Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: You’re Being Lied to About Cancer, How It’s Caused, and How to Stop It
Summary
In this episode, we discuss the alarming trend of cancer rates going up in younger people, and in particular, in those with advanced pancreatic cancer. Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Los Angeles, joins us to talk about why this is happening.
Transcript
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So you spent your life, you know, 50 years working on treatments for cancer.
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And when you started, it seemed like we were moving in the West toward the elimination of cancer.
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And we got rid of it, basically, but cancer rates went up.
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And that is a very rarely remarked upon mystery that really bothers me.
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Tell us, since you made billions of dollars selling your companies,
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but you're still involved in medical research, which I admire.
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Well, what's really worrisome to me now is not just the rate,
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but the population in which it's increasing, i.e. the younger people.
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So we're clearly seeing an increase in certain types of cancer,
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Just to set a baseline, what's the 10-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer?
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I think, you know, if you have pancreatic cancer today,
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I don't think there is a 10-year survival rate, so to speak.
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Like, what there is, however, if you have patients who are what we call
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the failed old standard of care, the survival rate is in months.
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That's certainly my understanding, having watched a lot of people die of it.
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So, advanced pancreatic cancer is a death sentence.
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Well, I've got to tell you a really concerning story.
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It's not only I'm seeing it now, I'm seeing it in younger people.
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And for the first time in my career, you know, when I left UCLA,
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I was doing all the whipples, which is a surgery to actually remove
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And I was also doing pancreas transplants for type 2 diabetes
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and islet cell transplants and stem cell transplants.
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So, I had this diverse activity as a UCLA assistant professor.
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And the greatest surprise to me was a 13-year-old with metastatic pancreatic cancer
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And to me, that was not only devastating, it emphasized the idea that we're seeing
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people with higher incidence of pancreatic cancer and younger.
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Right now in our clinic, we have a 45-year-old, 50-year-old.
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And what was sad about this young boy, by the time he came to see us,
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And all the major medical centers really had exhausted all their therapy.
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And by the time he came to see us, his body was ridden and he passed away.
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So, seeing cancers now in younger people and almost a rise, almost like a,
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I don't want to call it a non-infectious pandemic,
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but this is what I think is going to, the worrisome in the world,
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not just in the United States, but largely in the United States,
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we're beginning to see this, and it's really worrisome.
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A non-infectious pandemic of cancer, including deadly cancers.
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In your career, which I think is about 50 years of working on this,
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how many 13-year-old pancreatic cancer patients have you seen?
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I inquired around because it bothered me so much now
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So, Dr. Stephen Day was a good friend who was trained with me at UCLA when I was at UCLA.
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Listen, Patrick, I'm now seeing an 8-year-old, a 10-year-old, an 11-year-old with colon cancer.
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We're seeing now 30-year-old, 40-year-old ladies, young ladies with ovarian cancer.
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So, this is a real phenomenon of a rise of cancer in early people, in young people,
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Do you notice a difference in the virility of the cancer, of the speed with which it moves?
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Well, I'm getting reports, they've even called it turbocharged cancer.
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I'm getting reports of that now, that people that have been in remission before even,
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are now getting back their cancers and very rapidly progressing.
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So, if you really think about what the cause of cancer is, you know,
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and I did a piece with Sanjay Gupta many, many years ago on 60 Minutes.
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And I said, you know, the cause of cancer is its inability,
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it's not the rapidity of its growth, but its inability to die.
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And its inability to die is because it either hides from the cells that matter,
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your body and the cancer has found a way to suppress your killer cells.
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And once they do that, once they activate what you call the suppressor cells,
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then I think you see this rapid progression because there's nothing stopping them.
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Well, I think if you look back of causes, you know, ironically, when I was doing at UCLA,
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I was working on pancreas transplant where I want to immunosuppress the patients.
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And then I was working on cancer where I don't want to immunosuppress.
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So, I needed to understand the body's mechanism.
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And we have a crazy, wonderful, exquisite balance in our body.
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You have the yin and the yang of the killer cells,
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and these things called natural killer cells and T-cells.
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Whose job is to kill anything that threatens the body?
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Whose job is to kill, quite right, anything that threatens the body,
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whether the body has infection, if you have TB, you have HIV,
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These cells are there to recognize these infected cells and kill it.
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As you and I are sitting here today, our stem cells are growing
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in order to replenish parts of your body, your heart.
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If you didn't have that, you wouldn't have a heart.
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But mathematically, there are some cells that are transformed,
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and your body recognizes that through these natural killer cells and kills it.
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That's how we are all protected, and we are in the state of equilibrium or balance.
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On the other hand, the moment either the tumor finds a way to hide from these cells,
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or your body's, or the tumor, causes these cells to be suppressed.
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And there are certain cells in your body called T-reg cells or myeloderived suppressor cells.
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It's all technical, that when they get up-regulated, you've lost your protection.
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And so the question then is, how do we understand this balance?
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How do we increase the killers, and how do we decrease the suppressors?
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So that's been 50 years of my challenge of, and how do we expose the tumor?
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So on the one hand, you need to expose the tumor, because it hides from the killers.
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And on the other hand, you activate the killers.
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And on the other hand, you have to suppress the suppressors.
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And I think like astrophysicists, where you're looking for God's particle,
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where all these molecules are floating around, talking to each other.
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All the cells are floating around, talking to each other.
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You know, one of the best, most fun lectures I gave,
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I gave a lot of lectures on this and tried to be non-technical,
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And the problem with cancer is it's been treated by oncologists and not immunologists.
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And immunologists don't see patients because they look at basic immunology.
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And then when you have infection and you have virology,
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so this cross-disciplines of virology, immunology, oncology,
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So you're saying, just big picture for non-specialists, of which I'm, of course, one,
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you're saying that cancer is to some extent a problem with your immune system.
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So you've got all kinds of defective cells that could become cancer or cancer in your body at all times.
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And that's the fundamental balance of the human body.
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And when that body gets out of balance, when the killer cells become suppressed or less effective,
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No, I love it because that's the perfect interpretation that I couldn't do in a non-technical way
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So, but that's, that's, I think, is what's happening in our body.
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We have these perturbations, but we're in equilibrium, you know, and that's a good thing.
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The moment you knock yourself out of equilibrium, now what could knock you out of equilibrium?
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And that's why when, you know, Bobby Kennedy is talking about and standing up about the toxins in our food,
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the toxins in PFAS, the processed food, and viral infections.
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And really what knocks you out of balance basically is inflammation.
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If you have inflammation in your body, there's this, now I'm going to get nerdy again,
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these cells called neutrophils that actually see an infection and tries to kill it, which it does.
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But if there's persistent inflammation, these neutrophils actually flip into a suppressor cell.
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So what people don't realize is that we have the yin yang in our body, that every cell has a counter cell.
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I said the most fun conversation I had where I was asked by astrophysicists or physicists to give a lecture,
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is I named this concept of cancer a quantum theory, like a physicist.
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And that in our body, we have cells that can be in two states.
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And like the Schroeder's cat, it could be alive or dead.
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And so I named this thing Quantum Oncotherapeutics, just to be controversial,
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so that doctors could understand what I'm talking about,
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is that we need to understand the fact that you have a killer T cell and you have a killer suppressor cell.
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We have an M1 macrophage that actually chomps things up, an M2 macrophage that blocks that.
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You have an NK cell that kills, an NK cell that inhibits.
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And we need to have that balance, otherwise you'll get into autoimmune disease.
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But there's a thing called quantum entanglement, that is the cat alive or is the cat dead?
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If somebody interacts with that, and the person that interacts with that is the doctor.
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So you, as a doctor, could either be enlightened enough to activate just the activators and suppress the suppressors,
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But it's very complex because it's now quantum,
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because all those changes are happening in minutes in your body.
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These molecules, like God's particle, where they're colliding with each other,
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and cells are colliding and interacting, happens within minutes.
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So you need to have a theory of how do you interact at that level.
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And in so doing, the first thing you need to understand is, how does cancer happen?
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because that's a bad statement, a pejorative statement.
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Because everything we're doing is tipping the scales towards the suppressor cells.
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And we can go into this conversation where I can explain that.
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So if you activate the immunosuppression system,
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what's activating that immune system on the other way?
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Something is suppressing people's immune systems,
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including the poor 13-year-old boy who died of pancreatic cancer.
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but it is, you know, we're not the first people to notice
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there's been an increase in scary cancers in populations
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And a lot of people have pointed to both COVID,
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The best way for me to answer that is to look at history.
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What we know about virally-induced cancers is well established.
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We know that if you get hepatitis, you get liver cancer.
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Certain kinds of throat cancer are caused by viruses as well, right?
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So we call that oncogenic viruses in medical terms,
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And the fundamental basis for that are threefold.
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The hallmarks of an oncogenic virus is one, it must persist.
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It must inhibit the thing called P53 that's in your body
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to try and protect your body from not having cancer.
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it begins to have the hallmarks of an oncogenic virus.
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It goes wherever you have this thing called the ACE2 receptor,
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So wherever you have a blood vessel in your body,
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And if it has an ACE2 receptor on that blood vessel,
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Because that's the purpose of the spike protein,
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to hijack that ACE2 receptor and get into their cells.
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because it disrupts the blood vessels of the brain
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You've seen young people have sudden heart attacks all of a sudden.
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You see young people with pancreatic cancer all of a sudden.
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You see young people with colon cancer all of a sudden.
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So is it by coincidence that post-COVID infection,
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is this what I call long COVID virus persisting?
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does that COVID virus suppress the natural killer cell?
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I think this is a conversation I had with the...
00:19:20.960
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How long does the virus remain in the human body if not?
00:22:50.280
Is there any reason to believe it'll naturally go away?
00:23:09.480
And if the tumor or the infection or the inflammation
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what could be like the worst human health crisis in history.
01:10:02.280
So this cell is evolved since the Cambrian age.
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This cell, this natural killer cell in your body.
01:10:16.220
That's, this cell was only discovered in 1970s.
01:11:15.280
That's why Seattle has the highest suicide rate.
01:46:36.160
By the way, the editorial board never met even.
01:47:01.420
And they know they're, as you could see, because it's a left-leaning, they wrote terrible stories
01:47:11.180
So my statement to them was, listen, you may have an opinion, but all of us should have
01:47:18.700
I mean, one of the statements that came, and I won't name him, came from a person that said,
01:47:25.280
within this concept, that Vice President Kamala Harris was the most consequential Vice President
01:47:40.700
Having never met her, anyone, so now exactly, you just hit it on the head.
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So I said, you know, it boiled down to, look, we're not going to do that.
01:48:00.620
On why are you saying she's the most consequential Vice President of the United States?
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Like, what are the facts that underlie that judgment?
01:48:09.160
I obviously had disagreed with that person, and there had no basis for that, other than,
01:48:14.800
you know, as you said, a personal echo chamber, you know?
01:48:17.360
And look, I think, I don't know what they're trying to protect.
01:48:22.580
They're trying to, if I'm trying to find, I'm trying to find the kernel of basis, the
01:48:30.040
audience, because the audience is left, so they need to be left.
01:48:34.020
I think, meaning our audience, we lost a lot of viewers, right?
01:48:41.920
But I don't think it's right that we should be this cancelling society.
01:48:46.860
I think we should be a society that can have a civil discourse, like we're having now,
01:48:50.800
and disagree, it's okay, and understand each other's point of view.
01:48:55.260
That's what I think is the value of the paper when you talk about voices.
01:49:03.920
Let's go back to the Kamala thing really quick.
01:49:18.440
Because there are no editorial writing jobs left in the middle.
01:49:27.820
Look, the fact that I had the courage to resign, some of them.
01:49:48.480
I fired him because I didn't believe he was the right person or taking the paper where it needs to be.
01:49:59.500
And then, after that episode, the editorial board, the rest of them resigned.
01:50:11.940
And what's exciting to me is I'm rebuilding with young people.
01:50:14.180
And what's exciting to me is this opportunity with LA Times Next and LA Times Studio and in the newsroom.
01:50:24.320
She's working hard to take on the people and the productivity.
01:50:43.280
So, when you write one slug a month, I think that's not going to be good.
01:50:53.680
But, look, we're there in for the long haul, I think.
01:51:02.900
We've got to save the ability to have local discos.
01:51:05.720
Now, with the LA Fires, it's even more important, right?
01:51:08.660
Look, I called out Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom.
01:51:19.280
And what I tell the public is what I tell them.
01:51:24.520
I personally say, I said, you're not doing the right thing.
01:51:34.800
So, these are the kinds of things that I think it gave us the opportunity to have a say in our community.
01:51:47.420
And I think the next four years will be really, I hope, monumental.
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