The Joe Rogan Experience - June 18, 2020


Joe Rogan Experience #1494 - Bret Weinstein

Topics
defunding the police economic despair MAGA anti-science movement STEM racism proposals racism of the gaps police brutality slavery and cultural disruption lab leak hypothesis gain of function research masks effectiveness neck gaiter hunting virus transmission studies telomeres weren't mentioned telomeres Science Camp
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Bret Weinstein
Mentioned
George Floyd Eric Gardner Donald Trump Hillary Clinton Derek Chauvin Odette Carol Greider Sarah Cooper Andrew Yang Mike Heeman Joe Biden Africans COVID-19 Dave Chappelle Trevor Burrus Abe Lincoln Jamie Obama Richard Dawkins William McRaven and 35 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1493 - Steve Schirripa & Michael Imperioli Joe Rogan Experience #1495 - Kyle Dunnigan

Episode Stats


Length

3 hours and 6 minutes

Words per minute

166.26

Word count

31,016

Sentence count

2,366

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

157

sentences flagged

Hate speech

42

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On this episode of the podcast, we have a special guest on the show, Dr. Ben Shapiro. He is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who has been involved in the anti-police movement since the early days of the protests at Evergreen State University. He has been a long-time critic of the tactics used by the police in response to the Black Lives Matter movement, and has been on the ground floor of the protest movement since its inception. He's been a frequent guest on CNN and NPR, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He's also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the Weekly Standard, and he's one of the most influential people in the pro-police and anti-racist movements in the country. He joins us to talk about the Evergreen protests, and what we should do about them. We also talk about why we should be concerned about them, and how to deal with them in the real world, and their impact on our daily lives, and the impact they have on our political discourse, and whether or not we can stop them from spreading across the U.S. and the rest of the world. We also discuss what to do about it, and why we need to do anything about it. If you like the episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! and share it with a friend who needs to know about the episode. . Thanks to Ben Shapiro's work and Ben's work on the podcast. and the work of Ben Shapiro did on this episode! Thank you Ben's podcast, Ben's amazing work on this week's episode on Evergreen, and much more! Ben's great work, Ben is a must listen! - Ben's words of wisdom, and we hope you enjoy this episode, Ben s words, Ben and Ben s thoughts on this podcast, and his advice on what you can do to stop the madness in the world, too. -Ben's words about the evergreen protests in the streets, and more! - Tom's words on the future of the black lives matter, and so much more. -- Ben's thoughts on the black-ish movement, including his thoughts on it's impact on the police brutality in general, and our own thoughts on what we can do in the future, and a lot more! -- - Ben & Ben's tweets,

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:01.000 If anybody sounded the alarm that all this madness was gonna come to fruition in the real world, it's you, sir.
00:00:09.000 You were the guy.
00:00:11.000 Like, you were the one who was saying this is what's happening at Evergreen.
00:00:14.000 And if you don't know, go Google it.
00:00:17.000 Brett Weinstein, Evergreen.
00:00:20.000 And now it spills out into the real world.
00:00:23.000 Just like I said it was gonna.
00:00:24.000 You did.
00:00:25.000 I did.
00:00:26.000 You did.
00:00:26.000 I said it in several different places and pretty clearly, you know, it could have been a tiny bit more precision, but it was highly accurate.
00:00:33.000 You were highly accurate and often maligned and mocked.
00:00:37.000 People didn't think it was a big deal.
00:00:39.000 They think you're much ado about nothing.
00:00:41.000 You're making a big deal about some kids that are voicing their opinions on things.
00:00:45.000 But what you recognized early on was that there was an authoritarian aspect of it, a forced compliance aspect of it that's very dangerous.
00:00:54.000 Yeah, it's all about force.
00:00:56.000 And I've started to get calls in the last week or two.
00:01:01.000 The people who mocked me and others, including you, for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses – Some of them have started to call and say, I got it wrong.
00:01:14.000 What do we do now?
00:01:16.000 And actually, I appreciate those calls and those contacts because really that is the question.
00:01:22.000 Yeah, what do we do now to pull it back?
00:01:24.000 Yeah.
00:01:25.000 How do you get the genie back in the bottle?
00:01:26.000 Or as Douglas Murray says, how do you put the brakes on this thing?
00:01:29.000 How do you put the brakes on this thing indeed?
00:01:31.000 Well, I have to tell you, I'm not optimistic.
00:01:33.000 I think that this is actually...
00:01:35.000 The people who are catching up to the fact that Evergreen has now spilled over into the world have not caught up to the fact that this is unstoppable at this point with the current configuration.
00:01:49.000 The absence of leadership is going to prevent us from doing what we should do.
00:01:54.000 And that means that the next set of predictions are far more dire.
00:01:59.000 What is your next set of predictions?
00:02:01.000 Well, I would say we are headed for a With history.
00:02:10.000 I mean, we're really staring at many scenarios that end in some kind of civil war.
00:02:16.000 And while I do think it is still possible to avert that outcome, I don't know the name of the force that gets in its way.
00:02:25.000 It's really troubling.
00:02:27.000 What do you think these kids want?
00:02:30.000 Not just kids.
00:02:31.000 What do you think the people that are What do you think they want?
00:02:38.000 Well, I think there's some danger in casting them as one thing, because I think we have several things fused together, and that until you understand what has joined forces with what, there's no way to answer the question.
00:02:52.000 All right, let's break it down.
00:02:53.000 Okay.
00:02:53.000 So one thing that we're seeing is – and we really have to take this back a number of years to understand why it happened.
00:03:00.000 But we are seeing Occupy 2.0.
00:03:04.000 Now, I participated in Occupy.
00:03:07.000 Originally, Occupy made a lot of sense.
00:03:10.000 It was a complaint about the TARP program and too big to fail and the fact that the American public was not protected when those who had created the financial collapse And that was a legitimate gripe and it was also a legitimate gripe at the beginning of the Tea Party movement.
00:03:26.000 Occupy then morphed into an anarchist movement that was just simply hostile to civilization and it became absurd.
00:03:35.000 And so when I say this is Occupy 2.0, this is the anarchist version of Occupy that has now reemerged and it has fused with Black Lives Matter, which As I've said, lots of different places.
00:03:48.000 If Black Lives Matter just simply meant what those words imply, I'd be on board with it. 0.99
00:03:53.000 It doesn't.
00:03:54.000 It means a great deal more than that.
00:03:56.000 And we're beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.
00:03:59.000 What else do you think it means?
00:04:00.000 Well, let's put it this way. 1.00
00:04:02.000 For some reason, it means abolish the police, which is possibly the stupidest proposal I have ever heard. 0.99
00:04:12.000 And it's not like we haven't seen what happens when you do that. 0.99
00:04:15.000 Don't you think that that's just a fearful response to the obvious police brutality that we saw in Minneapolis?
00:04:22.000 What's the best response?
00:04:23.000 We have to do something.
00:04:23.000 We need to defund the police.
00:04:25.000 And then everyone's like, good job.
00:04:27.000 Great, great first step, at least.
00:04:28.000 Well, no. 0.97
00:04:30.000 It's a dishonest presentation and I'm concerned that there – as I've also said in many places, the proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish.
00:04:42.000 The strategy is incredibly smart and so that is confusing to people because when you hear folks in the street demanding that we abolish the police, you think, well, OK, that's never going to happen.
00:04:53.000 If it even started to happen, it would be so complex to make it happen that it can't possibly be.
00:04:59.000 They just need to blow off some steam.
00:05:01.000 Nope, that's not right.
00:05:02.000 The fact is the police in some places can effectively be halted in their tracks.
00:05:07.000 And really, if there's one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it's that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we're also seeing in Seattle.
00:05:18.000 Yeah.
00:05:21.000 The defunding of the police, which is happening in Minneapolis, what are they doing in replacement of the police?
00:05:28.000 Well, I don't know.
00:05:30.000 And I will say that the thing that is trotted out as the example that tells us that defund the police, which doesn't really mean defund the police.
00:05:38.000 It means abolish the police.
00:05:39.000 We are told that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example.
00:05:43.000 Well, Camden just – they sort of broke the police down but then built up a new version of the police, right?
00:05:50.000 Yeah, they shifted it to a different jurisdiction.
00:05:52.000 And look, I'm not arguing that we don't need massive police reform and frankly, I'd be up for a discussion of a total rethink of the way we do policing.
00:06:00.000 But the idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.
00:06:08.000 Mark Lamont Hill had a very good point about the guy who was killed.
00:06:14.000 What is the gentleman's name that was killed in the drive-thru fast food place?
00:06:20.000 Richard, is that how you say his name?
00:06:23.000 Who was just drunk and compliant and peaceful until they were telling him they were gonna arrest him.
00:06:30.000 Even said, get me an Uber.
00:06:32.000 And what his point was, it was a very good point, why were the police even called for that?
00:06:37.000 This is a non-violent person who just happened to be drunk.
00:06:40.000 Was he doing something he shouldn't have been doing?
00:06:42.000 Yes, but obviously compliant, polite, Speaking just like very reasonably until it escalated into this tussle and then he lost his life.
00:06:55.000 If they had just had some sort of a program where they could, we're going to park your car, sir, or we'll have someone drive your car to your house, we're going to call you an Uber, or we're going to take you home, and we're going to just write you a ticket and work this out in court.
00:07:09.000 You're not going to go to jail, you don't have to be arrested, you don't have to be handcuffed, you're going to be treated like a monster. 0.99
00:07:14.000 You fucked up, you made a mistake, but you're not a bad person. 1.00
00:07:17.000 You're not a person who's trying to hurt people. 1.00
00:07:19.000 The police should be there for robbers, murderers, rapists.
00:07:25.000 That's what we need the police for.
00:07:26.000 And this is none of those things. 0.99
00:07:29.000 This is just a guy who fucked up and he got drunk. 0.99
00:07:31.000 And then as they were speaking to him, clear, real clear, not a bad guy. 0.99
00:07:38.000 Like the way he's talking to the cops, just talking to him very reasonably.
00:07:42.000 Even asked for an Uber.
00:07:44.000 Well, look, I am no fan of this aggressive style of policing.
00:07:49.000 I'm not a fan of the militarization of the police.
00:07:51.000 I've actually – I mean I've had run-ins with the police.
00:07:53.000 I've been hit twice by cops.
00:07:55.000 So it's not that I – What happened?
00:07:57.000 Well, one of these is a long story that goes back to my first research gig in Jamaica.
00:08:03.000 And the other one was I was participating in a protest.
00:08:07.000 I mean, I was very young.
00:08:08.000 I was probably 20. And there was a protest about homelessness in Berkeley.
00:08:13.000 And frankly, it happened without my awareness that there was going to be a protest.
00:08:16.000 But I happened to be nearby and I was sympathetic.
00:08:18.000 And so I joined it and I was coming down the street with the protest and the cop hit me with a baton, knocked me down.
00:08:26.000 So anyway, I'm no fan of this stuff.
00:08:28.000 I'm not defending it.
00:08:30.000 But...
00:08:31.000 That's not what this movement is really about.
00:08:33.000 And even if it is, to the extent that it is what this movement is really about, it doesn't deal with the root cause.
00:08:38.000 We're dealing with a symptom, and it's not a symptom that you can treat in isolation.
00:08:42.000 Well, I had Jocko Willink on the podcast on Monday, and he had a great point.
00:08:46.000 Obviously, Jocko was a Navy SEAL commander and worked with the Navy SEALs to create programs for training.
00:08:54.000 And what he said is that these cops have the minimal amount of training.
00:08:59.000 It's the tiniest amount of training, and then they send them on the street.
00:09:02.000 He goes, 20% of their time should be spent training.
00:09:06.000 20%.
00:09:06.000 It should be de-escalation drills, simulation drills, We're good to go.
00:09:33.000 Higher qualified police officers, better trained police officers, better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this.
00:09:43.000 And these people are Nobody wants to be a cop right now.
00:09:47.000 So who's doing this, right?
00:09:49.000 The new generation from now out, when people sign up to be a police officer, who's going to do this?
00:09:56.000 You have a few that are going to answer that call because they feel like they have a duty.
00:10:00.000 But you're going to have a lot of people that just can't get other jobs.
00:10:04.000 And so they choose that.
00:10:06.000 And maybe they're not the cream of the crop.
00:10:08.000 And that's very bad for people with guns that tell other people what to do.
00:10:11.000 I hear two things in what you're saying, and one of them I fully agree with.
00:10:15.000 The implication of what you just said is that less funding isn't the solution.
00:10:18.000 If anything, more funding is so that we get better qualified people and we train them, right?
00:10:24.000 We get people who are better suited to the job in the first place, and then we train them better so they know what to do.
00:10:29.000 And I agree with that.
00:10:31.000 The part that I'm worried about is that I also – I think I hear you grasping at straws and frankly they're familiar.
00:10:37.000 I hear everybody grasping at straws here.
00:10:39.000 And what I think is not getting said is that brutal policing is a feature, not a bug, right?
00:10:46.000 This is part of a system that is about something else.
00:10:49.000 And to the extent that I think we can all recognize that there is something absolutely organic about the anger that has caused people to spill into the streets in large numbers.
00:11:01.000 That anger is the result of a process that does not begin with policing.
00:11:05.000 It begins with economic phenomena and political phenomena.
00:11:09.000 And one of the things that spooks me is this movement in part because it is leaderless and I would argue rudderless.
00:11:18.000 It is not correctly addressing the actual problem.
00:11:22.000 It is lashing out at things that it can see.
00:11:24.000 It's lashing out at anecdotes.
00:11:26.000 But the only solution here, the only proper solution that actually saves the Republic is a solution that addresses the core problem.
00:11:36.000 Economic despair, communities that are filled with crime and violence and gangs, and the people that come out of these communities with very little hope, and all the models that they operate under, what they model themselves on, is what they see around them, which is all this crime.
00:11:52.000 And they don't have this sense that there's a very clear path out of this.
00:11:57.000 Well, let's – I want to step back to something that will sound too remote to be useful but I'm sure it isn't.
00:12:03.000 I would claim that this actually goes back to a shift in the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration.
00:12:11.000 During the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party effectively switched.
00:12:17.000 It took up the Republican Party's business model, moving away from defending the interests of common people as its reason for gaining power.
00:12:27.000 And that created a problem.
00:12:28.000 So during the Clinton administration, we saw the end to aid to families with dependent children.
00:12:36.000 We saw NAFTA. We saw basically an abandonment of the core raison d'etre for the Democratic Party.
00:12:44.000 Now, the Republican Party at that point was the party of business, but that doesn't really mean the party of business.
00:12:51.000 What the Republican Party was was the party of well-established large businesses, which frequently meant, as it was catering to their interests, that it was preventing small businesses from rising up that would threaten its constituents.
00:13:04.000 Now, the Democrats took up this model.
00:13:06.000 They went into influence peddling as well during the Clinton administration.
00:13:09.000 And they became the party of other businesses.
00:13:13.000 So now you have two parties that are basically dealing with competing business interests, vying for power.
00:13:18.000 But what that does is it excludes the interests of regular folks.
00:13:23.000 And so regular folks have been getting the shaft ever since.
00:13:25.000 Nobody is representing their interests.
00:13:27.000 They're getting wise to it.
00:13:29.000 We're good to go.
00:13:59.000 So there's a cybernetic principle.
00:14:02.000 The purpose of a system is what it does.
00:14:04.000 It means that don't listen to what somebody says that the system is for.
00:14:09.000 Look at what it accomplishes.
00:14:10.000 That's what it's for.
00:14:11.000 And our system basically has two things that it accomplishes.
00:14:17.000 It basically keeps real change from happening and the reason it keeps real change from happening is because people who are winning in the present system will continue to win if the system continues to do what it does and they may lose if the system changes and starts doing something else.
00:14:33.000 So it creates what I would argue is a kind of Organic conservatism.
00:14:38.000 Those with power don't want change because it threatens them.
00:14:41.000 And the other thing that our system does is it reproduces present patterns of distribution into the future.
00:14:50.000 And what that means is racism that has almost died out is still alive and well in a sense because all you have to do is take people who are born into a neighborhood that is Devoid of opportunity and continue that pattern.
00:15:05.000 If no opportunity shows up then people who were oppressed are now going to continue to be oppressed and so it feels personal but it isn't.
00:15:12.000 It's just reproducing an existing pattern.
00:15:15.000 And a lot of that emanates from these communities that have been disenfranchised and economically distraught from slavery.
00:15:25.000 Like, literally, from where we're dealing with the echoes of slavery, and it doesn't get addressed.
00:15:31.000 And when people do bring it up and they start talking about reparations, people roll their eyes and people go, oh, that was so long ago.
00:15:39.000 But the results of that are still alive today in the South.
00:15:42.000 They're still alive today in many communities that were redlined as recently as the 1960s.
00:15:48.000 That's exactly right.
00:15:50.000 And so we basically have set ourselves up for a confused response because there is a subtlety.
00:15:57.000 The fact that ancient racism, people who are dead, their racism still haunts us today through mechanisms of the reproduction of patterns of distribution.
00:16:06.000 And mind you, when people hear distribution, they freak out because they think you're talking about wealth.
00:16:11.000 I'm not talking about wealth and we can talk about why I wouldn't bother.
00:16:15.000 What we're talking about is opportunity.
00:16:18.000 Opportunity has been hoarded.
00:16:20.000 It has been concentrated in some zip codes and almost totally excluded from other zip codes.
00:16:25.000 And so you're right.
00:16:27.000 The patterns of slavery moved into Jim Crow and now they've moved into a phase where they are very subtly infused into our system.
00:16:37.000 And so it is causing people to have the sense that There is an enemy and it is out to get me when it's not exactly an enemy that's out to get you.
00:16:45.000 It's a pattern, right?
00:16:47.000 It's a pattern that definitely needs to be addressed.
00:16:49.000 And so the natural place would have been the Democratic Party.
00:16:53.000 But the Democratic Party, because it has taken up with big business, is not going to do it even though it would be a winning party.
00:16:59.000 The Democratic Party is more interested in serving the economic interests of its actual constituents than it is serving the interests of its nominal constituents.
00:17:12.000 Why are you seeing something that looks like a communist revolution beginning in the streets?
00:17:19.000 For the natural reason, which is that people are feeling excluded from their share and they are being excluded.
00:17:28.000 This revolution that is beginning in our streets is no more coherent or desirable than Maoism and it's going to be brutal in the Maoist way or possibly the way that it unfolded in the French Revolution or maybe it'll be some unique version and it'll get its own name.
00:17:47.000 But if we want the republic to survive, we're going to have to prevent this from happening.
00:17:51.000 And because it's a leaderless movement, who do you even talk to?
00:17:54.000 Who do you reason with?
00:17:55.000 Yeah, that's what's fascinating about it, right?
00:17:58.000 Because it's emerging not just in America, but it's also in England.
00:18:02.000 It's in all parts of the world.
00:18:04.000 People are protesting.
00:18:06.000 And in many ways, I think it's probably because, love it or hate it, America sort of takes the cultural lead for the world in a lot of ways.
00:18:15.000 When it comes to movements and particularly art and, you know, expression.
00:18:24.000 And I see this leaderless movement and it seems so attractive to young people that do feel disenfranchised by the system.
00:18:34.000 So I watch them.
00:18:35.000 I mean, I've seen so many videos of these people out there screaming and cheering and chanting and they feel like they're a part of something.
00:18:42.000 Right?
00:18:42.000 And they are, right?
00:18:43.000 But what is that thing that they're a part of?
00:18:45.000 Like, what's the end goal?
00:18:46.000 That doesn't seem to have been really clear.
00:18:49.000 Like, there's kids out in, they were out in Woodland Hills out there chanting, no justice, no peace.
00:18:59.000 And I'm like, okay, what justice are you talking about?
00:19:02.000 Are you talking about George Floyd?
00:19:04.000 Well, in that case, it seems like that guy's going to go to jail for the rest of his life.
00:19:09.000 And I don't know if that's justice or not.
00:19:12.000 That police department has been disbanded.
00:19:14.000 I don't know if that's justice or not.
00:19:15.000 But what is justice and what is peace?
00:19:17.000 It's just a slogan, but they feel good saying it.
00:19:20.000 No justice, no peace.
00:19:23.000 I don't know what you're saying, but you feel very passionate about what you're saying and I think if you pulled one of those kids aside and said, what's your message and what are you trying to do?
00:19:34.000 I think a lot of them Would have nothing to say.
00:19:37.000 And that's very concerning to me.
00:19:40.000 I'm very concerned about that because it seems like they're very enthusiastic and passionate about an invisible enemy.
00:19:47.000 An enemy that they can't put on a scale.
00:19:50.000 They can't tangibly describe it in a way that I understand it completely.
00:19:54.000 It just seems like the structure of things they feel like is unjust.
00:20:02.000 It is unfortunately a zombified collective fighting a boogeyman that they have invented, which again doesn't mean that their frustration is not about something very real that does require a solution.
00:20:17.000 But to the extent that these people have de-individuated and they've become a true mob and they are pushing policies that make no sense and endanger us all, I mean, there is no neighborhood in the U.S. that is going to be safer for the absence of the police.
00:20:33.000 And it really doesn't even matter how corrupt the police are.
00:20:35.000 The absence of the police is going to create a power vacuum and we're going to get warlords, as we're already seeing in miniature in Seattle, as we already saw at Evergreen.
00:20:44.000 So it's not a coherent proposal, but...
00:20:50.000 Yeah, I think.
00:21:08.000 And it has trapped them in the gig economy.
00:21:11.000 And so we have a lot of people who would be in an excellent position to steer this justifiable anger at an enemy that is actually worth attacking to curb the violence and to make this a moment of useful and necessary change.
00:21:27.000 I would argue overdue change.
00:21:29.000 But those people are, instead of being leaders, What they are is influencers and influencers don't have the kind of power necessary to shape a movement and they don't have the position to negotiate on its behalf and this is very dangerous.
00:21:45.000 Trevor Burrus Where do you think this escalates to?
00:21:48.000 Do you have a map in your mind of where the territory is?
00:21:54.000 Yeah.
00:21:54.000 I mean, I would say there are several ways it could go.
00:21:58.000 But unfortunately, the dynamics look almost unresolvable if somebody does not speak for the movement.
00:22:07.000 And with it being unresolvable, you've got a conflict between Rural people and urban people.
00:22:15.000 You have a conflict between blacks and those who are self-declared allies. 0.76
00:22:23.000 And ally doesn't really mean ally, but foot soldiers on behalf of this movement and people who won't go along with it.
00:22:31.000 And what I'm trying to raise people's awareness of right now is that There's something in us, being raised in the U.S., there's something in us that thinks that the great leap forward in China cannot happen here, 0.83
00:22:49.000 that what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here, that Nazi Germany cannot happen here.
00:22:55.000 And, you know, the Soviet Union couldn't happen here. 0.69
00:22:58.000 I don't know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible.
00:23:02.000 I don't think it's impossible.
00:23:04.000 I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure.
00:23:10.000 It is the Constitution, which I would argue is showing its age.
00:23:15.000 But nonetheless, the values that America aspires to, the reason that the world does pay attention to us and still, even with all of our brokenness, allows us to lead it.
00:23:25.000 That reason is that the values that were described were honorable, even if we didn't meet them.
00:23:32.000 But what we aspired to be was great.
00:23:36.000 And I resent Trump's Make America Great Again because there are populations for whom it has simply never been great, right?
00:23:43.000 So I think that last A in MAGA is just a finger in the eye for people and it was designed to be.
00:23:49.000 But the structure, what it aspires to be is great and heading in the direction in which it could be great for everybody is obviously the right thing to do.
00:23:58.000 But what we are now doing and the thing that troubles me most about this movement is that if you listen to it closely and I have listened to it very closely.
00:24:07.000 It is explicitly about disassembling the very things that make the West marvelous, right? 0.88
00:24:14.000 It is anti-science, right?
00:24:17.000 It does not want policy based on science.
00:24:19.000 How so?
00:24:20.000 Well, I mean, you saw last week, presumably, that it got Nature, the journal Nature, Science Magazine...
00:24:28.000 Caltech.
00:24:30.000 It got all of these just absolutely top-level scientific institutions to broadcast the hashtag shutdownstem.
00:24:40.000 What?
00:24:40.000 Oh, yeah.
00:24:42.000 No, I'm not aware of this at all.
00:24:43.000 Oh, well, and this is another thing.
00:24:45.000 We're losing our minds because, to me, the idea that you would be unaware of this is hard to imagine.
00:24:51.000 There's just too much going on.
00:24:53.000 It was so thoroughly all over my feed, though.
00:24:55.000 But I'm discovering this.
00:24:56.000 There's stuff absent from my feed, too, that I should know about.
00:24:59.000 And I'm finding the same thing.
00:25:01.000 Well, here's the thing.
00:25:02.000 I don't read my feed.
00:25:03.000 Well, you don't read your Twitter feed, but you're plugged into enough people.
00:25:06.000 You have enough conversations in this room.
00:25:08.000 Things have to be almost nuclear before I'm paying attention to them these days.
00:25:12.000 Just for my own personal sanity, I've stepped away from almost all social media other than posting.
00:25:19.000 Yeah, it's actually, if I can say something perfectly weird.
00:25:23.000 I don't really aspire to great wealth.
00:25:26.000 I never have.
00:25:27.000 But there is part of me that wants to be wealthy enough that I can afford to ignore my feeds, right?
00:25:34.000 I can't now.
00:25:34.000 I have to be plugged in.
00:25:36.000 But anyway, the thing that's really concerning here, and I don't want this podcast to be all about concern.
00:25:43.000 Here it is.
00:25:44.000 Thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism in STEM. More than 5,000 scientists in two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the day to address racial inequalities in science.
00:25:57.000 The strike follows two weeks of demonstrations spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer.
00:26:05.000 People on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag shut down academia, shut down STEM. And strike for black lives.
00:26:15.000 Shut down academia is terrifying. 0.96
00:26:18.000 Shut down STEM is equally terrifying.
00:26:20.000 But I mean, like, what takes its place?
00:26:22.000 What do you expect?
00:26:23.000 If you shut down academia, like, what are they saying when they say systemic racism in STEM? What does it mean?
00:26:30.000 It's representation in terms of, like, the...
00:26:33.000 What are they saying?
00:26:35.000 So, this is so sad because truly, if you really wanted to raise black people out of the economic quagmire they find themselves in, if you wanted to do it en masse, you would arm them with the most powerful tools.
00:26:54.000 The most powerful tool and the tool that is best positioned to address biases, especially subtle biases, is science.
00:27:03.000 That's what the scientific method does.
00:27:05.000 It's one reason for existing, is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is wrong.
00:27:11.000 It takes your biases and forces you to see what's wrong with them.
00:27:15.000 That's what science is for.
00:27:16.000 Now, the reason that this movement is attacking STEM It has to do with the connection of this movement to critical theory.
00:27:24.000 And critical theory didn't come from the sciences.
00:27:26.000 The word theory is basically pilfered.
00:27:31.000 It's being used in a most ironic fashion.
00:27:34.000 Critical theory is a narrative that's now becoming a religious movement And it is anti-STEM on the basis that it claims that STEM itself, science itself, is racist inherently.
00:27:47.000 What do they mean when they're saying critical theory?
00:27:50.000 Yeah.
00:27:50.000 What does that encompass?
00:27:51.000 Well, my understanding is that critical theory was born as an honorable investigation of biases that exist inside of our court system, racial biases.
00:28:01.000 And that it has now morphed into something that its originators don't recognize and don't respect.
00:28:06.000 That it has become basically...
00:28:09.000 I mean, you've had Jordan Peterson on your podcast many times, once with me.
00:28:14.000 And what he talks about with respect to these are cultural Marxists and they are wielding this postmodern doctrine.
00:28:23.000 What he's talking about is critical theory.
00:28:25.000 Critical theory is basically a...
00:28:30.000 A Trojan horse that exists in academic departments that are dedicated to its study.
00:28:34.000 And what it does is it uninvents progress in other fields.
00:28:39.000 And that's a very...
00:28:43.000 It's an uninteresting process when it's hiding away in some corner of your university where you don't have to listen to it.
00:28:49.000 But what has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public.
00:28:54.000 And the nonsense that you hear about shutting down academia, shutting down STEM, abolishing the police, all of this is standard fare in those phony departments.
00:29:03.000 When you say uninvents progress, what do you mean by that?
00:29:07.000 Well, I mean that we have a system and I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody but we have a system that accomplishes a great deal and this style of thought that all of these departments that end in theory That don't actually function by normal rules of logic or the scientific process.
00:29:32.000 These things are an attack.
00:29:35.000 They're like an autoimmune disease of the academic culture.
00:29:39.000 And by and large, the scientific part of the academy keeps its head down and it stays away from people who believe in this stuff and it tries to do its work.
00:29:48.000 But what has happened is that the dynamics, the demographics have changed such that these departments which weren't taken seriously by the sciences are now dictating terms to the sciences which couldn't possibly be more dangerous because to the extent that The argument,
00:30:06.000 more or less, is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of those who are currently successful and that that bias is actually preventing people who are not succeeding under current conditions from getting there.
00:30:20.000 And therefore, we need to hobble these disciplines to level the playing field.
00:30:27.000 That America surrendered its advantage in the sciences in order to – even if you could level the playing field inside of the US by doing that, which you can't.
00:30:39.000 But even if you could, this would so hobble us in the world that it would be an insane policy to pursue.
00:30:46.000 Is there any debate going on about this?
00:30:49.000 Clearly what they're saying is if you're looking at the vast majority of the scientists, they represent – What is it?
00:30:58.000 European Jews are a lot of them. 0.70
00:31:00.000 There's a lot of various people of European ancestry, Asian folks, less African Americans, less Africans.
00:31:08.000 So they're saying that because of this, this is clear evidence of racism.
00:31:15.000 Yeah, which is total nonsense.
00:31:18.000 What is it evidence of?
00:31:19.000 It is – well, it's evidence of a number of things and I find myself in two places on a lot of these arguments.
00:31:26.000 On the one hand, somehow I'm sitting here on your podcast defending academia when on any normal day I would be telling you academia was so incredibly broken and science has been so incredibly corrupted by its contact with the market that we have to fix these things because that is in and of itself a threat to the West.
00:31:45.000 Here, I find myself saying, wait a second.
00:31:47.000 These people are actually telling you what they think.
00:31:50.000 They think science is the enemy.
00:31:51.000 And instead of democratizing the tools of science and giving them to the people who need them most, they want to end science.
00:31:58.000 So the problems are several.
00:32:01.000 Unfortunately, they're not tremendously interesting.
00:32:04.000 They're sort of dry inside baseball stuff.
00:32:06.000 But I think we have to cover them, though, just to sort of take the legs out from under this racism argument when it comes to representation.
00:32:13.000 Sure.
00:32:13.000 So first of all, let me just say academia is tremendously liberal and that – I mean that in both senses.
00:32:24.000 Let's take the honorable part of it, right?
00:32:26.000 Inside of a university, there is every desire to bring people who do not look like the old white guys that have done so much of the past work in science. 0.96
00:32:37.000 There is a desire to broaden.
00:32:42.000 It is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them and then behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color.
00:32:52.000 It's not like that.
00:32:53.000 There is a desire to have those people show up.
00:32:57.000 And get the job because for one thing it takes the pressure off to the extent that departments don't look like the demographics of the country in which these departments are housed.
00:33:06.000 You know, that raises questions and so there's a desire to bring in anybody who makes it clear that that's not going on.
00:33:13.000 Let's say that you were black and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you and you made it.
00:33:22.000 Let's say that you had people who said wise things to you and they got you to focus on the right stuff and you managed to dodge the stuff that captures so many and you made it, right?
00:33:34.000 Let's say you got into Harvard.
00:33:35.000 You got a really good quality degree in a proper science.
00:33:41.000 Well, what are you going to do with it?
00:33:43.000 You're going to go into academia?
00:33:45.000 That would be insane.
00:33:47.000 Because I don't know what the numbers are.
00:33:49.000 I don't know what fraction of people who get PhDs actually get the job that they've trained for.
00:33:55.000 But it's tiny.
00:33:56.000 Is it really?
00:33:57.000 I'll be like 1 in 20. Really?
00:33:59.000 Yeah.
00:34:00.000 Because there's only so many positions and every year you're graduating hundreds and hundreds of people with those degrees.
00:34:07.000 Well, but there's also a very good reason for this.
00:34:09.000 I mean, it's a terrible reason, but there's a very easily comprehended reason.
00:34:14.000 So universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grants.
00:34:19.000 So if you get a million dollar grant, Half or more will go to your university, right?
00:34:24.000 So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place.
00:34:26.000 So the university has an incentive to get as many people file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small.
00:34:36.000 So this, for example, is one of the reasons That science has taken up arms against theory, that is to say proper scientific theoreticians like me, and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments because big expensive experiments have big grants and those big grants bring in money.
00:34:53.000 But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, I think we're good to go.
00:35:20.000 And they do most of the teaching and they do a lot of the work of the university for incredibly low amounts of money.
00:35:28.000 They live under poor conditions and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. 0.96
00:35:36.000 But this means that we overproduce PhDs.
00:35:39.000 We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university in order that the people who are capable of getting the grant spend almost full time doing that job.
00:35:47.000 And it's a racket.
00:35:50.000 I wasn't aware of that at all.
00:35:52.000 I didn't know how it works.
00:35:53.000 Yeah, it's a racket.
00:35:54.000 And the person you should talk to, the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother.
00:36:00.000 So what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit Conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep the system running that in fact effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market to drive the wages down.
00:36:20.000 But all of these things mean that if you are coming from circumstances that have been challenging and you make it, you don't want to go to graduate school in the sciences because it's a dumb move.
00:36:34.000 You're going to take having gotten your head above water and then you're going to voluntarily drown.
00:36:39.000 It doesn't make any sense.
00:36:40.000 You're much better off even as bad as being a doctor has become.
00:36:44.000 It used to be a great job. 0.97
00:36:46.000 Now it's kind of a sucky job.
00:36:48.000 But you're better off doing that because at least it's a job.
00:36:50.000 You'll pay off your loans.
00:36:52.000 You'll make it.
00:36:53.000 So basically what we see is that there are lots of reasons that a rational person from certain demographics is less likely to go into the sciences.
00:37:02.000 That's not racism in the sciences.
00:37:05.000 It's again one of these echoes of a past racism or a past indifference that is having huge impact on the present.
00:37:15.000 Okay.
00:37:17.000 So these people that want to – that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it, what do they propose?
00:37:27.000 Like what do they propose in replacement of STEM and academia?
00:37:34.000 So, what they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it.
00:37:41.000 I will answer your question, but I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous.
00:37:46.000 The only reason that I'm so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly, and I watched this happen at every time.
00:37:52.000 You've talked to them directly, so you know this is actually what they want.
00:37:55.000 Well, I can't say they because undoubtedly there's variation, but I can say that to the extent that I've actually had these conversations with people, I was left completely shocked by, you know, there was an example at Evergreen.
00:38:12.000 Where we were in a faculty meeting and I said that the proposals that we're moving through were a threat to the enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution.
00:38:26.000 And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the enlightenment, but on the idea of enlightenment.
00:38:36.000 I was just so stunned.
00:38:37.000 I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.
00:38:48.000 What did they mean by enlightenment as a problem?
00:38:50.000 Well, so here's what I say to people who ask me about this, students in particular.
00:38:58.000 The enlightenment was a European project, right?
00:39:06.000 It definitely had a light skin tone, right?
00:39:10.000 It was European men. 0.57
00:39:13.000 It was not a Jewish project.
00:39:15.000 But I am not embarrassed about taking the tools of the Enlightenment and wielding.
00:39:20.000 They don't belong to Europe. 0.93
00:39:21.000 Right.
00:39:22.000 They're human.
00:39:23.000 They're human tools.
00:39:24.000 They were a discovery in Europe.
00:39:25.000 And arguably, the discovery in Europe happened because of unfair exclusion of other people. 0.99
00:39:30.000 But at some level, who the fuck cares? 0.86
00:39:33.000 These are the most powerful tools ever. 0.96
00:39:35.000 And you can't uninvent them.
00:39:38.000 The thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible.
00:39:42.000 But if you're in critical theory, first of all, if you end up in critical theory, any one of these fields, women studies, queer studies, whatever it is, you have already foregone this option.
00:39:56.000 You don't end up in critical theory if you have the chops to do science.
00:40:01.000 So, in effect, you have people who don't stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider because they wouldn't go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.
00:40:13.000 So, let's take a side step here.
00:40:16.000 Critical theory.
00:40:18.000 When you're talking about gender studies or queer studies, why do you think those are not valid avenues for people to pursue?
00:40:26.000 Well, because the method is non-existent.
00:40:31.000 If you were to do these things properly, you would study them with the tools of STEM, right?
00:40:37.000 But we know that's not what goes on inside of these departments, and we also know that the product doesn't add up from the point of view of science.
00:40:46.000 You can't take the claim, for example, That if a man decides that he is a woman, then he is a woman.
00:40:56.000 That's not a valid claim.
00:40:57.000 It just doesn't stand up.
00:40:59.000 And you can't claim that sex is a spectrum either.
00:41:01.000 That claim doesn't stand up.
00:41:03.000 These are empty.
00:41:04.000 And we could have a discussion about what we are to do in light of the part of gender that is flexible.
00:41:13.000 But we're not having that conversation because we've got an ultimatum on the table.
00:41:17.000 Either you agree sex is a spectrum or you're the enemy.
00:41:22.000 So all I would say is just empirically this is what happens.
00:41:25.000 Now I will also say...
00:41:28.000 One of the most telling incidents that happened during the Evergreen riots is now, finally, it's been covered by PBS. I've talked about it on my podcast.
00:41:40.000 A student of Heather and mine, an excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette.
00:41:49.000 Odette is half black.
00:41:51.000 Her mom is Afro-Caribbean.
00:41:54.000 She was known to be my student and Heather's student during the riots.
00:41:58.000 And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science.
00:42:09.000 This actually happened.
00:42:11.000 And what I'm telling you is- What did they say when they say you're a race traitor for studying science?
00:42:18.000 What specific discipline?
00:42:20.000 Well, she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me.
00:42:25.000 And they said you were a race traitor for studying evolutionary biology because... 0.92
00:42:31.000 Because science is racist. 0.97
00:42:34.000 Yo. 0.98
00:42:36.000 It's nonsense. 0.59
00:42:37.000 And I hear you trying to parse it as if it makes sense.
00:42:40.000 I just don't understand, as a person who spent three years barely paying attention in college, I don't know how it got to that.
00:42:48.000 I don't know how that becomes an actual course.
00:42:51.000 I don't know how that gets funded.
00:42:53.000 I don't know how you can get a degree from that.
00:42:55.000 Well, so what I've heard of late, and it may be James Lindsay who is the originator of this phraseology, but there's a term, racism of the gaps.
00:43:06.000 And racism of the gaps is a reference to the God of the gaps hypothesis.
00:43:11.000 Anything we can't explain in science is explained by God, which is obviously nonsense.
00:43:15.000 But racism of the gaps says any place where that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism.
00:43:24.000 So if we see an absence of black people in math, obviously the answer is racism.
00:43:30.000 Do they apply that in areas where black people excel?
00:43:35.000 No, because this is a self-serving modality.
00:43:39.000 Like hip-hop.
00:43:40.000 Right.
00:43:41.000 And so, let's go back to Odette for a second.
00:43:45.000 Trying to parse what they're saying as if it has content, logical content, is a mistake.
00:43:50.000 Trying to parse it as a tactical move makes a lot of sense.
00:43:55.000 Let's imagine that Odette was not the courageous person that she is and that she had caved.
00:44:01.000 Imagine you're cornered.
00:44:04.000 You're alone.
00:44:05.000 You've got a mob that's actually physically confronting you for studying science.
00:44:09.000 If she was not a person of strong character, she might have signed up with them.
00:44:15.000 If she had signed up with them, then A, now they have a potentially powerful ally, right?
00:44:22.000 A black person, former student of, or at that point, I guess, current student of Heather and mine, who would say, yes, in fact, science is racist, evolutionary biology particularly, so I was in that class, yada, yada, yada.
00:44:33.000 And people are easily influenced, and that being bullied by that would probably cause a lot of people to cave into that and give into that just for conformity, just so that people accept them.
00:44:44.000 Yes.
00:44:45.000 And so thank goodness that Odette is somebody who is of incredibly strong character, who really got the message of evolutionary biology very deeply.
00:44:54.000 And there's nothing that they could have said or threatened her with that would have caused her to make the move that they wanted her to make.
00:44:59.000 But processing it tactically is important.
00:45:02.000 What they're doing is tactical.
00:45:03.000 And what they did with shutdown STEM, tactical.
00:45:07.000 They were proving their power, right?
00:45:09.000 They were able to get the most important scientific institutions to broadcast a demand to shutdown STEM. That's an amazing level of power.
00:45:18.000 And actual scientists that are in disciplines that are legit, like evolutionary biology, went along with them?
00:45:28.000 Well, you know, I contacted Richard Dawkins as this was happening because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested, you know, he hadn't made a statement and I thought it would be powerful for him to do it.
00:45:39.000 He was totally unaware it was going on.
00:45:41.000 Right?
00:45:41.000 So you have the most important institutions broadcasting this thing.
00:45:44.000 Something about our environment is not calling it to the attention of people who might be in a position to say something.
00:45:51.000 And the whole thing is, it's setting us up.
00:45:55.000 We're in tremendous danger.
00:45:58.000 And what do you think their motivation is?
00:46:01.000 Power.
00:46:02.000 Power.
00:46:03.000 So what happens if they get through?
00:46:05.000 They shut down STEM. Then what do they do?
00:46:08.000 Are they thinking this far ahead?
00:46:10.000 They're not playing this long game.
00:46:14.000 Okay.
00:46:16.000 I would just – I would tell people who aren't aware of me and what I think and believe that I am very progressive.
00:46:25.000 I am very interested in making a fair system.
00:46:29.000 As am I. I know you are.
00:46:33.000 So what I'm about to say sounds like one of those right-wing crazy things.
00:46:38.000 What they want, well, imagine the following.
00:46:42.000 First of all, let's talk about reparations for a second.
00:46:44.000 I am not a fan of the idea of reparations.
00:46:47.000 I think it would be a terrible failure.
00:46:49.000 It would be a disaster.
00:46:50.000 But I do believe that something...
00:46:53.000 of very substantial magnitude is justified.
00:46:56.000 I just don't think reparations is the answer.
00:46:59.000 I completely agree.
00:46:59.000 Okay.
00:47:00.000 I think reform in terms of communities.
00:47:02.000 I think spending massive amounts of money to rebuild communities and give people hope.
00:47:08.000 Yes.
00:47:09.000 Economic opportunities.
00:47:10.000 Massive investment in communities that have been systematically frozen out and I would put American blacks and American Indians at the top of the list because I believe they have a special claim And Native Americans are particularly distraught because they've been subjugated to this weird position when they're stuck on these reservations.
00:47:28.000 So we'll come back to this in a second maybe, but I think that there's something very special that happened with blacks and with Indians.
00:47:35.000 It's not exactly alike, but it has to do with their different origin stories, that these two populations have both suffered a parallel, I don't even know what to call it, an obstacle that makes them unlike blacks. 0.96
00:47:51.000 Anyone else?
00:47:52.000 Yes.
00:47:53.000 So, not in favor of reparations, but I would be in favor of something that did the job that reparations are imagined to do.
00:48:01.000 Okay.
00:48:02.000 What this movement is, is an attempt to create a slant in every single interaction that does the job of reparations. 0.74
00:48:13.000 It's reparations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in every room, in every institution, in every context, right?
00:48:22.000 Now, that will be the uninvention of America.
00:48:27.000 It is, in some weird sense, a mirror for the America that blacks and Indians have faced.
00:48:35.000 They have faced an America in which everything was slanted against them.
00:48:39.000 It has grown less so.
00:48:41.000 But again, we have the echoes of that deeply slanted America that are broadcast into the present at a high level of intensity.
00:48:51.000 But You cannot do reparations inside of every institution, every hour, every discussion.
00:49:01.000 That is not a plausible plan.
00:49:04.000 Even people who support the idea of monetary reparations as a solution, if they understood the dynamics of trying to infuse it into every interaction, there is no way it could possibly work.
00:49:15.000 And it invalidates all of the most important principles on which So we are really talking about uninventing America and substituting a reparations program for it, which it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard.
00:49:29.000 And think for a second.
00:49:30.000 If you're trying to imagine what the hell I'm talking about, imagine the courts.
00:49:37.000 Now, there is a problem.
00:49:39.000 There's a process called jury nullification and Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what it has to do with race as we have because effectively, you can instantly create a situation in which the law doesn't apply to certain folks because of the color of their skin.
00:50:01.000 That would be an advantage.
00:50:03.000 You could argue that it was compensatory for years of being on the other end of that deal, but it cannot be made to function.
00:50:10.000 But the other thing is also possible.
00:50:13.000 You can not only have the law not apply to people on the basis that they have a skin color that suggests they've had a raw deal.
00:50:21.000 But you can also make the law apply to people because of their skin color.
00:50:25.000 We can have show trials, right?
00:50:27.000 I was effectively exposed to the equivalent of a show trial at Evergreen, right?
00:50:31.000 I was convicted of racism and it happened for various reasons.
00:50:35.000 I knew damn well that the charge was completely empty based on my history as a human being.
00:50:41.000 And so I felt I could stand up to it and withstand it.
00:50:45.000 And I guess in a way I did.
00:50:46.000 On the other hand, my wife and I were driven out of the college.
00:50:49.000 So, yes, I survived it, but I didn't survive it intact, right?
00:50:55.000 I made it somewhere else.
00:50:57.000 But that show trial mentality, I mean, it would be a perfect fit for the Maoist part of this movement's ethos.
00:51:08.000 I mean, we're already seeing struggle sessions, people being forced to admit things that aren't true, right?
00:51:14.000 Do you think part of the influence of this is that we, particularly white Americans, realize that there's a significant difference?
00:51:28.000 There's a significant disparity between opportunity that people in these disenfranchised communities of color have versus us.
00:51:37.000 There's a difference.
00:51:38.000 And so when someone from these critical theory disciplines, should I even say discipline?
00:51:47.000 Lack of discipline.
00:51:51.000 People that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country, that there is a situation in this country, and to voice any sort of disagreement with this movement that seems to represent the idea that there is a problem,
00:52:08.000 you become a part of racism.
00:52:12.000 So in order to stand out as not being racist, you are literally abandoning the ideas of science.
00:52:21.000 You're abandoning all this just so that you don't get labeled on the wrong side of history.
00:52:27.000 Yes.
00:52:27.000 And I was alerted to something a few days ago that I was not aware of.
00:52:32.000 Which is going to sound far afield.
00:52:35.000 But what I ran into was somebody describing what had happened to American POWs in the Korean War, who were being administered by the Chinese.
00:52:45.000 The Chinese had a very sophisticated mechanism for basically brainwashing. 1.00
00:52:52.000 And the mechanism was something that I have seen in this movement, but didn't understand, had a formal history.
00:53:00.000 One always imagines brainwashing to be this very aggressive But the incrementalness of the move that was arranged for these POWs was the key feature. 0.75
00:53:14.000 So the first thing that apparently POWs were asked to do was to write essays.
00:53:20.000 And it was really important that they write it rather than just say it.
00:53:24.000 But they write essays on topics that any reasonable person would think was fair.
00:53:30.000 Like, America is not perfect.
00:53:32.000 You could write that essay.
00:53:33.000 I can write that essay.
00:53:34.000 There's no moral compromise in it.
00:53:36.000 I'll write that essay.
00:53:38.000 Or the other example was, you know, unemployment is not a problem under communism.
00:53:43.000 Okay.
00:53:44.000 That doesn't strike me as a bridge too far.
00:53:48.000 Communism has lots of problems, but maybe that's not one of them.
00:53:51.000 So people were marched from these very tiny concessions where really the concession was just you're going to write what I tell you rather than any part of the content to an absolutely massive shift in their understanding.
00:54:05.000 And along the way, they were, for example, induced to write more substantial concessions with some very tiny reward like a piece of fruit or something.
00:54:18.000 Something that's actually desirable and if things are scarce you can understand wanting it, but it's not such a big concession that you can say to yourself, oh yeah, I said something I didn't believe because I got a lot out of it.
00:54:28.000 So you actually talk yourself into imagining that you really do believe the thing you wrote.
00:54:32.000 You must, otherwise you wouldn't have written it.
00:54:34.000 So what I'm seeing...
00:54:36.000 Is all sorts of excellent people making the first concessions onto – or the first steps onto the slippery slope and it's spooking the hell out of me.
00:54:48.000 So I must say I saw Dave Chappelle's 846 thing and like you, I thought, wow, do I get what he's saying.
00:54:59.000 On the other hand, I really thought he got it wrong.
00:55:02.000 What did you think he got wrong?
00:55:03.000 Well, what he effectively – What he effectively suggested was that he was on board with the movement and it was clear that this was based on his massive frustration at how deaf the white population has been to black suffering,
00:55:23.000 which I agree with.
00:55:24.000 I think the white population has been largely deaf, at least in recent decades.
00:55:30.000 But I don't know how much he knows about what the movement actually is and what it wants.
00:55:37.000 In other words, I have the maximum respect for Dave Chappelle.
00:55:40.000 I have for a very long time.
00:55:42.000 I think he's tremendously insightful.
00:55:44.000 But I don't know.
00:55:45.000 I mean, I think he's got the same problem tuning into the world that everybody else does, which is he gets some slice that's fed to him.
00:55:52.000 Or maybe, like you, he is not tuned into these things, and so he gets whatever crosses the threshold some other way.
00:56:00.000 And maybe he's not seeing that this movement is, A, spouting nonsense about getting rid of science, and he's not seeing that it's behaving in a Maoist way.
00:56:11.000 And he is seeing the videos that we all see that suggest to us that there is a very serious problem with race-based police brutality.
00:56:21.000 And the problem with that, of course, is that you can't do that analysis with anecdotes, no matter how egregious they seem.
00:56:28.000 Is it weird to connect all those things together, though?
00:56:31.000 When you're saying the movement, if this movement doesn't have any leaders, and you're talking about police brutality, but you're also talking about Maoist ideology that weasels its way into academia.
00:56:42.000 Is that really the same thing?
00:56:43.000 Is it all one thing?
00:56:45.000 Well, I don't, you know, I don't think it is one thing, but I think it's like a coalition of things.
00:56:53.000 And I think each of those things is comprehensible, you know, in isolation, and we can understand what happens when you fuse them together.
00:57:02.000 And all I can say is, We did see this in miniature at Evergreen, and people did say, you're making too much out of it, and they were wrong.
00:57:13.000 But you saw it on the ground.
00:57:15.000 The problem with seeing it from a distance is you can minimize many things when you don't experience the emotions, you don't see the fear, you don't see people running through the parking lot with baseball bats looking for you like they were doing. 0.94
00:57:28.000 You know, it's a different thing when you're actually there and you realize that this mass hysteria does lead to pretty despicable acts and that there is sort of a mob mentality that grips people and it allows people to be capable of some pretty heinous shit.
00:57:43.000 And what we see here in America is such a combination of factors, right?
00:57:48.000 You have COVID, which shuts everything down, so people are stuck at home for all these months.
00:57:54.000 Then you have this George Floyd thing, which is one of the worst cases of police brutality I've ever seen, because it was so torturous. 0.94
00:58:03.000 I mean, if you really know how long 8 minutes and 46 seconds is with someone leaning on your neck, you would know how fucking horrific that is. 0.54
00:58:14.000 And then you have the looting. 0.93
00:58:16.000 Yes.
00:58:16.000 And then you have the mass movement of all these people taking to the streets saying, we've got to change things.
00:58:22.000 We know things are wrong.
00:58:23.000 And on top of that, you have looting.
00:58:25.000 And on top of that, you have businesses failing because of the looting.
00:58:28.000 You have chaos, people getting their lives destroyed.
00:58:31.000 You have so many things happening all together at once.
00:58:33.000 They call it a movement.
00:58:35.000 One of the things we were talking about with Occupy Wall Street back in the day was we were saying they don't seem to know exactly what's going on, but it's like the immune system surrounding something that's wrong.
00:58:47.000 It's like something's going on here.
00:58:49.000 All these white blood cells are...
00:58:51.000 Flooding into this area.
00:58:52.000 I forget who made that analogy.
00:58:53.000 It might have been me.
00:58:54.000 It was so long ago. 0.98
00:58:55.000 But we're like, they don't necessarily know what to do or what it is, but they want to camp out around that area and figure out what the fuck's going on. 0.91
00:59:04.000 Yeah, and like I said, at first I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it. 0.95
00:59:09.000 And I even thought the leaderlessness of it was great for two weeks. 1.00
00:59:14.000 And then it became very, very stupid. 1.00
00:59:18.000 Yeah, it is an immune reaction. 1.00
00:59:20.000 And that's a normal part of history.
00:59:23.000 Revolutions are not started by a bunch of intellectuals who have some idea what system they want to correct.
00:59:30.000 It's people who are fed up.
00:59:32.000 And so that's what Dave Chappelle was responding to.
00:59:34.000 And I totally get it.
00:59:36.000 The problem is we are all in danger of being marched in the direction of things that are anti-American, that are in fact anti-black, because we are trying to grant the right concessions on the right points. 0.78
00:59:54.000 And it's a case in which you can't track what's really happening well enough to do it surgically.
01:00:01.000 So I'm so afraid to actually go down this next road, but you raised the case of George Floyd and what we saw on that tape.
01:00:12.000 I want you to think about the question of what you actually saw on that tape and what it actually tells you, what you actually know and what you don't know.
01:00:20.000 I'm worried.
01:00:23.000 Look, best possible thing from the point of view of the well-being of the world would be that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder and he is convicted of murder and he is sentenced for the maximum allowable time.
01:00:36.000 That would be the best thing for us.
01:00:38.000 I'm not sure that that's actually what is supposed to happen.
01:00:42.000 Why is that?
01:00:44.000 Okay.
01:00:46.000 The question is, did you witness a murder?
01:00:49.000 Are you sure you saw a murder?
01:00:52.000 What do you mean by that?
01:00:53.000 Well, murder is a crime.
01:00:55.000 Yes.
01:00:56.000 Okay.
01:00:56.000 Presumably, there was a lot of complaint about the fact that Chauvin wasn't charged with first-degree murder, right?
01:01:03.000 But he didn't – what story would make it sensible that he wanted to kill George Floyd, that that was his purpose?
01:01:10.000 Well, you know – do you know that he knew him? 0.98
01:01:13.000 You know, he knew him in advance and that they had had words and they had had problems when they worked together because Derek Chauvin was a shithead to customers and he was violent to customers. 0.64
01:01:24.000 And he and George Floyd worked as bouncers in the same establishment. 0.97
01:01:28.000 That's the word.
01:01:31.000 Well, from the point of view of the well-being of the world and from the point of view of us all processing this in some sense, I mean, you know, with the understanding that there is nothing that could possibly happen in an investigation or in a court that's going to bring George Floyd back.
01:01:45.000 So with that in mind, the best thing that could happen is that he is actually guilty of something egregious.
01:01:50.000 He's charged with it.
01:01:51.000 He's convicted.
01:01:53.000 Right.
01:01:53.000 But what makes you think that it's not murder?
01:01:55.000 This is what's confusing to me.
01:01:56.000 Oh, I'm not saying it isn't murder.
01:01:57.000 It may well be murder.
01:01:58.000 But I'm saying that what we saw doesn't tell us that it was murder.
01:02:01.000 Why is that?
01:02:02.000 Okay.
01:02:03.000 So there are several things about what we saw, what we didn't see but now know, and things that are possible.
01:02:11.000 Okay.
01:02:12.000 Okay?
01:02:13.000 One thing is that it appears that George Floyd was complaining that he could not breathe before he was on the ground.
01:02:20.000 Okay?
01:02:21.000 That he may have been having a heart attack before he was on the ground.
01:02:25.000 Now, again, even if that's true, I would think...
01:02:30.000 He obviously was deserving of immediate medical attention.
01:02:34.000 And so I am not arguing that it would not be criminal if he was dying of a heart attack and that's ultimately what killed him.
01:02:40.000 But what I'm saying is that were it the case that he was having a heart attack, he had apparently methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system at the time.
01:02:49.000 Were it the case that he was having a heart attack...
01:02:51.000 But when you say in his system, was it just because he tested positive for it, or was it active in his system?
01:02:57.000 Was it something that he had taken fairly recently, but the effects of it were no longer active?
01:03:03.000 I'm not an expert, and maybe I misunderstood what I read, but I thought that these things were recently in his system rather than just detected at trace labs.
01:03:12.000 I don't know.
01:03:13.000 I don't know either.
01:03:13.000 So let's leave...
01:03:14.000 So again...
01:03:17.000 I am not rooting for him to be...
01:03:19.000 I understand what you're saying.
01:03:20.000 The reason why I bring that up is coming from someone who works very closely with the UFC and USADA. One of the things that I'm finding out is that their methods of detection now are insanely sensitive.
01:03:32.000 And you can detect incredibly small, non-psychoactive amounts months and months and months after use.
01:03:42.000 Okay, well then it's obviously not relevant.
01:03:45.000 The possibility that he was having a heart attack is clearly relevant.
01:03:48.000 It's possible.
01:03:49.000 I mean, if he did say he can't breathe, it also could be that he was struggling and that there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe.
01:03:57.000 Or that reports that he said he couldn't breathe before he was on the ground are erroneous.
01:04:00.000 That's also possible.
01:04:01.000 It could be a lie. 0.97
01:04:02.000 When you look at what that man did, when you look at what Derek did to George Floyd with his knee on that man's neck, I could 100% kill a man that way. 0.97
01:04:12.000 Well, okay.
01:04:13.000 So here's the problem, okay?
01:04:16.000 Apparently, that technique is a technique that is authorized by the police department in question under some circumstances and apparently those circumstances were present.
01:04:32.000 It may be that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department needs to radically change.
01:04:38.000 No, it may be that the policy killed George Floyd.
01:04:41.000 Because the policy allowed him to do that?
01:04:44.000 Well, maybe it even required him to do it.
01:04:46.000 I don't know.
01:04:46.000 But the guy wasn't resisting.
01:04:48.000 That's the problem.
01:04:49.000 When he's on the ground, he's just got his knee on the guy's neck.
01:04:53.000 Did you watch the whole video?
01:04:54.000 I did watch the whole video.
01:04:55.000 There's another problem with the way he did it.
01:04:57.000 There's a drain there.
01:04:59.000 You see that cement drain?
01:05:01.000 And his neck is laying on the edge of the cement drain.
01:05:04.000 It's like a bone.
01:05:05.000 When you choke man, you don't use the meaty part of your body.
01:05:09.000 You use the bone.
01:05:10.000 And that's essentially that divot, that drain is laying right where his neck is.
01:05:16.000 I don't know if you placed him there on purpose, but I wouldn't doubt it.
01:05:19.000 Well, I'm not saying Derek Chauvin didn't kill George Floyd.
01:05:22.000 I'm not saying it wasn't racially motivated. 0.89
01:05:24.000 I am not saying that this wasn't murder in the first degree based on prior interactions.
01:05:29.000 I'm not saying any of that.
01:05:30.000 What I'm saying is that we don't know in the public based on what we have seen.
01:05:36.000 We don't know this to have been murder because if this was Derek Chauvin I think?
01:06:04.000 What do you mean?
01:06:05.000 About the policies?
01:06:06.000 I've read a bit.
01:06:07.000 What have you read?
01:06:09.000 What did it say?
01:06:10.000 It said, I'm going to struggle for the words that the acronym stands for.
01:06:16.000 There is a situation called EXDS. Extreme...
01:06:26.000 Boy, I don't have it.
01:06:28.000 Maybe Jamie can find it.
01:06:29.000 Okay.
01:06:32.000 Again, the real point here is not that he is innocent.
01:06:36.000 I don't believe him to be innocent.
01:06:38.000 My real point is that we are all acting as if we have seen with our own eyes something that is unambiguously murder.
01:06:46.000 And I don't believe that we saw that.
01:06:48.000 I believe we saw something that may well have been murder and may well not have been murder and that the way that we determine whether it is murder is in a courtroom with due process.
01:06:57.000 Well, isn't it through autopsies?
01:06:59.000 Because independent autopsies did find that asphyxiation and the cutoff of the blood supply to the brain were responsible for his death.
01:07:07.000 Now, there was a police department autopsy that was refuted by two individual independent examiners.
01:07:15.000 You know what you need?
01:07:16.000 What?
01:07:16.000 You need a court.
01:07:17.000 You need a court to examine the evidence.
01:07:19.000 You need a court to examine the evidence, and you need it to be done in front of a jury that is free to decide either way.
01:07:24.000 And here's what I'm really concerned about.
01:07:28.000 Because we all think we saw a murder, right?
01:07:31.000 We think it's unambiguous.
01:07:33.000 We think it's open and shut.
01:07:35.000 The entire case is going to unfold in that context, right?
01:07:39.000 And if he is exonerated, we are going to assume that this is a miscarriage of justice, right?
01:07:46.000 Which means, I mean, put yourself in the position of a member of the jury.
01:07:51.000 If you don't think this was murder, You may well be the person who stands in the way of a judgment and causes who knows what to erupt.
01:08:03.000 We're talking about Rodney King times a thousand.
01:08:06.000 Times a million.
01:08:07.000 Times a million.
01:08:08.000 Particularly if you look at what happened just from the reaction to this one murder.
01:08:12.000 Right.
01:08:12.000 I mean, we've seen cops murder people and we've seen a minimal reaction by the public, just protests and people get angry.
01:08:21.000 This erupted around the world.
01:08:23.000 Nobody anticipated this or saw that, but it speaks to the powder keg of circumstances that we were talking about.
01:08:30.000 All this different packed dynamite of COVID, the lockdown, financial distraught.
01:08:35.000 But can we agree that it could be that his being found not guilty would set in motion events that could be right up through civil war?
01:08:46.000 Catastrophic.
01:08:46.000 Catastrophic.
01:08:47.000 So if that is the case, what I believe is likely to happen is that he's likely to be convicted irrespective of the evidence.
01:08:56.000 He's going to be sacrificed, right?
01:08:59.000 And you agree that that might be for the best of everybody?
01:09:02.000 Well, what I want to point out is that we don't behave that way.
01:09:07.000 We don't behave that way.
01:09:09.000 The center of what we are as Americans is a country in which you are entitled to due process in a court of law that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
01:09:24.000 And if we are going to start sacrificing people because there is a mob in the street threatening to turn the place upside down, then I mean, you know what that is, right?
01:09:38.000 That's the uninvention of America.
01:09:40.000 And, you know, you can't use the term lynching for it because of the racial connotations of that term.
01:09:45.000 But if we are talking about sacrificing individuals because a mob has decided that they are guilty, then we aren't America anymore.
01:09:54.000 I think when you look at the spectrum of probability, if you had a pie, Is he guilty of murder?
01:10:03.000 Did he murder him by leaning on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds or did he not? 0.99
01:10:07.000 I would say did he not is so small you would have to have a fucking magnifying glass to look at it. 0.99
01:10:15.000 I'm an expert on choking people. 0.99
01:10:18.000 I understand what happens to the brain when you cut off the blood supply.
01:10:23.000 I've had it done to me.
01:10:25.000 What that guy's doing is torture.
01:10:27.000 And I think I could... 1.00
01:10:29.000 I know I could kill a man that way. 1.00
01:10:31.000 I know I could. 1.00
01:10:32.000 If I decided to lean on someone's neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds with all my weight, that's a dead person.
01:10:39.000 There's no way you're gonna survive.
01:10:41.000 Alright. 0.99
01:10:41.000 If your neck, one side of your neck is on the concrete and the other side is 200 pounds of my body, all focused on my knee, and I'm balancing my weight on your neck, you're a dead man. 0.99
01:10:54.000 But that's what we saw, right?
01:10:56.000 I know what you're saying, that maybe he also had a heart attack, but the idea that those two are not related seems to me to be...
01:11:03.000 Outside of the realm of possibility.
01:11:04.000 So I want to make a trade with you.
01:11:06.000 Okay.
01:11:07.000 Okay?
01:11:08.000 I absolutely hope that you're right.
01:11:12.000 Okay?
01:11:12.000 I hope this is clear.
01:11:15.000 But in exchange for that, I want the agreement that the American thing to do is to convict him by the evidence in a court of law.
01:11:24.000 And if the evidence is not sufficiently compelling, that's not what's supposed to happen, that that would be un-American for that to be the way he was convicted.
01:11:32.000 I agree, and we are convicting him in the court of public opinion, but we're doing it based on a video of a man putting all his weight on this guy's neck for 8 minutes and 40. That's, I mean, when you roll in jujitsu class, generally a roll is between 5 minutes,
01:11:47.000 maybe 10 minutes or something like that, and the idea of a man being on my neck the entire time is fucking terrifying. 0.78
01:11:54.000 Oh, I believe I saw a tremendous miscarriage of justice.
01:11:58.000 What I don't know and what I don't think any of us understand is what is the policy?
01:12:03.000 Did he exceed the policy?
01:12:05.000 Did he enact the policy?
01:12:07.000 I just can't imagine any cop would think that that was the way to do it.
01:12:10.000 It's one thing if someone is resisting arrest and they're very dangerous and you're handcuffing them and you put your knee on their neck to hold them down in place.
01:12:19.000 And I think that is a valid move.
01:12:21.000 If you have a guy and he's got a gun or he's wired on PCP and he's very strong and there's a bunch of you trying to hold on to the guy and someone leans on his neck, I'm all for that.
01:12:31.000 But then when you're done, when you got him cuffed, let him go.
01:12:33.000 He's not a threat.
01:12:34.000 That guy wasn't even moving.
01:12:35.000 He was just begging for his I wanted George Floyd to be taken to a hospital.
01:12:39.000 It seems clear to me that he needed to be taken to a hospital, but I don't know.
01:12:46.000 Officer can also use two type of neck restraints in less severe circumstances.
01:12:51.000 One is called a conscious neck restraint, which is an officer applies light to moderate pressure to the side of a person's neck, but does not intend to knock a person unconscious.
01:13:01.000 That could be used against people who are actively resisting.
01:13:04.000 So that alone Just dismisses this whole idea.
01:13:07.000 Because that's not what was going on there.
01:13:08.000 That guy was not actively resistant.
01:13:10.000 The other neck restraint is one meant to render someone unconscious.
01:13:14.000 That could be used when someone is exhibiting active aggression and for life-saving purposes.
01:13:19.000 Again, this does not apply.
01:13:20.000 Department policy said neck restraints can't be used against people who are passively resisting.
01:13:25.000 So right there it says neck restraints should not have been used against George Floyd because he was not Violently resisting.
01:13:33.000 That's not what was going on.
01:13:34.000 He was not exhibiting active aggression.
01:13:36.000 He wasn't do that.
01:13:37.000 He was begging for his life.
01:13:39.000 He was calling out to his dead mother.
01:13:41.000 His mother, I know. 1.00
01:13:42.000 It's horrific shit. 0.99
01:13:43.000 I am feeling the need to emphasize I do believe I saw a miscarriage of justice, but I know that the American thing to do is to have all of this out in a court of law where all of the appropriate arguments are on the table. 0.99
01:13:56.000 I agree with you.
01:13:57.000 I don't see A way where he wasn't guilty.
01:14:04.000 But I do agree with you that he should be tried in a court of law.
01:14:07.000 But just based on that, I say he's guilty.
01:14:10.000 And then we're also looking at the comparison between the Eric Gardner case, which I also thought was horrible.
01:14:16.000 And I also said, as a person who's an expert in martial arts, that was a chokehold.
01:14:21.000 They were saying it wasn't a chokehold.
01:14:22.000 It was a chokehold.
01:14:24.000 But here's the thing about the Eric Gardner case. 0.98
01:14:26.000 They should have never fucking arrested that guy in the first place. 0.97
01:14:29.000 He was just selling loose cigarettes. 0.99
01:14:30.000 Like, what kind of world we're living in where you grab a guy by his neck because he's selling loose cigarettes?
01:14:35.000 And when those guys did tackle him and take him down to the ground and held on to him when he said he can't breathe, he also appeared to be in poor health.
01:14:43.000 And it was likely that the altercation, which probably wouldn't have killed you, killed him.
01:14:48.000 And it was awful.
01:14:49.000 Terrible.
01:14:49.000 But this was a hundred times worse.
01:14:53.000 Well, can we come – you say what kind of a world are we living in where somebody selling loose cigarettes has this kind of interaction?
01:14:59.000 And we can say the same thing for George Floyd, right?
01:15:02.000 We're talking about – Yeah, counterfeit $20 bills, nothing.
01:15:04.000 Yeah, right.
01:15:05.000 But I want to go back to what I said before.
01:15:09.000 Police brutality is a feature, not a bug.
01:15:11.000 Yes, I agree with you.
01:15:13.000 So what I mean by that is if you are going to freeze people out of their share of the well-being that is generated by society – You are going to have to keep them from revolting.
01:15:26.000 And so what you do is you set up some sort of arbitrary administrator of authority that people run in contact with that they fear, right?
01:15:35.000 You set up some force that disincentivizes misbehavior.
01:15:40.000 And that force isn't just the police.
01:15:41.000 It's obviously the prison system as well.
01:15:46.000 Here's where I'd argue with you about that.
01:15:48.000 That only applies if you only see that force exhibited towards poor people in disenfranchised communities, but you don't.
01:15:57.000 What you see with police brutality is you see police brutality being utilized on wealthy people.
01:16:02.000 Yep.
01:16:12.000 Yep.
01:16:25.000 There's no threat.
01:16:26.000 Clearly no threat.
01:16:27.000 No weapon.
01:16:28.000 No nothing. 1.00
01:16:28.000 You've got a monster who just wants to fucking shoot people. 1.00
01:16:32.000 And I think it points to what Jocko was saying. 1.00
01:16:35.000 A lack of training, a lack of quality people, and a lack of a process of weeding out people that would be More inclined to use police brutality.
01:16:46.000 And that process, I think, should be similar to BUDS, like what Navy SEALs have to go through, or Rangers have to go through.
01:16:54.000 It should be something that weeds out people of weak character.
01:16:57.000 So the police should be something that's a very difficult job to get, where you only get the cream of the crop of human beings, of character, of emotional stability, people that would not do something like that.
01:17:09.000 Who would recognize that man on the ground as being a father and a husband and a human being who's a part of our community. 1.00
01:17:16.000 And you don't gun him down just because you're a fucking piece of shit. 1.00
01:17:19.000 And that's what that guy did. 1.00
01:17:21.000 So it's not just a bug that's designed to keep people of disenfranchised communities from speaking out and demanding their fair share.
01:17:30.000 It's a bug of human beings who have power over other human beings.
01:17:33.000 You know the Stanford prison experiments, which of course have been sort of discredited in some ways.
01:17:39.000 That they actually probably wanted out of it.
01:17:42.000 But the idea behind it makes sense to us, that if you give people power over people, they kind of tend to abuse it.
01:17:47.000 When people have just unchecked authority over folks, they tend to use that.
01:17:55.000 It's a feature of human beings.
01:17:57.000 Oh, believe me.
01:17:58.000 I mean, like I said before, I only told you the simpler story of my run-in with the cops.
01:18:06.000 I know that...
01:18:08.000 Putting a badge on somebody and giving them a weapon and giving them all of that power, it brings the worst out in many people and it's very, very – it's very dangerous.
01:18:19.000 But I still see something systemic here that isn't being discussed.
01:18:26.000 I don't think we disagree on that.
01:18:28.000 I think that's there as well.
01:18:30.000 I think there's multiple factors.
01:18:32.000 Well, multiple factors, yes.
01:18:35.000 But let's put it this way.
01:18:39.000 My claim is that opportunity is being hoarded, right?
01:18:42.000 At the top of the economic ladder, opportunity is widespread.
01:18:46.000 You can do very well.
01:18:48.000 The farther you get down the economic ladder, the less opportunity there is and the greater the danger of your falling off the bottom, right?
01:18:55.000 In some communities, you start off off the bottom, right?
01:18:59.000 And you cannot access the ladder up.
01:19:01.000 In such cases, it is not surprising that people resort to crime.
01:19:05.000 The reason most people do not resort to crime is that they have better options and people are wired to pick better options.
01:19:11.000 So let's talk about a couple things.
01:19:13.000 Okay.
01:19:14.000 And I do hope we get to some science at some point.
01:19:16.000 We got a lot of time, brother.
01:19:17.000 Good.
01:19:17.000 All right.
01:19:18.000 So let's talk for a second about why the black community has a special problem in America. 1.00
01:19:28.000 Can we talk about that?
01:19:29.000 Sure.
01:19:30.000 All right.
01:19:30.000 So I want to talk about two things.
01:19:32.000 One has to do with the special origin story for the African-derived population of Americans.
01:19:39.000 Obviously, slavery is where most African-Americans come from. 1.00
01:19:44.000 They arrived through that mechanism.
01:19:46.000 But slavery...
01:19:47.000 It has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being.
01:19:52.000 So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software reworked for different habitats.
01:20:04.000 The reason that human beings are I'm able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right?
01:20:14.000 You can have a software program for hunting in the Kalahari.
01:20:18.000 You can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes.
01:20:21.000 You can have any one of a number of software programs.
01:20:25.000 Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had and it did its best to erase that program and to render that program non-functional. 0.54
01:20:39.000 It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language. 1.00
01:20:44.000 So there was not one culture available.
01:20:46.000 And it sort of forces The bootstrapping of a new culture which was composed of various things but of course there was a prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that.
01:20:58.000 So there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had who were in the New World and a substituting of a version that was not as much of a threat to the slave holding population,
01:21:13.000 right?
01:21:14.000 And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even – we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms.
01:21:25.000 There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all.
01:21:30.000 So the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different I would argue – Is the systematic hobbling of the onboard, the inherited evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture. 1.00
01:21:53.000 And in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others whom they had the right language to talk to and all. 1.00
01:22:06.000 So in any case that carries through to the present it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully bring To fully update software.
01:22:26.000 Am I making sense yet?
01:22:27.000 Yes.
01:22:27.000 Okay.
01:22:28.000 You're speaking about this almost purely from like an evolutionary biology perspective.
01:22:32.000 Yes, and I'm afraid that it's not properly going to come through.
01:22:36.000 What I'm saying is that when you have one population in control of how another population accesses the shared culture, that it's never fair, right?
01:22:45.000 And so we saw this with...
01:22:47.000 You know, conquistadors who came into the New World and were forcing Catholicism on the Inca, for example, right? 0.99
01:22:54.000 So there's always this attempt to hand off culture that serves the powerful and undermines those who might rebel against them.
01:23:04.000 Okay.
01:23:06.000 Now, let's...
01:23:09.000 Let's go back to the question of how opportunity is distributed.
01:23:12.000 So for some populations, you have very little opportunity and you have a tremendous hazard of falling off the bottom of the ladder and there's not enough mechanism to allow you to get back to it.
01:23:23.000 That creates crime.
01:23:26.000 Let's say that those who control or who write the rules of the system do not want a revolt even though this scenario would set them up for it.
01:23:38.000 So one thing that happens is you create a tendency to incarcerate.
01:23:45.000 You have rules that free certain people out of opportunity and then you have a system that is capable of incarcerating massive numbers of them.
01:23:55.000 We incarcerate a much larger fraction of our population than any comparable nation and a very disproportionate fraction of people in that system are black.
01:24:05.000 So here's the part that I don't hear discussed.
01:24:12.000 When you take men out of a population, it has a very predictable effect. 0.93
01:24:18.000 You take men out of a population, it undercuts the bargaining position of women in mating and dating. 1.00
01:24:25.000 So if you take men out of the population, it means that those men who are still present in that population are in very high demand.
01:24:33.000 Now, men being men, if they're in high sexual demand, it is hard to get them to settle down.
01:24:39.000 A man who has lots of options is much harder to persuade to become monogamous and participate in traditional family raising.
01:24:50.000 So what that does is it creates an environment in which you have many more single parent homes, many more children growing up without their fathers present, which of course hobbles the kids who are raised in that situation because humans are so difficult to raise.
01:25:07.000 They're so costly in terms of time and energy and resources that one person has a much harder time doing it than a team of two people.
01:25:15.000 And this sets in motion all of the things for which white society imagines that there's some cause inside of being black when in fact it's a demographic process, a demographic process that unfolds very naturally if you remove a disproportionate number of men from a population and undermine women's bargaining position. 0.78
01:25:38.000 Is that making sense?
01:25:39.000 Absolutely.
01:25:40.000 Okay, so why are we not having that discussion and why are we instead talking about shutting down STEM? STEM is exactly what you need in order to understand how that process works and to figure out what you would have to do to fix it.
01:25:55.000 Well, I think those things are in many people's eyes so distantly connected.
01:26:00.000 You know, when they look at the economic disparity and the crime and the gang problem and the prison problem and the incarceration problem and They look at that and then they look at STEM as being a completely different thing.
01:26:15.000 Your connection and what you're saying about the fact that the hobbling of these communities is so systemic.
01:26:25.000 It's so a part of how they're established and set up and it's repeating itself over and over and over again, generation after generation.
01:26:34.000 That, in many people's eyes, doesn't seem related.
01:26:40.000 It doesn't seem related.
01:26:41.000 Exactly.
01:26:41.000 And this is why you need those enlightenment values and the tools that arise out of them.
01:26:48.000 Right.
01:26:49.000 You need to be able to look at it scientifically.
01:26:51.000 Right.
01:26:51.000 If this is causal, you have to go dispassionate in order to make a compassionate policy.
01:26:57.000 They can't be taboo subjects.
01:26:58.000 They can't be breached by white people because of your privilege. 0.81
01:27:01.000 Right.
01:27:01.000 So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on.
01:27:09.000 There really is a problem. 0.81
01:27:11.000 And what this movement is doing is it is advancing a phony explanation, bad policy, and then on the other side, everybody who's not going along with this You know, a vast majority of those who are not going along are thinking, okay, those people are just crazy.
01:27:27.000 They're complaining about something that doesn't exist. 0.92
01:27:29.000 This is nonsense.
01:27:30.000 It's chaos.
01:27:31.000 It has to be shut down.
01:27:32.000 And so, anyway, the truth is neither of those things.
01:27:36.000 The movement is advancing wrong ideas, but the energy that fuels the movement is about real legitimate complaints.
01:27:45.000 And the people who are against the movement because they don't buy what's being said or don't understand the actual unfairness in our system are being emboldened by this.
01:27:55.000 They're not being woken up to it.
01:27:58.000 Right.
01:28:06.000 Yeah.
01:28:18.000 I feel that always when I hear people discuss jobs like when I hear presidential candidates discuss jobs and unemployment and you know and boosting up the economy and like when Trump discusses the fact that you know when the economy was doing well before COVID that there was black unemployment was at an all-time low and that you know he was all these great things were happening it's like addressing You're
01:28:49.000 not addressing the foundation.
01:28:51.000 You're only addressing like the windows of a house.
01:28:54.000 We keep the windows shut and this house is solid.
01:28:57.000 But if the foundation is rotten because of termites and you're just ignoring it and you just keep stacking boards up to level it out when one side sinks because the rotten wood gives way, you're not fixing that.
01:29:10.000 These are temporary patches.
01:29:12.000 The real issue is very clear.
01:29:16.000 One of the ways I've looked at it, and this is a very simplistic way that I sort of say, if you really wanted to help America, if you're really patriotic, what's the best way to help America?
01:29:27.000 Well, you'd want less losers. 0.76
01:29:29.000 How do you get less losers?
01:29:31.000 You find the spots where the people have an unfair shot, and you fix that.
01:29:36.000 You fix those spots, whether it's the south side of Chicago, whether it's Baltimore.
01:29:39.000 You find these disenfranchised areas, and you fix them. 1.00
01:29:44.000 That's the only way.
01:29:45.000 You give people much more opportunity.
01:29:49.000 You set it up so people have...
01:29:53.000 If not the same advantage, a far superior advantage than they have now in terms of their ability to make it through, navigate the terrifying waters of being a young adult and getting through the system without going to jail and without making terrible mistakes and then having some sort of an economic opportunity that it gives you hope that you actually strive for something and you get rewarded for your effort and you see other people get rewarded for that effort as well and that becomes the model That you're using.
01:30:23.000 You use this model of, you know, the model that we see in a lot of upper middle class communities.
01:30:29.000 You see there's a path.
01:30:31.000 Mike made it through.
01:30:32.000 Look at Mike.
01:30:32.000 Now he has a Corvette.
01:30:33.000 You know, Tom made it through.
01:30:34.000 Look at that nice house.
01:30:35.000 And you see that and you just emulate that.
01:30:38.000 Whereas in these communities that have been established, they've had this problem for decade after decade and nothing's been done about it.
01:30:47.000 And so they hear all this This talk from politicians about black unemployment and this and that. 0.99
01:30:53.000 But meanwhile, the fucking neighborhood is exactly the same. 0.99
01:30:55.000 No one's done anything to fix it. 0.99
01:30:57.000 No one's done anything to...
01:30:59.000 And I think it's a tremendous problem in terms of what effort needs to be done to fix it. 0.99
01:31:06.000 And I'm a moron. 0.98
01:31:06.000 I'm not the guy to fix it. 0.98
01:31:07.000 I don't understand how it could be done.
01:31:10.000 But I do understand that there's not work being put into doing it.
01:31:14.000 Other than through the people in the community and community activists and some people that are philanthropists that have tried to figure out a way to do their best to put a dent in it, it's never been addressed on a national level.
01:31:27.000 It's not addressed like no president has ever made an address, even Obama, where they've sat down and said, here's the areas of this country where it's really hard to make it, and this is what we're going to do to fix that.
01:31:40.000 Yeah, I agree, but I still don't think you're at the root.
01:31:43.000 What's the root?
01:31:44.000 Trevor Burrus The root is a system that is so politically corrupt that it is not even interested in doing what it needs to do.
01:31:53.000 It is interested in doing the bare minimum that it can do that prevents revolt.
01:31:57.000 And now it's screwed up.
01:31:58.000 Now it's got revolt on its hands. 0.86
01:32:00.000 If you actually wanted to solve this problem, you have to solve it at the causal level.
01:32:05.000 You can't have a system in which people are choosing between candidates from two corrupt parties, both of which are hell-bent on stealing well-being from them and transferring it to their actual constituents.
01:32:20.000 I agree.
01:32:21.000 Yeah, that's a problem as well.
01:32:24.000 I don't think it's a problem as well.
01:32:26.000 I mean, imagine for a second, right?
01:32:29.000 How did we get here?
01:32:30.000 It's 2020. We are facing a global pandemic, which incidentally I do want to talk to you about.
01:32:36.000 We are facing a global pandemic.
01:32:39.000 We are facing rioting in the streets, a movement that's showing signs of a Maoist challenge to the most fundamental aspects of the West, right?
01:32:52.000 And we're going to have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden?
01:32:59.000 What?
01:33:00.000 Neither one of these people is capable of or inclined towards the kind of leadership that you have just described we would need.
01:33:09.000 Agreed.
01:33:09.000 So that means at the very least, if we do not...
01:33:14.000 Divert our course, right?
01:33:16.000 If November comes and we are choosing between those two, then that means we're putting off any solution at least four years because the president, the president would be essential to changing our course.
01:33:30.000 Right?
01:33:31.000 And this is just built into these parties now.
01:33:34.000 Right?
01:33:34.000 Obama, I can't figure out why it's the case.
01:33:37.000 I really like Obama personally.
01:33:40.000 He seems like the right guy to me.
01:33:42.000 But his administration at a policy level was indistinguishable from Bush.
01:33:49.000 In some ways it was worse.
01:33:51.000 So what we've got is parties that decide what we get to choose from and the game is to prevent us from having any choice that could possibly solve the problem.
01:34:01.000 So we have to fix that.
01:34:03.000 We have to address that problem and we have to break their stranglehold.
01:34:07.000 And you know, in fairness, Trump was a challenge to that two-party duopoly.
01:34:13.000 He's not really a Republican.
01:34:15.000 But he's also not really an alternative.
01:34:18.000 It's like a third crime family, right?
01:34:20.000 You've got the Republicans, the Democrats and now the Trumps.
01:34:23.000 Trevor Burrus He sort of co-opted their ideology to fit his needs.
01:34:27.000 Yeah.
01:34:28.000 But it's not a solution.
01:34:30.000 So we have to get that solution which means we have to get by the parties.
01:34:34.000 Trump proved that was possible.
01:34:36.000 Right.
01:34:37.000 I think if there was ever a time where an independent party has a chance, now's the time.
01:34:42.000 If someone steps in and has a real solution.
01:34:46.000 And also, in terms of the distribution of that information, now's the time.
01:34:50.000 Because you could just post something on YouTube where you're...
01:34:55.000 Demonstrating through a step-by-step process.
01:34:57.000 It could take hours to do it.
01:34:58.000 Like, this is what I want to do, and this is how I'm going to do it.
01:35:00.000 You break those down to clips, almost like a podcast.
01:35:03.000 And if someone was a person of substance that we really believed in, we said, that person can really do this.
01:35:10.000 This actually could happen.
01:35:12.000 Let's vote independent.
01:35:13.000 It could happen.
01:35:14.000 They don't have a monopoly on the distribution of information anymore.
01:35:19.000 And that's terrifying to them because they used to be able to count on the shills on the left and the right to get the word out for them.
01:35:25.000 But they don't have that anymore.
01:35:27.000 You have so many people that...
01:35:30.000 Really don't have an ideological foundation in either one of them that are talking and they're reaching millions of people.
01:35:37.000 That's a rare moment in time.
01:35:39.000 And this is, in my opinion, the very best time for someone to step in that's not They're not compliant.
01:35:46.000 They don't need that policy machine behind them or the political machine behind them.
01:35:54.000 Well, I've got a plan, but we'd have to find a really big podcast, I think, to get enough momentum.
01:35:59.000 There's none of those out there.
01:36:00.000 You haven't encountered a big podcast?
01:36:01.000 No, they don't exist.
01:36:04.000 All right.
01:36:04.000 You want to hear the plan?
01:36:05.000 Sure.
01:36:05.000 Okay.
01:36:06.000 The Rock and Jocko Willink.
01:36:08.000 Get them together.
01:36:09.000 Well, you know, let's put that to the side.
01:36:13.000 It's not part of the plan, but it actually could fit.
01:36:14.000 Okay.
01:36:15.000 Okay?
01:36:16.000 So here's the plan.
01:36:18.000 This plan needs a better name, but the working title is The Dark Horse Duo Plan.
01:36:24.000 And the plan looks like this.
01:36:26.000 We draft two individuals.
01:36:29.000 We find two people.
01:36:31.000 One of them is center-left and one of them is center-right.
01:36:35.000 And these people have to have certain characteristics, a minimum set.
01:36:39.000 They have to be patriotic, they have to be courageous, and they have to be highly capable.
01:36:46.000 But that's it.
01:36:47.000 Okay.
01:36:48.000 Center left and a center right.
01:36:49.000 And we pair them together.
01:36:51.000 And we draft them with the following plan that they will govern as a team.
01:36:58.000 That is to say, every important decision will be discussed and they will decide what to do as a team and only in cases where they cannot reach agreement or whether something has to be – whenever something has to be decided on a very short time scale like a military decision.
01:37:16.000 Does the person who inhabits the role of the president govern alone?
01:37:22.000 We draft these folks and then four years down the road, they switch and the one who had run for president now runs for the vice presidential spot and the one who was vice president now runs for president and they continue this way until one of two things happens.
01:37:37.000 Either we vote someone else in or one of them has inhabited the office of president twice and is no longer eligible and then that person has to be replaced.
01:37:46.000 So we have a patriotic team governing together from center left and center right.
01:37:52.000 But when you say drafted, that's the problem. 0.99
01:37:55.000 Like someone has to be motivated to ruin their fucking lives to try to run this country because that's what happens to everybody that does it. 0.99
01:38:01.000 I agree. 0.99
01:38:02.000 But then that's an obstacle.
01:38:03.000 You're spelling out an obstacle that I would argue is solvable, that we know these people.
01:38:07.000 Who?
01:38:08.000 Okay.
01:38:08.000 So let's just say that's the plan so far.
01:38:11.000 We can talk about what problems it solves as much as you want.
01:38:14.000 I feel like I should have a drink and listen to this.
01:38:16.000 You're welcome to have a drink.
01:38:18.000 It's probably a good idea.
01:38:19.000 Kind of kidding, but go ahead.
01:38:20.000 But okay, so here's my proposal.
01:38:23.000 So the plan could be right and my proposal for who we draft could be wrong and I'm happy to see other people swapped in.
01:38:30.000 Okay.
01:38:31.000 But my proposal would be Admiral William McRaven on the right.
01:38:36.000 You know who that is?
01:38:37.000 No, I don't.
01:38:38.000 Okay.
01:38:38.000 He is a Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL. He was, until 2018, the Chancellor of the University of Texas.
01:38:46.000 He is a very cogent center-right Republican.
01:38:56.000 He was the lead on the Bin Laden raid, and he is I think universally respected by people who know him.
01:39:04.000 I've never heard anybody say negative things about him.
01:39:08.000 On the center left...
01:39:10.000 Let me see this gentleman.
01:39:11.000 I'm going to look at his face.
01:39:13.000 Yeah, you're going to know.
01:39:15.000 Oh, yeah, I have seen that guy before.
01:39:17.000 I like it.
01:39:18.000 Looks like a president to me.
01:39:19.000 Yeah, it looks like a president to me too.
01:39:20.000 You know who else looks like a president to me?
01:39:22.000 Who?
01:39:23.000 Andrew Yang.
01:39:24.000 I'm down with that.
01:39:25.000 Okay.
01:39:26.000 I like what you're saying now.
01:39:27.000 Good.
01:39:28.000 So here's my point.
01:39:32.000 Those two guys together.
01:39:33.000 Those two.
01:39:34.000 Is that camera on?
01:39:36.000 Yes.
01:39:36.000 Admiral, your country needs you.
01:39:39.000 It really does.
01:39:40.000 Never more than now. 0.97
01:39:42.000 And I know that the job of president is a sucky one. 0.55
01:39:46.000 I'm sure the job of vice president is even worse.
01:39:49.000 But please consider this plan because the republic is in jeopardy. 0.68
01:39:56.000 Now, we already know that Andrew Yang is up for the job because he ran for office and faced appallingly stupid obstacles that, in my opinion, may be the reason that he's not the nominee. 0.91
01:40:10.000 So here we got two people. 0.93
01:40:12.000 One of them, I think, will do so out of duty. 0.65
01:40:15.000 The other is crazy enough to want the job in the first place.
01:40:18.000 And what are they?
01:40:20.000 Well, they're both patriots, they're both courageous, and they're both highly capable.
01:40:26.000 This is the road out.
01:40:28.000 I don't know the Navy SEAL gentleman, but Andrew Yang has some really good ideas.
01:40:39.000 And reasonable ideas across the board.
01:40:43.000 In terms of many things, not just universal basic income, which was the thing that he was most popular for, but even law enforcement.
01:40:51.000 He's got some great ideas about a lot of things.
01:40:52.000 He thinks outside the box.
01:40:54.000 He's a brilliant guy.
01:40:54.000 Open to anything?
01:40:55.000 Yes.
01:40:56.000 Very reasonable.
01:40:57.000 So I would suggest one last part of the plan.
01:41:01.000 Right?
01:41:01.000 Which is that we Americans have to get over the idea that when somebody runs for office, especially the office of the president, that the right reaction is to ask them a million questions about what they will do in office, what policies they advocate.
01:41:17.000 This is absurd.
01:41:19.000 Presidents don't make policy.
01:41:20.000 They certainly influence what policy is made.
01:41:22.000 But the important thing about a president is that they listen to the right sorts of people and that they have a mind capable of processing what they hear so that they can I think?
01:41:52.000 I think it's bound to be far more informative than dogging them about, you know, what they're going to do about health care and how they're going to pay for it.
01:42:01.000 The thing about asking someone what they're going to do, though, is it does influence people whether or not they're willing to vote for that person.
01:42:08.000 They want to see a plan.
01:42:09.000 I know what you're saying is a reasonable person who understands the system, but for the average American, they do want to see a plan to how to get out of a lot of the messes that we see.
01:42:19.000 Well, you know, the funny thing is we think a lot of things are true about what people want. 0.99
01:42:25.000 For one thing, we've been told that people are stupid and that, you know, they're hopeless. 0.98
01:42:30.000 And if, you know, I mean, you're really one of the earliest innovators here. 0.99
01:42:36.000 You have found that people that we've been told have an attention span so short that they can only deal with a sitcom are interested in a three-hour conversation about complex topics with people from all over the map, right?
01:42:48.000 People are ready to listen.
01:42:49.000 And what I'm trying to say is we have a wrong idea in our sense of what elections are.
01:42:57.000 And really that wrong idea isn't even about the fact that we think we want to hear the plan.
01:43:01.000 It's about the fact that we know that our power in the system is so limited that the only way we could possibly exert any influence on the policy that gets made is if we can get somebody to promise us something into a camera enough that they're embarrassed not to do it when they get in office.
01:43:15.000 And we also know that doesn't work.
01:43:17.000 Right.
01:43:17.000 As soon as they get in the office, they just do whatever they're going to do in the first place.
01:43:21.000 So my point would be, look, I will literally vote for any competent, courageous patriot.
01:43:28.000 I actually don't care in what direction they're ruling.
01:43:31.000 Yes, I would prefer that they were progressive because I believe we need to make progress or we will perish.
01:43:37.000 But any courageous, capable patriot is good enough because a courageous, capable patriot will do way better than we are doing with the current method.
01:43:46.000 Yeah, and I'm seeing this one thing that I keep hearing over and over again from people on the left that really disturbs me.
01:43:53.000 It's this concession that what you're voting for is the cabinet.
01:43:56.000 You're voting for the Supreme Court.
01:44:01.000 You're voting for...
01:44:03.000 Someone who's not going to reverse Roe vs. 0.75
01:44:05.000 Wade.
01:44:06.000 That's what I keep hearing from my friends on the left.
01:44:08.000 And, you know, they've basically just made this concession in their head like, hey, you know, this is what I'm voting for now.
01:44:15.000 They've given up.
01:44:16.000 And the news media on the left has completely ignored all of these...
01:44:22.000 Biden speeches that clearly show some sort of cognitive decline.
01:44:27.000 In fact, I've actually, like David Pakman, who I respect a lot, he was kind of arguing against it, that it didn't show his decline.
01:44:36.000 And I was trying to look at it in a way that it made sense.
01:44:40.000 I was trying to be rational about it.
01:44:42.000 I'm like, okay, maybe he's just exhausted, or maybe this, or maybe it's pressure. 0.98
01:44:45.000 You know, sometimes people get really tongue-tied and panic under pressure, and words come out all fucked up. 0.98
01:44:51.000 That is possible. 0.98
01:44:52.000 But there's a trend.
01:44:54.000 And if you go back to when he was a younger man, that trend didn't exist.
01:44:58.000 You're seeing a change.
01:45:01.000 And the idea that as you get older, you become less comfortable with the media, less comfortable with speaking publicly, that doesn't jive with me.
01:45:12.000 That doesn't make any sense.
01:45:13.000 So, look, I agree with you.
01:45:15.000 I see a decline.
01:45:15.000 But irrespective of what that is, Joe Biden is an influence peddler.
01:45:21.000 He is not an idea guy, right?
01:45:24.000 He's the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology.
01:45:31.000 Who cares?
01:45:31.000 This is not an answer to any known question.
01:45:35.000 This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less.
01:45:40.000 So look, how dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?
01:45:49.000 Well, they did it to us before this moment happened.
01:45:51.000 That's the thing.
01:45:52.000 They did it to us before COVID. They did it to us before the looting and before the demonstrations.
01:45:56.000 It was this moment.
01:45:57.000 I don't think they thought it was going to happen the way it happened.
01:46:02.000 I feel like they felt that if they got Joe Biden in there, if none of this stuff had happened, you would just be dealing with one solution to the problem that is Donald Trump.
01:46:13.000 Right.
01:46:14.000 But even if we are – if we bend over backwards to be generous to the Democratic Party, yes, it did this in a moment when we didn't know that COVID-19 was going to spread, right?
01:46:25.000 And we didn't know that there was going to be massive riots in the streets over who knows how many cities.
01:46:32.000 We did – we should have known that this was building.
01:46:37.000 The possibility of a pandemic was always on the table.
01:46:40.000 The fact that we have a pandemic and that that makes it clear why we need a cogent leader.
01:46:47.000 It was obvious that this could happen under any presidency.
01:46:50.000 Yeah, but there's a lot of other things.
01:46:51.000 I mean, it's hard to say that the possibility of a pandemic is on the table, so we should have been prepared for it.
01:46:56.000 I mean, the possibility of an asteroid impacts on the table, the possibility of a solar flare that wipes out the power grid, always on the table.
01:47:03.000 Yeah, but you're making my point.
01:47:04.000 My point is, you can never afford to have somebody who isn't a courageous, capable patriot in that office.
01:47:11.000 How dare they play games with this thing?
01:47:13.000 It's not theirs to screw up.
01:47:15.000 Right, and this also has highlighted the problem of Donald Trump's ego.
01:47:20.000 Yeah.
01:47:21.000 You know, I mean, people would say, his ego's, yeah, he's got an ego problem, but look, he's getting the job done, he's doing great things.
01:47:27.000 But then, in the face of this pandemic, when he's being criticized, like, almost to the point where he can't handle it anymore, you know, like, some people can run at a pace of five miles an hour, but when you force them to run at a pace of seven miles an hour, things get slippery.
01:47:43.000 You start feeling cramps.
01:47:45.000 You start looking for a way out.
01:47:47.000 And he's right now about nine miles an hour.
01:47:49.000 And it's not looking good.
01:47:51.000 I mean, he's tweeting about not falling down a ramp.
01:47:56.000 Why were you walking like that?
01:47:57.000 He's like, oh, the fake news media.
01:47:59.000 It's a slippery ramp, and I'm not going to give them a... 1.00
01:48:02.000 Like, what the fuck are you even paying attention to? 0.99
01:48:04.000 The fact that your ego is so fragile, you're paying attention to criticisms the way you walk down a slippery ramp. 0.99
01:48:11.000 They would have ignored that.
01:48:12.000 It would have been a non-issue. 0.99
01:48:14.000 But it's an issue that your ego is so fragile that you have to address the fact that they're criticizing the way you walk down a ramp with fucking slippery dress shoes on. 1.00
01:48:24.000 Those shoes suck. 1.00
01:48:26.000 I never wear them. 1.00
01:48:27.000 If you wear those...
01:48:28.000 I went to a cowboy boot store the other day, and I was like, what can you do with these bottoms? 0.99
01:48:34.000 I'm thinking, if you've got to get away from something, if some shit's going down, you can't run with these fucking things on. 0.98
01:48:38.000 Yeah, no, they're for dancing, so you can... 0.99
01:48:40.000 Yeah, they slip around with that.
01:48:41.000 Exactly.
01:48:42.000 But that's what dress shoes are. 0.84
01:48:43.000 Yeah.
01:48:43.000 They wear those leather-soled dress shoes that slip like crazy.
01:48:48.000 There's no tread on them. 0.97
01:48:49.000 They're nonsense.
01:48:50.000 That's what that guy's wearing.
01:48:52.000 Totally.
01:48:52.000 Walking on a ramp.
01:48:53.000 Well, and you know, you should be wearing a nice pair of Adidas with some good traction.
01:48:57.000 I agree.
01:48:58.000 I always wear practical shoes because you never know when you're going to need to run. 0.99
01:49:01.000 You never know when some shit goes down. 0.99
01:49:01.000 Exactly. 0.99
01:49:02.000 Yeah.
01:49:03.000 Exactly.
01:49:04.000 But it's the ego.
01:49:05.000 It highlights.
01:49:07.000 It gets really magnetic.
01:49:09.000 You find the weaknesses in the system when the system gets tested.
01:49:12.000 And now it's being tested across the board.
01:49:15.000 Across the board.
01:49:16.000 And that insecurity, believe me, our enemies know it's there.
01:49:20.000 Oh, for sure.
01:49:21.000 And they know how to exploit it.
01:49:22.000 Yeah.
01:49:23.000 So enough games.
01:49:25.000 Yeah.
01:49:25.000 We have to escape this.
01:49:27.000 And to my friends who are still believers in the Democratic Party at some point, of which I have many...
01:49:35.000 If you hate Trump, right, if that's really your cause and you're not going to be able to see clearly anything until we have removed him from office, that is also on the Democratic bill.
01:49:50.000 Hillary Clinton advanced Trump's candidacy because she wanted to run against him.
01:49:56.000 So if you have Trump derangement syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.
01:50:03.000 Yeah, she legitimately thought he'd be the easiest to beat, so she wanted him to run.
01:50:07.000 She thought she was going to humiliate him.
01:50:09.000 She severely underestimated people that were upset at the current system and that his rhetoric, this idea of draining the swamp, would actually resonate with so many people.
01:50:19.000 And also that People look at things in a very two-dimensional way.
01:50:23.000 They're not looking at it in this really complex, nuanced way. 0.97
01:50:26.000 And if you can paint a couple of good slogans together, build that wall, make America great again, all that kind of shit, that's a brilliant way of manipulating people. 0.97
01:50:37.000 Because that's the stuff they remember. 0.99
01:50:38.000 And he's a master at it.
01:50:40.000 Sleepy Joe Biden, Crazy Hillary Clinton, Lion Hillary, Crazy Ted, Lion Ted.
01:50:47.000 He has all these nicknames for people.
01:50:49.000 I don't even remember most of them, but there's some brilliance in it.
01:50:53.000 Oh, he is a political genius.
01:50:55.000 Yes.
01:50:56.000 He is.
01:50:56.000 Well, a manipulative genius in the sense that he understands how to use the media because he's been in it forever.
01:51:02.000 These fucking people have been in it in this Bush League way. 0.98
01:51:06.000 Like, you don't even know what it's like to have a real master communicator in that role. 0.99
01:51:12.000 Have you had someone that was a master public speaker in that role who really knew how to give a blistering takedown of someone like Trump or someone like Biden?
01:51:22.000 Easy, easy, easy.
01:51:24.000 Both those guys. 1.00
01:51:25.000 They're vulnerable as fuck. 1.00
01:51:27.000 They are. 1.00
01:51:27.000 And let's get them the hell out of there. 1.00
01:51:29.000 As you point out, and you are dead right about this, if ever there was a moment, this would be it.
01:51:34.000 Yeah, this would be the moment.
01:51:37.000 But do you think you can get that guy to run?
01:51:40.000 We have to draft him.
01:51:41.000 It's a matter of duty.
01:51:42.000 What's he doing right now?
01:51:43.000 I don't know.
01:51:44.000 I think he may have retired after he left the chancellor position.
01:51:49.000 Probably right now digging a bunker somewhere outside of Waco. 1.00
01:51:51.000 Fuck this place. 1.00
01:51:53.000 But, you know, I mean, look, the way you would draft somebody like that is you would let them know that we'd have their back. 1.00
01:51:59.000 Right?
01:52:00.000 Yeah.
01:52:01.000 They would earn our loyalty and they would have to have it.
01:52:04.000 But if they did, then it's the perfect moment.
01:52:06.000 Do you think there's enough time?
01:52:07.000 Here we are in the middle of June.
01:52:09.000 Was it the 16th?
01:52:10.000 15th?
01:52:10.000 What is today?
01:52:12.000 16th.
01:52:12.000 16th of June.
01:52:14.000 July, August, September, October, November, five months.
01:52:18.000 Actually, the world, we could be, you know, we could be speaking Chinese in five months.
01:52:23.000 Look, Joe, you ain't kidding.
01:52:28.000 The thing about 2020 is you can make an argument about what's possible, but 2020 is not the year to make such an argument in. 0.97
01:52:37.000 It threw all the fucking wrenches into the gears. 0.98
01:52:41.000 Every wrench. 1.00
01:52:42.000 All the sand into the oil.
01:52:44.000 Into the eyes. 0.99
01:52:45.000 Oh my god, it's fucking crazy. 0.99
01:52:47.000 I'm going stark raving sane. 0.98
01:52:49.000 Yeah, me too.
01:52:50.000 Yeah.
01:52:51.000 I think.
01:52:52.000 So, you wanted to talk about COVID. I do.
01:52:55.000 What are your thoughts on the lockdown?
01:52:58.000 Yeah.
01:53:00.000 Well, let's put it this way.
01:53:01.000 I'm not speaking in a vacuum here.
01:53:03.000 I've heard a certain amount of your take and my take is a bit different.
01:53:10.000 I am very concerned about SARS-CoV-2.
01:53:14.000 I am not concerned about it because it is as lethal as we feared it might be.
01:53:20.000 It isn't as lethal as we feared it might be.
01:53:23.000 But I'm afraid of it for other reasons.
01:53:27.000 One, it is brand new to us evolutionarily.
01:53:30.000 It just showed up in human beings.
01:53:32.000 And so, in my opinion, we screwed up the lockdown badly because we went halfway.
01:53:40.000 That a very short, very intense lockdown could have ended it and that that would have been the smart thing to do.
01:53:47.000 And unfortunately, the political will was not there.
01:53:51.000 But I am looking at New Zealand with utter envy.
01:53:55.000 Can you imagine at this moment being free of SARS-CoV-2?
01:54:01.000 Yeah, they nailed it.
01:54:01.000 But they also have so few people.
01:54:03.000 Oh, they definitely had it easier.
01:54:05.000 But the point is they did prove it was possible.
01:54:07.000 Yes.
01:54:07.000 So in my opinion, we should have locked down severely for six weeks or something along those lines and we should have driven it to extinction.
01:54:18.000 And the problem is that that runs afoul of all kinds of things including civil liberties concerns which I also hold.
01:54:26.000 I hate the idea of a government crackdown in which they're dictating with whom you associate and all of the rest, right?
01:54:33.000 I hate it as much as anyone.
01:54:35.000 We are dealing with a brand new landscape when it comes to a global pandemic.
01:54:41.000 And what's more, we are dealing with a virus that I think is not what we have been told it is.
01:54:47.000 How so?
01:54:50.000 Initially, I thought that this was a bat-borne virus that had been transmitted to people from the wild, probably through the bushmeat trade, probably through the seafood market in Wuhan.
01:55:03.000 In fact, Heather and I were in the Amazon where we had no connectivity to anything for a couple weeks.
01:55:10.000 And when we came out, what was then called novel coronavirus was just beginning to be discussed.
01:55:16.000 And so we became aware of it as we came out of the Amazon.
01:55:19.000 I was like, oh, what the heck is that?
01:55:21.000 And I looked into it and immediately I saw the story adds up.
01:55:26.000 You know, it's a coronavirus of a kind that's known to circulate in bats.
01:55:29.000 There's a seafood market, and I thought, okay, I know what the story is, and I tweeted.
01:55:34.000 I don't know enough about the story yet, but it looks to me like the Wuhan seafood market is the source, that the virus comes from bats, and we have to talk about the bushmeat trade, which has always been a terrible idea.
01:55:46.000 And immediately people tweeted back at me, so you think it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety lab level 4 in Wuhan where this started?
01:55:55.000 And I thought, what?
01:55:58.000 That's a heck of a coincidence.
01:56:00.000 And so I started to look into it.
01:56:02.000 I retracted the tweet.
01:56:03.000 I said, maybe I don't know enough about the story yet.
01:56:05.000 And I started to look into it.
01:56:06.000 And I went down the rabbit hole because as much as we have been assured by a huge range of experts that this has to have been a bat-borne coronavirus transmitted to people, possibly through pangolins,
01:56:23.000 maybe through some intermediate host that we don't yet know, That story looks less and less likely.
01:56:30.000 And the story that is looking more and more likely, what I would call the lab leak hypothesis, is looking ever stronger.
01:56:38.000 And anyway, I've been in contact with other people who have reached that conclusion.
01:56:43.000 We have faced all kinds of pushback.
01:56:46.000 But in a sense, again, we still don't know.
01:56:50.000 It is possible that this came from the wild without human meddling.
01:56:54.000 But the The virus itself has several components that suggest that it is actually the result of manipulation in the lab and that it escaped probably from the Wuhan Institute of Virology,
01:57:10.000 but there's another lab in Wuhan.
01:57:14.000 It may well have escaped and we may be dealing with consequences of the fact that it was manipulated in a lab.
01:57:25.000 So one of the techniques that labs who study viruses like this use is something, so the research is called gain of function research.
01:57:33.000 Gain-of-function research means you are taking a virus and you are adding a capacity to it in order to study how it works.
01:57:41.000 And then one of the things that is done to study how it works is something called passaging, where a virus is infected, a creature is infected with the virus and then...
01:57:51.000 The virus is allowed to pass between individuals of that species.
01:57:56.000 It can also be done in tissues, in cellular tissues, where tissues are infected and the virus is allowed to spread from one cell to the next.
01:58:04.000 And what happens is evolution.
01:58:08.000 So there's a strong possibility that this virus was under study, that it was enhanced in the laboratory, and that we are dealing with consequences that are the result of that enhancement that make it more dangerous than it would otherwise be.
01:58:25.000 And what do you believe those enhancements are?
01:58:28.000 Well, so one of the enhancements, there is something called a furrin site, a furrin site in the genome of this virus.
01:58:39.000 Furrin sites are not known.
01:58:41.000 It doesn't mean they don't exist, but they're not known from other beta coronaviruses.
01:58:45.000 And this fern site is conspicuous.
01:58:48.000 It's conspicuous in that it is in the genome as an insert rather than mutations of nucleotides that were there.
01:58:55.000 It's like somebody spliced it in.
01:58:57.000 That's one thing, which could happen naturally, but it may well not have.
01:59:02.000 And it has a flanking sequence, which has – this is probably going to be hard for people to follow, but – Nucleotides, that is DNA, code for proteins which are made out of amino acids.
01:59:17.000 There's an amino acid called arginine, and there are two arginines coded for in the genome of this virus.
01:59:23.000 But because there are so many possible codes, triplet codes, and only 20 or so amino acids, there's redundancy.
01:59:32.000 And so which code is used to trigger the production of an The inclusion of an arginine is variable and the two arginines are coded for in a way that is not seen in nature in this way very frequently.
01:59:48.000 So let's just say there are elements of the genome that are conspicuous and suggest possible laboratory manipulation.
01:59:57.000 The fern site that I referred to that has been inserted either by a natural process or by a laboratory process Greatly increases the transmissibility of this virus, which means various things.
02:00:12.000 It could be the explanation for why this virus is infecting so many different tissues in people who get sick, right?
02:00:20.000 The list of symptoms is huge here, and that's a very troubling thing from the point of view of treating it medically, is all of the things that can go wrong with the body once you're infected.
02:00:31.000 It also means that the virus is very good at jumping between people and that high transmissibility is obviously one of the things that makes COVID-19 such a difficult pandemic to control, right?
02:00:46.000 It's hopping between people so readily that it just runs away.
02:00:51.000 So in any case, and then there's a third question that I have, which is maybe that there's something about the virus.
02:00:59.000 I don't want to say fact as if it is a fact.
02:01:02.000 But if this was an escape from the laboratory, then the virus – I mean just as maybe we'll end up talking about the telomere problem in mice, which you spoke to Eric about when he was on your podcast last.
02:01:18.000 Evolution to the lab, evolution in the lab takes place and changes that the people in charge want to happen occur and then things they're not even thinking about occur.
02:01:28.000 There's adaptation to the laboratory environment that people who work in labs are unaware of.
02:01:34.000 And so one of the questions I have is this virus is highly transmissible.
02:01:39.000 Unless you're outdoors.
02:01:40.000 Then it seems almost not transmissible.
02:01:43.000 That's very conspicuous.
02:01:45.000 I mean, for one thing, bats live outdoors, right?
02:01:48.000 So is it possible that this virus has adapted to the laboratory environment, an indoor environment, and that it has forgotten how to get transmitted outdoors?
02:01:59.000 And if we are casual about the outdoor environment, That actually it could relearn that trick, that we should take it.
02:02:06.000 A, we need to be outdoors for various reasons.
02:02:08.000 One, it appears that vitamin D is very protective in the case of COVID-19, prevents the transmission, and you end up way less sick if you have proper vitamin D. So in the northern hemisphere here, while the sun is shining, we should be outdoors.
02:02:22.000 We should not be locking down those environments at all.
02:02:26.000 We should also be very careful outdoors, right?
02:02:29.000 Because anytime we allow it to be transmitted outdoors, that is going to, it creates an evolutionary signal, a selective signal that's going to retrain the virus to be transmitted outdoors, which is not something we want at the moment.
02:02:44.000 This might be an advantage that we have.
02:02:46.000 And we're going to lose it if we're not careful, which is why I'm very careful and why I wear this thing around so that, you know, I can pull it up at a moment's notice if I'm going to talk to somebody.
02:02:58.000 Because even though I think the virus is very difficult to transmit outdoors, which is something we've seen in the data of South Korea, for example, it could learn that trick.
02:03:09.000 Why is it easier for it to – do we know?
02:03:11.000 We don't know.
02:03:12.000 Indoors? 1.00
02:03:13.000 We don't know.
02:03:14.000 So we don't know the mechanism.
02:03:16.000 And there's no good reason that we don't know.
02:03:18.000 We should know.
02:03:19.000 Because it could be that it's UV light.
02:03:21.000 UV light is very powerful, destructive stuff.
02:03:25.000 But if it's UV light, then that suggests it's difficult to transmit outdoors during the day and it should be easy to transmit outdoors at night.
02:03:32.000 If it's not UV light, then that's not likely to be it.
02:03:37.000 So there is something weird going on with viral load.
02:03:39.000 Maybe it's not weird, but it's weird for those of us who learned how viruses work from the usual textbook diagrams where a virus gets into a cell and triggers an infection.
02:03:49.000 But here it seems like if you talk to someone briefly, your chances of picking it up from them even if they're sick is pretty low.
02:03:57.000 But if you talk to somebody for an extended period of time where you're constantly breathing air that they're exhaling, then your chances go up, up, up and up.
02:04:05.000 So there's a possibility that just exposure to UV light, even if they're outside talking for the same amount of time, just the fact that these particles are going through the air in the sunlight, that it kills the virus's ability to transmit.
02:04:18.000 It's possible.
02:04:19.000 I don't know that that's what's going on.
02:04:21.000 When you think about things like, you know what a SteriPen is?
02:04:25.000 Oh, like a UV... Yeah, it's a UV wand that backpackers use so they can drink creek water.
02:04:30.000 Yep.
02:04:31.000 It's crazy.
02:04:32.000 If you've ever seen one, it doesn't even take that long.
02:04:34.000 You take this wand, you put it in like a bottle, a water bottle, and you spin it around in this creek water, and it kills all the bad stuff.
02:04:43.000 Totally.
02:04:43.000 And it's weird, man.
02:04:45.000 It's weird that light can do that.
02:04:47.000 Oh, my goodness.
02:04:48.000 Well, the UV light is amazing stuff.
02:04:50.000 Yes.
02:04:51.000 Well, you know what happened when Trump said something about getting UV light into the body.
02:04:56.000 Well, there was an actual publicly traded biotech company that had an invention for when people are intubated taking this tube with UV light and inserting it into the lungs of these people.
02:05:10.000 And they were actually pulled off of Twitter.
02:05:14.000 Twitter actually banned their account because they thought there was some wacky Trump supporter who was trying to substantiate the president.
02:05:20.000 The president just got lucky.
02:05:22.000 He's basically like, maybe we get the light and put it in the body somehow, put it in the body, disinfect the cleansing.
02:05:27.000 You remind me of Sarah Cooper when you did that.
02:05:29.000 He was on to something, though, in a weird way, that this publicly traded biotech company had an idea that when people – they are on an – when they have been intubated, when they are on – This ventilator, this tube will go down the same tube that the air is coming through and actually flood the lungs where they're infected with COVID-19 with UV light and kill it.
02:05:51.000 Well, the thing is, I don't think he got lucky.
02:05:54.000 I think he did something that he's routinely doing, which isn't very high quality in terms of leadership.
02:06:00.000 Somehow he's getting briefings.
02:06:02.000 He's tuned into some channels.
02:06:04.000 There was discussion.
02:06:05.000 I remember seeing it.
02:06:07.000 There was discussion about how UV light might be used to treat a COVID-19 infection.
02:06:13.000 And I was actually alerted by this discussion to the fact that there was apparently a lot of work on this technique previously, that actually UV light had been successfully used in various ways.
02:06:25.000 Where it could be used to purify blood and things.
02:06:28.000 And I was sort of surprised to discover it.
02:06:30.000 And then I heard the president say this.
02:06:31.000 I thought that that's what he was talking about.
02:06:33.000 My guess is something crossed his feed.
02:06:36.000 Somebody in a briefing said, well, Mr. President, there is a promising theory, promising therapy, blah, [...
02:06:44.000 And he just walks out the door and riffs on it, which is why Sarah Cooper is so funny because basically she exposes the... 0.99
02:06:52.000 I don't know who Sarah Cooper is.
02:06:53.000 Maybe I do.
02:06:54.000 You've probably seen her.
02:06:55.000 She's making these videos where she lip-syncs Trump. 1.00
02:07:00.000 Oh, No, she's not the one who did the thing where, was it Dr. Fakenstein or the Fakening put Trump's face on a baby? 0.56
02:07:11.000 Have you ever seen that one?
02:07:11.000 No, I haven't seen that one.
02:07:13.000 Oh, that one's wonderful.
02:07:14.000 That's one of the best ones ever.
02:07:15.000 You haven't run into Sarah Cooper?
02:07:17.000 I may have.
02:07:18.000 I've seen so many people mock him.
02:07:20.000 It's so hard to keep track of who's who.
02:07:23.000 Okay, but...
02:07:24.000 There she is?
02:07:25.000 Yep.
02:07:26.000 Let's give you some volume on that.
02:07:27.000 More for the black community than any other president.
02:07:30.000 And let's take a pass on Abraham Lincoln, because he did good, although it's always questionable.
02:07:37.000 You know, in other words, the end result...
02:07:39.000 Well, we are free, Mr. President.
02:07:40.000 But we are free.
02:07:41.000 You understand what I mean.
02:07:42.000 So I'm going to take a pass on Abe, honest Abe, as we call him.
02:07:45.000 But you say you've done, in general... 1.00
02:07:47.000 That is the dumbest fucking thing a person's ever said who's been in office. 0.99
02:07:51.000 That he's done more than maybe Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves? 1.00
02:07:55.000 He's giving Abe Lincoln a pass because he did pretty good.
02:07:58.000 How crazy is that?
02:07:59.000 It's crazy, right?
02:08:00.000 It's just like he's stuck.
02:08:01.000 He said something and then he gets stuck trying to substantiate what he said.
02:08:06.000 He should have said, except for obviously Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves. 0.77
02:08:10.000 And everyone would have been like, yeah, okay.
02:08:12.000 It's braggadocious, but perhaps reasonable. 1.00
02:08:14.000 It's wrong and stupid, but at least it's not crazy. 1.00
02:08:17.000 It's absolutely fucking insane. 1.00
02:08:19.000 Right. 1.00
02:08:19.000 And then the fact that he's saying it to a black woman is like, oh my god. 1.00
02:08:23.000 Yeah. 0.90
02:08:25.000 So that's the thing is he's winging it.
02:08:27.000 He's winging it.
02:08:27.000 So that's what she's doing?
02:08:28.000 She's just lip syncing? 0.96
02:08:29.000 Well, unfortunately, I don't know whether the audience saw it in sync or not.
02:08:33.000 Find the baby one.
02:08:34.000 The baby one's amazing.
02:08:35.000 If you don't have it, I could airdrop it to you.
02:08:38.000 The baby one you need to see.
02:08:39.000 Okay, I got to see the baby one. 0.99
02:08:40.000 It's fucking amazing. 0.99
02:08:41.000 Somebody, it was either the Fakening or Dr. Fakenstein. 0.98
02:08:45.000 Do you know who it was, Jamie?
02:08:46.000 Do you remember?
02:08:47.000 One of those fake artists who takes, you know, they use the face swap technology, and they put Trump's face on this baby, and then they change the words.
02:08:57.000 Someone caught a baby doing something, and they talked to the baby, and the baby was trying to lie and get their way out of it.
02:09:03.000 It's like an old video, but then they put Trump's face on it, and then they change...
02:09:07.000 Here, go ahead.
02:09:08.000 Turn it up.
02:09:09.000 I think the original baby's first.
02:09:11.000 This is the original baby.
02:09:12.000 The original's first, yeah.
02:09:13.000 Yes you did.
02:09:16.000 You've touched Jude's food.
02:09:20.000 It's adorable.
02:09:21.000 I'm going to hire her to be my lawyer. 0.69
02:09:23.000 Your Honor, may I... Yeah, fast forward to it.
02:09:26.000 So now...
02:09:27.000 Mr. President, you said the virus was just like the flu.
02:09:29.000 You did.
02:09:32.000 You also said the virus could go away by April.
02:09:34.000 No, sir, you said it would disappear like a miracle.
02:09:41.000 Yes, you said only 15 people have it.
02:09:44.000 You have to see it.
02:09:45.000 If you can find it, folks, anybody who's listening to this, you should see it because it's really disturbing seeing a baby with Trump's face.
02:09:52.000 It almost looks like Sam Kinison has a baby.
02:09:58.000 Anyway.
02:09:59.000 Anyway, which brings us back to McRaven and Yang and the Dark Horse.
02:10:02.000 But still the COVID stuff.
02:10:03.000 Yeah.
02:10:04.000 I'm just kidding.
02:10:06.000 Yeah, so...
02:10:07.000 What I would say is first of all, I do think I am very much in favor still of driving this thing to extinction by being properly sober about it briefly.
02:10:21.000 Can I pause and address this one issue that seems to be an issue when someone says that it might have come out of a lab.
02:10:32.000 This is a right-wing, left-wing thing.
02:10:34.000 For whatever reason, you get labeled a right-wing conspiracy theorist if you think it came out of a lab.
02:10:39.000 And you...
02:10:41.000 People on the left are so, they're so willing to dismiss that without any real evidence.
02:10:48.000 We've been poisoned by these ideologies when it comes to conspiracy or whether or not something is actually true but we've been fed the wrong information.
02:10:59.000 That stuff is, if you don't believe the official narrative that's being discussed on CNN, you must be some sort of a right-wing nut.
02:11:08.000 Right.
02:11:09.000 Have you faced that?
02:11:10.000 Of course I've faced it.
02:11:12.000 And it's hard to escape it, right?
02:11:15.000 So I've tried to be very careful.
02:11:17.000 I have described it as a hypothesis, which is what it is.
02:11:20.000 I have tried to show that there are different probabilities for the different origin hypotheses.
02:11:25.000 Even China now admits that it wasn't from the seafood market.
02:11:28.000 Do they?
02:11:29.000 Oh, yeah.
02:11:29.000 What do they say it's from?
02:11:30.000 Don't they say it's from us?
02:11:32.000 I have not heard that.
02:11:34.000 I have.
02:11:34.000 But let's put it this way.
02:11:39.000 One of the things that is, in my opinion, the strongest piece of evidence that the lab leak hypothesis may be correct is that there is a missing phase in the evolution of this virus.
02:11:54.000 When a virus jumps from one species to another, it is not well positioned.
02:12:00.000 It is typically very poor at its job because it doesn't have any evolutionary experience with that host.
02:12:08.000 So it's not good at leaping between that host cells, which means that it's always in very small numbers, and it's not good at leaping from one individual to the next.
02:12:15.000 That's the key question.
02:12:17.000 When something leaps into a new species and then it becomes a pandemic, it's because it has solved that second problem.
02:12:24.000 It has figured out how to infect that creature in such a way that the creature spreads it to others of its kind.
02:12:31.000 There is no evidence in the case of this virus that that happened.
02:12:36.000 It showed up in Wuhan and spread immediately.
02:12:39.000 It became a pandemic.
02:12:41.000 It already had experience.
02:12:43.000 Now, how it got that experience, we don't know.
02:12:47.000 There are evolutionary ways this could have happened.
02:12:50.000 It could be that we have not found the initial population that it circulated in.
02:12:57.000 Or it could be that it circulated in a creature that we haven't found either.
02:13:01.000 But The fact that there is no evidence that it shows up in Wuhan and immediately spreads tells us that this virus was well adapted to our cells and well adapted to transmit between individuals.
02:13:19.000 That is conspicuous.
02:13:20.000 One way you could get there is if somebody, A, had added components to a virus in order to make it transmissible to humans.
02:13:30.000 So the research in question would be research that was interested in discovering what a pandemic in humans of a bat-borne coronavirus would be like so that we could do something about it.
02:13:40.000 Maybe we could prevent it.
02:13:41.000 Maybe we could create a vaccine ahead of time.
02:13:43.000 But if you're creating a virus that has enhanced capacity to infect humans in order to study what will happen if a virus ever escapes into the human population, then you are running the risk that the virus you are studying will escape.
02:13:57.000 Would they have added something like a fern site?
02:14:00.000 Absolutely.
02:14:01.000 It is established in the literature that the addition of a fern site makes the virus much more transmissible in human tissue.
02:14:08.000 So if you were going to study it, this would be high on your list of things to do.
02:14:14.000 You could also passage it through human tissue in order to effectively train it on the infectious pathway inside of people, which again, we might be suffering the downstream consequences of that if it escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
02:14:34.000 So these things have an amazing impact and I hear a lot that what does it matter?
02:14:38.000 It's with us now.
02:14:39.000 We just have to deal with it, which is nonsense because A, we need to have it never happen again.
02:14:43.000 B, there may be things that we could understand about what its nature is that would help us fight it.
02:14:50.000 But see, we have a really serious problem now because all but a few of the world's leading virologists, the experts in coronaviruses in particular, have sworn that this must have come from nature and couldn't have come from the lab,
02:15:06.000 which is nonsense.
02:15:07.000 Why do you think they did that?
02:15:09.000 Unfortunately, this goes back to our earlier discussion.
02:15:14.000 Our scientific system is broken.
02:15:16.000 We need our scientists to be empowered to tell us what we need to know and we need them, therefore, to be freed from a system where they are fighting for grant money in order to continue their work.
02:15:29.000 This entire group of people is now in jeopardy because if this turns out to have been a leak from the lab, Then we are all suddenly going to become aware that gain of function research puts humanity in jeopardy.
02:15:42.000 That one accident in gain of function research can cause the evaporation of who knows how many trillion dollars.
02:15:49.000 It could cause, and this is one of the other things I wanted to say to you about the danger of letting this virus run its course.
02:15:57.000 If we don't stamp it out, We, A, don't know that people who have been infected are not going to continue to have outbreaks.
02:16:06.000 We don't know that yet.
02:16:08.000 We don't know whether or not people who've had it are going to be immune to it in the future.
02:16:12.000 That's probable, but it's not certain.
02:16:15.000 And we don't know that it's not going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humanity the way flu is.
02:16:22.000 And even if this thing evolved to become flu-like, if it became as unserious as the flu, the flu is very serious.
02:16:33.000 And the cost that humanity pays for having flu circulate every year is immense.
02:16:40.000 So even if the only thing that has happened in the long term, if we let it go and it evolved into another flu-like pathogen, then we have increased the number of flu-like pathogens that we have to deal with annually substantially.
02:16:56.000 And that would be a major loss to humans.
02:17:00.000 My sense that we should be much more aggressive about dealing with this is really about the fact that I think we have a short time horizon in which to deal with it, that it will learn new tricks and it will become harder to defeat the longer that we play around with it.
02:17:18.000 And so an aggressive short-term move, it's really – it's the lesson of pulling off the Band-Aid.
02:17:25.000 We're not doing ourselves any favors by pulling it off slowly.
02:17:29.000 So what do you think we should do right now?
02:17:32.000 Well, I would say – I mean the problem is this is a much harder argument to make now than it was at the beginning because we're all so freaking sick of lockdown.
02:17:41.000 I mean Portland is still under full lockdown.
02:17:44.000 But not when it comes to protests.
02:17:47.000 Well, of course not.
02:17:48.000 That's the other problem, right?
02:17:49.000 There's a massive hypocrisy in the way we're treating businesses versus treating protests. 0.80
02:17:55.000 Oh, it's an epidemic of hypocrisy.
02:17:57.000 Not only that, de Blasio in New York City won't allow people, when they're asking people that have tested positive for COVID-19, you're not allowed to ask them whether or not they've been in a protest.
02:18:08.000 So they're doing contact tracing without valuable data because they want to be progressive.
02:18:15.000 That's insane. 0.81
02:18:16.000 Oh, he's insane. 0.99
02:18:17.000 Yes. 0.95
02:18:18.000 So you asked me what I would do.
02:18:20.000 I would – and again, I don't want to be in this position months in here.
02:18:25.000 I want to be in this position months ago of saying the right thing to do is a six-week lockdown that will be unbearably painful but hopefully it will be short and then intense contact tracing.
02:18:37.000 But we've done a lockdown with essential businesses open.
02:18:41.000 So that's not a real lockdown.
02:18:43.000 We've done a half-assed lockdown and the thing that we've done that I find the most troubling is that we have not bootstrapped a mechanism for high-quality, ubiquitous testing.
02:19:00.000 Because if you want to do, if you did a six-week lockdown, A real lockdown, right?
02:19:06.000 Hold your breath and get through it.
02:19:08.000 And then you open back up with testing that's so high quality and so universal that you can spot anything that happens and you can treat it locally, right?
02:19:19.000 You don't come into work if you don't pass this test and if your work puts you in contact with other people who are going to test you regularly.
02:19:24.000 If you did that, we could have driven it to very low levels and then we could have dealt with the flare ups.
02:19:31.000 But what we're doing now is we're just gambling and it's insane.
02:19:36.000 We're gambling and there is no, that I can detect, there is no movement that says open back up and be very aggressive about things like masks.
02:19:49.000 My feeling is if you're pushing open back up, you ought to be pushing things that would make opening back up as safe as possible.
02:19:57.000 But are masks really effective?
02:19:59.000 Because one of the things that the CDC was saying was that you should really only wear a mask if you're treating a person with COVID. Yes, except that we can effectively know that what they were really...
02:20:11.000 I don't even want to give them credit for really saying it.
02:20:14.000 The motivation for saying that nonsense Was that they were trying to preserve masks for people who needed it most.
02:20:21.000 That's what Fauci said.
02:20:22.000 So they basically lied to us.
02:20:23.000 They lied to us flat out.
02:20:24.000 Some of us were not. 0.99
02:20:25.000 Some of us were shouting and saying this is garbage advice. 0.64
02:20:30.000 And your question is, do masks really work? 0.98
02:20:33.000 Masks work when both parties wear them.
02:20:37.000 They work really well.
02:20:40.000 So, you know, and I don't know why we are pushing this madness of masks that scream medical, right?
02:20:49.000 So one of the things, you know...
02:20:51.000 Bank robber.
02:20:52.000 Yeah, man. 0.98
02:20:52.000 You're an old school bank robber. 0.98
02:20:54.000 I'm the mojito bandito. 0.90
02:20:55.000 Yeah, you've got a bandana.
02:20:57.000 I do.
02:20:57.000 But the fact is the bandana, all right, maybe I look like a goofball, but the fact is it's more fashionable in my opinion than a medical mask.
02:21:05.000 Oh, you're being fashionable.
02:21:06.000 That's cute.
02:21:06.000 It's also more comfortable though.
02:21:08.000 Yes, for sure.
02:21:09.000 So the fact is I have it.
02:21:10.000 I can pull it up as needed, put it down.
02:21:13.000 It's not hanging on my ear.
02:21:14.000 And that flexibility, the fact that I don't feel so terrible walking around with it actually makes me use it when I should use it.
02:21:22.000 The best is really a neck gaiter.
02:21:24.000 Have you ever used a neck gaiter?
02:21:26.000 Yeah, you wear them when you're hunting.
02:21:28.000 You want to obscure a lot of your face, you know, so animals can't see it.
02:21:33.000 It's all camouflaged.
02:21:34.000 It breaks up the pattern of your face.
02:21:35.000 They're real easy.
02:21:36.000 You just slip it back down again and pull it back up and it actually stays in place.
02:21:40.000 That makes total sense.
02:21:40.000 But I mean, the funny thing is I'm an animal biologist, so the same thing should apply to me, but I've never heard that.
02:21:46.000 You've never heard of a neck gaiter?
02:21:47.000 No, I've heard of a neck gaiter for other things, but not for hunting.
02:21:49.000 Oh, yeah.
02:21:50.000 Oh, super common.
02:21:51.000 Yeah.
02:21:52.000 Pull up, there's a photo of me in Lanai wearing a full Sitka outfit.
02:21:58.000 I look like a ninja.
02:22:01.000 Lanai is a very interesting place to hunt because it's one of the few places where you could say it's mandatory to hunt animals because they have an invasive species called Axis deer.
02:22:12.000 That's me.
02:22:12.000 See that thing on my face?
02:22:14.000 That's a net gator.
02:22:15.000 And it's actually in the sitka, the hunting gear that I'm wearing, it's actually built into the hood.
02:22:21.000 So it's not just something that you wear around your neck.
02:22:25.000 It actually is built into it so it slides up and it goes down on your neck if you like it to.
02:22:29.000 But then when you're moving forward, it can slide down.
02:22:31.000 These animals that live there, there's literally 30,000 deer on an island of 3,000 people.
02:22:38.000 And it's an invasive species.
02:22:40.000 They were brought there and given to King Kamehameha by the... 0.96
02:22:45.000 By India in like the 1800s and there's no predator.
02:22:49.000 So they're just out of control.
02:22:51.000 You've never seen anything like it.
02:22:52.000 It is crazy when you're there.
02:22:54.000 Like the mass populations and it happens to be one of the most insanely delicious animals as well.
02:23:00.000 Also super switched on because they evolved to avoid tigers.
02:23:06.000 I've got videos of these things where an arrow is coming at them from 80 yards, and as the arrow is about, you know, 15 yards away, they hear it and they get out of the way.
02:23:15.000 They move so fast.
02:23:16.000 Like, they're the fastest deer I've ever encountered in my life, by far.
02:23:20.000 Like, nothing's even close to them.
02:23:22.000 And, you know, you have to be sneaky to get close to these things.
02:23:26.000 That's why you dress like that.
02:23:27.000 That's cool in some sense.
02:23:29.000 So actually, can I connect that to the viral question?
02:23:32.000 Sure.
02:23:32.000 Okay, so the connection is going to be a weird one.
02:23:35.000 There is only one terrestrial mammal natively in Hawaii.
02:23:41.000 There's only one terrestrial mammal species.
02:23:45.000 Okay, there's aquatic, there's whales and things, and seals, but there's only one terrestrial mammal natively in Hawaii.
02:23:52.000 I'm trying to guess what that would be.
02:23:53.000 Yep.
02:23:55.000 A mammal.
02:23:56.000 Terrestrial mammal.
02:23:57.000 Well, terrestrial may be misleading here.
02:23:59.000 I just mean on land.
02:24:00.000 Oh.
02:24:01.000 Seal?
02:24:01.000 Nope.
02:24:02.000 No?
02:24:02.000 Well, there are seals, but that's an aquatic mammal.
02:24:05.000 Okay.
02:24:07.000 It's a bat.
02:24:08.000 Ooh.
02:24:09.000 Right.
02:24:10.000 So here's the thing.
02:24:10.000 Hawaii is as remote from mainland as anywhere.
02:24:15.000 It's really isolated.
02:24:17.000 And that means that the story of how a terrestrial mammal gets there is pretty rare because think about the condition.
02:24:27.000 How would almost any terrestrial mammal you can think of get there?
02:24:30.000 So at some point, some pregnant bat probably got blown off course by a storm and probably barely So they flew thousands of miles? 0.99
02:24:43.000 Well, my guess is it almost never happens.
02:24:47.000 But it did happen once with this bat.
02:24:49.000 But anyway, my point would be Hawaii is a tropical landmass.
02:24:55.000 You would think it would have high diversity because it's tropical, right?
02:24:59.000 Tropical places tend to have very high diversity.
02:25:01.000 Hawaii has very low diversity because it's so far from everywhere, right?
02:25:05.000 So the thing is, almost nothing can make it over the gap.
02:25:09.000 That big saltwater gap is very hard for anything to cross.
02:25:13.000 So what that means is that everything that's in Hawaii...
02:25:17.000 It's very well adapted for things like crossing huge gaps and not very well adapted for everything that would compete with that capacity.
02:25:26.000 So that sets Hawaii up for being invaded By any creature that you transport there, if you can solve the how do you jump the gap question by transporting on an airplane or a ship, then the species that are there are not in a position to fend it off competitively because they're not adapted to compete.
02:25:47.000 It's a low diversity environment where everything had to cross some amazing gap to get there. 1.00
02:25:52.000 So it's a sitting duck for invasive species like the one you're describing.
02:25:58.000 Okay?
02:25:59.000 Now here's the connection to the viruses.
02:26:02.000 If it is true that this virus originally came from a bat, was being studied in probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was enhanced and then escaped, was enhanced for the infection of human tissue and then escaped,
02:26:19.000 it is the equivalent of us having transported something very dangerous over a gap it couldn't have crossed on its own.
02:26:28.000 Right?
02:26:28.000 And we are sitting ducks for this thing.
02:26:33.000 So this is why I'm really on high alert about this.
02:26:38.000 Now what are your feelings when it comes to the high number of people that are asymptomatic or the high number of people that get it and it's a very small deal to them.
02:26:51.000 They just cough for a couple days and then it's no big deal.
02:26:54.000 Yes.
02:26:54.000 Well, so I've been advocating from the start that we should be much more aggressive in the way we are studying this.
02:27:02.000 That in fact, you remember the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had an outbreak and it docked in Guam.
02:27:11.000 My thought was...
02:27:13.000 I want to see that carrier used to study the virus.
02:27:18.000 It's too bad that it docked in Guam because they ruined a circumstance.
02:27:22.000 And it's not that I wanted to see people infected and it's not that I didn't – I wanted to see them get the highest quality treatment possible.
02:27:27.000 But it was an isolated population in which you could have studied the spread of this virus.
02:27:32.000 And because it's an aircraft carrier, you could also get anything you needed.
02:27:35.000 You could have built hospitals on the deck.
02:27:37.000 You could have given them the finest possible care.
02:27:39.000 And we could have learned a lot about how the thing is transmitted, what the symptoms mean, who is actually shedding live virus based on what symptoms they have, rather than studying this haphazardly amongst infected people in hospitals where you don't really know who they've been in contact with and all of that.
02:27:54.000 So we missed that opportunity.
02:27:56.000 We could do the same thing with military bases.
02:28:00.000 Or any isolated population where you can actually have enough data to know what these things mean.
02:28:06.000 As it is, we're left with all kinds of questions, right?
02:28:10.000 It seems that some of the people who are asymptomatic actually have significant damage to their lungs.
02:28:17.000 They have this ground glass opacity pattern in their lungs, even though they didn't show any symptoms.
02:28:22.000 What are the numbers of these people?
02:28:24.000 Well, it's been at least a month since I've seen anything on it, but it was a fairly high percentage.
02:28:30.000 It was like 30 or 40 percent, I think.
02:28:32.000 Of the asymptomatic people. 1.00
02:28:33.000 So all I can say is that makes no sense to me.
02:28:36.000 Right.
02:28:36.000 You're talking about significant damage to the lungs.
02:28:38.000 It seems like that would in and of itself cause a symptom.
02:28:40.000 Yeah.
02:28:41.000 I think the people to study would be those NBA athletes.
02:28:45.000 Because a large number of the NBA players had tested positive from, at least, Jamie, you would know better than me.
02:28:51.000 Was it one particular team where these athletes were?
02:28:55.000 Two or four guys on that team.
02:28:57.000 Two or four guys on the team.
02:28:58.000 Out of 15, 16. And they were all asymptomatic.
02:29:01.000 I don't think anybody got really sick that I've heard of.
02:29:04.000 Yeah, I would like them to be studied because they're peak physical specimens, you know, the professional athletes and it's such a cardiovascular sport.
02:29:14.000 You know, you're constantly sprinting and moving and you have to be in tremendous shape to play professional basketball at the highest level.
02:29:21.000 I would think I would want to know what's going on with their lungs.
02:29:24.000 What is it like when you get an elite athlete and you give them this disease?
02:29:29.000 And why are they asymptomatic?
02:29:31.000 Is it a function of their cardiovascular endurance?
02:29:34.000 I mean, is there something about the capacity of their lungs?
02:29:37.000 The fact that they're...
02:29:38.000 I mean, what happens if you give that to David Goggins, for instance, someone who can run 100-mile races and do them back-to-back?
02:29:46.000 You know, someone who's got extreme cardiovascular fitness, like Cameron Haynes or something like that.
02:29:50.000 I want to see that.
02:29:52.000 We could learn a lot about what this thing is really up to.
02:29:55.000 As it is, we're grasping at straws.
02:29:58.000 We've got a large list of symptoms.
02:29:59.000 We've got people who seem to be asymptomatic and yet damaged.
02:30:09.000 Yeah.
02:30:11.000 Yeah.
02:30:16.000 Yeah.
02:30:19.000 Yeah.
02:30:25.000 There's competing information.
02:30:28.000 China was giving us bad information for one case.
02:30:32.000 The World Health Organization in January was saying that there's no evidence that it transmits from person to person.
02:30:37.000 We know now that that's not the case. 0.92
02:30:40.000 Well, but think about how fucked up our situation is, right? 0.89
02:30:44.000 Imagine that you had some courageous, highly capable patriots governing. 0.98
02:30:50.000 Right?
02:30:51.000 This thing gets detected.
02:30:54.000 You call the right people into the room, okay?
02:30:57.000 You say, okay, what would a reasonable person do at this moment?
02:31:02.000 But then we've got a problem, right? 0.98
02:31:03.000 Now you see another part of our system that has become feeble and inept.
02:31:09.000 You see the virologists might circle the wagons in order to protect their access to grant money. 0.99
02:31:14.000 So the very people who need to tell you, holy shit, this could be very dangerous. 0.96
02:31:18.000 Here's what may have happened. 0.96
02:31:19.000 And here's what we would do to figure out what the epidemiology will look like, what the symptomatology will look like. 0.98
02:31:26.000 Those people may be covering their asses. 0.79
02:31:29.000 At all of our expense. 0.98
02:31:30.000 So what I'm really telling you is that, yes, we have to deal with COVID-19, but we also have to bootstrap our way out of a predicament where our whole system has been overrun by perverse market incentives that is causing everybody to turn into a liar or a dupe.
02:31:49.000 We can't live that way.
02:31:50.000 We've got too many high-tech problems to be dealing with anything other than high-quality information about the nature of those problems and what the possible solutions look like.
02:32:00.000 But how do we mitigate all these errors? 0.92
02:32:03.000 How do you eliminate all the bullshit that we're dealing with? 0.98
02:32:06.000 How do we filter it out? 0.99
02:32:08.000 What would be the best pure information?
02:32:11.000 Where would it be distributed from?
02:32:14.000 Well, this is weird because it's going to sound self-aggrandizing maybe.
02:32:20.000 But what's happened is you've had the people who have the right characteristics for this moment.
02:32:43.000 I think we're good to go.
02:32:49.000 I think we're good to go.
02:32:51.000 And we have to build a system that pays attention to what they've seen, what drove them crazy.
02:32:57.000 Okay?
02:32:57.000 And so, you know, the telomere story is that story writ large.
02:33:01.000 Let's tell that story because we discussed it on a podcast with your brother, but a lot of people might not have heard it.
02:33:06.000 So let's talk about what you discovered and what you mean by this.
02:33:12.000 Okay, so I was a graduate student in evolutionary biology.
02:33:17.000 My specialty was actually bats.
02:33:19.000 That's what I studied.
02:33:20.000 I studied tent-making bats, which was great.
02:33:22.000 And by the way, I think the danger of viruses leaping from bats to people Is actually less than we are being told.
02:33:29.000 The people who are selling the idea that we have to study these viruses with gain-of-function research are leading us to believe a virus is going to leap out of a cave at any moment and infect us.
02:33:39.000 And the large number of people who study bats regularly and are not catching these diseases suggest that that's not really true.
02:33:46.000 Were they the ones that were skeptical about this idea that it came out of this wet market?
02:33:50.000 No.
02:33:51.000 I actually haven't heard from them.
02:33:53.000 But what I can say is there are thousands of people who study bats, who handle them regularly, and they're not constantly getting sick.
02:34:00.000 So I think what we're learning is that there are a lot of viruses that could potentially jump and could potentially adapt to humans.
02:34:07.000 When they do jump, they almost never spread.
02:34:10.000 Can I ask you a question before you continue?
02:34:12.000 Sure.
02:34:13.000 Just because I know it's going to deviate us off topic.
02:34:15.000 There was a story that I read a long time ago, and I think I read it in the New York Times, and it was a story about these people that were studying bats, and they had parked themselves out in front of this gigantic cave to sort of film these bats coming out of the cave,
02:34:32.000 and they didn't anticipate that the bats were going to shit on them.
02:34:36.000 And they got insanely sick from some hemorrhagic virus and wound up dying, like, shortly afterwards. 0.94
02:34:43.000 Do you know of this story?
02:34:44.000 I don't know of this story.
02:34:44.000 I'm now feeling bad about having laughed that they got crapped on by these bats.
02:34:48.000 I know.
02:34:48.000 I should have warned you that it was a bad story.
02:34:52.000 But I remember reading this story that, you know, they talked about the...
02:34:57.000 Millions and millions of bats that flew out of this cave.
02:35:00.000 I believe it was in Africa. 0.98
02:35:01.000 They flew out of this cave and that they shit whenever they fly out and that these people didn't think about this. 1.00
02:35:07.000 They just wanted to film this thing and they just got covered in bat shit and it got in their eyes. 0.99
02:35:12.000 It got everywhere and they got a horrible virus from it. 0.99
02:35:15.000 It was definitely a virus.
02:35:16.000 No.
02:35:17.000 I mean, I don't know.
02:35:18.000 I just remember them getting really sick and dying shortly afterwards and them not being able to identify exactly what it was that killed them.
02:35:26.000 So let me say a couple things on this front.
02:35:29.000 One, there is a pathogen that people who study bats in caves, my bats didn't roost in caves, but people who study bats in caves sometimes get histoplasmosis, which is a fungus.
02:35:40.000 It's a fungus that also afflicts people in the poultry industry.
02:35:44.000 So anyway, that's a danger.
02:35:47.000 There are viruses, but the story that you're describing I suggest the pattern that I'm suggesting, which is that sometimes things jump.
02:35:58.000 They don't tend to spread.
02:36:00.000 That jump and spread are two different skills.
02:36:03.000 And the chances that something jumps are relatively small.
02:36:07.000 When something jumps, it then has to spread.
02:36:09.000 It has to accomplish both tricks in order to become a pandemic.
02:36:25.000 Mm-hmm.
02:36:29.000 Now there is also, the lab leak stuff is extensive, but there is one of the pieces of evidence in that story is that there were some miners in Yunnan who came down with a pneumonia.
02:36:44.000 There were something like six miners who came down with a pneumonia who had worked in a cave that had these horseshoe bats.
02:36:50.000 So to the extent that the lab in Wuhan was known to be working on bat coronaviruses, For the purpose of preventing a pandemic, they were getting their bat coronaviruses from this cave in Yunnan Province, long way from Wuhan. 0.75
02:37:05.000 And the cave was identified because these miners had come down with this pneumonia, of which I think three of them died.
02:37:13.000 So it's again a case in which something jumped, but it didn't spread.
02:37:17.000 No pandemic arose out of it.
02:37:18.000 So what we're looking at is the strong possibility That we were looking to prevent a pandemic at some place where something had jumped but had not spread.
02:37:27.000 And then we took viruses from there and imbued them with the characteristics that allowed them to spread, solving its second problem.
02:37:34.000 So that's a frightening story to me.
02:37:37.000 It is frightening.
02:37:38.000 And is it particularly frightening that it's coming out of China because we're not getting really good information from them because their propaganda is so strong?
02:37:45.000 Yes and no.
02:37:47.000 The Chinese have not behaved well. 1.00
02:37:49.000 They have not informed us in the way we need to be informed.
02:37:52.000 On the other hand, one of the reasons that this is a political football rather than a scientific question is that there is a perception, and in fact this perception has been amplified by the president, that this is potentially, if this leaked from the lab,
02:38:08.000 that this is a Chinese problem.
02:38:11.000 This lab in China was part of an international community of virology researchers The grant that they would have been working from came from the NIH or at least one of them did.
02:38:23.000 So this is really – if this is a lab leak, still not saying it is, but that's a strong possibility.
02:38:29.000 If this is a lab leak, the failure is one of the international scientific community.
02:38:34.000 In this particular lab, didn't they get admonished for something that happened within the last two years?
02:38:42.000 They had gotten safety violations.
02:38:45.000 Yes, and there was a 2015 paper concerned about gain-of-function research and the potential for exactly this sort of thing to happen.
02:38:54.000 So anyway, there was concern, but like so many things, I think it hovers outside of most of our awareness.
02:39:00.000 So we discover You know, after the Deepwater Horizon accident, we discover that we're drilling these really deep deposits that we can't plug a leak when it happens.
02:39:10.000 After the financial crisis, we discover that we're using leverage in a way that can cause one of these catastrophic economic meltdowns.
02:39:18.000 The Aliso Canyon disaster reveals that we're storing, you know, natural gas in these old oil deposits and that it can leak and not be plugged.
02:39:29.000 Fukushima reveals to us what we've been doing with nuclear reactors and spent fuel.
02:39:34.000 We always find out after the accident that we're engaged in some really dangerous thing.
02:39:39.000 Now, people inside these industries know, but they also have a conflict of interest.
02:39:43.000 So nobody warned us, right?
02:39:46.000 And we need to really get ahead of that problem.
02:39:48.000 We need to start finding out what it is that we don't realize humanity is doing that's going to go bad on us next.
02:39:53.000 Right.
02:39:54.000 Okay.
02:39:55.000 Back to the mice.
02:39:56.000 Okay.
02:39:57.000 So I was a graduate student studying bats in Michigan.
02:40:02.000 And I was interested in evolutionary trade-offs.
02:40:08.000 That's my signature thing.
02:40:10.000 And there was a very good piece of work from a guy I knew, George Williams, great evolutionary biologist, about the evolution of senescence, that is to say, the process by which we grow feeble and inefficient with age, what most people call aging.
02:40:25.000 And basically that's classic paper explained why it is that creatures like us get old and die.
02:40:34.000 And the answer was basically this, that you have a genome that's complex.
02:40:41.000 It's full of genes.
02:40:42.000 But there aren't enough genes to have a gene for every trait that you have.
02:40:47.000 In fact, there are a tiny fraction of the number of genes you would need to cover all of the various characteristics you have.
02:40:52.000 So genes always do multiple things.
02:40:56.000 And in the case when a gene does something that's very good for you when you're young, at some cost when you're old, selection tends to favor it because you may not live long enough to suffer the cost.
02:41:08.000 And so if you have the trait that makes you powerful when you're young, and you've got some cost that you're going to pay when you're old, but you're not going to live to get it, it may be a freebie, right?
02:41:20.000 So selection sees early life much more clearly than it sees late life, and it prefers things that help you early, even at a cost of harming you late.
02:41:28.000 That's the basic answer.
02:41:30.000 It's called the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of senescence.
02:41:35.000 But at the point that I started working...
02:41:38.000 We knew that this was right.
02:41:40.000 We could tell that the hypothesis was true because it matched all sorts of observations about wild creatures.
02:41:47.000 Certain creatures live longer than others, even when you correct for things like body size.
02:41:51.000 So creatures that fly live longer than creatures that are of the same type and size that don't fly.
02:41:57.000 Why?
02:41:57.000 Because they can fly away from danger.
02:41:59.000 If you can fly away from danger, you're more likely to make it to an older age.
02:42:03.000 The better selection can see the harms that afflict you when you get there.
02:42:07.000 So selection doesn't I prefer a bias in favor of youth if you can fly away from danger.
02:42:12.000 Same thing applies if you're poisonous, if you have a shell.
02:42:16.000 If you have a really good defense, then selection sees your late life better.
02:42:20.000 So we knew that this hypothesis was right.
02:42:23.000 But what we had never found at the point that I was working in the very late 90s on this was a gene that matched the description.
02:42:30.000 We knew that selection was finding these genes And accumulating them, but we had never found one of the genes in question.
02:42:38.000 And that was very conspicuous.
02:42:39.000 I called that the missing pleiotropy.
02:42:42.000 So anyway, I was sort of on alert about this.
02:42:45.000 It was a curious fact.
02:42:47.000 And I saw a talk given by somebody who was talking about telomeres.
02:42:54.000 And he was talking about telomeres and their relationship to cancer.
02:42:58.000 So telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes.
02:43:03.000 And they grow shorter every time a cell divides, right?
02:43:07.000 So it's like a fuse or a counter that ticks down each cell division and it drops to zero.
02:43:15.000 Or not zero, but it drops to a number that the cell refuses to divide after that.
02:43:21.000 And some people were working in one set of labs on the possibility that this was causing us to grow feeble with age because if your cells can't divide anymore, then they won't replace themselves and your tissues won't be able to maintain, right?
02:43:36.000 Another group was studying this question of telomeres with relation to cancer and they were saying Eureka Every time we look in a cancer, it has this enzyme called telomerase turned on, which elongates telomeres.
02:43:50.000 And these two groups were not talking to each other.
02:43:53.000 They were each claiming that they were about to cure their respective disease.
02:43:58.000 One group was saying, if we can activate telomerase, then we can lengthen your life.
02:44:03.000 And the other group was saying, if we can turn off telomerase, we can cure cancer.
02:44:07.000 Right?
02:44:08.000 And I put two and two together and I said, this is the missing pleiotropy.
02:44:12.000 Here we have something that is protecting us, that's helping us in youth.
02:44:16.000 We have a counter that is limiting the number of times a cell can divide and presumably preventing cancer, right?
02:44:22.000 And the cost is you can't maintain your tissues forever, so you grow feeble and inefficient.
02:44:28.000 That made a hell of a lot of sense to me.
02:44:30.000 I couldn't convince anybody else that this was sensible.
02:44:35.000 I couldn't even get them to understand what I was saying because in evolutionary biology, there has traditionally been a bias against mechanism, the study of cellular biology.
02:44:44.000 Not because there's anything wrong with studying cellular biology.
02:44:48.000 As an evolutionary phenomenon, but because early in the study of evolution, we just didn't have the tools to look into the cells.
02:44:56.000 So evolutionary biologists got used to thinking about the form of creatures and the behavior of creatures, but not thinking about the internal mechanisms because there just wasn't a lot that could be said.
02:45:06.000 Anyway, I retained an interest in the cellular biology.
02:45:09.000 I saw these two things that needed to be connected, and I started to work on the puzzle.
02:45:15.000 It turned out that that hypothesis would answer a great many questions that were otherwise very difficult to answer with respect to how aging functions.
02:45:26.000 But there was one huge obstacle.
02:45:29.000 The obstacle was that a fact that was well known about mice did not fit with the idea that telomeres were fundamental to the aging process.
02:45:39.000 And the fact that was known was that mice had It's extremely long telomeres and yet they live short lives.
02:45:47.000 So if it were true that the length of your telomeres dictated how quickly you were going to age, then a tiny creature with very long telomeres ought to be able to replace its tissues really well and it should age very, very slowly.
02:46:04.000 So I thought there's got to be something wrong with this.
02:46:06.000 The hypothesis answers too many questions for that obstacle to be real.
02:46:10.000 And I thought maybe one person has run a test and everybody else is just parroting it.
02:46:17.000 And I went and I looked and that wasn't the case.
02:46:22.000 I finally realized that all of the mice that had been looked at were coming from one source, that there was a laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine called the JAX Lab that was the source for all of the mice being used in all of the laboratories in the country.
02:46:40.000 I started to wonder, is there something going on at that lab?
02:46:43.000 Maybe mouse telomeres aren't long.
02:46:45.000 The ultra-long telomeres of mice aren't real.
02:46:48.000 Maybe that's a feature of laboratory mice.
02:46:51.000 And wild mice would have short telomeres, in which case the hypothesis would make sense.
02:46:55.000 And I called up one of the leading people in the field, a woman named Carol Greider, who has now won a Nobel Prize.
02:47:04.000 And I said, Carol, you don't know me.
02:47:05.000 I'm an evolutionary biology graduate student.
02:47:08.000 I have a question for you.
02:47:10.000 Is it possible that all mice don't have long telomeres, that that's really just laboratory mice?
02:47:16.000 And she said, well...
02:47:19.000 I think mice have long telomeres, but it's interesting if you order Mus spritus rather than Mus musculus and you order them from Europe, then how long their telomeres are depends on what supplier you get them from.
02:47:29.000 So this is interesting.
02:47:31.000 So anyway, we both agreed that it was really interesting.
02:47:34.000 She decided she was going to test the hypothesis.
02:47:36.000 She put her graduate student, Mike Heeman, on the case.
02:47:40.000 We exchanged some emails.
02:47:42.000 And anyway, they tested it and they got some mice that weren't really wild, but they were much more recently in captivity.
02:47:49.000 And lo and behold, they had short telomeres.
02:47:52.000 Okay, so that was an amazing moment.
02:47:54.000 My prediction had turned out to be true, which meant, A, that my hypothesis about senescence and cancer and aging might well be true.
02:48:03.000 That was important.
02:48:05.000 But it also raised a bunch of really difficult problems.
02:48:11.000 One was, if it is true that all the mice that are being used to study physiology are broken in this way, then how are we blinding ourselves?
02:48:21.000 Is it possible that we are using all of these mice that would be terrible models for wound healing, for senescence, for cancer, for a whole number of things?
02:48:33.000 How is it that we are allowing ourselves to take these mice who have been altered and using them as models for normal physiology?
02:48:42.000 The other problem, maybe even more serious, was that we use these animals in drug safety testing.
02:48:49.000 And the way we use them is, if you think about, if you'd come up with a drug that you thought was useful and you wanted to test whether it was safe to administer it to people, You can't really afford to give people a drug and then wait 40,
02:49:05.000 50 years to figure out whether you've shortened their lives, right?
02:49:09.000 So at the point that you start testing these things on humans, you're really in the final stage.
02:49:13.000 The way we test whether a drug is safe for long-term use or whether it is safe for your long-term life based on short use is we give large doses of it to small animals that live short lives on the assumption That if it's going to shorten your 80 or 90 year life by 10 or 20 years,
02:49:33.000 that it'll shorten a mouse's life long enough to see it.
02:49:37.000 But here's the problem.
02:49:39.000 If you've altered a mouse in the laboratory environment by favoring the radical elongation of its telomeres, then it has the ability to replace its tissues indefinitely.
02:49:51.000 A toxin that will harm you by killing tissue may not harm that mouse.
02:49:57.000 In fact, it may actually help it because these mice are very cancer prone.
02:50:01.000 So when we give a toxin that will damage you to a mouse that is highly resistant to tissue damage, you may slow down its tumors.
02:50:10.000 And in fact, we've seen this a number of times where a drug is given to mice and we get back the paradoxical result.
02:50:17.000 Not only is it not toxic, it actually makes the mice live a little longer.
02:50:22.000 So my contention is that we had a problem where we were testing drugs to see if they were safe on animals that were predisposed to tell us that they were.
02:50:32.000 And then when those drugs were released into the human population, it turned out they were not safe and people died.
02:50:39.000 Now the problem is I was absolutely unable to alert the world to this problem for reasons that still elude me.
02:50:48.000 I published my paper.
02:50:50.000 I went through – I don't think we need to bore your audience especially if they've been through Eric's description with the details of what happened in the attempt to bring this to public attention.
02:51:00.000 But – The world of scientists working on the question was unwilling to respond to the discovery that their model organism had this fatal flaw that was going to predispose us to see certain things and not other things in the laboratory environment.
02:51:33.000 The Vioxx scandal, which was a drug for arthritis, correct?
02:51:38.000 Yeah.
02:51:38.000 It gave people strokes.
02:51:39.000 Yeah, it did heart damage.
02:51:41.000 Yeah.
02:51:41.000 And so anyway, heart damage is actually probably not heart damage.
02:51:47.000 And by that, what I mean is if you take a drug, a substance that damages tissues in the human body...
02:51:55.000 It will show up as heart damage because of the special nature of the heart.
02:52:00.000 So let's say that you took some drug that killed every 10,000th cell or every 1,000th cell.
02:52:06.000 That would be destructive all over your body.
02:52:08.000 The heart, though, is a special tissue.
02:52:11.000 The heart has a very low capacity for self-repair at a cellular level, very low, for reasons we could go into if you wanted.
02:52:19.000 But because it has a low capacity for self-repair, it is also very vulnerable to something that does some kind of general tissue damage.
02:52:28.000 And it's also an organ that when it fails, it's absolutely conspicuous.
02:52:32.000 So you would expect that if we had substances that were body-wide toxins and we released them into the public having tested them on mice and not discovering that they were dangerous, That you would see relatively young people die from heart conditions which is where we would detect that there's a problem before we would detect it anywhere else.
02:52:53.000 So anyway, the government studied this problem after Vioxx and it put together a report.
02:52:59.000 And the report's 300 pages.
02:53:00.000 It doesn't mention mice.
02:53:01.000 It doesn't mention the genus Mus.
02:53:03.000 Do you think they did that to protect themselves?
02:53:05.000 Well, what I know is that I attempted to call their attention.
02:53:09.000 After the report came out, I looked at it and, you know, it had a physical form, but it also had – it lives online.
02:53:15.000 You can search it.
02:53:16.000 And I could see that telomeres weren't mentioned, mice weren't mentioned, rodents aren't mentioned.
02:53:21.000 And so I tried to alert them to the fact that they had screwed up and they blew me off.
02:53:27.000 They wouldn't talk to me.
02:53:28.000 So that is, it raises a question and I, to this day, cannot answer the question.
02:53:36.000 I can't even say whether or not.
02:53:38.000 So when I've tried to raise this issue, I have run into various kinds of resistance.
02:53:47.000 If I raise it with journalists, what I get back is typically I get interest back at first.
02:53:55.000 And they say, OK, I'm very interested in the story.
02:53:57.000 I'm going to pursue it.
02:53:58.000 I'm going to make a few phone calls.
02:53:59.000 And then they come back to me and they either – they go silent or they say, well, I talked to some people and they said it's been taken care of.
02:54:08.000 Well, I don't know what it's been taking care of means.
02:54:10.000 I published a paper that said, here's a hypothesis about what's going on.
02:54:16.000 I proposed a mechanism whereby telomere elongation would have happened in the breeding colonies in question.
02:54:23.000 It's been taken care of is a very strange way to describe something that could be an enormous problem.
02:54:29.000 Well, not only, let's say that it was taken care of, right?
02:54:32.000 Let's say that they have altered the breeding protocol and they've fixed the problem.
02:54:37.000 You still have all those drug tests that they've done for...
02:54:40.000 You've got all those drug tests, you've got all of the papers, you've got my paper which proposes a hypothesis and I have a right to say actually it turns out to be correct or it wasn't, right?
02:54:51.000 But so anyway, we got back all of these weird answers.
02:54:54.000 It's been taken care of or even more curious is the argument, well, everybody knows that the mice are bad models.
02:55:03.000 Which is insane because this telomere problem...
02:55:05.000 You actually got that response?
02:55:07.000 Yeah.
02:55:07.000 From?
02:55:08.000 Several people.
02:55:09.000 I went to several different journalists and it wasn't that I was told who they contacted.
02:55:13.000 What I was told was that they contacted somebody and this is what they heard.
02:55:17.000 And so their enthusiasm evaporated at the point they make a phone call.
02:55:22.000 Were they not aware of the consequences of this problem with these mice?
02:55:27.000 So again, this is...
02:55:32.000 We have a serious problem.
02:55:33.000 It's not about mice.
02:55:35.000 It's not about virology, right?
02:55:37.000 It's a general systemic failure of reason.
02:55:41.000 So what I encountered as a young, somewhat naive graduate student was an instance which frankly woke me up to the fact that my colleagues, even when human life was on the line, were going to pretend they didn't know what was going on.
02:55:58.000 It's quite possible they didn't know until I had put out my hypothesis and Carol Greider, who later pretended she didn't know what I was talking about, published the empirical work that revealed that indeed lab mice are unusual in having long telomeres.
02:56:15.000 After that work was out, there's no excuse for not investigating what the consequences were.
02:56:23.000 I cannot explain it except to say that the culture of science has become so rotten that this sort of thing Is maybe standard operating procedure.
02:56:35.000 Just protecting their ass and protecting the ass of those who give them jobs and all the work that's been done that sort of establishes that they should be doing these tests in the first place. 0.69
02:56:48.000 I'm sure they tell themselves some story in which they are the heroes and they are protecting us from something. 0.99
02:56:56.000 But I look at my own medicine cabinet and even though I am aware of what likely happened, I am in no position to protect myself or my family.
02:57:07.000 The only way to be protected from the downstream consequences of this error is to just not take pharmaceuticals.
02:57:15.000 Jesus Christ!
02:57:17.000 Yeah, it's a really huge problem and The response of the system generally to shut down the lone individual trying to point out a serious problem is just breathtaking.
02:57:32.000 When you've seen it, when you've lived it, you never go back.
02:57:38.000 You've looked into the eye of something that is willing to ignore.
02:57:41.000 I mean it's willing to ignore not only Human life, but it is willing to ignore the Requirements of good science How could you leave an error like that? 0.96
02:57:56.000 Undescribed and how is this being discussed on a fucking comedians podcast? 0.78
02:58:00.000 Why is this not front page the New York Times? 0.99
02:58:02.000 Why is this not?
02:58:04.000 Leading on the news when you're talking about the safety of pharmaceutical drugs How is this not something that's an enormous story?
02:58:10.000 Well, this raises another question, something I actually wanted to set the record straight about.
02:58:15.000 By and large, I thought Eric did a fantastic job of describing this.
02:58:19.000 In fact, we're here at the tail end of this podcast, and we're both tired, and I feel like I've done a much worse job than he did describing the science.
02:58:28.000 But I wanted to correct one thing, and I think it will help answer the question you just asked me.
02:58:34.000 You asked Eric why I had not pursued this and you said maybe was he afraid and Eric indicated that that was some part of it.
02:58:46.000 It's no part of it and I think Eric has actually forgotten what happened.
02:58:51.000 So I was dogged about this for a decade.
02:58:54.000 I tried everything I could think of.
02:58:56.000 I talked to every journalist who would listen.
02:58:58.000 As I said, I went to the Committee on Drug Safety, the Blue Ribbon Commission. 0.79
02:59:05.000 I did everything I could think of.
02:59:07.000 I wrote – when Carol Greider who refused to acknowledge my contribution got her Nobel Prize, I wrote – What I think was a generous op-ed to the New York Times saying that her Nobel Prize was deserved but that we had this serious problem related to mouse telomeres and that maybe now this Nobel Prize would give us the courage to look at it.
02:59:30.000 They wouldn't publish it.
02:59:32.000 So I tried everything I could think of.
02:59:35.000 And at one point, a good friend of ours, a guy named Mike Brown, who used to, he was the former CFO of Microsoft, really good guy, made a ton of money because he was at Microsoft on the ground floor, and he used to hold something he called Science Camp.
02:59:49.000 And Science Camp involved gathering a bunch of really high-quality people to talk privately where nobody was aware that we were even gathered, right?
02:59:57.000 It really gave us the room to be frank.
03:00:00.000 And I was there and I gave a talk on telomeres.
03:00:03.000 I gave a talk about the science and I talked about the politics that I had run into.
03:00:09.000 And, you know, they were blown away.
03:00:12.000 It was, you know, it's jaw-dropping stuff.
03:00:14.000 And afterwards, Eric and Mike took me aside and they said, you know, We understand why this is having the effect on you that it's having, but you're wrapped around the axle.
03:00:31.000 That was their phrase.
03:00:32.000 You're wrapped around the axle about the story.
03:00:35.000 It's preventing you from doing what you need to do.
03:00:39.000 And I didn't like hearing that.
03:00:41.000 And I, you know, initially I thought, no, that's not right.
03:00:44.000 And then I think, I think they were right.
03:00:47.000 And so I let it go.
03:00:49.000 And I started, I only talked about it with my students from that point forward.
03:00:53.000 I tried to teach the science as clearly as I could and tried to keep the politics as far away from it as I could.
03:00:57.000 And, you know, it's very hard to do.
03:01:00.000 But I let it go.
03:01:01.000 Now, at that point, I was an obscure college professor at an obscure college.
03:01:09.000 I had 400 Twitter followers.
03:01:12.000 I wasn't in a position to push the case if somebody didn't want to hear it.
03:01:19.000 Eric is right that we are in a different era.
03:01:22.000 I have 300,000 Twitter followers, 130,000 YouTube subscribers.
03:01:28.000 I got powerful friends.
03:01:31.000 It is possible that that is enough to get this raised at the level that it would need to be raised in order to get it addressed.
03:01:40.000 But I'm not convinced of that.
03:01:42.000 My experience trying to get the topic addressed anywhere for more than a decade was that it was like having a big hammer and there's a bell and you keep running at the bell and slamming it with the hammer and there's no sound.
03:01:59.000 It does not ring.
03:02:00.000 There's nothing that you can do to make it ring.
03:02:04.000 Now, maybe, maybe at this higher profile, there is now enough firepower to get that bell to ring.
03:02:11.000 But Eric's podcast, which is probably among the best places if you want to know the scientific story to go to, you can listen to the portal number 19 and you can hear him.
03:02:23.000 You know, he catches me off guard.
03:02:24.000 He forces me to tell the story, which I didn't.
03:02:26.000 I should have seen it coming, but I didn't.
03:02:28.000 So anyway, you get the raw version.
03:02:31.000 It is possible that we are now going to get the bell to ring, but episode 19 of the portal did not cause it to ring.
03:02:39.000 It caused a flurry of activity outside of mainstream scientific circles, but it did not cause anybody to sit up and take notice inside.
03:02:49.000 And that is the thing I think we still don't know.
03:02:52.000 We don't know what force we're up against.
03:02:54.000 The pharmaceutical industry has mice that will tell us that drugs that they are advancing into the market are safe when they are not.
03:03:03.000 And maybe that's the force that prevents the bell from ringing.
03:03:06.000 I really have no idea.
03:03:07.000 But I guess the question is, is the era different because we're at a higher profile or isn't it?
03:03:15.000 I think we're good to go.
03:03:34.000 What do we do about this?
03:03:35.000 And what does this mean?
03:03:37.000 What do we do about this and how many other thises are they?
03:03:39.000 I happened on this completely by accident.
03:03:42.000 I happened on this because I was a generalist who was interested in interesting things and I was interested in evolution and this just happened to show up.
03:03:53.000 And so, yeah, I pursued it.
03:03:54.000 There were features of my character that caused me to pursue it when others would have let it go.
03:04:00.000 It still indicates that there may be many such things lurking that we have no awareness of and that the fact that systems are so good at shutting down a story like this means that it would be very unlikely that you would have heard that there was a flaw like this.
03:04:21.000 So I don't know the answer to your question.
03:04:24.000 I do think Your point about the foundation being the important place that dealing with the rotten structure above is not where this has to go.
03:04:35.000 It's got to go to the bottom level.
03:04:37.000 What we are finding out is that in system after system, something has gone wrong.
03:04:42.000 I think there are a small number of themes that explain why these systems go wrong.
03:04:47.000 I think we have taken the magic of market forces, which really are magic for certain things, and we have infused them where they do harm rather than good.
03:05:00.000 In my opinion, markets are excellent at figuring out how to do things and they are terrible at deciding what to do.
03:05:09.000 And we have put them in charge of both jobs.
03:05:12.000 So we are so in love with the magic of what they can accomplish that we don't realize that they, you know, science, for example, is too delicate to allow market forces to govern it.
03:05:23.000 If you let market forces govern it, it becomes like any other market and it turns scientists into salesmen.
03:05:30.000 And things like that.
03:05:31.000 We have to get good at figuring out where we can afford to use the market, where we have to insulate something from the market.
03:05:38.000 And at the point we do that, we'll be in a much stronger position to protect ourselves.
03:05:42.000 But until we do, we're just going to keep doing self-harm.
03:05:47.000 And on that note...
03:05:50.000 You know, Joe, I was really hoping that this would be funnier.
03:05:55.000 I had a tight ten minutes that I was going to dribble out over three hours, and we just didn't do it.
03:06:00.000 I think you brought up some awesome stuff.
03:06:02.000 Really, very, very important points across the board.
03:06:05.000 Very brave points, too.
03:06:06.000 And I always appreciate you, man.
03:06:08.000 Really do.
03:06:08.000 Thanks, and I really appreciate you, too.
03:06:11.000 If it is not clear, your podcast, which you have built, is one of the few things of its magnitude that is not corrupt, which is why I think you have so many good people willing to come here at the drop of a hat and talk to you.
03:06:27.000 I have no idea how it happened.
03:06:29.000 Let's just keep doing it.
03:06:30.000 All right.
03:06:31.000 Thanks, man.
03:06:32.000 Thanks, brother.
03:06:32.000 Bye, everybody.