know, actually the problem solved itself because this article came out in 2017 about how he was totally lying about his age the whole time.
00:28:01.000He was like the millennial comic, but he was like 55. Did you know this?
00:28:06.000I didn't even know who he was until today.
00:28:57.000Yeah, well, that sounds like a great education, though, for a young guy to be working at a place like DC Improv, because you get a chance to see so many great comics come through there.
00:29:08.000It's probably a really fun, wild place to be.
00:29:11.000Yeah, no, it was just like, you know, and then we would go out drinking afterwards.
00:30:19.000It was a late show, because we had a 10 o'clock set, or a 10 o'clock start, and it was probably like 12, 30, so it was at the end of the show, and he's up there...
00:32:22.000Okay, can I tell you, I'll tell you one crazy story, and then we gotta talk about China or something like that, but I'll tell you this one crazy story.
00:32:28.000I probably shouldn't tell this, but who cares?
00:34:37.000With the lab leak hypothesis in that Trump was so adamant in calling it the China virus, the Chinese virus, that there was a lot of people that wanted to resist the idea that it was possible that this thing had come out of this level 4 lab that just happened to be coincidentally in Wuhan.
00:34:57.000Now that he's out of office, it's being entertained.
00:35:00.000Not just entertained, it was on the cover of Newsweek.
00:35:02.000A lot of top-level scientists are really examining and they're supporting this hypothesis that it's more likely than unlikely.
00:35:17.000No, I was going to say, we were talking earlier that there's very few people that were in support of this, and that you found it to be crazy.
00:35:54.000We're not pushing the lab accident theory.
00:35:56.000The argument that I make in the book, and I... I think I lay out a bunch of evidence to support this argument, but you be the judge, is that we have to investigate the lab accident theory.
00:36:05.000In other words, not that we know it came from the lab, but that there's enough circumstantial evidence that we can't rule it out.
00:36:10.000And when I understand very intimately, actually, How this story got so fucked up.
00:36:17.000And here we are in April 2021, and it's been a year, a year.
00:36:24.000And we have no information that is getting us closer to the virus.
00:36:29.000All the investigations have been crap, okay?
00:37:56.000I deal with all of them, and I move between them.
00:37:59.000So I'm watching all of this happen, and I'm thinking, oh, wait, this is really dangerous, because the coronavirus origin story is not just about blaming China.
00:38:08.000Because, of course, you could blame China for a number of things in the pandemic, for hiding the science, for hiding the scientists, for dealing with the journalists, for not locking down.
00:38:14.000If you're just about blaming China, and I'm not, you have ample reasons to blame China.
00:38:20.000The origin story is about figuring out how this happened so that it doesn't happen again.
00:38:49.000OK, so talking about the coronavirus origin was very considered very impolite.
00:38:53.000And add to that the fact that the Chinese government called, and this is in the book, called the State Department and told them if you talk about the origin publicly, because some of it had begun to be discussed, you won't get your masks.
00:40:09.000They have the most bat coronaviruses in the world.
00:40:13.000And the research that they were doing was to make them more infectious towards human lungs through something called the ACE2 receptor and the S proteins, the technical term.
00:40:23.000And then we have a virus outbreak in Wuhan that's a bat coronavirus where the ACE2 receptor is the exact same thing.
00:40:30.000It's not the exact same virus, but it's pretty close.
00:40:32.000Shouldn't we check out that lab, you know?
00:40:35.000And this became chatter inside the US government, like, again, bubbling up inside the system.
00:40:40.000I'm like, oh, I should probably check that out because I have some sources on China.
00:40:43.000I was already writing the book, by the way.
00:40:46.000And so then I found out there were these cables where these US diplomats had gone to this very lab, the Wuhan Institute for Virology, two years before and wrote back these cables warning, first of all, that there were a lot of safety problems at the lab, that they didn't know how to operate their lab, they were begging for more help.
00:41:02.000The cables were meant to get them more help.
00:41:32.000And now that we're in the middle of a pandemic where a back-coronavirus is affecting humans, a lot of people inside the government were sort of like, oh, remember those cables from two years ago that nobody gave a shit about?
00:42:16.000Because, again, they didn't want to piss off the Chinese because they wanted our masks.
00:42:19.000So I had thrown a wrench into that by floating this Now, again, the cables don't tell you what happened in the pandemic because they were written two years before, but suffice to say, they predicted the pandemic, or at least predicted that this could be something that could happen from these labs.
00:43:27.000So then here comes the scientists, okay?
00:43:29.000And this is the craziest part of this, is that...
00:43:33.000You know, the scientists who are the best friends of the lab, and I'll name a couple of them.
00:43:37.000Basically, they're doing this gain-of-function research, which is, again, they collect all the viruses in the wild, and then they bring them to this lab, or a bunch of labs, different labs, and they play around with them and see what's what.
00:43:47.000And the idea is to predict and preempt the pandemic, right?
00:43:51.000And this is a $200 million program funded by U.S. taxpayers.
00:43:56.000You've got the American scientists, the European scientists, the Chinese scientists going to every cave in Yunnan and this and that, finding all the most dangerous viruses, bringing them back to the lab, and then playing around with them.
00:44:06.000This was research that was actually banned by the Obama administration in the U.S. That's why they were doing it all in China, by the way, because the Obama administration had put a moratorium on it.
00:44:15.000And some of it, because it was risky, because there were accidents, because live accidents happen all the time.
00:44:19.000And so they moved some of it over to China, and they kept some of it, they grandfathered some of it over in the US. This program, I mean, first of all, it didn't predict the pandemic, did it?
00:44:36.000But the theory is that in doing all of these experiments to make these viruses more virulent, more dangerous, they've created a super virus, not manufactured, not engineered.
00:45:14.000But the problem was, once that theory was floated, the scientists who were involved in that research got on TV and they said, how dare you look at the lab?
00:45:35.000And these scientists, and I'm putting at the top of the list a guy named Peter Daszak, who runs the EcoHealth Alliance, who I've talked about lots of times before, To this day, tell us that we don't need to look at the lab, okay?
00:45:47.000And again, I'm not saying the lab did it.
00:45:48.000I'm just saying we should investigate all the theories.
00:45:50.000Let's investigate the natural spillover theory, which is basically that, I can't make this up, that a bat bit of pangolin that traveled a thousand miles and then that spilled over to humans 10 miles from the lab.
00:46:06.000Or it could have been the lab with all the bat coronaviruses.
00:46:09.000If you came into this conversation in April 2021 not knowing how Pompeo and these scientists had all corrupted the conversation, you would think we should probably take a look at that lab.
00:46:20.000But what happened was because these scientists were covering their own asses, they were – I think?
00:46:44.000There was a lot of pressure to do that because Trump's a liar and because he was using racist terms like, I won't repeat, but like for the virus.
00:47:00.000And those are horrible things for our society, for those members of our community.
00:47:04.000At the same time, none of that has anything to do with the lab.
00:47:08.000But because the issues got so conflated, now to even mention the lab accident theory became something that could get you criticized as being a racist or conspiracy theorist or worse.
00:48:50.000Well, maybe he knows, but I don't think he knows.
00:48:53.000You know, their legacy, this entire project of 200 billion dollars, $200 million, rather, to dig up viruses all over the world would be kaput.
00:49:01.000It would have to necessarily be stopped, this whole industry.
00:49:05.000Okay, now here's the part where I'm going to get a little controversial.
00:49:10.000Okay, so if I've gotten you that far, again, just to say that I don't blame anyone out there for having this notion that this lab accident theory is kind of a kooky thing that was cooked up by Mike Pompeo or something like that.
00:49:25.000But now Trump's not—he's not here anymore, right?
00:49:27.000We don't have to argue about Trump anymore, hopefully, ever again, right?
00:49:32.000And we can just look at the piles of circumstantial evidence, and there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it could have come—there's some circumstantial evidence that it could have come from nature.
00:49:40.000I feel that the lab theory has more compelling circumstantial evidence because, again, they were doing that kind of research.
00:49:46.000They also—there was a huge cover-up in there.
00:49:49.000Virus database went mysteriously offline somehow in December 2019. There's also the evolution of the virus itself, right?
00:49:55.000So Robert Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, a trained virologist, he says, I took a look at this virus, and I concluded that it is so powerful that it must have been evolved in a lab setting.
00:50:07.000And he pointed to the gain-of-function research, and they called him a racist, a conspiracy theorist, and all the rest.
00:50:40.000In other words, he is, and not just him, there's Francis Collins at the NIH and some other people, but basically he is the one dispersing all of the grants for this.
00:50:50.000He is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it back off.
00:51:02.000He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is like a part of the White House, but he didn't You know, the White House put a pause on it, and then he, like, undid the pause.
00:51:13.000I'm not saying that he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal.
00:51:17.000I'm just saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea this had turned it back on.
00:51:22.000He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration, because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns, right?
00:51:28.000So at the end, you could get stuff done if you just knew how to work the system.
00:51:38.000So what he would say, and again, to be perfectly fair to him, he's trying to predict the next pandemic.
00:51:44.000He thinks this is the way that you predict the next pandemic.
00:51:46.000By digging up all these viruses, we've got to dig up more and more viruses and play around with them because we're going to find how they evolve.
00:51:52.000Then we're going to come up with therapeutics and vaccines and all this stuff.
00:51:56.000Right, but we did have vaccines quicker than most because the DARPA funded a program to make mRNA vaccines 10 years ago that actually worked.
00:52:06.000You know, that was a military-funded program, but we can get to that in a second.
00:52:12.000Right, so that's a very fair observation.
00:52:16.000In other words, the $200 million program to predict and preempt the pandemic failed, to predict and preempt the pandemic, but it may have also sparked the pandemic.
00:52:25.000May have sparked, but here's my question.
00:52:28.000When I read all about the research they were doing, I didn't see what they were doing to prevent it.
00:52:36.000I just saw what they were doing was examining these viruses and trying to find out how they work and trying to see what happens when they get more virulent.
00:52:43.000But what I didn't see is the invention of therapeutics.
00:52:49.000I'm willing to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt that their honest goal was to create, do good science to prevent and predict.
00:53:15.000I don't know the answer to that question.
00:53:16.000But what I do know is that the majority of their time was spent digging up viruses in the wild and bringing them back to these labs.
00:53:22.000But Fauci, when he started it back up, did he start it back up with the intent to just uncover more information so we'd be better informed?
00:53:32.000His argument was this is vital research.
00:53:34.000The longer we pause it, the more danger that we're in.
00:53:39.000And so we got to turn this stuff back on because this is how we're going to save the world from the next pandemic, which I'm sure he believed.
00:53:44.000I'm sure a lot of these people believed.
00:53:45.000But there is another school of thought out there.
00:53:47.000And the other school of thought is, hey, instead of taking $200 million to dig up viruses and make them more dangerous, why don't you put that money into monitoring and surveillance in the places where the bats are?
00:53:56.000In other words, if you put resources where the outbreaks are likely to occur, then you can squelch them when they pop up because actually viruses change every day and trying to predict the pandemic is a fool's errand.
00:54:06.000That's another scientific school of thought.
00:54:44.000And when Robert Redfield spoke up because he's a big macher and he's a head of the CDC, he said, it's my opinion that it came from the lab.
00:54:53.000Because he can't declassify a bunch of classified information on CNN. But he's talking about what he knows, right?
00:54:59.000It's obvious to everyone who's in the know that he's seen the intelligence and he's not just talking out of his ass.
00:55:39.000Because it's all confirmation bias now.
00:55:41.000Like, oh, I tweeted this in March 2020 and I want it to hold up.
00:55:45.000Nobody cares what you tweeted in March 2020. Let's just have a rational conversation about what are the likely ways we got into this horrible crisis that we're in.
00:55:54.000And so for people in the know who are listening to Robert Redfield, it's clear that he's calling out Anthony Fauci.
00:56:00.000In other words, he's pointing to the gain-of-function research, which he knows because he's the head of the CDC, reports up to Fauci.
00:56:07.000But he's not saying that because even that's too hot for him to say.
00:56:10.000And the scientists are not going to say that either.
00:56:13.000Now you have a lot of people sort of on the right-wing media and the MAGA media who've been saying that for a long time, but they don't have any credibility with the mainstream media.
00:56:20.000And I'm just in that weird space where I wrote a book about US-China relationships, so I had all this good reporting, and I'm not MAGA media because I criticize Trump in my columns all the time.
00:56:30.000So I am mainstream media, but I'm saying we should look at the lab, and it messes with people's minds because they're like, oh, why is he doing this?
00:56:58.000All I'm saying is that we have to also look into these labs and that we can't hire The best friends of the lab to look into the labs because they have a clear conflict of interest and they fucked it up already.
00:57:34.000There's argument and there's evidence.
00:57:35.000So the most compelling argument that I've heard for the natural spillover theory is that most of the pandemics, or most of the outbreaks, Over time have been from natural spillovers, the vast majority of them.
00:58:09.000And then what Peter Daszak will say on TV, who says all the time, is that, oh, well, we know that the market, the Wuhan market, the seafood market, they call it a wet market.
00:58:18.000You know, you go to Asia, there's markets everywhere.
00:58:20.000We know that the market had the animals that could have been the pass-through animals.
00:58:24.000In other words, they had pangolins in the market.
00:58:26.000Now, to me, that's not evidence either.
00:58:28.000That's just, again, a plausible theory.
00:58:31.000Now, why is it that despite a year of searching for every pangolin and palm civet and mink and raccoon dog from, you know, Kathmandu to Kabul— Peter Daszak and his friends have never found—they never found any pangolins linked to the outbreak, right?
00:58:46.000There's no— Yeah, that's what I was going to get at.
00:58:48.000So this is another trope, and this is a trope that, like, we have an opportunity to actually fix right here in this moment, which is that, you know, it drives me crazy when this is written into news stories because it's not true, which is that— You'll see there's no evidence of the lab leak theory and there's lots of evidence of the natural spillover theory.
00:59:06.000That's what a lot of objective journalists will write into their news stories because they've been writing that for a year and they never thought about it really for more than two seconds or whatever.
00:59:15.000And the truth is that, you know, I think there's much more evidence, circumstantial evidence to be sure of the lab leak theory.
00:59:22.000But either way, if you say there's no evidence, then you have to admit that there's no evidence of either theory.
00:59:38.000The Chinese CDC, they said it didn't come from the market.
00:59:41.000The market was an amplifying event, not an origin event.
00:59:44.000Some people went to the market, they found some people who had it, they never, the first people that they found that had it, they never went to the market, they didn't know anything about the market.
00:59:52.000So, again, and then you have, I think there's, it's very plausible that this spilled over in nature.
00:59:58.000It's also very plausible that it spilled over into the lab, that it was the result of gain-of-function research gone awry at the lab, and we have to investigate them both.
01:00:06.000And that's, I think, I don't, I can't, again, I understand why that's a controversial thing to say, but it ought not to be.
01:00:14.000Well, what is the argument when they talk about the Nazis?
01:00:21.000So after a year of like, you know, so we're not talking about the elephant in the room, which is really the most important thing, which is the CCP, which is the Chinese government, which is lording over all of this, right?
01:00:34.000Impossible to talk about this without talking about the fact that the Chinese government has had a year-long campaign to cover up the origin, to squelch the science, to jail and disappear anyone who said anything that wasn't the party line, and then to use the scientists who are the best friends of the lab to launder a bunch of really horrendous disinformation.
01:00:54.000And that's not to say that the scientists are assets.
01:01:07.000They just happen to say the same exact thing.
01:01:10.000And in the case of the WHO report, they actually did work directly together.
01:01:14.000And what they say is that, okay, well, if we can't find the palm civet...
01:01:18.000You know, that, like, made the thousand-mile walk from Yunnan to Wuhan without spilling over once until it got to the lab doorstep.
01:01:24.000Maybe it came out on a frozen food package from Norway.
01:01:26.000Like, let's go check every frozen food package, distribute to a point that, like, you know, that shipped anything, any box into Wuhan in the four months before the outbreak.
01:02:04.000When you hear something, can you think about that being true without cracking up in your mind?
01:02:08.000It doesn't pass because what that would lead you to is to searching every frozen food package that's ever been shipped into Wuhan, which creates 100 years of busy work that leads you to no conclusion whatsoever.
01:02:20.000But the Chinese government loves this because for the CCP... Confusion is enough.
01:02:27.000They just need to make sure we don't find the source.
01:02:29.000They control their information environment.
01:02:32.000Their people have no choice but to hear the things that they say, and anyone who says something different disappears.
01:02:38.000They're working on our information environment.
01:02:39.000This is part of the influence part of the book.
01:02:42.000They're trying to change our discussion by getting into our information space and corrupting it for their own malign And in this case, it has a direct effect on our public health because we need to figure this out so we can figure out how to prevent the next one.
01:02:56.000So this is the, again, I'm not saying the scientists are working with them.
01:02:59.000I'm just saying the line that they're pushing is the same line now being pushed by these same exact scientists.
01:03:04.000Which would only lead you to searching every frozen food package that ever came into Wuhan in the last two years, which is crazy, which is a fool's errand.
01:03:12.000It's another way to distract us from the thing that we need to do, which is to take a look at these labs.
01:03:16.000Did anybody question this frozen food narrative?
01:03:21.000I mean, it got ridiculed on the internet, but these scientists are not ridiculing it?
01:03:25.000They're not saying, hey, this doesn't even make sense?
01:04:45.000But if it does turn out to be true, it doesn't just implicate China.
01:04:50.000The big reveal of the lab accident theory is that it implicates us.
01:04:55.000That it points the finger back at us because we're the ones who sponsored that research.
01:04:59.000We're the ones who built up this industry.
01:05:01.000We're the ones who, you know, it was mostly the French, but who built this lab in China in the first place, okay?
01:05:06.000We had this bet on China, and this sort of fits into the broader U.S.-China relationship, which is the bigger scope of the book.
01:05:12.000That if we just engage with China as much as we could and help them out as much as we could, that that engagement and cooperation would in turn convince them to liberalize, first economically and then politically, and then we could avoid the Cold War and we would all live in peace and happiness.
01:05:26.000That was the basic, I'm simplifying it to be sure, stance of US foreign policy towards China since 1972. Okay, and scientific cooperation was held up as the bastion of that, because if you can't cooperate on stopping a pandemic, what could you cooperate on?
01:05:40.000But the problem is that the Chinese government doesn't think that way, and they don't see it that way, and they're not liberalizing, and it's becoming increasingly obvious to everyone, slowly but surely.
01:05:51.000And over the course of the Trump administration, more and more parts of American society sort of realized this idea that, oh wait, they're weaponizing their engagement Against us for their interests, which are adverse to ours.
01:07:16.000But that's, again, if you think of it just like a mafia family, that's sort of how it operates.
01:07:21.000They're working together, and Xi Jinping is the head of it.
01:07:25.000Now, what that means for us is that, getting back to the issue at hand, is that Our scientific collaboration may be with these Chinese scientists who are very nice people who also want to solve the pandemic, who dedicated their life to solving pandemics, and that's what they've been doing for 20 years.
01:07:41.000They've got a party guy standing behind over their shoulder, who's got a general standing over his shoulder, who's got another party guy standing over his shoulder, who's got Xi Jinping standing over his shoulder.
01:07:50.000And that's what a lot of Americans don't understand.
01:07:53.000Like, how could, oh, I thought we were just doing open science.
01:08:12.000Just this time it killed 600,000 Americans.
01:08:15.000Now, again, that doesn't excuse our poor response.
01:08:17.000That doesn't excuse any of the bullshit that Trump put us through that made it much worse.
01:08:22.000I'm just saying there's plenty of blame to go around.
01:08:24.000What that tells us about our relationship with China, again, not the Chinese people.
01:08:30.000You wouldn't blame the Italian people for the mafia, so you wouldn't blame the Chinese people for the CCP. But what it tells us is that this is an organization that has to be viewed with clear eyes.
01:08:40.000And the clear eyes are that They covered up the origin.
01:08:45.000They still won't give us the data that they have to this day.
01:08:48.000And this is having a direct effect on our security and our prosperity and our public health.
01:08:54.000And so we're going to have to do something about that.
01:08:56.000And what I say is that we have to start here.
01:08:59.000We have to start investigating our labs, the gain-of-function research that we're doing here.
01:09:02.000You see that happening a little bit now.
01:09:04.000You see some congressmen, some more scientists like Jamie Messel, by the way, You know, took a lot of shit, man, when he started talking about the lab accident theory a year ago.
01:09:14.000He was just getting attacked all the time.
01:09:18.000I mean, me too, to a lesser extent, but I'm a journalist.
01:09:22.000That was one of the problems with Trump, is that everything that he endorsed was so problematic that even if it didn't make any sense to oppose it, people opposed it just based on the fact that it was his.
01:09:47.000The thing that scares me terribly is that there's still people, despite the fact that this evidence is slowly emerging, there's still people that are ideologically opposed to it being true, so they're fighting it hook, line, and sinker.
01:10:44.000Now, you'll notice, and a lot of people point this out, that when...
01:10:48.000When I started publishing about these cables, you know, and the scientists came back and were like, oh, you can't talk about the lab accident theory.
01:12:04.000Now, of course, the political people were 100 percent wrong because if Trump had done a better response, he might have won the election.
01:12:10.000And his failed response actually cost him the presidency when people realized that he didn't know what he was doing.
01:12:15.000But at that moment, guys like Matthew Pottinger were like, hey, we really think this came from the lab.
01:12:20.000The intelligence people, who also didn't like some of them anyway, who didn't like the Trump people, leaked there was no evidence to fuck with the Trump people.
01:12:27.000And the mainstream media ran with it because, like, isn't it great to fuck with the Trump people?
01:12:30.000They leaked it or they decided to run with that narrative to fuck with the Trump people?
01:12:35.000Because it's not a leak if they knew it wasn't factual.
01:12:38.000No, it's factual, but it's misleading.
01:12:48.000They were rebutting what Pompeo and Trump were saying.
01:12:52.000And people talk about – I'm not going to use the term deep state, but this was an attempt by them to reset the narrative or somebody in the intelligence community, a bunch of people.
01:13:02.000But what had actually happened was that Pottinger went to the intelligence community and said, what do you have?
01:13:07.000Okay, give me the SIGINT. Give me the satellite shit.
01:13:11.000Do we have any human sources on the ground?
01:15:31.000If I can convince you, that would be like a watershed moment in this conversation.
01:15:35.000Well, I've been aware because of Jamie and because of many other people that the whole way it was established that it was the natural spillover was very faulty.
01:15:44.000But not to the extent that you're laying it out here today.
01:15:47.000I'm taking you a couple more layers down into the system to tell you what was going on inside the beast.
01:15:51.000And again, I'm just blurting it all out because I don't have an agenda.
01:16:01.000And what I know is that from Jump, there were a lot of very serious people who wanted to look into this lab and for a number of fucked up reasons that we've just discussed.
01:16:57.000And to dump another $1.2 billion into it, a lot of which is U.S. taxpayer money, to take the Fauci-Datastic Project and just make it huge, much bigger.
01:17:09.000According to the website, to dig up 500,000 new dangerous viruses from the wild to bring back the lab supply.
01:17:20.000I mean, it's an international consortium of scientists from many, many, many countries.
01:17:26.000Do you think they're taking advantage of the fact that there is this need for an understanding for how to fix a situation like this if it were to occur in the future, the doubling down?
01:17:39.000There's sextupling down on their mistake, if it's a mistake.
01:17:43.000But all I'm saying is, shouldn't we find out?
01:18:04.000As they're releasing that report, the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, who most right-wing outlets accuse of being totally compromised by the CCP. Again, I don't think that's the case.
01:18:14.000I think he has a conflict of interest.
01:18:55.000Again, just as a curious human being, I'm like, oh, why would he do that?
01:19:00.000Well, he was trying to save his credibility and the credibility of his organization, because now it seems pretty clear and obvious to more and more people that we're going to have to take a look at these labs.
01:19:08.000So as time goes on, the investigation will reveal more of this.
01:19:13.000More people will start looking into it now that it's no longer taboo.
01:19:19.000What I find is that, because I've been having a lot of these conversations, is that, again, when people come to this issue without all that baggage, we have this rational conversation that you and I are having right now.
01:19:32.000But when people come to it with the baggage that they had from 2020, it immediately descends into like, oh wait, I tweeted this in March 2020, and this is why I think this is still right.
01:20:22.000And it says that, you know, what we're lacking in our politics and in our discourse and in our society is the ability to challenge our own assumptions and that when new information comes in and to To have some sort of constructive disagreement and testing where we can allow ourselves to be wrong because the important thing is not to be right first.
01:20:42.000The important thing is to be right at the end.
01:20:45.000You want to be right when the chips are all down.
01:20:47.000You want to be right at the conclusion of it.
01:22:19.000The double, triple, quadruple, whatever they're doing with the gain-of-function research scares the shit out of me because has this been approved?
01:23:11.000But if you ask, that's still the current plan.
01:23:13.000In other words, there's not another plan.
01:23:15.000But does it include treatments this time?
01:23:19.000Well, I mean that would be done by a different – Right.
01:23:22.000But if you're examining all these viruses and they're doing what they did with these mice by passing it from one to another and seeing what's the most virulent strain, what are you doing other than empowering the viruses?
01:23:35.000You're gaining an understanding, but what good is that gain of understanding if there's no significant treatments that are being developed simultaneously?
01:24:20.000And that was developed so that we could respond to any virus, not to respond to the coronavirus.
01:24:25.000The beauty of the mRNA technology is that you can apply it to the virus you don't know about, which, again, is the big criticism of all of this natural virus project.
01:24:46.000I know that this is an honest debate inside the scientific community by people who think that this research and whether or not it led to therapeutics, I don't know the details.
01:24:53.000Again, I've got to be transparent about the limits of what I don't know everything about.
01:24:57.000But the bottom line is that that argument, that scientific project, which I'm sure does include a path towards therapeutics.
01:25:09.000The other way to do it is to take all that money, all of it, all these scientists, the whole industry, and do something different.
01:25:15.000And it's called mitigation, surveillance, pre-stocking of supplies, so that when the outbreak happens, again, probably where the bats are, probably where the viruses live.
01:25:29.000If I had to guess where the outbreak is going to be, you know, which is again a very weird thing about this when it happened a thousand miles away next to the lab.
01:26:01.000Even if that involves asking some tough questions of Anthony Fauci, who I'm sure, again, is a very nice man who dedicated his life to solving viruses.
01:26:09.000And if it turns out that his research helped spark the pandemic, well, okay, I'm not accusing him of doing anything illegal or wrong.
01:26:18.000He was going through a regular process.
01:26:20.000He was doing approved stuff, as far as we know.
01:26:23.000But he wasn't personally doing it, right?
01:26:25.000He was doing it in a lab that was cited in 2018 for safety violations.
01:26:29.000In many, many labs all over the world, including this lab in Wuhan.
01:26:32.000Now, the person I do think bears a little bit more responsibility is those people in the Chinese labs that were not doing the public research.
01:26:41.000And this is a new thing that I'm talking about now, which is that the Trump administration, again, in its Trumpian kind of way, on the very last week of existence, put out the statement.
01:26:51.000On January 15th, making claims about the lab.
01:27:57.000But anyway, in that last week, in that confusion, they pushed through a lot of shit.
01:28:01.000And Pompeo came out with a statement saying, oh, well, we have all this declassified intelligence about the labs, that there were sick researchers at the lab with COVID-like symptoms in September and October 2019, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab that they didn't tell us about.
01:28:16.000They published some of it, and that they were doing military work at the lab, again, that they didn't tell us about.
01:28:21.000Now, these are amongst some other claims, but these are the three big claims that Pompeo made.
01:28:53.000They checked it out, and they said, yeah, the facts are true.
01:28:55.000Now, what the Biden administration said, the State Department, anti-belief State Department said, we confirm these facts.
01:29:00.000In other words, our intelligence does in fact show that there were sick researchers at the lab, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab, and that there was some undisclosed military work at the lab.
01:29:09.000However, we do not agree with the Trump and Pompeo statement that the lab probably did it.
01:29:42.000They went and checked all of the intelligence, what we had, and said, yeah, there is this suspicious activity at the lab that we didn't previously know about.
01:30:31.000But to say something that's so egregious, to say that it's debunked when it hasn't been debunked, there's got to be some sort of motivation to do that.
01:30:42.000I mean, I think some of it is like orange man bad.
01:31:02.000Merge racism and the origin story in a horribly destructive way in the sense that we can't even untangle it.
01:31:09.000So now if you're on the progressive side, this is why the progressives got mad at Redfield because they're like, oh, you're fueling AAPI hate, right?
01:31:35.000You know, what I argued is that it's a tragedy that Trump used the China issue to stoke anti-Asian hate, which is, I think, a fact, an undeniable fact.
01:31:47.000However, now that Trump is gone, we have to separate these two things.
01:31:51.000In other words, we can be critical of the Chinese Communist Party Without being racist against Asian Americans.
01:31:56.000In fact, it's crucial that we do that because the Chinese Communist Party intentionally stokes our racial divides, including our anti-Asian hate, in order to divide our society to undermine our democracy to advance its own interests.
01:32:11.000Tons and tons of propaganda and trolls, state media.
01:32:17.000The first time Yang Jishu, the state counselor of China, met with Tony Blinken, he criticized him about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, right?
01:32:45.000And again, with the Facebook groups and the whole thing, all the same shit the Russians did.
01:32:50.000And it's meant to drive a wedge into our society to inflame our existing tensions, again, to undermine our own confidence in our society and our democracy.
01:33:23.000Then there's the influence part, which, again, is a big subject of the book, which is Harder to talk about because it's less visible.
01:33:30.000And this is the seeding of American institutions with cash and favors and relationships that the Chinese Communist Party has deftly built over decades on both sides of our political spectrum, but also in our institutions, in academia, in Wall Street,
01:33:47.000especially in Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in our sports.
01:33:54.000And, you know, there are certain watershed moments where it pops into our public consciousness.
01:33:58.000And I'm talking about the NBA here, right?
01:34:00.000You had one guy, Daryl Morey, who I've, I don't know if you know this, is a former DOD and CIA contractor and a MITRE researcher, a smart guy.
01:34:49.000And of course the NBA, and this is kind of like what I argue in the book, they didn't know how to deal with that.
01:34:54.000They didn't understand, much like the American scientists, much like the American media, they didn't know what they were dealing with.
01:34:59.000So what Adam Silver did, quite tragically, was he went to the guy who he thought would have the best line on it, Joseph Tsai, the head of the Brooklyn Nets, who's like a CCP party member.
01:35:09.000He's like a kid-eating Taiwanese billionaire, but he's like a chief promoter of the...
01:36:03.000And so what the NBA did was what all these companies do when they get punished by the CCP is they bow and scrape and beg for forgiveness and promise never to do it again.
01:36:12.000So they're saying 1.4 billion Chinese people were offended by a tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters who were seeing their freedoms impinged upon by the policies of the CCP. Correct.
01:36:23.000But that's not true, of course, because they don't have Twitter in China.
01:36:29.000But anyway, the NBA eventually, then they got dunked on by Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke and any politician who wanted to be tough on China, right?
01:36:39.000And this is like D.C. It's like very good politics to be tough on.
01:38:18.000That's their biggest growing market for everything, from jerseys to games to you name it.
01:38:23.000And with a lot of sports, that's the case, too.
01:38:26.000And with Hollywood, and with the stock markets, and with Silicon Valley tech companies, and with American universities, all of the sectors of American society see the Chinese economic market as a huge lure, as well they should.
01:38:37.000And they do edit films to appease the standards of the Chinese party.
01:38:42.000Self-censorship is the cost of doing business.
01:38:45.000Right, but there's certain things they do, like in Doctor Strange, the Tibetan master was replaced by an Anglo-Saxon woman.
01:38:54.000Yeah, this is my Tibetan face mask, and now this episode will never be aired inside mainland China.
01:39:31.000But we have to find a way to live with China, and we have to convince the Chinese government to find a way to live with us in a way that doesn't compromise our security and our prosperity and our...
01:39:48.000These are sort of like bumper stickers that people throw out to dissuade people from having an honest conversation about how to deal with a Chinese Communist Party that is becoming increasingly problematic in ways that affect our lives.
01:39:58.000And what I'm trying to say is that, you know, we have to be clear that, you know, this is not about China or the Chinese people.
01:41:16.000And none of these companies are powerful enough to stand up to the CCP on their own, which is why I think they have to work with the U.S. government in some sort of way, but that's not really going on because...
01:41:26.000Politicians just want to dunk on the companies or they want to criticize them for not doing the right thing.
01:41:30.000But there's no positive incentives to say to the NBA, hey, listen, why don't we get together on this thing and we'll use our diplomatic pressure and our diplomatic tools to make sure that American companies and industries don't get punished by the party for bullshit, like a tweet.
01:41:45.000But we're not sophisticated enough in our discussion of China or in our government response to China to actually make that happen.
01:41:51.000But I think that's basically where we have to go.
01:41:56.000Inescapable question, which is, if Nike's using slave labor for their shoes, why are sneakers so expensive?
01:42:23.000So anyway, this is a long way of saying that the parties – to understand China, you have to understand that the party is in control of everything and that dealing with that is just the way things are now.
01:42:35.000And that doesn't mean that we have to have a Cold War or that we have to decouple from China.
01:42:39.000It just means we have to figure out a new way to first try to convince them not to do the worst things and then second, to protect ourselves if they insist.
01:42:48.000One of the things that's confusing to people is that this was never a narrative a decade or two decades ago.
01:42:54.000This is a fairly recent discussion that we're having about China.
01:42:58.000China was an innocuous, just an enormous country with a lot of people just two decades ago.
01:43:06.000They didn't think about China as being this incredibly influential superpower that had particularly its tentacles in terms of business, like how much business they own.
01:43:18.000During the pandemic, there's been a lot of purchasing different stocks and learning how much China has bought percentages of companies.
01:44:01.000That's the discussion inside the China Hand community of these old gray-beards, kind of like ivory tower kind of guys, all of whom I know, right?
01:44:22.000And then secondly, what I say is, It's clear that this has to be a discussion that has to be had by all Americans because no longer does it affect just the China-watching community.
01:44:34.000If you're sitting in your house, if you haven't seen your grandmother in a year, if you're worried about getting sick and dying, you know instinctively, and we can debate how much, but you know that some of that is because of the decisions and policies of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.
01:44:47.000In other words, what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing.
01:44:50.000You know, now that they're intentionally interfering in our politics, our sports, our music, our Hollywood films, our stock markets, our Silicon Valley tech companies, and our academic campuses, We have to get more people into this conversation.
01:45:12.000I'm trying to convince them not to think what I think, but to educate themselves and join in a constructive discussion about how we deal with this shared problem.
01:45:22.000And that's a very difficult discussion to have, and it's almost impossible to have in Washington because Washington is so fucked up right now.
01:45:29.000But I saw that discussion happening On campuses and inside Silicon Valley tech companies and inside Wall Street firms and inside the government.
01:45:37.000And the problem was that all these discussions were siloed.
01:45:39.000And then when the FBI comes a knocking at your university and says, hey, we've got to take a look at all your China research, universities are like, fuck you.
01:45:46.000Because in America, our institutions guard their independence fiercely and rightly.
01:45:52.000So they're not trying to get the FBI to help them.
01:45:55.000But on the other hand, this is a problem they kind of need the FBI's help for.
01:46:13.000When you're going over this kind of information, and you're writing a book like this, and you have all this data that you just spilled out, do you feel like a man without a country?
01:46:25.000I don't mean a literal country, but I mean in terms of being connected to a group of people that see your point, because you're stepping out there sort of in violation of both ideologies.
01:46:38.000Well, no, I mean, in a way, I think that I'm putting a voice to a lot of things that a lot of people have been talking about privately for a very long time.
01:46:47.000And there's, you know, first of all, inside the government, you know, these are a lot of issues that people were wrestling with, and very honestly, in many cases, even well before Trump.
01:46:58.000It just didn't get talked about publicly for a lot of the reasons we've already discussed.
01:48:46.000And the way that they do it is through a network called the United Front.
01:48:50.000And the United Front dates back to Maoist times.
01:48:53.000It's still referred to as striking the party's enemies by using the party's friends.
01:48:58.000And the United Front system in China is part of the party.
01:49:01.000It's baked into its DNA. And what they do is they lord over the party's interactions with anyone who's not in the party.
01:49:07.000Some are in China, some are overseas Chinese, and some of them are foreigners like us.
01:49:12.000And the way that they do that is through proxies.
01:49:14.000And what they do is they set up hundreds all over the world of these proxy figures and organizations which launder the money, billions and billions of dollars, into our institutions, hand over fist all day long for years and years and years and years.
01:49:33.000Now people keep track of it a little bit, but not really.
01:49:38.000The Trump administration tried to force these universities to report on their foreign funding because they're supposed to, by law, report when you get a certain amount of money.
01:49:46.000They found all sorts of bullshit and all sorts of corruptions.
01:49:50.000So that's the number one way they do it is they take billions of dollars, they give them to their proxies, which are like Hong Kong billionaires or, you know, Malaysian billionaires or whatever.
01:52:29.000Like, the Russian guy with, like, the belt up to here and, like, the white patent leather loafers who's like, oh, Mr. Rogan, you're here at this bar, too?
01:53:38.000Seems like I would want to investigate privately before I put that out to the GP. I was trying to get the Homeland Security Department to check it out.
01:57:58.000So here's a great example of a really tough problem in US-China relations, which is that we want Chinese students to come to America, right?
01:58:07.000Not just for the schools who make a bunch of money off of it, but because that's a key way of having our societies not fall into these silos where we can't deal with each other, which is terrible, right?
01:58:17.000At the same time, there's a threat there.
01:58:20.000Because once they build these Confucius Institutes...
01:58:23.000Oh, by the way, there's a lot of corruption in the Confucius Institutes.
01:58:25.000Then they tell you that you can't have the Dalai Lama come to your campus because they could offend 1.4 billion Chinese people.
02:00:09.000It's not really about the US versus China, it's about Free and open societies responding to China's rise where it affects us.
02:00:17.000And because Trump was Trump, this got framed as a US-China Cold War.
02:00:21.000But the honest way to talk about it is an international response to China's actions as it rises.
02:00:26.000And that response requires dealing with all these other countries which have different interests.
02:00:30.000But there are cases where the interests overlap and there are cases where our values overlap.
02:00:35.000And we have to take advantage of those overlaps in order to join together to, again, Combat the biggest country in the world that's run by a mafia organization.
02:00:43.000And these are very, very complicated things to think about.
02:00:47.000And that's where that discussion, again, is not really happening.
02:00:51.000Despite all you get is like, you know, China bad and then, oh, don't say bad about China.
02:01:05.000Is it possible that the recognition of this issue, and especially when it relates to American institutes of higher learning, could allow them to understand the whole in the logic of having these sort of closed ecosystems where they have this,
02:01:23.000there's echo chambers in American institutions of higher learning now.
02:01:29.000So many universities are—they're not liberal in the sense of what we originally thought of as—they're leftist.
02:01:37.000And because of that, they won't even entertain opposing viewpoints or have debate.
02:01:47.000This is not to say that you should support those other ideas, but you've got to entertain them and debate them and squash them with better logic.
02:01:59.000The simple, lazy way to handle it is to stop it, and to pull fire alarms, and to yell at people, and to not have people that have opposing viewpoints, and don't allow conservatives on your campus.
02:02:11.000But I think it's really dangerous, and I think it opens us up to more manipulation.
02:02:17.000Not just China, but whatever foreign entities are, and we know they are.
02:02:21.000We know Russia's doing that with the Internet Research Agency.
02:02:27.000And they're aware of them, and so they're using our own struggle that we're having internally with free speech and with open discussion and honest debate.
02:02:37.000And they're reinforcing the idea that it's a good thing to stop this stuff and to squash it.
02:02:44.000And we're proving them right by acceding to their...
02:02:47.000I'm hoping that the silver lining is we recognize that one of the reasons why the First Amendment is so important, it's we need to figure out who's right.
02:02:57.000And the only way to figure out who's right is to listen to who's wrong and to have the person who's right debate the person who's wrong, and let's find out where the facts are, and let's also agree to disagree occasionally.
02:03:13.000In this country now, if you are in any way conservative, you're a Nazi and you're a racist and you're a terrible person and you're against history.
02:03:32.000Certainly, there's a lot of me that leans towards, like, I understand human nature, right?
02:03:38.000And this is one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of the Second Amendment.
02:03:41.000I don't understand why people don't understand that there's times where you can defend yourself with a firearm.
02:03:48.000How is that not, how is that, when you see people saying that, oh, if you are in favor of the Second Amendment, you're in favor of mass shootings, you're in favor of No, that's not what I'm saying.
02:04:02.000What I'm saying is the reality of human beings.
02:04:05.000These ideologies, the problem with them, specifically in this country, is that you get lumped off into camps.
02:04:14.000And if you don't agree with one side...
02:04:26.000He did a great job of putting it into comedy.
02:04:29.000And Chris does an awesome job of doing that with a lot of subjects.
02:04:32.000But with that in particular, it really resonates today.
02:04:37.000Because people don't have the time to research like you've done with China.
02:04:42.000Or like many people have done with many subjects.
02:04:44.000And really find all the nuances and find all the things that are uncomfortable to discuss, like you're discussing with all the things about COVID-19, like the things you're discussing about the CCP and their influence and all these different businesses and entertainment.
02:05:00.000There's a lot of people that don't have the time to do that.
02:05:02.000So when you start criticizing, you know, in any way, China, they equate you to racist.
02:05:08.000And don't you understand about the anti-Asian American hate that's elevated in this country right now?
02:06:11.000To make money for their stockholders, not to defend human rights for the Uyghurs, right?
02:06:15.000The colleges, their incentives are not to get sued, so they have to create all these crazy safe spaces and the such, right?
02:06:20.000So if we build our incentive system to drive people into the teams and then we're like, why is everybody on teams?
02:06:26.000And then isn't that fucking up our own discourse?
02:06:29.000Well, it leads me to the conclusion that, okay, well, maybe we have to change the incentives.
02:06:34.000And when you talk about conservatives and liberals, again, I think the only reason that people even listen to me on this topic, if they do, I hope they do, is because I'm criticizing Trump and I'm praising Trump.
02:07:32.000So you have to think for yourself, first of all.
02:07:35.000And the only way you can really do that is if you're not bound by your incentives and your paymasters.
02:07:41.000If you work for an organization, like, remember all those conservative newspapers that are like, organizations like, oh, Trump's terrible, Trump's terrible.
02:07:48.000And then they switch, like, Trump's great.
02:08:25.000There's a story in there about how the coronavirus is, the news is coming out, and people like Pottinger, the guy I told you about, and other people are like, hey Trump, listen, this is bad.
02:09:28.000At the same time, I'm prepared to argue that there are lots of things that the Trump administration did to reset our conversation on China that the Biden administration is continuing for a very good reason because they make perfect sense.
02:09:45.000I don't know enough about American universities on how to solve that.
02:09:47.000But I do see something inspiring, actually, which is that when I started speaking to a lot of these college students about these issues, And you know what I found, which surprised me actually, is that they get this, okay?
02:10:04.000I don't have my finger on the pulse of what's going on inside the Generation Z community, admittedly.
02:10:10.000But I've talked to enough of these students who say, no, no, no, we understand that genocide against Uyghur Muslims is bad and we can't stand for it.
02:11:17.000Now keep in mind- Uyghur Muslims is what they're targeting specifically though, no?
02:11:20.000So in this region of China, which is a very resource-rich region that has been ruled by different elements of Chinese leadership over the course of hundreds of years, there resides a rich tapestry of ethnic minorities.
02:11:33.000Now, the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are the largest of, let's say, 12 million out of 20 million people in this particular province, right?
02:11:43.000And, you know, what started many years ago was slow but steady encroaching upon their rights and their freedoms, okay?
02:11:53.000And then this took its form in a number of different ways.
02:11:56.000But what really made it sinister was not the camps, actually.
02:12:00.000It was the mass surveillance, monitoring, and persecution that happens before you get to the camp, before you even...
02:12:28.000Cameras that sit atop the streets that can spot a Uyghur by their facial recognition so that the police can come down and tell you what's what.
02:12:37.000And these people were living in an open-air prison before there were ever concentration camps.
02:12:41.000Now, then the destruction of hundreds of mosques, then all of a sudden...
02:12:46.000All of the journalists and leaders and thinkers and musicians and artists and political leaders disappeared, right?
02:13:13.000Then they came up with these camps, which are like, I mean, listen, I get that there's like, there were a couple terrorist incidents, but imagine if, you know, we had a couple terrorist incidents here.
02:13:23.000And I'm not saying we treated Muslims well after 9-11.
02:14:54.000And just for a couple examples, just to paint the picture, We have this thing called Radio Free Asia, where you have people broadcasting news in other languages.
02:16:38.000So, an American resident, Chinese national, 20-year-old young woman, sophomore in college, never heard a fly, not a terrorist, not even a dissident, just trying to go to college, trying to do her homework.
02:16:56.000But then that was only the beginning of her nightmare because then she got let out of the camp for an interesting reason and she couldn't leave China.
02:18:17.000Some of the people got their kids back, some didn't.
02:18:19.000And then there was another woman who I interviewed who said when she was finally let out of the camp, they were like, oh, we have to give you a medical check.
02:18:30.000And they put her under, and then when she woke up, they were like, okay, you can go now.
02:18:55.000I hate to use this analogy because it's like God wins law, but when you think about the Chinese government, This is a real example, a boat with 17,000 tons of human hair.
02:19:07.00017,000 tons of human hair from Xinjiang.
02:19:12.000And do you think that hair was given over willingly by those Uyghur women?
02:19:16.000Do you think they were properly compensated for that hair?
02:19:20.000Because the ones I talked to said they didn't get a dime for the hair that was shaved off their head that got put on a boat and sent to California.
02:19:27.000When the Trump administration, again, something they did right, had the audacity to say, no, we're not going to take that human hair, and we're not going to put it on...
02:19:34.000It's not really an issue for you, by the way.
02:19:36.000But, like, most people didn't want to put...
02:19:38.000Once they know that the hair was shaved off of the concentration camp victims' heads, they don't want to put it on their heads.
02:19:44.000Because, in essence, Americans are good people.
02:19:48.000Once they're aware of these atrocities, they don't want to be complicit in them.
02:19:51.000And we turned back that boat that had the 17,000 tons of human hair, and then...
02:19:55.000The Communist Party went crazy and Punish the companies and, oh, sanctions, you Cold War crazy, you hawk Pompeo Americans, what are you doing to us?
02:20:27.000But what I'm saying is that if you – again, if you believe in sort of the idea of human dignity, the path of the enlightenment, liberty and democracy and human rights and people can choose what they want to do and choose who they want to worship and choose who they want to love,
02:20:45.000these are the things – More than geopolitics matter to human beings at their core, then these actions can only be described with one word, and that word is evil.
02:20:55.000And that word evil is a big word, and it deserves some justification.
02:21:01.000At the same time, it's kind of a word that we can't live without for some reason, because when we see it, it's so clear and it's so stark that we have to call it out.
02:21:12.000How far does this extend in terms of businesses?
02:21:15.000Like, so much of what we buy today is manufactured in China, including Apple products.
02:21:44.000You hear a lot about IP theft and trade subsidies and all the things that were part of the trade war, by the way, which was not a whole other subject.
02:21:52.000But that's not really the way that we're supporting.
02:22:00.000That hundreds of millions of Americans are unwittingly funding all of these malign Chinese companies passively through their pensions and investments and indexes and other Wall Street companies.
02:22:16.000In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the biggest transfer of power and wealth to these malign Chinese companies and to all Chinese companies comes from Wall Street, comes from American firms who have been drastically increasing their involvement,
02:22:32.000assistance and holdings of these Chinese companies, including the ones that build the concentration camps and the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls.
02:22:39.000And the companies that sell the cotton, but also the companies that build the missiles that are pointed at us, and the companies that are doing the spying of our cyber hacking.
02:22:48.000And if you just think of that just for one second, and this is like a chapter about this in my book, but this is like the bleeding edge.
02:22:53.000Now we're getting to the bleeding edge, because we're getting to the real shit here.
02:24:30.000At the same time, there's got to be some limits.
02:24:31.000There's got to be some points where we say, okay, well, maybe the company that builds the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls, maybe that's one we shouldn't pour Americans' money into.
02:24:42.000And by the way, once 100 million Americans are invested in that company, it's going to make it a lot harder to sanction that company because they're going to have a constituency.
02:24:48.000You know, they're tying our financial interests to their political interests.
02:24:53.000Again, it's not for the benefit of China.
02:24:55.000It's for the benefit of the party who wants to do a genocide against Muslims.
02:25:27.000All of the restraint crowd people, all of the libertarians out there who are like, oh, this is just another scam to Have the military industrial complex have an excuse for endless defense budgets.
02:25:40.000Now we're going to have the new Cold War with China.
02:25:41.000That's going to be the thing we're going to spend all of our trillions on to replace Afghanistan, right?
02:25:48.000But what I'm trying to say is I get that.
02:25:50.000But here's what I would say is that the competition with China is really not a military competition, okay?
02:25:55.000So yes, we're going to need some military stuff, but don't get too concerned.
02:25:59.000I mean, be concerned about the horrendous abuses of the military-industrial complex, which are real, but that's not the point of the China competition.
02:26:07.000Economic, ideological, and technological competition for most.
02:26:11.000And the real action is really in the markets.
02:27:38.000Has Apple done anything to try to mitigate this?
02:27:40.000And is it more morally sound to buy a Samsung product?
02:27:44.000Or do they have the same sort of ties in China as well?
02:27:47.000No company that does manufacturing in China is immune from the pressures.
02:27:52.000What Apple did was they moved their cloud servers for Chinese users inside China, essentially giving up on the privacy of those Chinese users.
02:27:59.000They erased a bunch of Hong Kong apps from the App Store at the Chinese Communist Party's demand because they were helping the Hong Kong protesters figure out how to protest for freedom and democracy.
02:28:20.000One of the stories that hasn't even really broken out yet, that nobody really talks about, is when Apple wanted to change its privacy controls to give people with their iPhones actually more control over their data, all their Chinese partners decided to ignore that and build a workaround.
02:28:33.000In other words, you have 10 major Chinese tech companies that are producing content and apps for iPhones who are declining to follow Apple's rules.
02:28:43.000There's nothing Apple can do about it because if they protest, the Chinese Communist Party is going to literally shut down their profit-making ability, and that's a huge, huge, huge business.
02:28:52.000So it gets to your decoupling question, which is like, okay, if we can't change China, and we shouldn't try because it's hubristic to think that they're going to become like us, China's going to develop...
02:29:03.000In a way determined by the Chinese people one way or the other.
02:29:06.000That's what four decades of U.S. military intervention failures should have taught us, is that we can't change these countries, okay?
02:29:13.000But what we can do is we can put them to a choice.
02:29:15.000In other words, we can say, okay, if you're insistent on doing this bad behavior, we're going to act accordingly and change our behavior to respond.
02:29:23.000And that could be a mix of increasing the cost of the bad behavior.
02:29:58.000Because there's going to be another pandemic and we don't want to have to bow and scrape and promise to shut up about Hong Kong just to get our masks.
02:30:39.000None of them are actually progressing because we're all...
02:30:43.000You know, talking past each other and, you know, trying to like, you know, talking about like, you know, whether or not it's okay to say Wuhan virus, you know what I mean?
02:30:51.000So just as far as we've gotten in this time, it's way farther than I've ever gotten in my entire life talking about this stuff, to be honest with you.
02:31:51.000And you could say that that needed to be done, but what he failed to do is set it back up again.
02:31:56.000That's what the Biden administration is charged with doing.
02:31:58.000And I think they're making an honest effort to do that, but they're also caught by their own politics and their own bureaucracy and their own infighting and their own bullshit, which is natural.
02:32:07.000But the dichotomy of the book is that we have this awakening in American society to the challenge of a rising China But the first inning was played by the Trump administration, and because they were such a mess—so it's called chaos under heaven—they fucked a lot of it up.
02:32:26.000Now, when you say they fucked everything up— No, no, not everything.
02:33:06.000I understand the trade war was very unpopular, and even amongst Republicans, the idea of tariffs and all of this trade stuff was like an anathema to their core ideological belief system.
02:33:17.000But what you saw, actually, inside the government, underneath, was a genuine effort to find ways to convince the Chinese government to do something different.
02:33:27.000But the problem was that Trump was such a Bad tactician, right?
02:33:31.000He had this vision of like fixing the thing, but he varied between different ways to do it that he kept handing the trade issue.
02:33:38.000First, he handed it to Wilbur Ross, then Jerry Kushner, then Steve Mnuchin, then Lighthizer, and then Navarro.
02:33:45.000And it was just such a disaster policy and bureaucracy-wise.
02:34:24.000That was a crazy one because, you know, again, once Trump realized that Xi Jinping had lied to him, his good friend Xi Jinping, who they had chocolate cake.
02:34:33.000Remember with that chocolate cake that we had at Mar-a-Lag?
02:34:36.000The most beautiful chocolate cookie I ever saw in your life.
02:34:39.000And he really thought they were really good friends, you know?
02:34:42.000And so, like, you know, once he realized that that was all bullshit and that actually they weren't friends, he turned on Xi Jinping and he unleashed his national security people to do whatever they wanted.
02:34:54.000The first thing they're like, we're going to ban TikTok.
02:34:56.000Which is a weird hill to die on if you think about it.
02:36:36.000And then, you know, the Chinese come in, they're like, hey, they don't come in and say, hey, would you like to buy Huawei?
02:36:41.000They say, hey, would you like to get rich?
02:36:44.000And would you like to have your dictatorship absolved of any war crimes in the UN? And we're going to build you a house in a soccer stadium.
02:36:53.000And then we're going to give everybody in your country phones.
02:38:53.000Tells you that the Chinese telecom companies are working with Chinese gangs who are working with the Chinese government.
02:38:57.000So they come to collect because you lost money, so you don't have it connected to a credit card?
02:39:03.000Once they connect it, once they are bought in, and once there's a debt to be paid, that debt is collected by a different Chinese organization that's not a company, it's a criminal organization.
02:39:13.000What I'm trying to get to here is that the CCP works with the actual Chinese gangs.
02:39:17.000In Hong Kong, the triads, which are like the Chinese gangs, beat up the protesters, right?
02:40:49.000And their own ecosystem, I'm sure, is way more porous and susceptible to...
02:40:55.000So you've got to go to these countries.
02:40:56.000If we were smart, what would we do is we'd go to these countries and say, listen, do you like your cell phones with spying or without spying?
02:41:03.000Now, I know a lot of the listeners are going to, doesn't the NSA spy on all our shit too?
02:41:12.000I'm not excusing the US government's abuses.
02:41:15.000And believe me, I spent years and years reporting on the US government's abuses just because I am a Washington guy who reports The Washington Post.
02:41:35.000And if you build an AT&T or a Verizon network or if you build a Huawei network, those two things are not the same.
02:41:44.000And both of them have vulnerabilities.
02:41:46.000But I'd rather have the non-Huawei network.
02:41:49.000But these countries would also rather have it because they know that once they get bought in, once they take the bribe, once they take the corruption, once they take the package, that's it.
02:42:00.000You can't untangle yourself from that.
02:42:02.000They would, in many cases, prefer to work with us if we had something to offer.
02:42:07.000In other words, we can't just bash China that's not productive.
02:42:10.000We have to have an alternative that's based on our values, that's based on rule of law and free commerce and companies that are less susceptible to governments buying.
02:42:31.000But it seems like there were so many steps behind, they didn't anticipate any of this.
02:42:36.000Some people did, but those people were ignored for many, many years.
02:42:38.000And the Trump administration, in a way, was a chance for those people to have their voices heard.
02:42:42.000And that's why you saw so much change in U.S.-China policy that you did.
02:42:46.000Unfortunately, those people also had to deal with Donald Trump, and so that's why it got all screwed up.
02:42:51.000Again, I think the Biden administration, to their credit, is thinking about these things very hard, you know?
02:42:56.000They want to understand what are the things that the Trump administration did that were good, what were bad, but they're taking a while, you know?
02:43:03.000The Chinese Communist Party is not waiting.
02:43:06.000They're actually speeding up their plans.
02:43:07.000If you look around the world, what did they do during the coronavirus pandemic?
02:43:25.000And they increased their oppression of the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, by the way, and the Inter-Angolians and anyone else who didn't shut up.
02:43:34.000Now that we're sort of attuned to it more, they're speeding up their plans, and our response has to speed up as well.
02:43:40.000This is such a fucked up subject because what I'm looking at, if you're watching this play out...
02:43:48.000I don't see a real good way out of this.
02:43:52.000I don't see a way where they don't have some pretty significant influence on us, even more so than what they have now over the next decade or two.
02:44:08.000I mean, having written this book and having researched this for that long, you've got to be pretty concerned.
02:44:14.000Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've spent a lot of time on this, but there are a lot of people...
02:44:18.000How does this end is a really interesting question, because again, you know, there are some people who say we have to bring down the CCP right now, like Steve Bannon, you know, and Peter Navarro and these guys, and they're like, okay, well, listen, if this is the reality, then we've got to bring those guys down right now.
02:44:58.000So the question is, how do we avoid that?
02:45:00.000Because that's actually the worst thing.
02:45:01.000And I argue, and many people like me argue, that the best way to avoid it is by confronting this problem now, by addressing it now, that the more we let it fester, that the more powerful and evil and expansionist and aggressive and repressive the CCP gets, And guess what?
02:45:16.000But according to all of the evidence and everything we see, The more dangerous this situation becomes because their appetite grows with the eating.
02:45:24.000The more powerful they get, the more they tell us to go fuck ourselves.
02:45:28.000And so we have a limited amount of time to prove to them that we actually do desire a world where they can have their country.
02:45:37.000It doesn't mean we're going to shut up about their atrocities, but it means that what we're concerned most about is what their actions are in our countries.
02:45:44.000That the real fight against the CCP and the competition with China Begins inside of our own borders, in our schools, in our markets, in our Silicon Valley tech companies, in our sports, and in our movies.
02:45:55.000And that's where we have to focus the most of our efforts.
02:45:57.000Then we have to join with our allies and partners, specifically in the region, who are facing the same problem that we are.
02:46:03.000And so that's how this ends, is that, you know, in the best case scenario, is that we convinced the Chinese Communist Party to limit its ambitions such that we can all live together and avoid the hot war.
02:46:14.000But ignoring the problem is not a strategy.
02:46:16.000And history shows us that when you face expansionist, totalitarian, pseudo-religious dictatorships, inevitably they keep expanding and they keep gaining until confronted.
02:46:32.000Okay, outside of the hot war, is there another scenario that you could see that also would be similarly worst case in terms of what they've done to Hong Kong?
02:46:40.000Yeah, they changed the world to be safe for autocracy and repression.
02:46:43.000In other words, they compromise us and are so powerful that we can't stand up to them that we lose what Christopher Hitchens would call our way of life.
02:47:03.000But yes, when you see – that's why we have to stand up against things like self-censorship in our own society.
02:47:08.000That's when Daryl Morey tweets something, everybody who believes in the enlightenment and individual liberty and the path of human dignity It has a responsibility to say, no, fuck you.
02:47:44.000There will become a tipping point where we're so invested in these Chinese companies that sinking them, even if they're committing atrocities, will sink our own economy.
02:47:52.000So that we have to figure out what we have to protect, where we have to decouple, and where we don't.
02:47:57.000There are plenty of places where we don't.
02:48:40.000So for me, it was a pressure release valve.
02:48:44.000But the point is, this is crazy, for like six weeks, it wasn't banned in China.
02:48:49.000And there were thousands of people from mainland China On the app talking with Tibetans and Ai Weiwei and Hong Kongers and dissidents and Americans and in Chinese.
02:49:01.000And what I witnessed is that they actually were not all that different.
02:49:05.000Actually, these people want the same things that we want.
02:49:29.000No, but there were a lot of my friends who were Chinese speakers were in these other rooms, and we were having this crazy community of people who were coming together, and then the Chinese Communist Party shut it down.
02:49:42.000So they shut it down in China, and you can't even get it through a VPN? There are some people who have found out tricky ways to get through the firewall, but they do so at great risk.
02:49:50.000Because what we then found out is that Clubhouse is built on Chinese tech.
02:50:39.000I'm telling you, it's a false exclusivity.
02:50:41.000It was early on, but now it's like basically anybody can join.
02:50:45.000But my point is that if you engage with Chinese people, good things happen, and we need to somehow preserve that engagement without succumbing to the party's rules and edicts and doctrines.
02:50:56.000And that, again, is a very difficult thing that I'm not prepared to give you the perfect solution for at this moment.
02:52:43.000If you ask any person, even any Chinese person, who doesn't have a mind or standing over them, they'll choose that thing.
02:52:49.000So if we keep that idea in our mind, then we don't have to worry about if you're Republican or Democrat or American even.
02:52:55.000It doesn't even matter because this is a universal truth that human dignity and individual liberty and rights are things that we all must strive for and that we all have a responsibility to advocate for.
02:53:06.000And if we keep focused on that mission, then we can take the politics out of this and we can join in our shared humanity and make some progress.
02:53:13.000That sounds awesome, but how do you get a country that's under the grip of a totalitarian party, under a regime that does have supreme control, under a regime that is more than willing to commit genocide and force people into slave labor?
02:53:30.000How do you convince them that that's not the way to go, especially when they have ultimate control and it's been insanely profitable and the power that they've amassed is unprecedented?
02:53:43.000In terms of the ability to control what's kind of a capitalist society, it's kind of capitalist, right?
02:53:49.000It's not communist in a traditional sense where they've taken away all the incentive.
02:53:55.000They've allowed people like Jack Ma to amass billions of dollars.