The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1616 - Jamie Metzl

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:00:02.000 Check it out.

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Showing my day.

00:00:07.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:00:08.000 All day.

00:00:14.000 Okay, cool.

00:00:15.000 What's up, Jamie?

00:00:15.000 Good to see you, man.

00:00:16.000 Hey, Joe.

00:00:16.000 Nice to see you again.

00:00:17.000 Thanks for coming down here.

00:00:18.000 It's really my pleasure.

00:00:19.000 I'm bringing you chocolate with you again.

00:00:20.000 You know, I always bring the chocolate.

00:00:22.000 You got to be ready.

00:00:23.000 Yeah, you're a legitimate chocolate fiend.

00:00:26.000 I'm definitely a legitimate chocolate fan.

00:00:27.000 How much do you eat a day?

00:00:28.000 How much chocolate do you eat a day?

00:00:29.000 You know, every single morning I have hot chocolate and it takes about 45 minutes of preparation time, has about four different ingredients, so I start that and then I have some chocolate over the course of the day.

00:00:40.000 45 minutes?

00:00:42.000 Yeah, a lot of it is simmering, so it's not really fully active, but it's some active and some passive intervention.

00:00:48.000 So is this a preparation that you do?

00:00:51.000 Like, does it prepare you for the day?

00:00:53.000 Is it like a meditation thing?

00:00:55.000 You know, it's probably some kind of morning ritual, but it's just, I don't know, it's very calming for me.

00:01:01.000 And by the time after this 45 minutes, it's like pudding.

00:01:04.000 I mean, it's like this thick, bubbling hot chocolate.

00:01:07.000 It brings me joy.

00:01:08.000 I feel like everyone should start their day with joy.

00:01:10.000 There's some, like, positive qualities, and it's not just a good-tasting thing, right?

00:01:16.000 Like, chocolate has some...

00:01:17.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:18.000 Dark chocolate, especially, has all kinds of very positive health benefits.

00:01:23.000 I'm not saying that everyone should just eat chocolate bars all day and you're going to live forever, but actually, the woman who lived longest of everyone in recorded history ate two pounds of chocolate a week, Jean Calment in France, so at least...

00:01:37.000 It could help.

00:01:38.000 Two pounds seems excessive.

00:01:40.000 It's a lot, but she lived to 122. But chocolate's different in terms of, like, some chocolate is, like, really sugar-based, and some chocolate is more of, like, kind of...

00:01:51.000 I really like dark chocolate and peanut butter together.

00:01:54.000 You know...

00:01:54.000 Like a chocolate bar.

00:01:55.000 Yeah, or like a Reese's Pieces.

00:01:57.000 Yeah, so the dark chocolate is the healthier version of chocolate, on average.

00:02:03.000 And so the darker, pure cacao, that's where the health benefits are.

00:02:07.000 But some people think there's some psychoactive benefits to chocolate, right?

00:02:12.000 To cacao as well, right?

00:02:13.000 Well, there is a little bit, yeah.

00:02:14.000 So cacao has been used ceremonially for about 5,000 years, so there definitely is a history of that.

00:02:22.000 I mean, it's not as psychoactive as some of the other stuff you talk about on the show, but it has a little bit of it.

00:02:29.000 Well, we did a podcast before the podcast while we were getting COVID tested out there.

00:02:32.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:02:34.000 Talking about our experience last time.

00:02:38.000 There's another thing that happens that I was reading about.

00:02:43.000 Some people like chocolate because it gives them a feeling of being loved.

00:02:50.000 Have you ever read that?

00:02:51.000 I haven't read that, but I mean, maybe it's true.

00:02:54.000 I don't know whether there's something...

00:02:55.000 I doubt there's something that's chemical about chocolate, but I think there's probably an association with chocolate and happiness and everybody's...

00:03:03.000 Lots of people's grandmothers gave them little chocolates.

00:03:07.000 I think that there's a little bit of that.

00:03:09.000 Maybe it's part of the chocolate.

00:03:10.000 Maybe it's part of our experience.

00:03:11.000 I think it's like a...

00:03:12.000 God, I wish I could remember it.

00:03:14.000 See if you can find this.

00:03:15.000 There's tryptophan in it.

00:03:17.000 Really?

00:03:17.000 That's what it is?

00:03:18.000 That's what this article says.

00:03:19.000 There's tryptophan in amino acids in small quantities.

00:03:21.000 Flavinits is the...

00:03:22.000 Yeah.

00:03:24.000 Does it have something to do with love?

00:03:27.000 What is what it says here?

00:03:28.000 Oh, this is fast acting.

00:03:30.000 Chocolate in the brain.

00:03:31.000 Signs behind chocolate.

00:03:32.000 But, okay, there we go.

00:03:33.000 Butterflies we feel in falling in love.

00:03:35.000 Yeah.

00:03:36.000 Wow, all right.

00:03:37.000 Great.

00:03:37.000 Well, if the internet says it, it must be true.

00:03:40.000 Must be.

00:03:41.000 That was the idea that I had read, that some people like chocolate when they're depressed, when they're heartbroken.

00:03:48.000 They like chocolate, sort of a replacement for love.

00:03:51.000 Yeah, I mean, definitely, if you're feeling bad and you eat chocolate, you're probably going to feel better.

00:03:57.000 So maybe it is a replacement in a little way.

00:03:59.000 So you were a part of this open letter recently about COVID-19, where you want to get to the bottom of the origins of it.

00:04:09.000 And this is something we've talked about on the podcast before, and a lot of people have been talking about it lately.

00:04:14.000 Now that Trump's out of office, it's sort of freed up the discussion.

00:04:17.000 For the longest time, discussing that in terms of it not being just some sort of a random mutation from bats, And coronaviruses, that it may have been a lab leak, was so taboo because it was what Trump was pushing.

00:04:33.000 And it's so crazy that something, which is science, it's a scientific discussion and inquiry, that it could be stunted by these political ideas when someone is so polarizing, like Trump,

00:04:48.000 that people just completely want to reject very plausible and possible ideas just because of him.

00:04:55.000 It's exactly right.

00:04:56.000 I was the lead drafter with a community of other people and lead scientists around the world of this letter.

00:05:04.000 And since the beginning of last year, 2020, I had maybe the leading website in the world that was just stating what is the evidence about the origins of COVID-19, particularly the evidence for a lab leak.

00:05:20.000 And the evidence is actually really strong.

00:05:23.000 It's all circumstantial evidence, but we don't have any evidence of the other hypotheses of where COVID comes from, like this series of jumps through different animals in the wild.

00:05:36.000 And so I, for a long time, more than a year, have been saying, hey, we need to look really seriously at this.

00:05:42.000 Not because we know or certainly I don't know for sure that's where COVID comes from, but in my view, it's the most likely hypothesis worthy of a full investigation.

00:05:53.000 And so there was a World Health Organization organized an independent advisory committee Yes.

00:06:17.000 In that press event, what they said was, we don't support investigating the possibility of a lab leak any further, but we should investigate what seems like a much less likely hypothesis that COVID started with frozen foods being shipped to Wuhan.

00:06:33.000 And so we already had a community of scientists and others who'd been meeting virtually For a while, trying to really say, where does this come from?

00:06:41.000 What's the evidence?

00:06:43.000 We had academic presentations challenging the data, trying to figure out where are the gaps.

00:06:49.000 And we looked at that and we said, that can't be right.

00:06:51.000 And we decided we needed to put out an open letter, which we recently released, and it was covered in newspapers all around the world.

00:07:00.000 And the letter made a I think?

00:07:30.000 We should be investigating all hypotheses, not saying we can't even look at something that really could be the real story here.

00:07:42.000 A lot of people are not trusting anything that the World Health Organization says anymore.

00:07:50.000 I'm sure you saw the spokesperson for the World Health Organization speaking with a reporter and he wouldn't even mention the name Taiwan.

00:07:59.000 Did you see that?

00:08:00.000 I did see that.

00:08:02.000 He logs off and then comes back on, and then she asks him again about Taiwan's response to COVID-19, and he says, well, China's done an amazing job, and let's just change subjects.

00:08:13.000 The woman keeps getting back to Taiwan, and he won't recognize Taiwan because China doesn't recognize Taiwan.

00:08:20.000 And China has some sort of strange, I don't know what it is, but there's some sort of political influence on the World Health Organization.

00:08:28.000 Yeah, so there's a lot there.

00:08:30.000 So first, full disclosure, I'm a member of the World Health Organization International Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing.

00:08:45.000 And so I'm actually a real supporter of the World Health Organization.

00:08:51.000 But there's a big problem, and that problem is being realized, and we're seeing it through the course of this pandemic.

00:08:58.000 So first, in the earliest days of the pandemic, why was it that World Health Organization inspectors weren't able to go to Wuhan?

00:09:08.000 And the reason was the Chinese government wouldn't give them visas, and there was nothing the WHO could do.

00:09:13.000 Why was it that the WHO was just essentially, unfortunately, parroting We're good to go.

00:09:49.000 It's in part because the WHO is created by these member states that have a lot of influence, and it's terrible.

00:09:55.000 We're all suffering because Taiwan didn't have a full voice.

00:10:00.000 On December 31st, 2019, Taiwan declared a national emergency.

00:10:05.000 On COVID. That was way before we did.

00:10:08.000 I wish Taiwan had had a bigger voice.

00:10:11.000 So WHO is in a really, really difficult position because on one hand, we're asking them to investigate and call out a member state.

00:10:20.000 On the other hand, their governing body essentially is made up of member states, including China.

00:10:27.000 Yeah, it's just so strange to see scientific inquiry and analysis Well, that's the whole story here.

00:10:38.000 Unfortunately, the story of COVID is that.

00:10:42.000 I mean, it was politics that made it so that you could have this outbreak.

00:10:47.000 And we can talk more about where the outbreak started.

00:10:50.000 But wherever it started, whether it was a lab leak or something else, if you had had a fully functioning system, if it hadn't been Chinese politics and the national instinct or the natural instinct, Hadn't been to cover up, to silence the whistleblowers, to lie essentially to the World Health Organization and the international community.

00:11:09.000 It could well have been possible to suppress COVID in the first few weeks, and we wouldn't be having any of this.

00:11:17.000 And then it was politics that made China...

00:11:20.000 Again, whatever the origin, carry out this massive cover-up over the course of the last year where they destroyed samples, eliminated or removed databases, imprisoned Chinese journalists asking tough questions and put a universal gag order on their scientists,

00:11:37.000 making it impossible for them to speak about any of this stuff.

00:11:41.000 That's pretty incredible that that's not really well known.

00:11:45.000 Yeah.

00:11:46.000 So for me, it's been more than a year, and I have it on my Jamie Metzl website, and I've been trying to tell everybody, not to point fingers, but to say, like, we have a real problem here.

00:11:57.000 Unless we can just be really honest about what's the problem that we're facing, how are we possibly going to address it?

00:12:03.000 Now, what is the circumstantial evidence?

00:12:06.000 Sorry.

00:12:06.000 So let me start from the beginning of this.

00:12:10.000 We know we have a long history of these pathogenic outbreaks and they tend to happen in more tropical parts of China and Southeast Asia and just tropical parts of the world.

00:12:23.000 So when SARS, when this outbreak began, For me, I had a little bit of background.

00:12:30.000 One of the reasons why I started to get suspicious very early on is I'd recently, before then, been in Wuhan.

00:12:38.000 And I knew Wuhan wasn't a place where a bunch of yokels are eating bats.

00:12:42.000 Wuhan is a really sophisticated city.

00:12:45.000 It's their Chicago.

00:12:46.000 And I knew that they didn't have horseshoe bats in Wuhan.

00:12:51.000 As a matter of fact, when the outbreak happened, it was winter there.

00:12:55.000 And so there weren't bats there.

00:12:58.000 And I knew early on that this whole story of the wet market was a lie.

00:13:02.000 And as the Chinese government knew, and they for many, many months pushed that story, even knowing it wasn't true.

00:13:10.000 How did you know it was a lie?

00:13:11.000 The Wuhan story?

00:13:13.000 Because there was a paper that came out in The Lancet in January of 2020. And in that paper, it made clear that around a third of the first COVID cases had no exposure to that market.

00:13:28.000 And so if everything started in the market, you would have expected all of the early cases to have had a market exposure.

00:13:36.000 And so that was known—their government knew that in January, but they didn't admit it until May of last year.

00:13:41.000 Was there a common denominator for all the people that were exposed?

00:13:45.000 That's the big question.

00:13:46.000 Now, so the finding patient—so-called patient zero, that's the essential— The essential question.

00:13:53.000 If the lab leak hypothesis is true, then either patient zero would be someone who works at one of these Chinese virology institutes, probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or it would be someone who was exposed to a virus that had somehow escaped from that,

00:14:13.000 whether it was through waste or maybe an animal escaped or something like that.

00:14:18.000 If the alternative story that many scientists believe and could well be true, that the patient zero, it comes from a series.

00:14:29.000 There was animal to animal, what are called intermediate hosts.

00:14:32.000 It started with a bat and then went back to a pangolin or whatever and eventually to a human.

00:14:37.000 Then you would find a patient zero somewhere that was that first human.

00:14:43.000 I think this is a really important point.

00:14:47.000 If that's the case, you'd have to say, well, what are the chances that that patient zero from this series of animal-to-animal-to-human transmissions?

00:14:56.000 It just happens to be it shows up in Wuhan, which is the only city in China with a level 4 virology institute.

00:15:06.000 That has the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses that is doing gain-of-function research trying to make those viruses more virulent, particularly by making them more able to infect human cells.

00:15:25.000 If patient zero is just somebody who had an exposure to an animal, you have the mathematical odds of that person just showing up in Wuhan would be actually kind of absurd.

00:15:38.000 There's also an issue with the actual structure of the virus itself, right?

00:15:42.000 Yes.

00:15:43.000 Well, this is a virus that is ready-made for getting to humans.

00:15:50.000 For the first SARS, we were able to track how it jumped, and you could see, in retrospect, how you could see it got closer and closer, and as the virus mutated, it became more able to infect humans.

00:16:05.000 This virus showed up As a matter of fact, in the comparative studies of different animals, including humans, humans are the most susceptible to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

00:16:21.000 So somehow, you have to explain how this virus shows up, kind of seemingly out of nowhere, in Wuhan, ready for action, ready to fully infect humans.

00:16:32.000 Now, this level 4 virology lab that's in Wuhan, what are they doing those studies for?

00:16:38.000 Like, what is the intent?

00:16:39.000 Yeah, it's a really important question because there are a lot of people who are saying things that I don't agree with, that, oh, this is some kind of military bioweapon.

00:16:51.000 Say what you want about Chinese government. 0.99

00:16:54.000 They're not stupid. 0.94

00:16:55.000 And so for them, I truly believe, if you had to ask me what's the most likely story, I believe that they recognized that these kinds of pathogens are a big threat to humans and that we're getting more and more,

00:17:11.000 the frequency of these kinds of outbreaks is growing.

00:17:13.000 And rather than being behind the curve and waiting for some terrible outbreak, the idea was, well, can we predict how these viruses will evolve?

00:17:24.000 Can we get ahead of the game in developing treatments and vaccines for what we think may be coming?

00:17:31.000 And that's what this gain-of-function research is about.

00:17:34.000 And so we know that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing We're good to go.

00:18:01.000 How the most dangerous pathogens might develop.

00:18:04.000 And if my hypothesis is true, I think there was an accident.

00:18:09.000 And there's a whole history of people who are warning, saying, well, we're trying to prevent some kind of future threat.

00:18:15.000 But in our effort to prevent it, we're actually increasing the likelihood of it happening.

00:18:20.000 Wasn't that lab cited in 2018 for safety violations as well?

00:18:23.000 Yes.

00:18:24.000 So the U.S. Embassy sent a small delegation.

00:18:28.000 They visited the lab, and then there were two cables about this saying, hey, this is really dangerous.

00:18:35.000 They're doing experimentation with these dangerous coronaviruses, and their safety protocols aren't up to snuff.

00:18:43.000 So there was a lot of warning and a lot of fear.

00:18:45.000 Ugh.

00:18:48.000 Have any of the people that were initially skeptical or pushing back against the idea that it came from this Level 4 lab, are they coming around or are they still digging their heels in?

00:18:58.000 So some are coming around.

00:19:01.000 So certainly there are people like Matt Ridley, who's a member of the House of Lords in the UK, a very well-known science communicator.

00:19:10.000 He was firmly on the other side.

00:19:13.000 And now he's started to be more open and actually has been quite vocal.

00:19:18.000 What was his motivation for being on the other side?

00:19:22.000 It's a really interesting story because in the earliest days of the pandemic, there was a concerted effort by a relatively small number of high-profile There were scientists, virologists, who recognized that if the story was that this came from a series of what are called zoonotic jumps between animal hosts in the wild,

00:19:44.000 that was going to lead to a kind of a positive outcome where we'd say, hey, let's be very mindful of our encroachment into wild spaces, climate change, all those things that we should be very mindful of.

00:19:55.000 I think we're good to go.

00:20:11.000 There was a process where a series of scientists did two things.

00:20:15.000 One, they came out with a letter in the British medical journal, The Lancet, which we've subsequently learned was highly manipulated by a small number of people who may have had vested interests.

00:20:27.000 And there was an academic paper in a journal called Nature Communications, and both made the case, oh, this isn't a lab leak.

00:20:34.000 And then there was a concerted effort to label Anybody else as a conspiracy theorist.

00:20:40.000 I spent last year in that uncomfortable space.

00:20:46.000 I don't live my life as a conspiracy theorist.

00:20:49.000 I try to be data-driven in everything that I do, but I really felt that this was a very real possibility and it deserved a full investigation.

00:20:57.000 And it was only in the beginning of this year, 2021, that that started to turn.

00:21:04.000 I wrote some things.

00:21:07.000 Someone named Nicholson Baker, he had a great piece in New York Magazine.

00:21:12.000 The Wall Street Journal did a great job covering this.

00:21:15.000 And so the space was starting to open up.

00:21:18.000 Then they had that really, in my mind, ill-fated press event in Wuhan, where it was this independent committee and the Chinese government.

00:21:27.000 And they said, don't investigate lab leak, investigate the frozen food hypothesis.

00:21:33.000 And then in every newspaper around the world, the headline was, World Health Organization says lab leak is not possible, essentially.

00:21:43.000 And so I immediately...

00:21:45.000 Sent messages to my friends at the World Health Organization and saying, look, this is being misreported.

00:21:52.000 The World Health Organization hasn't said this, and the position of the WHO must be we have to investigate all hypotheses.

00:22:02.000 And I was very pleased that three days later, so the press event was on a Tuesday, that Friday, Tedros Adhanom, who's the director general, he then said in a press event that we believe that every hypothesis needs to be investigated, which implicitly meant the lab leak hypothesis.

00:22:20.000 And then our letter came out, which was just last week.

00:22:25.000 I mean, it feels it's been such a whirlwind since then.

00:22:29.000 And that's been picked up in I think we're good to go.

00:22:51.000 It's a thorough, unrestricted, unpoliticized investigation into what happened with access to all the lab records, all the samples.

00:23:00.000 There's tons of scientists in China who were working on these issues.

00:23:05.000 Very, very few of them have been interviewed.

00:23:07.000 We don't have access to them.

00:23:09.000 And frankly, I think a lot of them are afraid that if they speak up, they'll be imprisoned or worse.

00:23:13.000 Yeah, that is the problem, right?

00:23:15.000 The people that were initially very vocal and biased towards the idea that it wasn't a lab leak, and you said they were highly motivated and they labeled all the folks a conspiracy theorist.

00:23:28.000 What was motivating them?

00:23:31.000 Yeah, so it's a really tricky point.

00:23:33.000 And so there's been a lot of controversy around a guy named Peter Daszak.

00:23:39.000 And Peter is an interesting figure, because if you had asked me a year ago, A year and a half ago, who are the people who you respect most in the field of virology?

00:23:52.000 He would be really at the top of my list.

00:23:54.000 He was one of the heroes of understanding where the first SARS came from.

00:23:59.000 He has an organization called EcoHealth Alliance that was really trying to get ahead of the curve on understanding these But he also, through EcoHealth Alliance, was a funder of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, specifically the gain-of-function research that was being done there.

00:24:17.000 And I truly believe it wasn't anything nefarious.

00:24:20.000 The idea was, well, if we want to understand dangerous pathogens, we have to do it in the place where those dangerous pathogens are.

00:24:29.000 Then, under the Obama administration, there was a moratorium on this kind of gain-of-function research, and then it was lifted in the Trump administration.

00:24:40.000 So that's one piece of it.

00:24:42.000 And so for Peter, I understand that his whole experience of his life has been, well, this is where these kinds of outbreaks come from.

00:24:54.000 But this could be just a very different story.

00:24:57.000 And for me personally, that's, I think, one of the reasons why I was able to see this a little earlier, perhaps, than other people, is that part of a big chunk of my life has been in the world of science, but another big chunk of my life has been in the world of understanding China.

00:25:12.000 And so I think if you're just in the world of science, you don't understand China, you think, well, the Chinese government says that this isn't from a lab leak.

00:25:19.000 It must not be from a lab leak.

00:25:21.000 But I know That in the Chinese government, they've totally suppressed the entire basically history of Mao and all the millions of people who died under Mao.

00:25:29.000 When they got their speed trains going, the first train had this terrible crash, and they just buried the whole train and pretended like it never happened until there was an outcry and they had to dig it up.

00:25:43.000 We're good to go.

00:26:03.000 And his influence shaped the way the entire world was addressing this outbreak?

00:26:10.000 I wouldn't say it's one guy, but it was, I think, a relatively small number of people.

00:26:15.000 Because they certainly, the Lancet letter, and it was all kinds of big luminaries who signed it, that really shaped things.

00:26:26.000 Definitely, if the story in the beginning had been, maybe this comes from a zoonotic jump, maybe it comes from a lab leak, we need to look at both options, I think that would have been a much healthier place because there would have been more pressure on China.

00:26:43.000 It wasn't just one guy, but Peter certainly was very influential.

00:26:47.000 Then, in spite of this conflict of interest, He actually was selected as a member of this World Health Organization Independent Advisory Committee.

00:26:58.000 So one of the people who went on this mission to China was Peter.

00:27:02.000 He also is the chairman of The Lancet, the same British journal that I mentioned.

00:27:08.000 They have a study group.

00:27:11.000 He's the chairman of that.

00:27:12.000 And I'm not saying he's doing anything wrong.

00:27:15.000 I'm just saying if you have that kind of conflict of interest, you shouldn't be in those kinds of roles.

00:27:20.000 It's just always so disturbing to someone like me who's a non-scientist who relies on scientists to be unbiased and to just look at the data when you find out that things are being influenced by very human factors like ego and financial gain and relationships with foreign powers and laboratories that they're involved with and That scares the shit out of me.

00:27:46.000 Well, you know this better than most anybody, Joe, because you kind of are here every day looking into people's psyche and people are people, even scientists.

00:27:54.000 And everybody in the world has a story that explains what they're doing and why.

00:28:01.000 And so I'm sure that you could, maybe even should, have Peter on the show and he'll give you his story.

00:28:07.000 But at least from the outside looking in, the way I would see it is, well...

00:28:12.000 He's invested his entire life into doing the right thing, trying to protect us from this terrible threat of a pathogenic outbreak.

00:28:22.000 He correctly recognizes that encroachment into wild areas and climate change are big threats.

00:28:30.000 Wherever COVID-19 SARS-2 comes from, still those are good things to do.

00:28:38.000 He has a longstanding relationship with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a friendship with the people who work there.

00:28:50.000 My guest, and I can't speak for him, he's become kind of a stakeholder in this story.

00:28:55.000 But this isn't just about Peter.

00:28:58.000 I mean, there are lots of very prominent scientists.

00:29:01.000 I would say there are more prominent scientists Who believe that this comes from a series of zoonotic jumps through intermediate animal hosts in the wild than there are who believe that it's more likely to come from a lab leak.

00:29:15.000 But what I will say, I'm in touch with lots of people who are world-famous scientists, scientists who many, many people will know who are privately telling me We think that there's a 90% chance that it comes from a lab, but really don't want to speak up because we don't want to get pulled into the muck.

00:29:33.000 You were talking about Trump before.

00:29:35.000 People remember the Iraq War, where there were all kinds of experts who were saying, oh, they definitely have nuclear weapons.

00:29:41.000 We invaded the country. 0.98

00:29:42.000 It's like, oh, oops, they don't have it.

00:29:44.000 So people didn't want it to justify any kind of bad things.

00:29:48.000 And as scientists, I mean, the problem is the scientists rely on data, and there wasn't data because China was covering it up.

00:29:55.000 And the journalists require scientists to legitimate claims about the origins.

00:30:03.000 And so there was this weird thing that's lasted for a year, and our hope is, and we're starting to see, that our letter...

00:30:11.000 Has opened up some space where we can have a real honest conversation about let's look deeply into all the possibilities and try to get to the right answer.

00:30:20.000 What has started to be discussed mainstream, like Newsweek had the cover where it talked about the lab leak hypothesis and people were talking about it more often.

00:30:29.000 Brett Weinstein, who was very vocal about it very early on, And Heather Hying were just on Bill Maher talking about- I loved it.

00:30:35.000 It was great.

00:30:36.000 I mean, I thought that was a fantastic interview.

00:30:39.000 And that's why I'm so happy to be here with you, Joe, because it's one thing where people have a gut feeling, like, oh, I don't trust China.

00:30:45.000 I feel it was a lab leak, or I want to protect the environment.

00:30:50.000 I feel like, well, this is the kind of thing of nature fighting back.

00:30:53.000 And we don't know, but we have to follow the data and be fearless in asking tough questions.

00:30:59.000 Yeah, that's a problem that we have with our culture today is that we've fallen into this very strange situation where we really have two sides of America.

00:31:09.000 We have a left side and a right side.

00:31:12.000 And I don't understand how it happened this abruptly, where it even has an influence on the way we view this pandemic.

00:31:22.000 It has an influence on the way we look at scientific inquiry.

00:31:29.000 Don't want certain results because those results would somehow or another solidify this political party that's, you know, so polarizing.

00:31:40.000 Or would go against this other party that is more to their liking.

00:31:46.000 And it's just...

00:31:47.000 Yeah.

00:32:08.000 How often can this happen?

00:32:09.000 Can this happen with other ones?

00:32:11.000 Like, this is not a normal thing.

00:32:12.000 It's usually they can trace it.

00:32:13.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:32:14.000 So, two great points.

00:32:16.000 One, it can happen.

00:32:18.000 It's happening with more frequency of viruses going from, let's say, bats through intermediate hosts to humans.

00:32:24.000 We've seen it with Hendra virus and Nipah virus and other viruses.

00:32:28.000 That's real.

00:32:30.000 But it's really unfortunate exactly what you're describing is that people, we live in these kind of information cul-de-sacs where we just are stuck.

00:32:39.000 And it seems to me we should just say, well, let's try to be open-minded.

00:32:44.000 And that doesn't mean we don't have views.

00:32:45.000 We all exist on some kind of spectrum kind of for everything.

00:32:49.000 But if we're just stuck there and we can't even look, we can't even hear what other people are saying, we're going to drive ourselves to not just to ignorance but terrible decisions.

00:32:59.000 We just have such a tendency to buy into narratives, and I think now more than ever, because there's almost, not almost, there's too much information out there to pay attention to everything.

00:33:08.000 So we find the information that fits our narrative, we lock into it, we hold onto it, and then we just stick with it and argue against anything that opposes it.

00:33:18.000 It's exactly...

00:33:18.000 And I'm mindful of it because especially with all of this conversation about the origins of the pandemic, I'm now on Twitter more than I was before all of this because there's a lot that's...

00:33:32.000 Terrible place, isn't it?

00:33:32.000 Well...

00:33:33.000 I mean, it's great in a way, but now every time when I go on Twitter, it's like all these people who I really respect, who agree with me, I see their feeds.

00:33:44.000 And obviously, I like their feeds.

00:33:46.000 And because I like their feeds, the next time I go on Twitter, I see more of it.

00:33:52.000 So that's why we all have to kind of...

00:33:56.000 We're good to go.

00:34:13.000 Three people like what you say.

00:34:15.000 If you say the most incendiary things, you start like a whole you-know-what storm.

00:34:19.000 And I just think that being mindful of the environment in which these ideas are being shaped is as important as the ideas themselves.

00:34:29.000 I agree with you wholeheartedly.

00:34:31.000 Now, moving forward from here out, what do you think needs to be done in terms of opening up inquiry, being able to completely figure out the origins of this virus,

00:34:46.000 and what could be done to So the next step is going to be when this joint committee that I mentioned, made up of the Independent Advisory Committee to the World Health Organization and their Chinese government counterparts,

00:35:06.000 they are going to be issuing their preliminary report within a couple of weeks.

00:35:13.000 As I said very publicly, I hope that the report is much better than just the really just atrocious press event that they had on February 9th.

00:35:23.000 In the best case scenario, they'll say, just exactly like we did in our open letter, that one, This wasn't a full investigation.

00:35:35.000 I mean, they essentially had four weeks on the ground in Wuhan, two weeks in quarantine, and two weeks a fully chaperoned, highly curtailed study tour.

00:35:45.000 But if they were to say, here is what a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation, the origins of the pandemic, with full access, To all samples, records, and personnel would look like, that would be a start.

00:35:59.000 But they're in a real bind because it's going to be a joint report.

00:36:04.000 If they say what needs to be said, just in total honesty and fearlessness, this is the full investigation, examining all hypotheses, including the possibility of a lab leak, it's very likely the Chinese government isn't going to sign off on that letter,

00:36:22.000 on that report.

00:36:23.000 But if they do another compromise, like they tried to do in the February 9 press event in Wuhan, where they try to throw out some tidbits, have a little more information, but not too much upset their Chinese counterparts, then that process is going to be delegitimated.

00:36:42.000 So I don't know how they're going to get out of that bind, but I certainly hope that they're honest.

00:36:47.000 But let's just say, hypothetically for now, that they're honest.

00:36:51.000 The Chinese government is unlikely to say, oh, sorry about that.

00:36:56.000 We've been doing this full cover-up for a year.

00:37:00.000 We've destroyed the samples, eliminated the records, imprisoned the journalists, gagged the scientists.

00:37:06.000 Are bad.

00:37:07.000 Just come in and do what you want.

00:37:09.000 So then we can say, well, what are the next options?

00:37:12.000 We can try to renegotiate the terms for a new investigation, maybe with different skill sets of people.

00:37:20.000 You still run into the China problem.

00:37:21.000 You could try to go to the United Nations for a stronger mandate.

00:37:25.000 You still run into the China problem.

00:37:28.000 To tell you the truth, I don't know whether we're going to be able to have the full investigation that we need to get to the bottom of this, but at very least, we should articulate what that is.

00:37:41.000 And if China wants to tell the rest of the world, essentially, screw you, we have millions of people dead from this totally avoidable pandemic, the future of our species depends on understanding where it comes from, 0.91

00:37:58.000 But we don't want you to look deeply at what happened.

00:38:03.000 At least, at very least, there should be a political cost for that.

00:38:07.000 But at most, we'll get as much information as we possibly can.

00:38:12.000 I was reading that if China had been honest about it from the beginning and let everybody know about the pandemic, like the moment they knew about it, it would have saved 95% of the lives.

00:38:24.000 I truly believe that.

00:38:25.000 And it could be even more.

00:38:27.000 It could be less, but I really think it could be more because these viruses...

00:38:32.000 I mean, you talked about patient zero.

00:38:34.000 So there was one person who had this.

00:38:38.000 Then it became two.

00:38:39.000 That's what we call viral growth.

00:38:44.000 The earlier you intervene, the greater the possibility to stop it.

00:38:50.000 This is certainly a highly contagious virus.

00:38:54.000 But in those early critical days, I mean, China, they silenced the whistleblowers, they started destroying the materials they didn't share immediately, even the genomic sequence of the virus.

00:39:12.000 China was absolutely atrocious and there's a percentage, not the full percentage, but every single person who dies from COVID, part of that is attributable to the failure of the Chinese government, particularly in the first month. 0.70

00:39:28.000 There's other parts of it that are attributable to the massive failures that we had here in the United States and elsewhere.

00:39:34.000 It's such a fascinating country, you know, because they have this weird mix of the government and business.

00:39:42.000 They're intertwined inexorably, right?

00:39:45.000 And they have influence over the media, they have a full lockdown on the internet, and if anybody promotes anything that's negative about the Chinese government, whether it's bloggers or journalists, they just arrest them and make them vanish.

00:40:00.000 Well, so what I would say is it's the Chinese government.

00:40:03.000 Even business is subject to the Chinese government.

00:40:07.000 And it's an authoritarian system.

00:40:11.000 And we've experienced authoritarian systems before.

00:40:16.000 The Soviet Union was one. 0.66

00:40:17.000 But never one as sophisticated as these guys.

00:40:21.000 And it's not like, you know, I traveled in former Eastern Europe in the old days.

00:40:26.000 We talked about it last time I was on the show.

00:40:28.000 I've traveled all through North Korea.

00:40:30.000 And there's one thing when you go to an authoritarian, or in this case a totalitarian system, when it's totally dysfunctional.

00:40:36.000 And you see that when you see people pulling plows on their backs in North Korea.

00:40:40.000 It's another thing to go to a place like China where it's an incredible level of sophistication.

00:40:46.000 I mean, one of the reasons why we're even having this conversation is their level of scientific acumen and artificial intelligence and genomics is incredible.

00:40:56.000 I think?

00:41:02.000 I think?

00:41:25.000 Yeah.

00:41:27.000 Yeah.

00:41:29.000 Yeah.

00:41:45.000 You know, a virus that starts somewhere and spreads, it affects all of us.

00:41:48.000 So our fate is dependent in this and in many other ways on the behavior of governments like China's.

00:41:56.000 And so when they have these kinds of terrible I don't even want to call it a breakdown because maybe the government was working as designed to prevent the Communist Party from losing face.

00:42:11.000 Then it affects all of us.

00:42:13.000 And so this idea that, well, what happens in your country is your business, it doesn't really make sense when we're talking about highly contagious viruses and lots of other things.

00:42:23.000 Lots of other things.

00:42:24.000 I want to talk about, is there anything else you want to say about coronaviruses or about...

00:42:32.000 I have a very strong view that not just that I think lab leak hypothesis is the most likely, but that what we need is a full and unrestricted international forensic investigation into all of this.

00:42:49.000 But I would certainly encourage your listeners not to take my word for it, but to really read the evidence.

00:42:55.000 And that's why on my website, on jamiemetzel.com, I've just laid out the evidence.

00:42:59.000 I have lots of links.

00:43:00.000 And I would encourage people just to go there and look and read and disagree.

00:43:06.000 I mean, I think we have to have a space for the conversation.

00:43:10.000 I think that's the key point.

00:43:11.000 And it should be data-driven.

00:43:12.000 It shouldn't be political.

00:43:13.000 And I'm hoping that it can be now.

00:43:15.000 Now that Trump's out of office, I personally feel like the country's more relaxed.

00:43:20.000 Oh my God.

00:43:21.000 It's so relaxed.

00:43:22.000 I think the thing is, everybody wakes up.

00:43:25.000 And then the first thought is, huh, I wonder what I'm going to have for breakfast.

00:43:30.000 It's not taking out the phone.

00:43:31.000 What did Trump do?

00:43:32.000 What did Trump do?

00:43:34.000 It's like, we don't have to think about politics all the time.

00:43:37.000 He's so polarizing, unfortunately, because if he did a lot of the things that he did in terms of policy but didn't have this sort of polarizing personality, we'd have a very different discussion about all these different things.

00:43:52.000 Yeah.

00:43:52.000 I mean, I don't agree with a lot of the policy things, but there was a style.

00:43:58.000 And I think people have always had a sense, I think, for a long time, that if you don't pay attention to government, by and large, at least in the United States, you know, Some good things are going to happen.

00:44:11.000 Sometimes there'll be screw-ups.

00:44:13.000 And I think that when you don't have the faith that your government is going to do things right, or just what to expect, or just that when you hear the voice of the president, it should kind of soothe you a little bit.

00:44:25.000 Like Joe Biden, my former boss, when he speaks, I mean, he's an exciting enough guy, but you think, like, all right, I'm going to listen before bed, and then I'll fall asleep.

00:44:34.000 You'll fall asleep halfway through this conversation.

00:44:36.000 Exactly.

00:44:36.000 But with Trump, it's like you listen, and then you're all...

00:44:39.000 Agitated, and then you pass it to your dog, and your dog is agitated.

00:44:43.000 Well, Obama was the best example, right?

00:44:44.000 Because he's such a statesman.

00:44:46.000 The way he would talk would be so measured, intelligent, articulate.

00:44:49.000 Everything that he said, you felt like, all right, he's got it.

00:44:54.000 That's how I felt.

00:44:55.000 He would talk like a president, and he'd go, all right, that's a president.

00:44:59.000 Whether you agree or disagree, and I agree with a lot of what he did, you think there's a process that I trust.

00:45:08.000 I think we've just gone through this experience where Many of us just didn't trust the process.

00:45:16.000 It felt chaotic.

00:45:18.000 It didn't feel safe.

00:45:19.000 But to get back to my point, data, we have to be able to look at these situations like the pandemic outbreak and look at it.

00:45:30.000 And not have rhetoric, not have these polarizing conversations, not have a vested interest in it being one way or the other.

00:45:38.000 It has to be just looking at it and analyzing it and experts looking strictly at the evidence and discussing the evidence without any bias, without a need for one conclusion or the other to be...

00:45:55.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:45:57.000 I don't feel that that has been the case.

00:45:59.000 There's been so many articles.

00:46:00.000 I mean, there was an article written about Brett Weinstein after he came on my podcast about how I was having this guy on to promote this conspiracy theory that's been widely debunked.

00:46:10.000 And I remember reading that, and there was no data in that article, but it was basically a smear article.

00:46:16.000 Yeah, and you're going to get it after this podcast.

00:46:19.000 You'll get it more, and I guarantee you people— I think less.

00:46:23.000 I hope so.

00:46:23.000 I think the tide's turned on that theory.

00:46:25.000 But I think that even in the response to our letter—I mean, we've had the media response has been great, but there are a lot of people who've been saying, well— There are more prominent scientists who are saying that the zoonotic theory is more likely.

00:46:39.000 And my feeling is they may even be right.

00:46:41.000 And I welcome the conversation, but we have to have the conversation.

00:46:45.000 You have to have the conversation.

00:46:46.000 So is there a possibility of getting those prominent scientists that do have this opinion and matching them up with prominent scientists that believe the lab leak hypothesis and having some sort of an actual scientific debate?

00:47:00.000 Yeah, so it's funny that you mentioned that because there was a private thing, but I will now make public in our conversation.

00:47:07.000 So I sent a note a few days ago to Peter Ben Imbaric, who is the person who leads the World Health Organization Organized Independent Advisory Committee.

00:47:21.000 And when I said to Peter in that note, and I haven't yet heard back, but I imagine I will now, I said, why don't we have a private Zoom dialogue between the members of your committee and the signatories of our open letter, and let's just have this conversation.

00:47:38.000 And I think that's the kind of thing that we need to do.

00:47:43.000 And I hope it's possible, certainly in writing this letter, our goal wasn't to shut down conversation, but to open space for it.

00:47:51.000 Well, that's the best case scenario.

00:47:53.000 The best case scenario is scientific inquiry is supported and this becomes something we could all look at and say, okay, these guys are acting rationally now and let's figure out where this came from and how does this stop?

00:48:09.000 How do we make sure that this doesn't happen again?

00:48:12.000 The Level 4 Virology Lab in Wuhan, are they still operational?

00:48:17.000 They are.

00:48:17.000 They've been taken over by the military.

00:48:19.000 I mean, the first thing that happened after the outbreak is that the Chinese military came and took over.

00:48:25.000 And it's not only that, there are lots of other virology institutes around China and around the world.

00:48:31.000 Right now, Singapore, for example, is building A level four virology institute.

00:48:35.000 So there's a real conversation to be had.

00:48:38.000 One is how should we think about safety in these kinds of virology institutes, these kinds of biolabs? 1.00

00:48:45.000 Second, should we have them at hub cities like Wuhan or Singapore?

00:48:50.000 Or should we just put them out in the middle of Siberia or someplace like we put nuclear waste?

00:48:56.000 And those are the kinds of conversations that we need to have.

00:49:00.000 And that's why, coming back to your earlier point, This issue of polarization is so significant because, again, if we can't have the conversation, we're screwed.

00:49:10.000 Well, here's another question, rather.

00:49:13.000 What did they learn in studying these super dangerous viruses that was applicable in this pandemic?

00:49:21.000 Because you would hope that if you're going to study these super dangerous viruses, You're going to have some solutions.

00:49:29.000 But it didn't seem like there was any solutions on the table when the pandemic initially started.

00:49:33.000 Yeah, that's exactly right.

00:49:34.000 And there are people, like there's a scientist, Mark Lipsitch at Harvard, who have been traditionally one of the big opponents of gain-of-function research.

00:49:42.000 And they said, you have the danger of realizing the thing that you're trying to prevent.

00:49:48.000 So there were academic papers that, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, that said, oh, hey, it is possible to make coronaviruses more able to infect human cells.

00:50:02.000 That was, I guess, it's useful information.

00:50:04.000 Now we have lots of evidence that coronaviruses can mutate in ways that make them more able to infect human cells.

00:50:12.000 We have hundreds of Millions of examples and more than 100 million examples.

00:50:16.000 But was there any research on how to combat that?

00:50:19.000 So that was what they were trying to do.

00:50:22.000 But I think that they made progress in identifying the problem.

00:50:29.000 As far as I know, there wasn't any significant, like, were we that far ahead in developing vaccines?

00:50:36.000 No.

00:50:37.000 Were we that far ahead in developing treatments?

00:50:39.000 No.

00:50:40.000 And that's why I'm a little more sympathetic to the people who are critics of this aggressive gain-of-function research than to the people who are its proponents, like Peter Daszak, another scientist at University of North Carolina named Ralph Daszak.

00:50:54.000 Barrick and others, because I just think that there are almost an infinite number of viruses that can threaten us.

00:51:02.000 If we are going to try to push these viruses to make them more dangerous, I mean, we have to question, is that the right thing to do?

00:51:11.000 And if we do it, we just need to make sure, do we have all of the safeguards in place?

00:51:16.000 And that seems to me as an international question.

00:51:19.000 I mean, if China, with all of its problems and all of its Insufficient safeguards and this culture of pushing science ahead as a vehicle for national greatness.

00:51:30.000 If they're just making their own decisions about safety for these viruses that have the potential to kill as many people as they've potentially now killed, that's not just a Chinese issue.

00:51:43.000 That's an everybody issue.

00:51:44.000 Also, no accountability in terms of like, hey, show us what you were doing to try to stop this virus.

00:51:51.000 Show us what you were trying to do when you were examining these viruses and doing experiments on them.

00:51:56.000 What progress did you make in terms of how to stop a pandemic or how to combat these viruses?

00:52:03.000 Where is the work?

00:52:04.000 No, it's exactly right.

00:52:05.000 And let's just say there's work.

00:52:07.000 That's why in the earliest days of the pandemic, The right response from the Chinese would be to say, all right, this terrible thing has happened. 1.00

00:52:16.000 It started in Wuhan.

00:52:18.000 At Wuhan, we have the world's leading center for studying bat coronaviruses with the largest collection of bat coronaviruses.

00:52:27.000 We are going to make everything open right now because let's get to the bottom of this.

00:52:33.000 But instead, they did the exact opposite.

00:52:37.000 They removed access to all of the viral databases.

00:52:41.000 So still to this day, nobody knows what viruses they had.

00:52:45.000 They gagged all of the scientists.

00:52:47.000 There could be scientists in China who actually have known a lot from the beginning about this virus, how it functions, how we might respond to it.

00:52:57.000 Those people have no access to the international community.

00:53:01.000 And that's Why?

00:53:02.000 There are these pathologies of the Chinese state, which are bad enough if you're living in China. 0.99

00:53:07.000 But we're all, whatever the origins of the pandemic, we're all, I think, being victimized by those pathologies now.

00:53:16.000 Has China offered any information about how to combat the virus?

00:53:22.000 Have they contributed to the development of the mRNA viruses or vaccines?

00:53:28.000 First, in terms of a public health response, I mentioned that China was absolutely atrocious, particularly in the first month or two of the virus. 1.00

00:53:38.000 They also mounted the most aggressive and, in many ways, highly successful We're good to go.

00:54:01.000 China has been more helpful.

00:54:03.000 Now, even with this idea of, well, where does the virus come from?

00:54:10.000 So China has been very aggressive trying to look for animal hosts.

00:54:14.000 They haven't found any.

00:54:15.000 There's no evidence of it.

00:54:16.000 They've been even more aggressive with this, in my view, somewhat nutty, but maybe worthy of exploration idea, that it came from frozen foods shipped from someplace else.

00:54:26.000 I mean, there's absolutely no evidence that that's the case.

00:54:29.000 But not helpful with this, and certainly not helpful with providing access to the scientists who've been studying, just to your point, who've been studying this for years.

00:54:42.000 The access to those people has mostly vanished.

00:54:45.000 So they didn't really contribute to treatments.

00:54:48.000 They basically figured out a way to lock people in their homes and isolate.

00:54:53.000 They had more power over the population in terms of stopping their movement.

00:54:57.000 But in treatments, they also have their own vaccine.

00:55:02.000 When did they develop their vaccine?

00:55:04.000 They actually developed it a little faster than ours.

00:55:06.000 But when the first tests came back, it only had about a 50% efficacy rate, so it was a bad vaccine.

00:55:13.000 But they had the first vaccine.

00:55:15.000 They're now working to develop an mRNA vaccine like the Pfizer and Moderna.

00:55:21.000 What was their vaccine?

00:55:23.000 Their vaccine was a...

00:55:25.000 An inert vaccine?

00:55:26.000 Yeah, it was an attenuated virus vaccine.

00:55:28.000 But it wasn't very effective.

00:55:30.000 It wasn't very effective.

00:55:31.000 The Johnson& Johnson vaccine is quite a bit less effective.

00:55:34.000 Yes.

00:55:35.000 It's a one-shot.

00:55:36.000 Yes.

00:55:37.000 And so that one, it's called a Trojan horse vaccine. 0.58

00:55:40.000 And basically, you get a virus that is basically a non-harmful virus.

00:55:45.000 You kind of neutralize it by taking out its kind of delivery package.

00:55:50.000 And then put the gene that's delivered through that other virus into the body.

00:55:55.000 Whereas the mRNA vaccine, what that's doing, it's hijacking the machinery of your cells and saying, hey cells, the mRNA is the messenger, messenger RNA. We kind of hijack and say, hey, here's a new message.

00:56:10.000 And we say, the message is cells make this spike protein, which is something it's not part of normal human body, but we make this little protein.

00:56:20.000 And then our body says, our immunological system says, hey, this is an alien thing, and it mounts a response.

00:56:26.000 And that's what gives us our immunity.

00:56:28.000 And the problem that I'm reading about the Johnson& Johnson virus is there's religious opposition to it.

00:56:34.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:56:35.000 Because it was made from cell lines that were derived from aborted fetal tissue.

00:56:39.000 Yeah, aborted fetal tissue in the 1980s.

00:56:43.000 So I just want to be clear that all of these vaccines, certainly the American ones, I think are very effective, great vaccines, and everybody should be happy to take whatever ones they have access to.

00:56:56.000 There were some Catholic bishops, and the Vatican was not fully this way, who said that because the Johnson& Johnson vaccine was derived in part,

00:57:11.000 in small part, from a cell line taken from an aborted fetus in the 1980s, if you have a choice, you should avoid that.

00:57:21.000 I think, in my view, that was an unfortunate statement.

00:57:26.000 I think this is about health and safety.

00:57:28.000 If anybody has access to a vaccine, it's my view that they should take it, not just for themselves, or they should do it for themselves, but it's also the faster we can reach herd immunity, the more the people who can't take vaccines will be protected,

00:57:44.000 whether it's people in chemotherapy and other things.

00:57:47.000 The Johnson& Johnson vaccine, since it's less effective, does it have less side effects?

00:57:55.000 No.

00:57:56.000 No.

00:57:56.000 I mean, all of these vaccines have, at least the American ones and pretty much all of the vaccines, have very, very minimal side effects as far as we know.

00:58:06.000 I mean, these are all vaccines that have been rushed, but I see no reason to—I don't think there's some kind of hidden thing that two years from now we're going to find out that these vaccines are more dangerous than— No, not saying that, but the side effects were some people have been pretty extreme.

00:58:21.000 Like Ben Stein was just on television talking about, or on the internet rather, talking about side effects that he experienced.

00:58:29.000 It was pretty ruthless.

00:58:31.000 And I think people are.

00:58:32.000 I mean, what we're doing is we're getting our body, like if your body, if there's some kind of alien invasion, that's what we've evolved for, And that's why every time you get a fever or whatever, it's your body's fighting something.

00:58:45.000 But in that fight, your body is getting stronger.

00:58:49.000 So I definitely think that there are – I wouldn't even – maybe you can call them side effects, but it's like your body is mounting this kind of response.

00:58:58.000 It's not a side effect.

00:58:59.000 It's a consequence.

00:59:00.000 It's a consequence.

00:59:01.000 That's exactly right.

00:59:02.000 Let's talk about, because we got into a little bit about China and genetics.

00:59:09.000 There was an article that I read recently where there was some sort of program to try to make Chinese men more manly, that the government was instituting some sort of a program.

00:59:23.000 And I read that, and see if you can find it, because it was a weird article. 0.98

00:59:27.000 They were doing these manly exercises and shit. 0.98

00:59:30.000 Like, what are manly exercises? 0.99

00:59:32.000 That's a good question.

00:59:32.000 I guess aggressive weightlifting or something along those lines.

00:59:38.000 The real ethical dilemma, and this is your area of expertise, right?

00:59:42.000 In terms of genetic engineering.

00:59:45.000 There's many ethical dilemmas, right?

00:59:48.000 One of them is the haves and the have-nots.

00:59:50.000 That's the big one to me.

00:59:51.000 It's like if really, really wealthy people Can figure out how to genetically manipulate their children and their bodies before it's available to anyone else.

01:00:00.000 They'll have such a massive advantage that the gaps between the haves and the have-nots will grow ever wider.

01:00:05.000 I think that's a real possibility.

01:00:08.000 China promotes education drive to make boys more manly.

01:00:12.000 So you see these boys, what are they doing there?

01:00:15.000 Punching sand?

01:00:17.000 Yeah, I don't think that has anything to do with genetics, but it seems like whatever they're doing...

01:00:22.000 They're flexing.

01:00:23.000 Yeah.

01:00:23.000 The middle guy's got some good chest muscles.

01:00:25.000 Yeah.

01:00:26.000 What does it say here?

01:00:27.000 Chinese government...

01:00:28.000 What does it say?

01:00:29.000 Oh, the proposal to prevent the feminization of male adolescents.

01:00:35.000 I guess they don't want Chinese men to become too metro.

01:00:38.000 Well, is metro feminization?

01:00:40.000 I thought metro was just style.

01:00:42.000 That's what I think, but I don't know.

01:00:44.000 Feminization seems like...

01:00:45.000 Different take.

01:00:47.000 I don't think this is genetics.

01:00:50.000 I think it's culture.

01:00:53.000 Oh, for sure.

01:00:53.000 But my question is, when does it lead to genetics?

01:00:57.000 It says, while Chinese government has signaled concern that the country's most popular male role models are no longer strong athletic figures like, in quotes, army heroes.

01:01:08.000 If I had to guess, I do a lot with Korea.

01:01:15.000 And in Asia, there's a thing called Korean Wave.

01:01:19.000 And it's Korean culture.

01:01:20.000 You can pull up Korean Wave on this screen.

01:01:24.000 But there's like the Korean pop stars and these movie stars, they have a little bit of a feminine look. 1.00

01:01:32.000 And I think that style has spread certainly across Asia and Japan.

01:01:38.000 Oh, there you go.

01:01:40.000 So my guess is that...

01:01:42.000 That's feminine? 1.00

01:01:43.000 That guy looks jacked. 0.74

01:01:45.000 Look at that guy in the middle. 0.94

01:01:46.000 That's not feminine at all.

01:01:47.000 That guy gets all the ladies. 1.00

01:01:49.000 Anyway, we welcome all Koreans on Twitter to give us your thoughts.

01:01:53.000 But my guess is that Chinese modern history, it all comes out of this mythology of the Long March, this kind of fake history that the Chinese government has, that they fought and defeated the Japanese, where in fact the nationalists were the ones who actually fought the Japanese.

01:02:11.000 So my guess is that with this story is they're afraid of kind of their society becoming quote-unquote soft like they maybe see the Koreans, the Japanese, and us.

01:02:21.000 That's interesting.

01:02:22.000 Well, us?

01:02:23.000 Really?

01:02:23.000 Americans?

01:02:24.000 Are we feminizing as well?

01:02:25.000 Jamie, any thoughts on that?

01:02:29.000 I don't know whether we are, but my guess is they see us as softening and weakening.

01:02:34.000 Yeah, well, a lot of people do.

01:02:37.000 My question is, do you think that there's a real possibility of some sort of a government program to manipulate genetics?

01:02:49.000 Yeah.

01:02:50.000 And now that we understand that CRISPR is a real tool and it's viable and we can...

01:02:56.000 They've used CRISPR on living humans, not just on fetuses, right?

01:03:01.000 In China.

01:03:02.000 Can you explain how they do that?

01:03:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:03:03.000 So it's really an incredible story.

01:03:06.000 If you don't mind, I'll just go back a little bit.

01:03:08.000 So last year, 2020, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, who are scientists who developed the tool that you just mentioned called CRISPR. In 2012, they had their famous paper came out,

01:03:24.000 which was essentially describing a basic science tool, something that you would do in a lab.

01:03:28.000 Six years later, in 2018, the world's first three genetically modified CRISPR babies were born in China as a result of highly, in my view, unethical human experimentation by a Chinese biophysicist named He Jiankui. 0.83

01:03:45.000 As a matter of fact, The World Health Organization Committee on which I serve was created in the aftermath of that.

01:03:52.000 So what He Jiankui was doing and trying to do was to change one gene to try to give these two, and then it became three kids, greater resistance to HIV later in life.

01:04:06.000 It doesn't look like he succeeded.

01:04:08.000 But we've entered the era of genetically modified humans and it's just in this little way and more broadly we're entering this period where our species has the increasing ability to read, write, and hack the code of life.

01:04:24.000 Wasn't there some sort of—because they were trying to give them resistance to HIV, didn't it impart some sort of cognitive benefit?

01:04:33.000 Well, there were stories that it may have from some experiments that were done in mice, and there was some analysis that was later partly debunked from the UK Biobank that had suggested that.

01:04:48.000 But the short answer is nobody really knows, and that was why it was— So unethical to do these human experimentations because the outcomes were so unknown.

01:05:00.000 Having said that, even though this was a terrible first step, it's my absolute expectation that in the future, and whether that future is 10 years from now or 20 years from now or 5 years from now or 50 years from now— We will begin a process of genetic modification of humans that will start very small.

01:05:19.000 It will certainly start with changing single mutations that would otherwise condemn a child to die of a terrible, deadly genetic disorder.

01:05:33.000 That will be the starting point.

01:05:34.000 But over time, as we increasingly understand the complexity, not just of the human genome, but of systems biology more broadly, we will move from that smaller bit of engineering to bigger.

01:05:47.000 We'll also use tools of embryo selection.

01:05:50.000 Right now, an average woman going through IVF has about 15 eggs extracted.

01:05:55.000 Let's say you have 10 viable pre-implanted embryos in in vitro fertilization.

01:06:02.000 So now you can screen each one of those 10 embryos, and you can rank order them roughly in the tallest, likely tallest to likely shortest.

01:06:11.000 In a small number of years, likely highest genetic component to likely lowest genetic component of IQ. It's all highly, highly controversial stuff, but this is where we're going.

01:06:22.000 So I do think that it will be possible that we'll have embryo selection and then very likely we'll be able to use stem cell technology called induced pluripotent stem cells to turn adult cells into stem cells.

01:06:35.000 So just to make it practical, let's say...

01:06:38.000 A woman has a skin graft and there's millions of skin cells. 0.99

01:06:42.000 You induce those skin cells into stem cells, stem cells into egg precursor cells, egg precursor cells into eggs.

01:06:49.000 Now let's say you have 10,000 eggs and average male ejaculation has hundreds of millions or sometimes little billions of sperm.

01:06:57.000 You fertilize those 10,000 eggs, use high-throughput screening to extract a few cells and sequence them from each, and now you have 10,000 options.

01:07:07.000 And then you have real possibilities, and you don't even need to use genome editing.

01:07:11.000 Our ancestors took chickens laying one egg a month and turned them into chickens laying one egg a day, not knowing anything about genetics, but just through this kind of selection.

01:07:21.000 And what does it mean for humans, for agriculture?

01:07:25.000 For so many other things when we are the drivers of that evolutionary process.

01:07:29.000 That's where people get really uncomfortable, right?

01:07:32.000 Because now we're entering into what many people would consider eugenics.

01:07:37.000 You're engineering the human race for the most favorable outcomes.

01:07:44.000 And maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but Sometimes less favorable outcomes create a different strength.

01:07:56.000 Oh, absolutely.

01:07:57.000 I think that is such a wise point and it's essential because you talked earlier about equity as being one of the issues.

01:08:05.000 But an equally big issue is, is your point, diversity.

01:08:10.000 And so if you gave everybody a choice, what kind of kid would you want?

01:08:14.000 Maybe everyone would say, I want...

01:08:16.000 The Rock.

01:08:16.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:08:17.000 Yeah.

01:08:17.000 Yeah, I want my kid to look like the rock.

01:08:19.000 Everybody would say that.

01:08:20.000 Yeah, no, I want the rock with the mind of Einstein and whatever.

01:08:25.000 And it's not wrong.

01:08:26.000 It's just within the context of our society, those seem like good ideas.

01:08:32.000 Just like if you were a dinosaur and someone asked a T-Rex, what kind of kid do you want?

01:08:38.000 T-Rex, like, F yeah, I want a kid.

01:08:40.000 I want a big tail.

01:08:41.000 I want sharp fangs. 0.97

01:08:43.000 But then the- A longer arm. 0.97

01:08:45.000 The asteroid hits, and being a cockroach was actually the right answer.

01:08:50.000 Or being a crocodile, a lot of rotten meat.

01:08:53.000 Exactly.

01:08:54.000 That's true, but it's overcooked.

01:08:56.000 So we don't know what the future holds.

01:09:00.000 Our evolutionary diversity, in a Darwinian sense, we talk of random mutation.

01:09:07.000 That's just diversity.

01:09:08.000 That means that something that seems really good now, like being a big T-Rex, in some future environment is actually a disadvantage.

01:09:16.000 So if we start making even well-intentioned decisions, even to eliminate terrible diseases, it may be that we limit not just our diversity, but through our diversity, our resilience as a species.

01:09:29.000 But there's also, human beings tend to, we like to innovate, right?

01:09:36.000 And the more time people spend on innovation and the construction of new methods, technology, new things, the more time they spend on that, the better they're going to get at that.

01:09:50.000 If they're more sexually viable, if they're more aggressive, if they're more athletic, there's going to be less time being spent on those things.

01:09:59.000 It's the weird balance.

01:10:02.000 You don't get no knock on the rock, but he's not out there inventing CRISPR. You know what I'm saying?

01:10:10.000 We need a little bit of this, a little bit of that. 0.72

01:10:13.000 I just think we're fucking around with the way the universe works and the way biology works in a weird way.

01:10:20.000 I don't necessarily think we understand the consequences of each individual action.

01:10:25.000 Right now, it hasn't It hasn't become a factor because there's a couple babies in China and there's a few experiments done in America.

01:10:33.000 But once it actually starts happening, that you can pick what kind of child you have.

01:10:40.000 Not just what kind, but if we...

01:10:44.000 Go forward 100 years or 200 years from now.

01:10:47.000 There might be some super sophisticated methods of engineering the type of person.

01:10:53.000 So we might be able to create people that, as of right now, don't even exist.

01:10:58.000 People with extraordinary vision, bulletproof skin.

01:11:02.000 I mean, we might be changing the human race.

01:11:07.000 Maybe that's good.

01:11:08.000 Maybe if you grabbed a monkey or Australopithecus and said, hey man, one day you're going to be flying in a plane and you're going to be floating around in a boat.

01:11:18.000 And I think Australopithecus would say, well, I want to sit in business class.

01:11:22.000 I want free orange juice. 1.00

01:11:23.000 I think Australopithecus would be like, fuck that. 1.00

01:11:25.000 I'm going to stay what I'm doing. 1.00

01:11:26.000 I don't want to change.

01:11:27.000 I'm going to lose all my hair.

01:11:29.000 What do I do?

01:11:29.000 I'm cold.

01:11:30.000 Well, you're going to get clothes.

01:11:31.000 I don't want clothes.

01:11:32.000 I have hair.

01:11:33.000 I'm good.

01:11:34.000 Exactly.

01:11:35.000 And the hard part is, yes, we can imagine some earlier time where our ancestors like Australopithecus, because we were just animals.

01:11:44.000 There were other animals.

01:11:45.000 We kind of lived like animals.

01:11:47.000 We've left that world.

01:11:48.000 It's now...

01:11:49.000 Of all the species that have ever lived are one little group of monkeys.

01:11:53.000 We're not just taking over.

01:11:55.000 We are reshaping all of life on this planet, and we're reshaping our own biology.

01:12:02.000 So, yeah, it's scary.

01:12:05.000 It should be scary.

01:12:05.000 And that's the work that our World Health Organization committee is trying to grapple with, is how do we try to create a governance system that can transform We try to prevent terrible abuses, because it's clear we can identify what feel like, at least for now,

01:12:21.000 terrible abuses.

01:12:22.000 And we can identify some things where we think, well, that seems pretty good.

01:12:26.000 I mean, if someone's kid is going to die of a terrible genetic disorder and we have the ability to prevent that, well, let's do it.

01:12:33.000 And there's a lot of gray area in between, and our sense of what's okay and not okay Changes over time.

01:12:42.000 And that's why it's a dynamic process.

01:12:44.000 Just like you were saying before on politics, if we kind of force ourselves into one extreme or another, we'll end up with the wrong answer.

01:12:51.000 But the challenge is, how do we negotiate this part in the middle that helps us advance the beneficial science but prevent abuses?

01:13:00.000 And that's why the ethics are so important.

01:13:03.000 But it's really hard to define what the abuses are because people think differently about them.

01:13:08.000 And we also don't really know what the consequences of each individual decision will be and how they'll lead to more.

01:13:14.000 And if we have ethics, these ethics are not going to be globally accepted.

01:13:18.000 There's going to be people or countries that go, you know, we don't like our standing in terms of the world market.

01:13:25.000 And this is one way to really elevate our entire nation is to engineer a completely new kind of human.

01:13:32.000 It's exactly right that countries, just like in the United States in the Second World War and immediately after, we had all these wise people like Vannevar Bush and others who said American leadership in science and technology is the foundation of American power.

01:13:49.000 Right now, that's what the Chinese government is saying.

01:13:52.000 When I went to the Beijing Genomics Institute, or BGI, which is not in Beijing, it's in Shenzhen, and I saw they have the world's largest collection of sequencing machines, there was a Chinese flag on every one of those sequencing machines.

01:14:06.000 When He Jiankui, the scientist who I mentioned before, Manipulated these embryos for the first CRISPR babies.

01:14:14.000 When he did his application, it was all about bringing glory to the Chinese state.

01:14:21.000 So we are in that environment.

01:14:22.000 And that's one of the problems that we face is that human beings, we've become this species with a global reach that just like we're seeing with the virus and so many other things.

01:14:33.000 Small numbers of us are doing things that have big implications for everybody, but we don't have a system, a global way of solving these kinds of problems.

01:14:43.000 There's a really dangerous mismatch.

01:14:45.000 Yeah, that's the concern, right?

01:14:47.000 The concern is that other countries are going to do what we would consider to be unethical, but through those decisions, they're going to gain some sort of an advantage, whether it's an advantage in terms of intelligence or advantage in terms of athletics.

01:15:01.000 I mean, we already know that countries manipulate people's bodies in order to win the Olympics.

01:15:05.000 Have you seen the documentary Icarus?

01:15:07.000 Have you seen that?

01:15:08.000 It's amazing, right?

01:15:09.000 Well, we know Russia will go balls to the wall to try to win the Olympics.

01:15:14.000 They did, and they got caught, and they've been eliminated from the Olympics.

01:15:18.000 Yeah, but they're clawing their way.

01:15:19.000 So it's exactly right.

01:15:20.000 In my book, Hacking Darwin, I have a whole chapter on this, which is called The Arms Race of the Human Race, and I play out some of those scenarios.

01:15:28.000 So imagine you are a country That your population has decided, you know, this stuff, it's too scary.

01:15:35.000 This feels like we're playing God.

01:15:38.000 It's ethically uncomfortable.

01:15:40.000 And there's another country that has made a different decision.

01:15:43.000 And let's just say that you start to see evidence and maybe it won't work.

01:15:47.000 I mean, maybe you just do nothing and it turns out that these guys are taking too big of a risk and then they've got some kind of big problem.

01:15:54.000 Or maybe it actually starts to work.

01:15:57.000 So then what do you do?

01:15:58.000 Do you just say, all right, we're sticking to our guns, and we recognize that maybe we'll be less competitive than them in the future, and that's a price that we're willing to pay?

01:16:07.000 Or do you try to stop them?

01:16:09.000 And maybe you can, maybe you can't.

01:16:11.000 If it's a big, powerful country, you probably can't.

01:16:15.000 And if you can't stop them, and you don't want to pay the price of not doing it, do you feel that you have to match them?

01:16:23.000 And just like in the Olympics, I mean, there are different societies that make different decisions of how they're going to do Olympics.

01:16:30.000 Some say we're just going to let a bunch of kids play sports and the best ones will emerge.

01:16:34.000 Some say we're going to measure all these kids and test them when they're five years old.

01:16:40.000 And then we have a way of measuring those outcomes, which is gold medals.

01:16:45.000 And maybe it's the case that these different collections of societal decisions will lead to different outcomes.

01:16:54.000 There's nothing that's set in stone of why we in the United States have a higher standard of living than people in Venezuela or whatever.

01:17:02.000 But if there's like a lot of little decisions that add up to these things called national competitiveness and the application of revolutionary science is one of them.

01:17:11.000 The concern for a lot of people is that we're going to get to some situation where in order to become more competitive, people are going to do things that are very questionable or very unethical and ultimately very dangerous.

01:17:31.000 Yeah, we're already seeing it.

01:17:33.000 There's a guy named Josiah Zahner who's become kind of infamous for these do-it-yourself experiments on himself.

01:17:41.000 What is he doing?

01:17:42.000 It's like these quote-unquote DIY biology giving people the tools to try to do gene therapies on themselves.

01:17:52.000 He does it on himself?

01:17:53.000 He does it on himself.

01:17:54.000 What kind of therapies is he doing?

01:17:56.000 He injected himself at a science conference.

01:18:00.000 There's a whole series on HBO called Unnatural Selection, which is all about this kind of stuff.

01:18:09.000 Is that him?

01:18:10.000 He looks like the kind of guy that would inject himself.

01:18:13.000 I don't know who Rick is.

01:18:14.000 This guy is the first person to attempt editing his DNA with CRISPR. He's like the guy from The Fly.

01:18:22.000 Exactly.

01:18:23.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:18:24.000 Remember how that worked out?

01:18:25.000 I remember it.

01:18:26.000 I remember it.

01:18:27.000 I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they're like, I'm drunk.

01:18:33.000 I'm going to crisper myself. 1.00

01:18:35.000 This guy's an asshole. 1.00

01:18:36.000 Yeah, and I say, don't crisper yourself. 1.00

01:18:38.000 Fuck you too, bro. 1.00

01:18:39.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:18:40.000 No, no.

01:18:40.000 I mean, what we're talking about here, and coming back to earlier...

01:18:44.000 These billions of years, almost four billions of years of biology got us from little single cell organisms to this.

01:18:52.000 And so there's a lot of evolutionary lessons, trade-offs that are us.

01:18:58.000 I'm not saying we shouldn't change things.

01:19:00.000 We must change things.

01:19:01.000 We don't want to live like our ancestors did, dying of all these terrible preventable diseases.

01:19:05.000 But that doesn't mean that we should just do anything.

01:19:07.000 There shouldn't be regulation.

01:19:08.000 We need to find the right balance.

01:19:10.000 And if you wanted to look at biological life objectively, you would imagine that there's some sort of – there's these competing elements, right?

01:19:18.000 You have disease and you have immune systems that fight off the disease.

01:19:23.000 And through this sort of selection and natural selection and mutations, some people develop and – Continue to breed and advance their lines and other genetic lines die off because they weren't able to compete or to handle these environmental stressors or these viruses or these various things.

01:19:49.000 On one side you would say, I don't ever want to see someone suffer and die from a disease.

01:19:55.000 But on the other side you say, how many people do we need on this planet?

01:19:59.000 And that's where people get scared with eugenics. 0.92

01:20:01.000 When you say, you know, what we need is the strongest, most healthy, most disease-free version of humanity.

01:20:13.000 So does that mean people with diabetes should not be allowed to breed?

01:20:16.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:20:17.000 People get real weird when it comes to...

01:20:19.000 And they should.

01:20:19.000 Rightly so.

01:20:20.000 Rightly so.

01:20:21.000 So the whole history of eugenics is a terrible one. 0.92

01:20:24.000 I think everybody recognizes the horrors of Nazi eugenics, but the Nazis actually learned a lot from the eugenicists here in the United States, who in the early 20th century Right. 0.55

01:20:53.000 We won't always frame these questions as eugenics yes or no.

01:20:59.000 I lecture a lot about this stuff and about the future of biology and reproduction, and a lot of people say things like what you've just said, or even say things like, you're saying that in the future there'll be far less incidence of Down syndrome.

01:21:16.000 I have a kid who has Downs.

01:21:19.000 Are you saying that kid has A lesser justification to live than somebody else.

01:21:25.000 And what I always say is, I would never say that it's not what I believe.

01:21:29.000 But that's not how the question's going to be framed.

01:21:31.000 It's going to be framed, all right, you're having a, you decide to have a child.

01:21:35.000 You're having a child through IVF and embryo selection.

01:21:37.000 You have your, extract your eggs, fertilize them.

01:21:41.000 You have these 10 pre-implanted embryos, fertilized eggs.

01:21:45.000 And you know that one of them has Down syndrome.

01:21:50.000 Will you pick that embryo to implant in the mother?

01:21:53.000 Or will you pick an embryo that doesn't have Down syndrome to implant in the mother? 0.85

01:22:00.000 Well, some people have just a huge problem with the idea of picking embryos.

01:22:03.000 Yeah.

01:22:04.000 Right?

01:22:04.000 That we're playing God.

01:22:06.000 Yeah.

01:22:06.000 Maybe a better analysis or a better analogy, rather, would be if you gave a person an option and all you have to do is check a box and your child wouldn't have leukemia.

01:22:16.000 Yeah.

01:22:17.000 Wouldn't you do that?

01:22:18.000 Yeah.

01:22:18.000 You would, right?

01:22:19.000 Well, we can do that.

01:22:20.000 We can go in there and edit the genes and make sure that the child doesn't have this incurable disease.

01:22:26.000 Yeah, and so, you know, I always struggle when people use that term, playing God.

01:22:31.000 I mean, without sounding disrespectful, I feel like if God were playing God, we wouldn't have to do it.

01:22:38.000 How disrespectful to me.

01:22:40.000 But if you think that, all right, I believe in God, God is making decisions about my children, and God has for some reason decided that my kid is going to have a deadly genetic disorder, I'd say, well, I'm not down for that.

01:22:55.000 But that's why we can't pretend like we don't have these powers that we increasingly have.

01:23:02.000 And that's why I call these powers godlike powers in biology and AI and in many other areas.

01:23:08.000 It's...

01:23:09.000 It's inevitable that if we survive and we don't blow ourselves up or there's not some sort of a natural disaster, that human beings are going to get better at virtually everything that we do currently.

01:23:20.000 We're going to figure out more innovative ways to do things, we're going to invent better technology, and we're going to figure out ways...

01:23:29.000 I mean, we already have figured out, if you look at...

01:23:33.000 Yeah.

01:23:51.000 Yeah, no, for sure.

01:23:52.000 And the rate of that increase is accelerating.

01:23:56.000 When people talk about exponential change, that's what they mean.

01:23:59.000 But one of the ways of thinking about that is about 100 years ago, there were 2 billion people on Earth and roughly a 20% literacy rate.

01:24:12.000 That's about...

01:24:13.000 400 million people who are able to contribute to the world of knowledge.

01:24:17.000 Now we're approaching 7 billion people, 85% literacy rate.

01:24:23.000 We're all connected to each other through the internet systems.

01:24:27.000 Many of us are.

01:24:29.000 And so that means that if you're kind of solving any problem, one, you have access to the whole world of knowledge.

01:24:35.000 And two, once you solve that problem, nobody else on Earth has to solve it again.

01:24:42.000 And then it's not just these individual tools like the computers and AI and the new CRISPR and other biology tools.

01:24:52.000 There's a super convergence of all of these technologies.

01:24:56.000 So everything is getting faster and the rate of change is accelerating.

01:25:00.000 And that's why I totally agree with you.

01:25:02.000 It's like that we are our ability to kind of solve new problems, to create new realities that fit.

01:25:10.000 I feel like science fiction today, but will just become our normal tomorrow.

01:25:14.000 I mean, that's what's happening now, is that our brains came of age on the African savannas. 0.85

01:25:19.000 And so our brains aren't really designed to deal with this incredible rate of change that we're experiencing.

01:25:25.000 Do you ever stop and think, do you ever just sit alone by yourself and wonder where this is going to lead?

01:25:33.000 Yeah.

01:25:35.000 There's a video that I put on my Instagram yesterday that my friend Eddie sent to me.

01:25:39.000 It's Walter Cronkite from the 1950s.

01:25:43.000 And he's talking about the future.

01:25:44.000 And it's amazing.

01:25:46.000 It's really interesting.

01:25:47.000 Because it's a short video.

01:25:49.000 We can play it real quick.

01:25:49.000 I think?

01:26:08.000 In the 1950s, see if we can pull it up, because it's pretty wild.

01:26:13.000 But I want to apply the same sort of thinking.

01:26:17.000 Yeah, I will make a plug while we're pulling it up.

01:26:20.000 I think Walter Cronkite is born in my hometown, my original hometown of Kansas City.

01:26:25.000 All right, shout out to Kansas City.

01:26:35.000 By the year 2000, the United States will have a 30-hour work week and month-long vacations as the rule.

01:26:44.000 A lot of this new free time will be spent at home.

01:26:48.000 And this console controls a full array of equipment to inform, instruct, and entertain the family of the future.

01:26:57.000 We could watch a football game.

01:27:02.000 Or a movie shown in full color on our big 3D television screen.

01:27:08.000 This console provides a summary of news relayed by satellite from all over the world.

01:27:14.000 I might check the latest weather.

01:27:17.000 A telephone is this instrument here.

01:27:21.000 If I want to see the people I'm talking with, I just turn the button and There they are.

01:27:27.000 With equipment like this in the home of the future, we may not have to go to work.

01:27:31.000 The work would come to us.

01:27:33.000 One government report.

01:27:34.000 It's interesting.

01:27:35.000 He's kind of right.

01:27:36.000 The pandemic kind of made the work come to us.

01:27:39.000 Yeah.

01:27:39.000 That is one thing that did happen, which was, I think...

01:27:42.000 One of the very few positive silver linings of this pandemic is a lot of people realize, like, hey, I don't have to go to an office to work.

01:27:50.000 So all this hour-plus time commuting, we can eliminate all that.

01:27:55.000 I can be more efficient.

01:27:56.000 I can be more productive just working from home, Zoom calls.

01:28:00.000 I have a friend who lives out here who's a writer on a Hollywood show, but he lives in Austin.

01:28:05.000 The writer's meeting is through Zoom.

01:28:09.000 I totally agree.

01:28:11.000 And it's not just this.

01:28:12.000 The way I've described this from the beginning, it's the future is crashing into the present.

01:28:19.000 There were these trends that would have played out over 10, 20, however many years.

01:28:24.000 It suddenly crashed in, and it's in weeks and months.

01:28:27.000 And it's not just virtualization.

01:28:29.000 And I think it's here to stay.

01:28:31.000 What I said at the start is this isn't a snow day.

01:28:34.000 Whatever happens with the vaccines, it's not like we just go back to our old lives.

01:28:39.000 Our lives are going to be a hybrid of the kind of physical and virtual lives.

01:28:43.000 But also in the realm that we were discussing with the biotech revolution.

01:28:49.000 I mean, this mRNA platform isn't just about vaccines.

01:28:53.000 It's going to be a whole new delivery mechanism for all kinds of health interventions.

01:28:58.000 And the genetics revolution isn't just about human health care.

01:29:02.000 It's going to fundamentally transform agriculture and how we think about materials.

01:29:08.000 I know you've talked about This precision fermentation, where it's basically the way that we brew beer, we're going to be brewing all sorts of things, this cellular meat, plastics, energy.

01:29:21.000 And so it's really, I think we're going to look back at this moment as a quantum leap.

01:29:26.000 And some of those changes we'll think as negative, but some of them will actually, I think, end up feeling pretty positive.

01:29:34.000 Well, that's oftentimes what happens in history, right?

01:29:37.000 There's an event, and through that event, a lot of innovation and a lot of change springs out of it as an adjustment or as a reaction.

01:29:46.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:29:46.000 Like World War II, I mean, it was a terrible experience, but...

01:29:50.000 The technology of rockets and electronics and space travel were just massively pushed forward.

01:29:57.000 I was actually telling somebody the other day when their microwave broke, like, do you know that the microwave comes out of this crash MIT effort to build the radar in the Second World War and the microwave technology was just a side effect?

01:30:14.000 The exact what World War II was to electronics and space travel, I think that this pandemic will be to the genetics and biotech revolutions.

01:30:22.000 When we were talking before, I showed you the Walter Cronkite clip.

01:30:27.000 Do you sit alone sometime and think about all this genetic engineering and the possibility of manipulating human beings and wonder what the human of three, four, five hundred years from now is going to be like?

01:30:42.000 Yeah, all the time.

01:30:43.000 I mean, I'm also a sci-fi writer, so I spend a lot of my time kind of imagining.

01:30:48.000 And one of the things, it's just what you said before about Australopithecus.

01:30:51.000 I mean, it's 500 years, given what I said about exponential change, particularly if we don't blow ourselves up.

01:30:58.000 That's a long, long time from now.

01:31:01.000 And I think we're going to think very differently about how all kinds of biological systems work, about what makes a human, about how we interact with the environment.

01:31:12.000 Certainly, we aren't all going to be living on the surface of this planet 500 years from now.

01:31:17.000 You think 500 years from now, we'll be traveling to other planets?

01:31:20.000 Oh, for sure.

01:31:21.000 I mean, or traveling to other planets, for sure.

01:31:24.000 Living in space, I mean, my guess is we'll have space colonies where people live their whole lives there.

01:31:28.000 And those people will need to be a little bit biologically different from us because we are designed for the surface of this planet.

01:31:38.000 That's why when you do scuba diving, you need equipment.

01:31:41.000 And when you go in, when you fly, you need to be inside of a plane or have equipment.

01:31:46.000 There's actually plans for a space hotel that's going to launch, they think, around 2027, which is probably way off. 0.99

01:31:55.000 They always say shit like that. 0.99

01:31:56.000 Get funding. 0.99

01:31:57.000 Well, we already have a space hotel with the International Space Station.

01:32:00.000 So it's not like we need that much.

01:32:02.000 We have rockets.

01:32:03.000 We have the International Space Station.

01:32:05.000 So all you have to do is put in a Gemini sauna and you're there.

01:32:09.000 Well, there's a big difference between the type of people that are allowed to go to the International Space Station.

01:32:14.000 They have a lot of training and preparation.

01:32:17.000 They're talking about consumers.

01:32:19.000 They're talking about just average person like me and Jamie flying to the space hotel.

01:32:24.000 They have an image of this thing.

01:32:27.000 I was just trying to get to the website.

01:32:29.000 Yeah, but we already have them.

01:32:30.000 Look at that.

01:32:30.000 But how about that thing?

01:32:32.000 The space carousel.

01:32:33.000 You know, fly up there and dock.

01:32:35.000 Yeah.

01:32:36.000 And we already have, and I don't want to call them regular people, but like Anushka, whatever her last name is, the first space tourist.

01:32:44.000 I mean, she didn't know anything about space.

01:32:46.000 She just could afford to buy the ticket.

01:32:49.000 So she was the first space tourist?

01:32:51.000 Yeah.

01:32:51.000 How much did that cost?

01:32:52.000 It's like $10 million to the Russians.

01:32:55.000 That seems a little pricey.

01:32:56.000 Where'd you get that cash?

01:32:58.000 Yeah, I don't know.

01:32:58.000 But you get lots of frequent flyer miles.

01:33:01.000 Yeah, I guess.

01:33:03.000 But this space hotel thing, if you see it, Jamie, it looks like what happens is some sort of shuttle-looking thing docks at the end of each one of those little ports, and you let people out.

01:33:17.000 Look at this.

01:33:17.000 Look how that works.

01:33:18.000 Yeah, I mean, to tell you, that doesn't look that crazy. 0.99

01:33:22.000 That's crazy as fuck, Jamie Metzl. 0.99

01:33:24.000 How dare you? 1.00

01:33:25.000 I mean, sometimes you see a thing where you think, like, how are they going to do that?

01:33:30.000 I mean, looking at that, there's no technology there that you think, well, that whole technology needs to be invented in order to make this vision real.

01:33:40.000 Like, we have pretty much every one of those technologies.

01:33:43.000 I wonder why it's spinning.

01:33:44.000 I mean, they can't recreate artificial gravity by spinning like that.

01:33:48.000 I don't know, but my guess is it has something, my guess, and I'm not a physicist, but something to do with gravity and holding a position in space, but I really just don't know.

01:33:59.000 This is freaking me out just looking at it.

01:34:01.000 They got a lot of these little docking ports.

01:34:03.000 Yeah, well, there's going to be a lot of people up there.

01:34:05.000 They're going to make that cheddar.

01:34:06.000 If you're going to put a big giant hotel in space, you want to stay in there?

01:34:09.000 What's that?

01:34:10.000 You just got to stay in that little room?

01:34:11.000 Yeah, stay in your room, bro.

01:34:13.000 You don't get to walk around?

01:34:13.000 No, you get to walk around.

01:34:14.000 Where are you going to go?

01:34:15.000 You're like a hamster as that thing turns around. 0.94

01:34:18.000 Well, it looks pretty goddamn big, so it looks like you'd be in a giant building. 0.98

01:34:23.000 So it would be like if we were staying at the Encore at the Wynn or something like that. 0.81

01:34:29.000 Just picturing in my head the like...

01:34:30.000 But the thing is, with this, like I was saying before, I think that technology is fully realizable.

01:34:35.000 But what we learned from the Kelly brothers—I don't know if you've had one or both of them on the show—is that there are biological changes that happen to humans when we're in space for a long time.

01:34:47.000 And so let's just say that future generations are going to live their entire lives in that space.

01:34:53.000 So we may need to think about, well, what are some biological differences that could be engineered to make that possible?

01:34:58.000 There's a guy named Chris Mason at Cornell.

01:35:01.000 Who's studying this?

01:35:02.000 You've had my friend, our mutual friend David Sinclair on the show, who's thinking about what are the kind of interventions that could be made to reduce the threat of radiation.

01:35:16.000 Building this infrastructure is possible.

01:35:18.000 Changing who we are to make living there for our full lives possible, I think that's more advanced.

01:35:26.000 And the same thing with, I know you recently had Elon Musk on again, and I think that's the same thing with Mars.

01:35:32.000 Our human bodies aren't built for Mars.

01:35:35.000 Maybe we can be there for a while.

01:35:36.000 If we want to stay, we may need to think differently about how we're constructed.

01:35:39.000 Well, that's where it gets spooky, because what if you make a commitment to adapt your body to the environment of Mars, but then you can't go back to Earth and survive, because the gravity is stronger and the radiation...

01:35:50.000 Yeah, and it may be, and if I had to guess, it will be that some humans live their entire lives in space.

01:35:59.000 That they will have a different, slightly at first, biology than us.

01:36:03.000 And that if there are generations of people over many, many millennia who are living in space, eventually our biology will become more different.

01:36:13.000 That's the real problem, because then we'll go to war with them. 0.89

01:36:16.000 Because they're not even us anymore.

01:36:18.000 If we behave, if all we have that's guiding us is kind of our brains like when we were the Australia Epithecus, it may be the case. 0.52

01:36:27.000 But we also have these millennia to continue to develop ethical systems because culture is part of our evolutionary inheritance as much or even more.

01:36:37.000 Than our genetics.

01:36:39.000 So we have these technologies, and the technologies are advancing exponentially.

01:36:43.000 And the challenge for us is, can we grow and develop our ethical systems so we can manage these technologies wisely?

01:36:49.000 Right.

01:36:50.000 So we have to figure out a way to evolve past biological competitiveness, like the primate DNA that we have that wants to dominate and control things and that makes someone want to be the governor of New York.

01:37:04.000 I think we need to balance it out.

01:37:08.000 When you say, why is it that humans are always pushing?

01:37:11.000 Why are we always wanting to climb mountains or solve problems?

01:37:14.000 There's a little bit of this competitiveness that we have with ourselves and with each other.

01:37:21.000 And that's healthy.

01:37:22.000 But unbridled, it has the potential to be not healthy.

01:37:27.000 But isn't there other motivations outside of competitiveness?

01:37:30.000 Just curiosity and just the need to challenge oneself?

01:37:34.000 It doesn't necessarily have to be competitive in terms of competing with other people.

01:37:38.000 Be competitive in terms of working together to try to achieve a goal that's difficult to get to.

01:37:45.000 Humans like puzzles.

01:37:46.000 We like problems.

01:37:48.000 We like to solve things.

01:37:49.000 I think it's part of what made us who we are today.

01:37:52.000 And I think there's these ancient reward systems that are sort of ingrained in our biology that make it very satisfying.

01:38:01.000 I mean, that's why people like Rubik's Cubes, right?

01:38:03.000 I totally agree.

01:38:04.000 But I also think that we're also—I'm just looking down at this little—I don't know if it's a chimpanzee skull or whatever it is.

01:38:11.000 Isn't that cool?

01:38:11.000 I love it.

01:38:12.000 This is made with Zildjian symbols. 0.98

01:38:14.000 Wow, I love it.

01:38:15.000 Yeah, so it's got the Zildjian thing in the back of it. 1.00

01:38:17.000 Wow, I love it.

01:38:18.000 Anyway, so chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives, and what is it when you see chimpanzees in a community?

01:38:30.000 I mean, part of it is curiosity, and part of it is this kind of jostling.

01:38:34.000 And I think that both of them are part of the story.

01:38:37.000 So if we just had jostling without the essential...

01:38:41.000 The impulse of curiosity and learning that you've mentioned, I think that would be bad.

01:38:48.000 If we just had that curiosity and there wasn't that competitive drive that made us want to be the fastest runner in the world or win the Nobel Prize, would that take away some of our edge?

01:38:59.000 I don't know, but my hunch is maybe.

01:39:02.000 Maybe.

01:39:02.000 But there's some people that aren't competitive in terms of like they don't enjoy competition, but they do enjoy puzzles and they do enjoy innovation.

01:39:09.000 They do enjoy personal challenges to try to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal.

01:39:15.000 Yeah.

01:39:16.000 And then that comes back to your diversity point is that we have all these different kinds of people and we need them.

01:39:20.000 If we were only people who were trying to be the alpha chimpanzee, I think our societies would fall apart.

01:39:28.000 And so I think that we need those kinds of people.

01:39:32.000 I want to say this is my biggest fear, but one of the things that I think about in terms of humans is that one day we're going to realize that one of the things that holds us back is these animal drives to reproduce.

01:39:46.000 And that there is this sort of our built-in sexual selection and then emotions and ego and all these different things that have served us well.

01:39:58.000 Over the millennia to get to 2021 that ultimately we're going to realize like these are a bottleneck to progress.

01:40:04.000 And then we're going to turn ourselves into one of these little guys.

01:40:09.000 Well, at least these guys...

01:40:12.000 This is from Travis Walton.

01:40:15.000 Do you know who he is?

01:40:16.000 He's like one of the most famous UFO abduction cases.

01:40:21.000 Well, the good news is when everybody looks like that, nobody has hair.

01:40:25.000 And so it's like we're all on the equal footing.

01:40:27.000 We all have giant heads, too, and no one has any advantages physically because they're all basically the same thing.

01:40:34.000 When you look at primates, if you look at a chimp and their small skull and small brains versus our large skull and large brains, and you go extrapolate, you look at the future and you look at like, well, where's this trend?

01:40:46.000 Where's it going?

01:40:47.000 It seems like the heads are getting bigger.

01:40:49.000 It seems like the bodies are getting smaller and more frail.

01:40:52.000 You know, we're far less strength.

01:40:53.000 We have far less strength pound for pound than chimpanzees do.

01:40:56.000 A grown chimp is like a 400-pound man. 1.00

01:41:00.000 And they're 150 pounds.

01:41:02.000 And as we continue to quote-unquote evolve or change, I wonder if that's what...

01:41:09.000 When we see this...

01:41:11.000 Human beings have this iconic image of an alien, right?

01:41:15.000 Yeah.

01:41:17.000 I don't know why they have that image.

01:41:19.000 I don't know what that is, but all these people that supposedly experienced alien abductions or sightings, it's always the same thing, for the most part.

01:41:29.000 There's some variation, but there's a lot of this one thing, which is a small body with a large head.

01:41:35.000 And you look at what humans are now versus what ancient primates used to be, If you keep going, that's what happens.

01:41:45.000 Well, it could.

01:41:48.000 Again, I write science fiction, so I try to think a lot about these kinds of things, and that's certainly one possibility.

01:41:55.000 Or you could say, well, maybe we're going to supplement our brain function through technology.

01:42:02.000 And so I know you talked with Elon Musk about this, of whether there's some kind of brain-machine interface so that not all of the activity happens in your brain.

01:42:13.000 Certainly, that's one possibility.

01:42:15.000 Maybe the sexual competition and sexual reproduction will be a driver, and maybe it won't.

01:42:22.000 We have lots of experience in the past from societies that have tried to restructure the family, restructure the way men and women interact. 0.64

01:42:31.000 In most cases, it hasn't gone well.

01:42:34.000 But one of the key points, and I think why this moment in history is so interesting and it's so pregnant, is that for our entire history as a species and in our earlier incarnations,

01:42:49.000 about 3.8 billion years, We've evolved through the Darwinian principles of random mutation and natural selection.

01:42:57.000 And so all of these decisions weren't decisions.

01:43:00.000 They just kind of happened, and you're born with a certain set of attributes.

01:43:04.000 Now we have the ability to actually make decisions about our evolution that could push us and will push us in one direction or another.

01:43:13.000 And then the big question is, do we have the wisdom to make those kinds of decisions wisely?

01:43:20.000 What do you think?

01:43:21.000 You're a guy who writes science fiction.

01:43:22.000 I don't think we have the pure wisdom, but I think that we have pieces of it.

01:43:30.000 I mean, we have ethical traditions that have evolved over many thousands of years, and they're applicable.

01:43:37.000 I mean, you talked about The Catholic Church and the vaccines.

01:43:59.000 A report from me, which I wrote for them, it's also on my jamiemetzel.com website, about these kinds of tradeoffs.

01:44:08.000 And what I said is, we have these ancient traditions.

01:44:11.000 That doesn't mean that just applying one-to-one, which is why I'm a critic of...

01:44:17.000 We're good to go.

01:44:35.000 We won't do it perfectly.

01:44:36.000 We're going to make big mistakes.

01:44:38.000 I mean, certainly with human genetic engineering, the first three CRISPR babies was a massive, terrible mistake.

01:44:45.000 But there is a process of learning and growing.

01:44:48.000 And so I think we'll always be one step behind.

01:44:51.000 But I do have hope.

01:44:56.000 Whatever happens, humans so far have just survived.

01:45:00.000 I mean, 75,000 years ago, there were maybe 1,000 humans left just in the southern tip of Africa.

01:45:07.000 But it was terrible, and yet we kind of made it back.

01:45:09.000 That's from a supervolcano, right?

01:45:10.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:45:11.000 And then we made it back.

01:45:13.000 I think that our species will survive in one form or another.

01:45:17.000 Maybe it'll be on those space stations like that and the Earth won't exist.

01:45:22.000 Eventually, that's going to happen.

01:45:24.000 But I think it's a race between exponentially evolving technology and our ability to develop ethical and governance systems.

01:45:35.000 When you say that the three CRISPR babies were kind of a disaster, how was it a disaster?

01:45:41.000 So here's the ideal scenario of how I would have liked to see, because I'm not opposed to using genome editing tools on pre-implanted human embryos in principle.

01:45:56.000 It's just it needs to be done safely addressing a very real need That can't be addressed in any other way.

01:46:06.000 And so the reason was, one, it wasn't transparent.

01:46:09.000 Two, it wasn't trying to address a need.

01:46:13.000 I mean, these were otherwise perfectly healthy babies.

01:46:17.000 To be babies.

01:46:19.000 And the engineering was to try to confer on them an increased resistance to something that they may or may not be exposed to in the future HIV. How did they do that?

01:46:39.000 We're good to go.

01:46:51.000 But again, that's very different from saying, all right, this is a pre-implanted embryo that is carrying a single mutation that is almost certain to cause a deadly, untreatable genetic disorder.

01:47:07.000 And so if these parents want to have their own biological child and their genetics dictate that either all of the embryos have that same mutation or they just have one embryo that has it, This one intervention will change a child's trajectory from dying young of a terrible disorder to living a full life.

01:47:29.000 If that had been the first story Then I think it would have said, all right, how can we build on that?

01:47:36.000 It was gonzo science, unregulated, sloppy science, non-transparent, and not addressing a need that couldn't be addressed in some other way, like condoms.

01:47:48.000 Well, not just condoms, just medical treatments too, right?

01:47:51.000 The death rate for people who have HIV is radically dropped.

01:47:55.000 Yeah, but these kids wouldn't have had HIV. They just had a father who had it.

01:47:59.000 Oh, okay.

01:48:00.000 Now, when you say transparency, do you mean like with the entire scientific community to let them know what they're doing and how they're doing it?

01:48:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:48:10.000 So our World Health Organization Advisory Committee, one of the things that we're doing is calling for a registry.

01:48:19.000 I mean, other than a very small number of people, including some scientists at Stanford and elsewhere, but nobody knew that this was even happening.

01:48:30.000 So it was in 2008, in November, I remember this really well, All of a sudden, this story just emerged out of nowhere, and most everyone had no idea.

01:48:41.000 And if you had asked me, I was doing a bunch of interviews then, and someone said, well, when will the world's first genome-edited babies be born?

01:48:49.000 I would have said in 2018, I'd say maybe about Ten years from now, not because it wasn't possible, because scientists were already doing it in animals, but to go from something that works in animals to humans, especially embryos that are being brought to term,

01:49:07.000 you need to be really careful, because otherwise it's like Nuremberg-style human experimentation, which is what I think this was.

01:49:14.000 And, you know, it's funny, 2008 seems like it's recently.

01:49:19.000 Oh, 2018. I'm sorry, it was 2018. It was just three years ago.

01:49:22.000 Yeah.

01:49:22.000 Sorry if I misspoke.

01:49:23.000 That's okay.

01:49:24.000 So, even so, 2018, you've got to think they're still doing that.

01:49:32.000 So that we don't know.

01:49:33.000 So in our committee, our WHO committee, we were already meeting, and then there was a report that this scientist, Denis Reprikov in Russia, was planning on doing it.

01:49:45.000 And so we issued a statement, and Dr. Tedros, I don't know, the WHO director general, he issued a statement, and then apparently they backed off.

01:49:56.000 But it could be.

01:49:57.000 It could be done in China.

01:49:58.000 It could be done in Russia.

01:50:00.000 It could be done somewhere else.

01:50:02.000 And again, that's why there are a lot of things that could be done, like even now using synthetic biology to create a pathogen more deadly than SARS-CoV-2.

01:50:12.000 It's possible, but that's why we kind of want to try to create cultures and regulations to decrease the likelihood.

01:50:19.000 But you're absolutely right.

01:50:19.000 For all we know, there are more than three CRISPR babies in this world.

01:50:23.000 They have to be.

01:50:25.000 You're talking about a culture that's willing to take the Uyghur Muslims and ship them off into these concentration camps. 1.00

01:50:31.000 You're talking about a country that gets rid of journalists, that criticize the government.

01:50:38.000 When they buried that train that crashed with people on board, right?

01:50:43.000 I don't think there were any living people in the train.

01:50:45.000 Dead people, though.

01:50:46.000 They just buried them in the train.

01:50:47.000 That I don't know, but they certainly buried the train.

01:50:49.000 Well, imagine...

01:50:51.000 Yeah.

01:50:51.000 That these people are going to go, well, editing genes to make superior people is just taking it a little too far.

01:50:58.000 Well, what I can say is that when the news came out in November 2018 about these first CRISPR babies, in the first hours, there was a lot of crowing in the Chinese media, including state media, saying this is showing that China is leading the world. 0.86

01:51:16.000 And then there was a massive international backlash, and then China flipped because they realized that if they became a pariah state, especially within the application of this kind of revolutionary science, they would lose more than they would gain.

01:51:32.000 How so?

01:51:34.000 I think that China really sees itself as being the world leader.

01:51:41.000 For them, with this science, they don't want to be seen as some kind of rogue bad actor.

01:51:45.000 They want to be seen as the leading cutting edge science power, like the United States has been since the Second World War.

01:51:55.000 Then they actually created a pretty strong law.

01:52:00.000 They actually imprisoned Ho Jong Kui by retroactively applying a law that didn't really exist.

01:52:09.000 They punished him by putting him in jail for doing the thing that they said they were leading the way in.

01:52:15.000 100%.

01:52:15.000 So not only that, they had a thing where they were funding, and still are, Funding scientists, especially scientists who were trained outside of China, to come back.

01:52:27.000 They're giving them grants to do revolutionary science in all kinds of areas.

01:52:34.000 There's a very strong cultural pressure, as I was mentioning before, to really push those limits.

01:52:40.000 That brings us back To our original conversation about the origins of COVID, because let's just say that the lab leak hypothesis is right.

01:52:51.000 And then let's say, well, how is the lab leak story connected to the CRISPR baby story?

01:52:59.000 And you could say, all right, well, so you have this kind of young power.

01:53:04.000 China is an ancient civilization, but a young power, and they basically destroyed their whole base in the Cultural Revolution. 0.99

01:53:12.000 They now have these incredibly powerful tools, and they have a lot of nationalists and other pressures to drive science and scientists to cut corners and leap to the head of the line, but they don't have the governance systems.

01:53:29.000 They don't have the culture of care.

01:53:31.000 So it could easily be the case that these scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology Maybe in the lab of the famous Batwoman, Dr. Xi, but maybe in Chinese military that was doing or commissioning work in the same facility.

01:53:48.000 And we don't even know the full extent.

01:53:50.000 But I think it's extremely likely, even whatever the origins of the pandemic, that there was all kinds of really aggressive science that's happening there.

01:54:00.000 And I think that's happening across the board in AI and In genomics, in many, many different areas.

01:54:07.000 Yeah, that's where it gets spooky, right?

01:54:10.000 Yeah.

01:54:10.000 And this doctor, is he still in jail now?

01:54:12.000 Yes, Ho Chiang Kui, yes.

01:54:16.000 You got to think they gave him authorization to do that.

01:54:18.000 Oh, no, for sure.

01:54:20.000 I mean, not for sure.

01:54:21.000 It seems extremely likely to me that somebody knew that he was doing it.

01:54:28.000 I mean, this is China.

01:54:30.000 The government, as we were talking about earlier, plays a really central role in everything.

01:54:35.000 So somebody knew about it.

01:54:38.000 And I think they thought, just as he, in his application...

01:54:41.000 He thought that he was going to win the Nobel Prize and his heroes were the British and American scientists who developed IVF, Steptoe and Roberts, and he was going to be like them and bring glory to China.

01:54:57.000 So I think that was something that was supported.

01:55:00.000 Among the small number of people who knew about it and then it went wrong and then I think China realized they had a PR problem and they had a legal problem so they wrote a stronger law and then they imprisoned this guy to make a point.

01:55:13.000 When you say they had a legal problem, who's the legal problem with?

01:55:17.000 Well, there wasn't sufficient regulation about whether what He Jiankui did was okay or not okay.

01:55:26.000 And so that was what created the space for him to do this.

01:55:32.000 And then I think they realized that this was really revolutionary science and that the state wanted to have more control.

01:55:40.000 That doesn't mean that the state is against, in principle, human genome editing.

01:55:45.000 I don't think ultimately they will be.

01:55:48.000 But it does mean that they wanted to have control over what did and didn't happen, which I think they've probably reasserted.

01:55:57.000 Wouldn't you think that would be really stifling to the scientific community in China if Hu Zhongkui is imprisoned for something that they most likely asked him to do?

01:56:10.000 It's really an interesting thing because China, there are two different messages.

01:56:14.000 One message is, to scientists and to entrepreneurs, Race forward as fast as you can.

01:56:21.000 The world is a highly competitive place.

01:56:24.000 China, the government, has set a goal of being the world's leading power by 2049. Science and technology are a big piece of how we're going to get there.

01:56:35.000 Race forward.

01:56:40.000 That if you do something that pisses us off, you're going to be punished.

01:56:45.000 And we're not going to tell you exactly what that is.

01:56:50.000 So you may think that you're the richest man in China.

01:56:53.000 You may think that you're Jack Ma.

01:56:55.000 But if we decide that we don't like something you're doing, you're going to disappear for a while, and then you're going to come back, and you're going to have to apologize.

01:57:04.000 You may think that you're the most famous actress in China.

01:57:08.000 But you're just going to disappear one day and then months later re-emerge and apologize and basically assert, oh, the government is in control of everything.

01:57:20.000 Is that what happened with an actress as well? 0.99

01:57:23.000 Yes.

01:57:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:57:23.000 The most famous actress in China.

01:57:27.000 I don't know who the equivalent here, but just imagine some beautiful- Jennifer Aniston type person. 1.00

01:57:32.000 Jennifer Aniston.

01:57:33.000 So imagine Jennifer Aniston. 1.00

01:57:36.000 All of a sudden, vanishes.

01:57:39.000 Nobody knows where she is.

01:57:41.000 The media isn't allowed to say what's happening with Jennifer Aniston because people have a pretty good sense.

01:57:48.000 And then three months later, Jennifer Aniston reemerges and says, I've realized I was wrong in some little minor infraction, and I pledge my support to the Chinese government,

01:58:03.000 essentially.

01:58:04.000 And so that's the system.

01:58:06.000 And it's confusing for people because when I went to North Korea, it's like this is an authoritarian system.

01:58:13.000 It's a totalitarian system.

01:58:14.000 Everywhere you look, everyone's got the pin.

01:58:17.000 It's clear.

01:58:19.000 China, it's not like the Soviet Union.

01:58:22.000 This is like a really scientifically advanced society.

01:58:25.000 It's a sophisticated place.

01:58:28.000 But there's this level of control that people have really internalized.

01:58:33.000 I talked earlier about the Chinese government setting and narrative.

01:58:35.000 When you go to Tiananmen Square, what do you see?

01:58:39.000 You see this big portrait of Mao.

01:58:41.000 If you didn't know anything about Chinese history, it's, oh, isn't that great?

01:58:44.000 Mao, it's like their George Washington. 1.00

01:58:47.000 But if you know anything about Chinese history, you know that through the purges after the Civil War and the Great Leap Forward and then the Cultural Revolution, Mao is responsible for the deaths of about 47 million Chinese people.

01:59:00.000 That's more than Hitler and Stalin's And Stalin combined. 0.65

01:59:05.000 And yet the story has been recast as this is the father of the nation.

01:59:11.000 And the reason is because the Communist Party is still in charge.

01:59:15.000 And so if you get rid of Mao, what's the origin story of the communists?

01:59:20.000 But they've recast that whole story.

01:59:24.000 And so when you're in China, people do have private thoughts, but there's a narrative.

01:59:30.000 If you're on the side of the dominant narrative, You're in good shape.

01:59:35.000 If you're on the other side, you're in trouble.

01:59:37.000 And I'll just say personally, I have an acquaintance of mine who I knew very years.

01:59:42.000 He was kind of like the Lou Dobbs of China.

01:59:46.000 He had a CCTV, China Central Television, nightly business show.

01:59:52.000 And he was on.

01:59:53.000 Everybody in China knew this guy.

01:59:55.000 Every average nightly broadcast, let's say you have kind of the entire equivalent of the entire population of the United States watching this guy every night.

02:00:04.000 Suddenly disappears.

02:00:06.000 And the reason is he was said to have a connection to a former security chief who got on the wrong side of Xi.

02:00:16.000 And so this acquaintance of mine hasn't been seen in years.

02:00:20.000 It just vanishes.

02:00:21.000 And I think that's It's complicated because you look at the pictures of Shanghai, you see Beijing, and you see a really sophisticated place, and it is.

02:00:31.000 But if you're on the wrong side of the Chinese government, you're in trouble.

02:00:34.000 And that's why, as I said before, I am extremely confident there are many people in China right now who have highly relevant information about the origins of the pandemic, and they don't dare speak up. 0.54

02:00:49.000 That's terrifying.

02:00:50.000 It's terrifying that that can coexist with what we deal with today in America, which is, you know, we complain about small infringements upon our freedoms.

02:00:59.000 And we think that, you know, our rights are being stripped away, which, you know, there's arguments that we are and that we have had some, particularly during the pandemic when governors have grasped massive amounts of power, often without legislative control.

02:01:16.000 But they...

02:01:18.000 What we're doing is nothing in comparison to what's happening in China.

02:01:21.000 Yeah, that's for sure.

02:01:22.000 And it also makes us realize that we have to fight for what we have.

02:01:26.000 I mean, the freedoms that we have, they don't just exist.

02:01:30.000 Our parents and grandparents and ancestors fought for them.

02:01:35.000 And we have to fight for them.

02:01:37.000 It comes back to your earlier point about divisions.

02:01:39.000 And we need to fight for them with a vision of the whole.

02:01:43.000 And the vision of the whole that includes everybody, including the people with whom we may not agree.

02:01:47.000 That's why the freedom of information and the freedom of expression are so important.

02:01:52.000 And free speech, it's so important.

02:01:54.000 It's not just speech that you agree with.

02:01:56.000 Because as soon as you decide that someone can dictate what someone can and can't say, just because you think it's right, you open up the door to censorship.

02:02:06.000 And censorship leads to what you're seeing right now in China.

02:02:09.000 Yeah, I completely agree.

02:02:10.000 It's just hard for people to extrapolate.

02:02:13.000 I think that's exactly right.

02:02:14.000 And though there's another thing of how do we find a common sense of reality and truth?

02:02:22.000 Because it used to be—and you showed Walter Cronkite.

02:02:25.000 It used to be everybody in the United States, you watch Walter Cronkite or one of those other guys, and you have a story of the world.

02:02:32.000 Now it's not just that we live in different stories.

02:02:35.000 We live in a world with entirely different— Factual foundations.

02:02:40.000 I don't know the answer to this question.

02:02:42.000 How do you avoid the kind of total relativism that they have in China where the government can just create a whole fake reality and then more than a billion people are forced to live in that reality?

02:02:58.000 So how do you avoid that?

02:03:00.000 How do you have the kind of openness, but how can you have a center of gravity so that there can be a space where people can find common ground?

02:03:07.000 I think we have to really clearly establish the narrative of how dangerous tribalism is and how human beings are inherently tribal because this is how we evolved.

02:03:16.000 We evolved to find a tight-knit group of people that you can trust, and you stick with them in these small villages, and you fight against intruders.

02:03:23.000 And this tribalism now is extended to 350 million people, or whatever we have here.

02:03:27.000 And it's terrible.

02:03:28.000 It's terrible.

02:03:29.000 We're supposed to be a community.

02:03:31.000 And that's the best version of what the United States is, is a large continental community.

02:03:36.000 And that's what it should be.

02:03:37.000 That's what it really should be.

02:03:39.000 It's possible to do that.

02:03:41.000 We just have to establish in young people This narrative.

02:03:44.000 And we have to avoid the short-term success of silencing the opposition and silencing the people that you don't agree with.

02:03:51.000 There's a short-term success in that that leads to long-term imprisonment of our values.

02:03:57.000 It's a terrible idea.

02:03:58.000 Yeah, I completely agree.

02:03:59.000 And that's what America is.

02:04:02.000 I mean, it's all these different people who have...

02:04:05.000 I mean, it's the genius of America.

02:04:08.000 I think our ancestors come from Europe, Where it was like, yeah, we're on this hill.

02:04:13.000 We hate those guys on that hill.

02:04:14.000 And this was this place where, you know, I live in New York.

02:04:18.000 You show up in New York for five days and you're a New Yorker.

02:04:21.000 No one says, oh, where are you from?

02:04:23.000 It's just like, you're what New Yorkers look like. 1.00

02:04:25.000 And it's totally normal and healthy that we'll have our differences.

02:04:31.000 But if we don't have a space where we can interact with each other and share ideas and be convinced to do something even just a little bit differently, Then I think you're absolutely right.

02:04:43.000 This tribalism is going to harm us, and winning for your tribe, in most cases, is losing for yourself and for your community.

02:04:53.000 Yeah, I think we have to reject leaders who enforce tribalism, and I think the real hope of that is young people.

02:05:01.000 Young people recognize in this message that censorship is inherently dangerous, and that there's so much reward People are so often rewarded for tribalism online.

02:05:14.000 They're rewarded by the likes of the people that agree with you.

02:05:18.000 I think people need to reject that.

02:05:20.000 They need to reject that kind of communication, that polarizing communication.

02:05:23.000 They need to recognize that there's a lot of people that are legitimately mentally ill because of social media. 0.97

02:05:30.000 Legitimately mentally ill.

02:05:31.000 It's a bad way to communicate.

02:05:33.000 And people are addicted to it and it becomes impulsive.

02:05:39.000 It becomes this thing that they search and check all day long to see how their messages are being responded to and what arguments they're in with people.

02:05:50.000 Is there division in their clan or is everybody united in this front?

02:05:54.000 Even if the front is illogical and foolish as long as it's tribal and there's reinforcement from the other people in the tribe. 0.98

02:06:00.000 Like, whatever it is. 0.88

02:06:02.000 Whether it's the election was stolen or whether it's the virus came from a bat.

02:06:06.000 These narratives that people are so assured of that don't make any sense.

02:06:14.000 You should be able to talk about stuff.

02:06:17.000 And we should reward this kind of free discourse where people are being polite and people are being inquisitive and people are genuinely trying to find out what the actual facts are.

02:06:30.000 Without any bias and without any need to flavor things to fit the narrative that their tribe holds onto. 0.99

02:06:38.000 We've got to abandon all that shit because that's the only way we're going to get past this weird state we're in now where you've got a bunch of fucking morons storming Capitol Hill because they really think that, you know, you know what I'm saying? 1.00

02:06:52.000 Yeah, I totally get it. 1.00

02:06:52.000 And it's like we're all, if we're not careful, we enter into our own Self-referential realities. 1.00

02:06:59.000 I mentioned it earlier in the show, even with me, with our community calling for a full investigation, but by definition, we're all sympathetic to the lab leak hypothesis.

02:07:08.000 But we're all kind of in a world with each other and you get more and more affirmation.

02:07:13.000 But you also mentioned something I think is really essential about the role of young people in getting us out of this.

02:07:19.000 And I, for one, I actually have a lot of hope in the earliest days of the pandemic I gave a talk about these kinds of problems and how the only way we're going to solve these problems is by recognizing that we have to come together to do it.

02:07:35.000 And all of these young people around the world rallied around that call.

02:07:42.000 And we've now come together and we've founded an organization called One Shared World.

02:07:46.000 It's about finding that common space, solving common problems.

02:07:51.000 It's oneshared.world, if anyone wants to Go to the website and learn about it.

02:07:55.000 But I think there is a lot of hope in these young people, but we all exist in this context.

02:08:01.000 And the superstructure is pushing us in a certain way.

02:08:06.000 And I think that while we have to focus on our individual behaviors, We don't look at the superstructure and say, well, what are all the incentives?

02:08:14.000 And how are these incentives pushing us toward a certain set of behaviors?

02:08:22.000 It's going to be really difficult to get out of them.

02:08:25.000 So there's a lot of hope, but we also have a lot of work to do.

02:08:27.000 Yeah, that's where we have a lot of work to do.

02:08:29.000 These algorithms that have been created and they're generating enormous amounts of money for these social media companies.

02:08:35.000 And so they have a vested interest in continuing to sort of, this divide is very valuable.

02:08:42.000 Like the divide between us, the more they can find things that piss us off, it turns out that's the stuff that we engage with.

02:08:49.000 And so the algorithms are favoring things that are inflammatory and favoring arguments that divide people.

02:08:58.000 I had Tristan Harris on the podcast to talk about it, and he paints a very scary picture.

02:09:04.000 It's really weird.

02:09:06.000 It's really weird when you consider where this is all going and how there's no breaks.

02:09:12.000 Yeah, and so that's the thing is that I think there was a time, as I was talking about this with somebody earlier today, there was a time in the early days of the internet where I think a lot of us, we had this theology, oh, the open systems are going to win.

02:09:27.000 And so let's let the internet is going to bring freedom to the world.

02:09:31.000 And we've learned out, what we've learned is Is that no technology comes with its own built-in value system.

02:09:38.000 Every technology, you think, oh, a stirrup, that seems like a good idea.

02:09:41.000 Well, yeah, the Mongols used it and conquered the world and killed a lot of people. 0.99

02:09:46.000 The plow, every technology can be used for good or for bad, and these technologies are just the same, but they're so powerful that if we don't really try to establish frameworks for how they can be used ethically, we'll just be pushed into all these kinds of behaviors That are antithetical to who we would at least like to be.

02:10:08.000 Yeah.

02:10:09.000 Now, to get back to China and that famous actress, do you remember what she said?

02:10:13.000 I don't know if she said anything, but it was more that she...

02:10:19.000 I think.

02:10:20.000 There's a Chinese saying, which I can't remember, but it's something like, kill the chickens to scare the...

02:10:28.000 Something or other.

02:10:29.000 But I think that this was someone who was becoming very powerful, with a massive social media following, who was a high-profile person.

02:10:39.000 And the government was making a statement, no matter who you are.

02:10:43.000 It's the same Jack Ma statement.

02:10:44.000 You could be the richest man in China.

02:10:46.000 You could be the most famous actress in China.

02:10:49.000 You are...

02:10:52.000 I think that's why I think that message has been spread across China.

02:10:59.000 And that means that there are a lot of other people, like these scientists, possibly from the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere, Who know what the system is.

02:11:08.000 And I think it was a way of delivering a message that everybody in China would hear.

02:11:13.000 So it encourages self-policing.

02:11:14.000 Self-policing is the name of the game.

02:11:16.000 And now you're seeing that spread to Hong Kong.

02:11:19.000 I mean, Hong Kong is a place I've been visiting for many, many decades.

02:11:23.000 And it was this thriving intellectual community.

02:11:26.000 And it's slowly being strangled.

02:11:29.000 And the world is not doing anything.

02:11:32.000 Yeah.

02:11:32.000 What can the world do, though?

02:11:35.000 So this is the challenge, is that China is becoming more powerful.

02:11:41.000 COVID, even if COVID started with an accidental lab leak, as I believe it most likely did, has in many ways made China relatively more powerful because they got a handle on it.

02:11:53.000 They've seen the chaos here.

02:11:55.000 The United States antagonized until recently all of our friends and allies.

02:12:02.000 And so I think, frankly, it's going to take the rest of the world coming together to balance China and the rest of the world coming together in spite of our differences and saying, here is a vision of the world in which we would like to live.

02:12:17.000 It's a world where...

02:12:18.000 Human rights are respected.

02:12:22.000 We're able to investigate accidents with the kind of free and open access where there aren't shameful land grabs in the South China Sea or in the Himalayas.

02:12:35.000 It's where people are free to express their views of how they would like to live and how they'd like to be governed.

02:12:43.000 And if you, China, would like to be part of that world, we will welcome you, but here are the rules.

02:12:49.000 If you don't want to be part of that world, here are the consequences.

02:12:56.000 We're good to go.

02:13:15.000 And not just for them, but also for ourselves, which is why what's happened here in these past years in the United States was such a heartbreak for many people, myself included.

02:13:23.000 A world that's not based on standards of ethical behavior is a world that is going to decay.

02:13:32.000 And there's nothing that says that we will have the kind of security and stability in the next 76 years That we've had in the last 76 years since the end of the Second World War.

02:13:45.000 But when you see all these companies just sort of caving in at China because of the amount of money that China generates them, even the NBA caved into China.

02:13:55.000 It was painful to watch.

02:13:56.000 Weird, right?

02:13:57.000 Yeah.

02:13:57.000 Well, it wasn't weird.

02:13:58.000 I understood it.

02:13:59.000 It was just painful.

02:14:00.000 But it's spooky.

02:14:01.000 It's spooky because they have so much money to be made.

02:14:04.000 And China, the Chinese government does a great job Of using that kind of pressure, but there's no way that any individual company can stand up to China on its own.

02:14:15.000 I have an acquaintance of mine who years ago was on the board for GE. And you think, oh, GE, that's a big company.

02:14:24.000 And so somebody in China, this was years ago, went to their representative in China and said, look, you have two big businesses in China.

02:14:34.000 One is wind turbines, and the other is medical equipment.

02:14:38.000 We're going to steal your wind turbine business.

02:14:41.000 We're going to steal all the technology.

02:14:42.000 We're going to copy it.

02:14:44.000 We don't want you to complain.

02:14:46.000 If you don't complain, you get to keep your medical equipment business.

02:14:50.000 If you do complain, we'll also steal your medical equipment business.

02:14:55.000 And so there's no way that GE on its own could stand up to China.

02:15:01.000 And so when it's an individual company, including Apple, our most powerful companies, or the NBA, and it's them versus the Chinese government, this company is going to lose.

02:15:10.000 And that's why we need to the United States, Europe.

02:15:14.000 Japan, Australia, others, we need to come together and have a united front and to establish standards.

02:15:22.000 And that's why we're going to have to compromise with each other in order to make that kind of balancing possible.

02:15:29.000 But if we're all competing with each other for access to China, then they're going to play both sides against the middle.

02:15:38.000 I just think with the massive amount of control they have over the population, why would they adjust?

02:15:45.000 Well, the only reason that they'll adjust is if they face an environment where the benefit of adjusting outweighs the harm of doing what they're doing.

02:15:55.000 And I think that we have to try, whether it's possible or not, maybe it's too late, we have to try to make that happen.

02:16:03.000 Your friend who was the journalist, the Lou Dobbs of China, what did he do that got them angry?

02:16:08.000 He was connected.

02:16:09.000 There was a former security chief who was probably one of, if not the most powerful people in China.

02:16:18.000 And when Xi Jinping...

02:16:20.000 The current leader was coming up.

02:16:22.000 That guy represented a different power center.

02:16:29.000 My acquaintance was connected to that guy through some kind of patronage system that I don't fully understand.

02:16:37.000 When that guy at the top of the pyramid got taken out, Can you explain that?

02:17:02.000 I think?

02:17:30.000 Right now they're doing a major purge of the intelligence service.

02:17:37.000 And so there are all these people who are being kicked out.

02:17:40.000 It's not because they're corrupt, because basically the entire system is corrupt.

02:17:46.000 It's because they are corrupt in service of somebody who is deemed not loyal to Xi Jinping.

02:17:53.000 And when you say they're being kicked out, they're not just being kicked out.

02:17:57.000 Like your friend was vanished.

02:17:59.000 Yeah.

02:17:59.000 I mean, in some cases, you lose your job.

02:18:02.000 In some cases...

02:18:03.000 You lose your life.

02:18:04.000 In some cases, you lose your liberty.

02:18:06.000 And in some cases, you lose your life.

02:18:08.000 I think that...

02:18:09.000 The number of people who are straight out executed is probably...

02:18:14.000 I mean, it used to be tons.

02:18:16.000 It used to be millions.

02:18:18.000 Now it's much, much less.

02:18:21.000 But certainly...

02:18:22.000 Well, what happens to them?

02:18:23.000 So you can lose your job.

02:18:25.000 You can be under house arrest, under constant surveillance.

02:18:28.000 You can be put in prison, as some people are.

02:18:32.000 But you certainly know that if you speak up, You're going to be in trouble.

02:18:39.000 As a matter of fact, I had a great conversation a few weeks ago with somebody I know who's a professor at, I won't mention the school, but who's an expert in how this whole system works and in touch with all of the Chinese dissidents from the old days from Tiananmen Square.

02:18:58.000 And I was asking him, let's just say That there's somebody in China who has some really important information about the origins of the pandemic.

02:19:08.000 How could they get that information out?

02:19:11.000 And he thought about it for a while.

02:19:13.000 And certainly, maybe they could send an encrypted email, but they think it would be a super high risk.

02:19:20.000 And the only thing he could come up with was maybe they could get in touch with somebody from the U.S. Embassy.

02:19:28.000 And try to sneak in the door and then be able to speak freely once they got there.

02:19:34.000 I mean, this was like the world's expert in how people in China who had really highly sensitive information could get that information out in a way that they would not think that they and their family were at risk.

02:19:51.000 You have no idea what happened to your friend, the Lou Dobbs of China. 0.98

02:19:54.000 So I'm sure he's still in prison.

02:19:58.000 His name's Rui Chengong.

02:20:00.000 I'll mention it now.

02:20:01.000 Yeah.

02:20:01.000 And I'm sure he's in prison.

02:20:04.000 Maybe he'll reappear as a result of this.

02:20:07.000 How long ago was this?

02:20:07.000 This was, I don't know, six, five, six years ago?

02:20:10.000 Maybe he'll reappear.

02:20:11.000 And maybe as a result of this podcast, he's out there and we'll get pictures online of him living it up.

02:20:19.000 But I certainly haven't heard anything.

02:20:21.000 I know he just one day or the next vanished.

02:20:24.000 Just was in the wrong circle.

02:20:26.000 Wrong circle.

02:20:27.000 And the Jack Ma billionaire guy, he criticized China openly.

02:20:33.000 Yeah, he did.

02:20:33.000 But he had this special role for many years as this high profile.

02:20:38.000 He was basically the face of Chinese business.

02:20:41.000 And he could speak openly and honestly.

02:20:44.000 And he was this great Chinese success story.

02:20:47.000 And I think they wanted him to be the face of the new...

02:20:52.000 I think?

02:21:15.000 And all of a sudden, there was an institution that had power that was really relevant.

02:21:22.000 And the government said, hey, wait a second, we don't want that.

02:21:26.000 And unlike in another country where they could say, well, how can we think about regulation?

02:21:31.000 The whole point was, we want to deliver a message that even the wealthiest person in China is not free from control.

02:21:41.000 And the other point, and this is...

02:21:44.000 It's a broader point connected to what we were talking about, about international competition, and that is when we think of a company here in the United States, whoever they are, Apple, we don't really think of them as a state actor.

02:21:58.000 When Apple is going and doing deals somewhere else, But in China, if you're a big company, you don't have the ability to buck the Chinese government.

02:22:07.000 I mean, the Chinese government mandates that there be a Communist Party sell in all of these big companies.

02:22:13.000 And that doesn't mean that every day you have the local political boss telling you, do this, do that.

02:22:20.000 But you know that if you do something that is not to the liking of the government, Or if the government says you must do this particular thing, whether it's Huawei making their computer code accessible or anybody else,

02:22:37.000 the companies aren't in a position on important things to say no to the government.

02:22:43.000 And that's why when we interact with Chinese companies, especially Huawei, The big ones, we need to recognize they aren't companies like the way our companies are companies, like the way most European companies.

02:22:56.000 These are quasi-state actors.

02:23:00.000 That's terrifying.

02:23:01.000 It's just terrifying that a company or that a country, rather, as big as China with over a billion people can operate like that with such an iron fist in this information age in 2021, that they have their internet locked down, that they have their population completely under control, and that they could even expand that to Hong Kong.

02:23:18.000 Yeah.

02:23:19.000 And so it is scary.

02:23:22.000 And the scary thing is that they're actually really good at it.

02:23:27.000 North Korea, they have their population completely under control and they're just bad at it. 0.99

02:23:32.000 There's no good outcome.

02:23:33.000 China, their economy is growing even in spite of the pandemic.

02:23:39.000 The country is getting stronger.

02:23:41.000 They're eradicating poverty.

02:23:43.000 I mean, they're doing a lot of things and there's a trade-off Between the government and the people.

02:23:49.000 And the people don't have a choice, so they have to accept it.

02:23:52.000 And it's scary that it's happening, but it's also scary that they're really good at it.

02:23:58.000 And that's the challenge to us.

02:24:00.000 I mean, in retrospect, the Soviet Union was kind of doomed from the start.

02:24:04.000 How could that system have worked?

02:24:06.000 And you see the old movies, and there's like the fat guy with the sweaty hair and the bad suit making decisions.

02:24:12.000 They go, that was never going to work.

02:24:14.000 These guys, I mean, they have developed a highly competitive system, and they're competing with us, and they have the goal of being the world's leading country by 2049. I'm afraid of living in that world,

02:24:30.000 a world that is defined by China's norms.

02:24:35.000 And so that's why, for me, The lesson for us is we better make us the best version of ourselves that we possibly can be.

02:24:44.000 And that means, like you were mentioning, to think about how do we want to build our culture and our society?

02:24:50.000 How do we make sure that our businesses are as competitive as possible?

02:24:55.000 How do we build alliances with our partners around the world because we need them?

02:25:01.000 And I think this is the real lesson.

02:25:03.000 We can't act like nothing matters.

02:25:05.000 And I feel like one of the tragedies of these Trump years is that we've acted like nothing matters.

02:25:09.000 Like we have such a head start Over the rest of the world, that we don't need to focus every day about how do we strengthen ourselves?

02:25:17.000 How do we improve our society?

02:25:19.000 How do we deepen the connections between us and our friends and partners around the world?

02:25:24.000 And now I think we're getting back to that, but that's what we have to do.

02:25:26.000 And we have to make sure that we don't become them to beat them.

02:25:29.000 That's what's scary to me.

02:25:31.000 And that people are embracing this idea of the government having more control over people.

02:25:36.000 I mean, you go to Washington DC now and there's armed guards surrounding the Capitol now and there's a green zone.

02:25:42.000 And there's barbed wire and the whole deal.

02:25:45.000 It's like, what are we doing?

02:25:46.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:25:47.000 And that's this tragedy.

02:25:50.000 And that's why I hope that we can have a renaissance here in the country, because we've certainly taken a bad turn, but maybe there's a positive way.

02:25:58.000 But I also think we need to ask, what can we learn from them?

02:26:02.000 Because there are things that China is actually doing well.

02:26:06.000 What do you think they're doing well that we can learn from?

02:26:08.000 One is they've made huge progress in eradicating poverty.

02:26:12.000 It's been a national priority and they are achieving it.

02:26:16.000 What have they done?

02:26:16.000 Well, they've brought 700 million people out of abject poverty.

02:26:21.000 Our poverty problem isn't as bad as theirs is, but they've really put a focus on that.

02:26:28.000 What did they do to do that?

02:26:30.000 It was through agricultural policy, which wasn't all perfect, but they had a series of policies, especially to improve the livelihoods of rural people through greater access.

02:26:46.000 They basically opened up a highly restrictive agricultural sector.

02:26:51.000 And this is something they had industrial policies.

02:26:55.000 They were very smart of thinking, how do they develop through the different stages of development?

02:27:01.000 So they started with this high labor manufacturing. 0.84

02:27:05.000 So when I compare a country like China, where they had kind of no manufacturing, and then all of a sudden, all this low-quality crap was suddenly made in China. 1.00

02:27:16.000 And because of that, though, they brought all of these really poor people into the lower middle class. 0.95

02:27:22.000 And then on top of that, they started to build more of a market economy and they could lever up.

02:27:29.000 India, another country that's roughly the same size population, They didn't do that.

02:27:35.000 And so India, in a way, has missed that level of high employment manufacturing, and that's why India is stuck with these hundreds of millions of people who are still in abject poverty.

02:27:50.000 And then industrial policy.

02:27:51.000 I mean, we used to have industrial policy in the United States in the war years and post-war years, and we thought, well, it's government and academia and business need to work together.

02:28:01.000 Then we went all the way to the other end of the spectrum.

02:28:04.000 We think, well, government needs to stay out of the way.

02:28:06.000 It's just a bunch of kids in their garage, and they're going to...

02:28:10.000 Do everything.

02:28:10.000 And now, I think in response to the China threat, even people like Marco Rubio are starting to say, well, what's the right relationship between government, business, and academia?

02:28:23.000 And I think that if we just said everything that we do is the best, And no one else can compete.

02:28:31.000 I think that is going to be a losing hand for us.

02:28:34.000 But we also need to say, what are the stuff that we're great at and how can we be better?

02:28:38.000 This is not a rosy picture you're painting.

02:28:41.000 I don't see, with our current climate, with so much...

02:28:46.000 There's so much chaos involved with us socially and politically and so little trust in the actual government.

02:28:55.000 Particularly, look what they say they're going to do versus what they actually do.

02:28:59.000 Who you vote in.

02:29:01.000 You vote in people based on promises that are rarely ever achieved.

02:29:07.000 Yeah, there's a real danger, and that's why so many people are looking to the history of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, where there were these things.

02:29:16.000 You have this big civilization, and it grows, and it's strong, and then it starts to fall apart, and then people are trying to fix it, and then it falls apart.

02:29:24.000 Well, that's the analogy that they're making about us right now.

02:29:27.000 Yeah, and there is one possible future for us that really sucks.

02:29:32.000 And the way I say it, I spend a lot of time, I'm a big fan of Mongolia.

02:29:36.000 And if you're in Mongolia in the 14th century, you think, well, yeah, we've had a couple of bad decades, but we're the Mongols.

02:29:45.000 We were the biggest land empire in the world.

02:29:48.000 Of course, we're going to get everything back.

02:29:50.000 And now Mongolia is a big place with very few people, but the whole empire was gone.

02:29:57.000 It'd be more shocking if that doesn't happen to us, right?

02:30:00.000 Historically.

02:30:01.000 There's no natural floor and there's no natural ceiling.

02:30:06.000 So everything that we have is up for grabs every day.

02:30:09.000 And if we want to climb higher, we have to get to work climbing higher.

02:30:14.000 And if we want to fall lower, we just let go and stop climbing and just assume that everything we have now, we'll always have.

02:30:22.000 Because we're living off of the hard work of past...

02:30:26.000 Generations.

02:30:27.000 And we have to be adding credit, not taking credit.

02:30:31.000 And we've done the worst thing ever is we've given children a sense of entitlement.

02:30:36.000 That they're entitled to success and they're entitled to all these things.

02:30:40.000 And that it's being denied them.

02:30:43.000 I would have said that...

02:30:46.000 A year ago.

02:30:47.000 But as I was saying before, I have been so inspired by these young people who I've worked very closely with over the last year through our community of OneShared.World.

02:31:01.000 And now we have a partnership that we're doing with Model United Nations, called MUN Impact.

02:31:08.000 It's kind of this crazy thing that we're doing.

02:31:11.000 At the end of March, we're having 10 different debates all around the world in English, French, Spanish, and Russian.

02:31:17.000 The goal of every one of these debates is to negotiate a Model United Nations resolution Guaranteeing clean water, basic sanitation and hygiene, and essential pandemic protection for everyone on Earth by 2030. Then we have a small team of experts that are going to take these resolutions negotiated by these kids and turn it into a resolution that looks every bit as professional as a resolution passed by the United Nations.

02:31:46.000 Then we're going to have a global advocacy campaign saying, all right, a bunch of kids can negotiate an answer to help not just protect the most vulnerable people on earth, but to recognize that if the poorest people on earth don't have water and sanitation,

02:32:05.000 guess what?

02:32:06.000 The virus is going to mutate there and our vaccines won't make a difference.

02:32:11.000 And then we're going to call on world leaders to actually pass a real resolution and try to actually solve this problem.

02:32:17.000 So there's hope, but we need to be creative in how to harness this hope and turn it into something real.

02:32:23.000 Well, you're talking about a group of people that sound very promising, but how large are their numbers?

02:32:29.000 So, it's not huge.

02:32:31.000 That's the problem.

02:32:51.000 You know, a year and a half ago, we're sitting at home posting pictures of lasagna on Instagram and thinking that was life.

02:32:58.000 And I do think that a lot of young generation people have realized that the world that our generation has left them is broken in so many ways, and that if they don't rally to fix it, the future is going to look like this.

02:33:13.000 So there's a huge amount of danger, but I also feel hope.

02:33:17.000 I think the polarization, though, is stronger now than ever before. 0.97

02:33:20.000 And I think the problems that people are focusing on in terms of like, in comparison to the threat that we're experiencing, we discussed for the last couple hours about China is relatively trivial, and that we need to stop all that shit and work together. 0.86

02:33:35.000 And even then, we're behind the curve, because China's government has massive influencing control over their people and complete control over their business. 0.86

02:33:46.000 Yeah, so we are behind the curve, but we are not out for the count.

02:33:52.000 My father came to this country as a refugee.

02:33:55.000 I love this country.

02:33:56.000 I believe in this country.

02:33:58.000 But we have to fight for it to be its best.

02:34:02.000 And I think this is one of those moments, and I couldn't agree more.

02:34:06.000 I wonder if someone said that exact same thing in Rome one day.

02:34:08.000 For sure!

02:34:10.000 For sure.

02:34:12.000 I believe in Rome.

02:34:13.000 We're going to be rocking deep in the 1900s.

02:34:17.000 It's so true. 0.84

02:34:18.000 So there's a better path and a worse path.

02:34:21.000 And the question is, what can each of us and all of us do to fight for the better path?

02:34:25.000 Well, for sure, one of the most important things is our ability to communicate openly and freely so that we understand these problems and we realize that our differences are far smaller than the things that we have in common.

02:34:40.000 Our differences, we tend to highlight our differences and which is part of the problem with today's social media algorithms is it enhances those differences.

02:34:50.000 It makes those differences seem like they're the only thing that matters.

02:34:53.000 And that's really the first time ever in my life that it seems like that, that people are concentrating more on our differences than on what we have in common.

02:35:03.000 Yeah, I agree.

02:35:04.000 And the sad thing is, you would say, like, in some abstract way, well, maybe if, like...

02:35:09.000 Hostile Martians show up. 1.00

02:35:11.000 We'll realize, oh geez, we're all humans. 0.95

02:35:13.000 But right now we have hostile Martians. 1.00

02:35:15.000 We have this terrible vaccine that's killing so many people.

02:35:20.000 You mean virus?

02:35:21.000 I'm sorry, you are so right.

02:35:22.000 Terrible virus, wonderful vaccine.

02:35:24.000 Terrible virus that's killing all these people.

02:35:27.000 I think, well, now is the time to rally.

02:35:29.000 And that's why it's been a heartbreak that we've kind of fought over these things.

02:35:33.000 But I still think that there's an opportunity To come together, but to do it, we have to do it.

02:35:41.000 And it seems so big and abstract for people to say, oh, come together.

02:35:45.000 It's like, yeah, sure, kumbaya.

02:35:47.000 But maybe if we kind of break it down and everybody can, like maybe if everyone who's listening to this podcast can have like one nice tweet right now about some issue.

02:35:58.000 How about this? 0.99

02:35:59.000 Just stay the fuck off Twitter. 0.99

02:36:00.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:36:00.000 Just live your life and go out and meet people. 0.99

02:36:03.000 If you go out in the rest of the world, in most of the world at least, well, the problem is in a lot of cities, the world has become like Twitter.

02:36:10.000 That's the problem in terms of like the pandemic has exacerbated a lot of the financial struggle and crime has risen radically, particularly violent crime.

02:36:22.000 And it's become like, I don't have a lot of hope for like Los Angeles.

02:36:29.000 When I go back to Los Angeles and I see where I used to live, I'm like, this is not going to get better.

02:36:33.000 My good friend is the mayor, Eric Garcetti, and he's in this really tough position because it really is exactly what you say.

02:36:42.000 Things are pulling apart.

02:36:44.000 The wealthy have gotten wealthier, which is insane over the course of the pandemic.

02:36:48.000 The poor have gotten poorer.

02:36:51.000 And we don't have this sense of common responsibility to solve problems.

02:36:56.000 Well, they've also handled it horribly.

02:36:58.000 They've managed the pandemic in Los Angeles as bad as could possibly be.

02:37:03.000 Just before the pandemic, I was in Los Angeles and I was giving a talk at the LA Public Library and I was staying at a hotel right there.

02:37:10.000 And I thought, all right, this is a nice morning.

02:37:12.000 I'm going to go for a run.

02:37:14.000 And I went running, and I was like a few blocks away.

02:37:18.000 And literally, I mean, I've lived in a lot of rough places I've been to.

02:37:22.000 I lived in Cambodia for two years.

02:37:24.000 I've been in Afghanistan.

02:37:25.000 I've been in war zones.

02:37:27.000 I don't know if I've seen conditions as really just desperate as these blocks and blocks of these homeless people.

02:37:36.000 Shanty towns. 0.92

02:37:38.000 In America.

02:37:39.000 In Los Angeles.

02:37:40.000 In Los Angeles.

02:37:41.000 I couldn't believe it.

02:37:42.000 Well, there's a great documentary on that hotel where that woman died.

02:37:46.000 It's on Netflix.

02:37:48.000 The Cecil Hotel.

02:37:49.000 And it documents, there's a guy on there that I'd love to talk to who's a historian on Skid Row.

02:37:54.000 And they've sort of engineered Skid Row.

02:37:58.000 They took all these people that were homeless and drug addicts and criminals and they kept them in Skid Row.

02:38:03.000 They released them there and they kept them there and they put the homeless shelters there and the food kitchens.

02:38:10.000 It's terrible.

02:38:11.000 And it's way worse than people imagine.

02:38:14.000 If you have this idea of what Los Angeles is and you've never been to Skid Row, you have no idea.

02:38:18.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:38:19.000 It's fucking insane. 0.97

02:38:20.000 And it was like that when I was filming Fear Factor back in the early 2000s. 0.97

02:38:26.000 So we're talking about 2003, 2004. It was just horrible.

02:38:31.000 I couldn't believe how bad it was and no one was talking about it.

02:38:34.000 Yeah.

02:38:34.000 Because it's contained into this one area.

02:38:36.000 But now it's expanding and it's all throughout downtown.

02:38:39.000 It's not just Skid Row anymore.

02:38:41.000 Yeah.

02:38:42.000 And that's coming back to what we were saying before about what can we learn from China.

02:38:45.000 But China has set a goal of eliminating extreme poverty, and they're working toward it.

02:38:51.000 We may disagree with a lot of things that they're doing.

02:38:53.000 We should do that.

02:38:55.000 And we're not doing it the way we should be.

02:38:57.000 I mean, certainly some of the early decisions- Well, what can they do?

02:39:00.000 Talk to your boy, Eric Carcetti.

02:39:02.000 Yeah.

02:39:02.000 What can he do about Los Angeles that he hasn't done?

02:39:04.000 It was certainly one of the challenges that he has is like Chicago has a strong mayor system where the mayor has the responsibility and the power.

02:39:13.000 Los Angeles has a weak mayor system where there's the nominal responsibility but not all of the power.

02:39:20.000 But I certainly think that in our society more generally, Unless we recognize that we're all in this together, that if we want to address the problems of the poorest people, I mean, there's certain things, I mean, certainly housing,

02:39:37.000 health care, mental health, sanitation, I mean, some of the zoning things, like you mentioned.

02:39:44.000 There are a lot of things that could be done, but we need to really solve these problems systemically.

02:39:50.000 I mean, the new Biden stimulus bill has some things certainly which are welcome to help poorer people, but it has to happen at the federal government, at the state, at the city, and also at the personal level.

02:40:03.000 I mean, I think people need to be empowered to solve their own problems.

02:40:09.000 And I think that These are holistic things.

02:40:11.000 And like I said, I'm not the world's genius on how to solve all of Los Angeles' problems, but I do know that we're the society that we put people on the moon, we've done all of these things.

02:40:22.000 If we decided that it was a national priority to massively reduce extreme poverty, for sure, I think it would be achievable.

02:40:33.000 It would be wonderful if we put an effort into that, but there's also a massive resistance to doing anything like that because people consider it a form of socialism.

02:40:43.000 I am a capitalist.

02:40:46.000 But I think there are elements of socialism that are desirable.

02:40:51.000 Well, there's elements of socialism we embrace, right?

02:40:53.000 Like the fire department.

02:40:54.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:40:55.000 And the thing is, I mean, again, that's what this virus is showing, is we're all connected, and the economics are just the same.

02:41:03.000 I mean, it's...

02:41:04.000 Or even connecting this to genetics.

02:41:07.000 I mean, when I was in that horrible...

02:41:10.000 Shantytown in Los Angeles or when I was in refugee camps all around the world, I always think, well, let's just imagine if we could do a genome sequencing of every single person there, and we have a little more knowledge of how to understand genome sequencing.

02:41:28.000 Could we, 20 years from now, say, you see this kid here who's born in this totally crappy place with no access to quality education?

02:41:39.000 That person has the ability to be a Mozart, the potential to be a Mozart, to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

02:41:46.000 We kind of see other people in our own society and we don't see potential.

02:41:54.000 It's not just a crime.

02:41:57.000 It's anti-competitive, coming back to this China point.

02:42:00.000 If we want to compete with China, let's empower, let's educate everybody in America so that everybody can be part of this engine of making our society better and stronger.

02:42:09.000 Well, I've always said that the one way, if you want to make America great again, is to have less losers.

02:42:14.000 Like, how do you have less losers?

02:42:15.000 Well, you've got to take all these areas that have historically been impoverished, like, you know, places like South Side of Chicago that for decades have been riddled in crime and gangs, and do something about it.

02:42:25.000 And if we put the kind of effort that...

02:42:27.000 Remember the economic stimulus that they first did when the pandemic first hit?

02:42:32.000 Because we've got to save these businesses.

02:42:34.000 Well, how come they don't...

02:42:37.000 I mean, $2 trillion now, we're up at almost $5 trillion.

02:42:41.000 Imagine someone said, all right, here's $5 trillion.

02:42:43.000 We're just going to take $1 trillion, and we're going to try to solve this problem, not just by spending money, but by having a systemic approach.

02:42:53.000 And then the other thing that we could do that I've always said that we should do is we should tell...

02:42:56.000 Every embassy in the world, every US embassy in the world, we've got a new job for you.

02:43:01.000 We're going to give you, and just pick a number, let's say 500 green cards a year, 1,000 green cards a year.

02:43:08.000 And your mission is to search this country for the smartest, most creative, most ambitious people you can find.

02:43:16.000 Give them a green card and say, we want you to move to the United States to help build our country. 0.84

02:43:22.000 We could just, I mean, this is such a great country.

02:43:25.000 We could just have all these people.

02:43:27.000 Instead, what we're doing is keeping those people out or some of those people are coming here, they're getting educated here, and then we kick them out after they graduate.

02:43:39.000 So I think that if we're If we really want to grow our economy, our competitiveness, we should do it.

02:43:47.000 In one of my novels, I have a thing called the Department of National Competitiveness, and it was in the story.

02:43:56.000 That sounds so Orwellian.

02:43:57.000 You know, it does, but here's the basic premise, is that the two parties can't agree with each other, and so finally there's a breakthrough, and they create this Department of National Competitive that comes out and says, all right, if the United States wants to be the most competitive country in the world, here are the things that we're going to do,

02:44:14.000 and then everybody has to vote on it, kind of like with the old base closings, in an up or down vote.

02:44:21.000 But I do think it doesn't have to be the government.

02:44:22.000 Like, we should say, well, what do we have to do to make America the most vibrant, most competitive country in the world as we've been for the better part of a century?

02:44:34.000 And I think we need to come together around building that.

02:44:37.000 I think the way you're looking at it, though, is looking at it like a country.

02:44:42.000 And most people look at it like, how can I get ahead?

02:44:46.000 They don't.

02:44:47.000 And that's historically been very beneficial.

02:44:50.000 If you look at it as a country, well, you're not going to fix this thing on your own. 0.99

02:44:54.000 You put all your effort into fixing that, you're going to wind up broke and fucked up and angry and bitter. 0.98

02:44:58.000 And I should have just concentrated on myself. 0.99

02:45:00.000 Yeah.

02:45:02.000 It's not unhealthy for people to prioritize their thing.

02:45:05.000 I mean, you want people to say, well, I'm going to build a great business and that's going to help a country.

02:45:11.000 But it can't be all or nothing.

02:45:14.000 I think we need to say, well, my mission in life is to do X or whatever it is.

02:45:18.000 But some piece of that has to be connected to a sense of the commons.

02:45:24.000 I don't think...

02:45:26.000 That that hope has expired.

02:45:29.000 I mean, like I said before, I'm from Kansas City.

02:45:32.000 And in places like Kansas City, there are people who have a really strong sense of community, but somehow community has stopped being the whole country.

02:45:42.000 It's been a little piece of the country.

02:45:45.000 And I don't know how we get that back.

02:45:48.000 I mean, but again, this is a country that has civil war.

02:45:51.000 And somehow we came back together.

02:45:54.000 So there's that possibility.

02:45:55.000 But you're right.

02:45:56.000 It's going to be hard.

02:45:57.000 I'm not totally pessimistic.

02:45:59.000 I'm generally an optimistic person.

02:46:01.000 But my worry is that by the time we recognize what's happening, it's going to be too late.

02:46:09.000 China already has the biggest navy.

02:46:12.000 They had a massive show of force the other day where they showed over the last, I forget how many years, they've built their navy to be the largest force in the ocean in the world.

02:46:24.000 And they're doing that with everything.

02:46:25.000 And we're not.

02:46:27.000 And so we're still well ahead of China, but they are advancing, and we are stuck in this place. 0.97

02:46:37.000 And we're embracing censorship.

02:46:38.000 We're embracing these organizations controlling the flow of information.

02:46:44.000 We're embracing a lot of the things that are the antithesis of what makes America great.

02:46:50.000 We are, and...

02:46:52.000 And there's some progress and hope, and certainly we just came through a hard-fought election.

02:47:00.000 And there are little seeds being planted.

02:47:02.000 Will they grow?

02:47:04.000 I don't know.

02:47:05.000 But I definitely think, I mean, I don't talk about this stuff about China just to scare people.

02:47:11.000 What I really want people to hear is...

02:47:14.000 There's a competition in the world, and that competition is to define what are the norms under which we all live.

02:47:25.000 One of the reasons why it was great that America, with our allies, won the Second World War is we set the rules.

02:47:32.000 For a big part of the world, and then more of the world, and all of our lives have played out in the context of those rules.

02:47:41.000 And now people don't like globalization, but the ideas of international law and all those things that allow us, have allowed us to live as we have, were in many ways created by the United States.

02:47:53.000 We thought we had a peer competitor in the Soviet Union, and then it turned out that they were less of a peer than we thought.

02:48:01.000 China really is a peer competitor.

02:48:03.000 They have a very different vision of the world than what we have.

02:48:09.000 If we don't want to live in a world that is defined by China's rules, now is the time to start strengthening our society, building our relationships, doubling down on our best values,

02:48:26.000 whether it's democracy, inclusion, Human rights, because it won't be that we just don't do enough.

02:48:33.000 We languish.

02:48:34.000 We don't take our democracy seriously.

02:48:36.000 We don't think about how we'd like the world to be organized.

02:48:40.000 And then 10 years from now, 20 years from now, or two years from now, there's some moment and we also, oh, now it's too late.

02:48:47.000 Now we've already lost.

02:48:48.000 That's the worry, right?

02:48:50.000 And it needs to be universally recognized by both parties across the entire country.

02:48:55.000 And that's probably part of the problem, too, that we do only have two parties.

02:49:00.000 Yeah, you know, it's interesting.

02:49:02.000 Everybody solves the last problem, and then you get the new problem.

02:49:08.000 So there's a stability that comes...

02:49:10.000 Yeah, well, there's a stability that comes with the two-party system that was a reaction in some ways against the multi-party parliamentary systems that other countries have.

02:49:20.000 I see it a lot in Afghanistan, where they have an era where it was the political party system.

02:49:28.000 And so all the parties were fighting each other.

02:49:32.000 And then they said, all right, we don't want political parties.

02:49:34.000 So it's Any one of these systems can work, but a lot of these systems pick up bad habits over time and pathologies over time.

02:49:45.000 And if we don't have some kind of process of rejuvenation and renewal, we become kind of caricaturish versions of ourselves and our systems change.

02:49:58.000 Become so dysfunctional.

02:49:59.000 And that was one of the reasons why we had such a hard time under President Trump is that previous presidents had said, well, all right, the system is breaking down.

02:50:08.000 Let's put more power into the presidency so the president can rule by executive order, essentially by decree.

02:50:16.000 And then when we had presidents from both parties who seem like a reasonable person and they're making executive orders to fix problems that Congress couldn't solve, it's like, all right, that's okay.

02:50:28.000 Then all of a sudden, we have somebody else who's making executive orders that maybe some of us didn't agree with.

02:50:36.000 And so it seems like the right answer is to think, well, how can we build a system that works better?

02:50:42.000 And that's the challenge that we're facing now as I see it.

02:50:45.000 Jamie, thank you very much. 0.65

02:50:47.000 You scared the shit out of me. 0.76

02:50:48.000 You made me very gloomy. 0.97

02:50:49.000 I'm going to be bummed out for the rest of the day.

02:50:52.000 Awesome.

02:50:52.000 My great pleasure to join you, Joe.

02:50:55.000 I'm not really that bummed out, but I am concerned, and I think rightly so, and I think you highlighted a lot of really important stuff.

02:51:02.000 Awesome.

02:51:03.000 Thank you.

02:51:03.000 Really my great pleasure to be here.

02:51:04.000 Thanks for being here and your book, Hacking Darwin.

02:51:07.000 It's available everywhere.

02:51:08.000 Go get it.

02:51:09.000 It's excellent.

02:51:10.000 Appreciate you, man.

02:51:11.000 Thank you very much for being here.

02:51:12.000 Thanks, Joe.

02:51:12.000 Goodbye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 09, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1616 - Jamie Metzl

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