Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong: You’re Being Lied to About Cancer, How It’s Caused, and How to Stop It
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 52 minutes
Words per Minute
152.9777
Summary
Dr. David Gergen says cancer rates are on the rise in younger people . Gergen: We're seeing an increase in certain types of cancer, like pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, colon cancer . He says it's a "non-infectious pandemic of cancer," including deadly cancers, including pancreatic .
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
00:23:27.100
what could be like the worst human health crisis in history.
01:10:02.280
So this cell is evolved since the Cambrian age.
01:10:09.020
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.
01:47:52.780
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?
01:48:03.420
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.
01:51:58.540
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