All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

Starting point is 00:00:00 Silicon Valley royalty, legendary investor Bill Gurley. Track record's incredible. The legend who backed Uber and Zillow, who's lived through every major tech cycle for over 25 years. You're not just a commentator, right? You've been an operator. I'd love to unlock this latent human potential. There's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster.

Starting point is 00:00:23 You can increase your surface area for luck. I'm not a big fan of these dystopian narrative. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can. Please welcome Bill Gurley. It's good to be here again. Three years ago, I gave a talk on regulatory capture, and this group was quite kind in how they reacted and how that video was promoted. And I'm very happy we got that word out into the public discourse. Obviously, today you hear it quite a bit.

Starting point is 00:01:03 I have a different topic I'm going to talk to you about today. I'm not going to talk about AI. It's a serious topic, and so there might not be as many fun joke parts in it. But it's something that's been weighing on my mind for the past five or six years, and I'm thankful that the team here allowed me to come to talk to you about it, and I'm hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well. I'm going to start by talking to you about some catastrophes that have happened in the world and how humans normally respond to them.

Starting point is 00:01:36 This is the Chamberlain Towers in Surfside, Florida. You may remember in June of 2021 when the building suddenly collapsed. 98 people died. What happened? There were design areas from the very beginning. There was poor maintenance schedule. And then the board of the condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Three different things.

Starting point is 00:02:00 That's kind of the institutional failure. The technical failure was different, and you can see it here. This is a New York Times article. Hopefully they can push play, so you can see it's a 3D article. If they can't make it play, you'll have to watch it on your own. Here we go. But the reason I want you to see this isn't to talk about the details of exactly how this collapsed. It turned out the pool deck was exposed to saltwater air.

Starting point is 00:02:27 It corroded. The pool deck collapsed into the basement, which took out the structural columns. and the building came down. But what I want you to take away from this is the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened, which comes from doing primary investigative work. There were four other parallel investigations that happened. The NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Starting point is 00:02:54 After 9-11, they were assigned as a federal agency to go investigate what happens in a building collapse. These two individuals, Matrini Reisner and Bell, would spend five years on this. Alan Killsheimer is the wolf of building collapses. He's who you call when you want to figure out what happened. The town of Surfside hired him. Judge Randall would convene a grand jury in the state of Florida to investigate this,

Starting point is 00:03:20 and there were 17 victim lawsuits which got put under a single class. Tropin was the defendant or the litigant, and Honsman was the judge that did that. All of these different groups were doing investigations on their own. sometimes running into each other, sometimes helping each other out, but all trying to get at what caused the failure. One particularly heroic group was the Miami Herald. They had just gone through bankruptcy. They had a new executive editor named Monica Richardson, but they went after this hard. The beat reporter, Alan Liebuitz, was on the scene within two hours.

Starting point is 00:03:55 Sarah Blaskey would lead an investigative team. They would eventually find Don Lehman, who was a professor at the University of Washington, and she would join the team. They would staff up to 37 people on this. They have a 3D model that's equally impressive to the New York Times one, and they would deservedly win a Pulitzer Prize for the work that they did. When they won it, Monica Richardson, the executive editor, who also won an award for executive editor at the year from her peers,

Starting point is 00:04:25 said we will continue to investigate the collapse to find answers to how this happened to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again. Now, finding the failure cause doesn't help if you don't prevent. This is a list of some of the changes that went into all the condominium rules in Florida. And thankfully, multiple other states, especially coastal states, adopted them. So you have change that causes prevention. That's what you want to have happen when these things happen.

Starting point is 00:04:53 737 max crash. Unfortunately, there were two crashes, October 2018 and March 2019. For those of you don't know what happened, let me give you the really short version. Airbus had come out with a plane that was incredibly fuel efficient, and they were starting to take share from Boeing. Boeing wanted to respond. If they built a new plane, it required tons of hours of teaching and training, and that makes it harder to sell. So they decided they would attach a fuel efficient engine to an old plane, the 737. That's how you get the name 737 max.

Starting point is 00:05:28 The problem is the engine was too big, and they had to move it forward on the wing. When you move it forward on the wing, the plane is imbalanced. And they had this problem during test flights when it would occasionally tip up. So they wrote a piece of software, secret software, called MCAS, MCAS, and they put it in there without telling anybody. And if the sensor went off and told them the plane was tipping up, the autopilot would push it down. The poor pilot that was flying the Ethiopian airwaste flight, his sensor malfunctioned, the software thought that the plane was tilting up and it pushed it into the ground. That's what happened.

Starting point is 00:06:11 There were many people that investigated this. I call them the six searchers. The U.S. government did a Senate commission, a House commission, and the DOJ went after it. K&KT is the Indonesian firm or the Indonesian agency that had the right to inspect the black boxes. They could tell very quickly the pilot was fighting the autopilot. The press played a key role. Dominique Gates had followed Boeing for the Seattle Times for 16 years. He would win a Pulitzer for his work here. Peter Robeson wrote a book called Flying Blind. You can tell why it would have that title. Fifty-seven whistleblowers sent letters into the Senate to tell on Boeing. The victim's

Starting point is 00:06:51 family showed up and were ever present and put pressure on Congress to make sure something happened. And the head of the pilot union was very upset that they had put this piece of software in there and not told the pilots. Boeing tried to come have a sit down with the pilots union, and they secretly recorded what Boeing said and gave it to the press. And then when they wouldn't respond to Boeing's request, the pilot's union issued FOIA request against Boeing. It's unheard of. Now, in these situations where you have six searchers, you also have blockers. And unfortunately in this case, both Boeing and the FAA were being unhelpful in trying to find out what happened. Boeing initially accused the pilots of not being trained well enough.

Starting point is 00:07:40 The FAA refused document request to the Senate panel. And one thing I would tell you about these big organizations, when you put a spotlight on them, they can feel the way to that spotlight and they circle the wagons. I think part of it's institutional, I don't think they're necessarily even. They have a sixth sense about how to respond when they're put on the spot like that. The other thing that's interesting here is a lot of people came to think that Boeing and the FAA were working as one. Senator Ted Cruz, when he had the head of the FAA in front of the Senate, literally accused him of being captured. There's our favorite word again.

Starting point is 00:08:22 And he even said to him, sir, do you know you don't work for Boeing? One of the real failures here in this case, 45 days after the first crash, almost everyone knew the MCAS software was at fault, and no one grounded the plane. Boeing didn't ground the plane, the FAA didn't ground the plane, and the second crash. I mean, the first crash should have never happened because that piece of software should have been identified, which would have required retraining, but the second crash should have really never happened. I wanted to share with you, I don't want to go through this in detail, but these are the

Starting point is 00:08:58 two different committees in the House and the Senate. And I just want to highlight that they were decidedly bipartisan. DeFazio was the head of the House committee, very active. Ted Cruz and Wicker were super active. No one thought this was anything that should be partisan, nor should it be. It turns out the scientific community has a process they use when they want to do failure analysis. It's called CAPA, captive and preventive action.

Starting point is 00:09:23 And there are five steps. You detect, you investigate, confirm root cause, correct and prevent. And it's all about prevention. You want to stop this from happening again, but you can't skip root cause. That's a requirement. You don't know how to fix it if you don't know actually what happened. Capa is required by law by the FDA and pharmaceuticals and medical device. The aerospace industry has regulations that require this type of process if you have a failure. Now let's move on. Hurricane Katrina 2005. Look at these stats. They're horrible. 1,800 deaths, 400,000 people displaced, damage $125 billion.

Starting point is 00:10:05 What happened here? Well, the Army Corps of engineers that built the levee want you to believe that the water went over the levees. But that's, you know, an act of God, natural disaster. But this was only a hurricane, or category three level hurricane. What in fact happened was the levees gave way from underneath. They washed under. And that's what's unfortunate. fortunate is this was a preventable accident as well. As with these others, you have searchers and blockers. The House had a commission, the Senate had a commission. The press played a key role. Mark Schlesstein and John McQuaid had written a series three years earlier about how this could happen. They would win two Pulitzer's. I actually had a chance to talk with John about it. The NSF,

Starting point is 00:10:52 the National Science Foundation, cared so much about this. They did a bake-off for it to have another team doing investigation, and these two professors from the University of California led that. And then the state of Louisiana hired a team out of LSU, and they all investigated. And I, you know, I talked to John, sometimes once again, running into each other, sometimes blocking, sometimes sharing notes, and they all came to the exact same conclusion that this was a man-made error. The U.S. Corps of Engineers is the one that built the levees, and they naturally, as I talked about, are going to act as blockers.

Starting point is 00:11:25 What's weird here is they asked the American Society of Civil Engineers if they would join the investigation, join the internal investigation. They paid them a million dollars. And over time, they would just get kind of encapsulated inside the Army Corps and become blockers themselves. When this dust-all-settled Raymond Seed, the professor from UCKal, he wrote a 42-page report to the ASCE, explaining all the times that they blocked. That documents on the internet. You can go see it. Like 42 pages. That's a lot of blocking. The other thing that happened here that's great is prevention. These different investigations led to 90 recommendations. Those changes were made.

Starting point is 00:12:10 And the seawalls have held, it was $15 billion. Sea walls have held now for 20 years, which is great. Let me move through a couple more real quickly. This is Fukushima. 2,200 dashes. 154,000 displaced 200 billion in cleanup. What happened here is pretty simple. The seawall in front of the nuclear plant was 5.7 meters. The water went over the wall, took out the generators, the cores started to melt down. There was no way to cool them, and the disaster happened.

Starting point is 00:12:45 There were internal documents that showed they expected tsunamis in a 30-year window to be in the 10 to 15 meter range, and they buried the report. So if you had simply raised the wall, this never happened, but it didn't happen. And in a lot of these cases, there's a combination of a technical failure and an institutional failure. The technical failure is what happens to the product or the surface of the building or the seawall. The institutional failures, why did the humans let that become a weak point here? As with the others, their searchers and blockers, the press played a role.

Starting point is 00:13:20 Martin Fackler, at the New York Times, spent 20 years in the Tokyo Bureau. He would be a Pulitzer finalist. Mr. Yorimitsu took the third place paper and added 20 investigators to his staff to go after this, had a huge impact, won two awards. The Japanese citizens were out in force, both protesting and filing claims. And just like the FAA and Boeing, TEPCO was the company running the power plant. Nisa was the regulator and they blocked and they blocked and they got in the way. And in fact, the failure was partially just a result of regulatory capture once again

Starting point is 00:13:59 that they weren't playing the right role of regulator and regulate E. They had almost become friends. Now, the real hero of this story is a guy named Kyrioshu Kirokawa. He was asked by the Japanese parliament to lead the first ever private investigation they've ever had in their country. history. And they had a lot of power. They were told that no one on the committee could have any institutional connection to the regulator or the power company. They had the full authority to go after anybody in any way. And they had a ton of meetings. Here are some of the stats. Kira Cowell, when he kicked this off, said he had three mandates that he wanted to adhere to. One, he cared about human safety.

Starting point is 00:14:43 He didn't want it to be a battle about nuclear energy. Two, he said the investigation should definitely result in recommendations. And third, he knew the weight of this because of Three Mile Island and Sharon Noble from a global perspective, and he cared about that. Now, interestingly, he's a medical doctor. He's not a nuclear physicist, but he led this commission with a level of grace and professionalism that makes him a hero from my perspective. All these searchers are heroes from my perspective. He would publish a report seven months later. Interestingly, they chose to publish it in English first because they were worried about global transparency and how they were perceived. And in the first sentence, he says, the accident at the power plant cannot be regarded as a

Starting point is 00:15:30 natural disaster. It was profoundly man-made, and it could have and should have been prevented. Powerful. One last one. This is the Challenger shuttle disaster. January 1986, I remember where I was. It was a Tuesday. I was in college. It was a long time ago. Everyone, if you've seen the documentaries, you know what happened here. The O-rings on the solid rocket boosters weren't designed for cold. Turns out it was cold that morning in Florida, and that flaw caused a problem. Unfortunately, the subcontractor that had worked on that piece tried to object the night before that they shouldn't launch and he got shut down. So, yeah, have a technical failure and institutional failure once again. Now I can talk about a lot of searches

Starting point is 00:16:21 and blockers, but I'm just going to talk about one, Richard Feynman, who was already mentioned during the All-In conference this week. Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech. When the shuttle challenger blew up, Ronald Reagan created the Rogers Commission. And they added mostly insiders, Neil Armstrong, they had astronauts, they had generals, they had people from Washington, people from NASA executives, but someone had the idea that they should put Feynman on there. I think they wanted like a stamp of approval from a physicist. The good news is it made a lot of sense. He's one of the most famous scientists of all time. He won a Nobel Prize and he worked on the Manhattan Project. So he had a lot of credibility.

Starting point is 00:17:08 What they didn't know is he's fiercely independent, he's highly truth-seeking, and he has zero-time for unnecessary diplomacy. They didn't know that was coming. He didn't want to do it. He said he hated Washington. I kind of get that. His wife talked him into it, but once he did it, he cleared his schedule.

Starting point is 00:17:29 He took everything off his calendar for six months into the future. None of the other commission members did that. And he started doing investigation. On his own, before he ever went to Washington, he's like showing up at NASA facilities and like asking to meet with people. And when he got to Washington, None of the other members wanted to act that way.

Starting point is 00:17:47 In fact, Neil Armstrong told him, you know, we just evaluate. We don't investigate. It was too late. He was already doing it. Now, three fun facts about this. First of all, there's a famous story, if you watch any of the documentaries, where Rogers runs into Neil Armstrong in the bathroom and says, Feynman's being a real pain in the ass.

Starting point is 00:18:06 The second thing is he staged a stunt on live television. He found some material that was similar to the O-ring and in front of everybody. He dipped it in his cold ice water in front of him and pulled it out and cracked it to show the failure. It infuriated the rest of the commission. And then lastly, when he submitted all his notes to the commission, they wrote a final report. They really kind of smoothed over everything, and he was pissed. And so he called Rogers and said, you know what, take my name off of it. Of course, he'd already done the thing on TV.

Starting point is 00:18:38 There was no way they could take their name off of it. They caved. Appendix F to the report is all of his notes included in there in time. Now, why am I talking to you about all these catastrophes and searchers and blockers and heroes like Kirokawa and Feynman? Because I want to talk to you about COVID-19. In December of 2019, COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths, disrupted every life on the planet and cost our globe $45 trillion. It was particularly hard on children. You've read about learning loss.

Starting point is 00:19:17 My kids were in high school and college. You missed three years of the most formative years of your life. I never want to live through this thing again in my life. But guess what? For all the other catastrophes, I told you what root cause is. Six years later, we don't know. So forgive me if I'm unafraid of what some AI guy's chatbot is going to do to humanity when you can't tell me what this thing already did.

Starting point is 00:20:00 My P-second COVID is way higher than my P-Doom. And if their models are so f-fitting smart, tell me what happened here. Let's get them working on this problem. I want to put this in perspective. I've added up all the deaths and costs of the five catastrophes I talked, walked through with you. And you get to $5,000 deaths and $349 billion.

Starting point is 00:20:32 $3,000 times bigger than that. Feynman in one of the documentaries said, someone was telling him he needed to be nicer, and he said, but seven people died. If you have to get through niceties and seek truth when seven people died, how are you supposed to behave when 15 million people die? I can take it even further. I add up all plane accidents, all hurricanes, all nuclear accidents,

Starting point is 00:20:58 all building collapses, all space accidents. you still only get one-third of the way of what happened with COVID. We should want to know what happened here so we can stop this from happening again. Here's what didn't happen. And this is shocking because all these wonderful people, all these well-intended people did this in the other cases, which were much smaller. And they did it in a purposeful and meaningful way.

Starting point is 00:21:26 There's no committed newsroom with over 30 investigators on COVID. None of the major papers did that. there was no gates or Schlefstein or Flackard like a dog had investigated reporter that had the backing of his newsroom going after this. No bipartisan Senate congressional committees like you had in Katrina in 737 Max. You didn't have a standalone investigation with someone like Feynman or Kirakawa. There was no science-funded investigation. The NIST and the NSF launched them in these other two cases. NIH didn't fund a third-party investigation here

Starting point is 00:22:03 and no massive victim's lawsuit to figure out what happened. So what went wrong? I'm going to share some thoughts with you, and I want you to be aware of a couple pieces of information that I think are kind of new or new to be understood. And I want to make one qualification. This has been bothering me for a long time. I've read a ton.

Starting point is 00:22:23 I'm sure there are people that are smarter than me on this, but I've got to be top 1% in terms of how much information I've consumed. The first thing I would tell you is these five people were relied on as experts. You know the first two, Francis Collins, Anthony Fauci. Peter Dasick runs something called the EcoHealth Alliance. It's a nonprofit that did virology research. Jeremy Farrar was the head of the Welcome Trust that funded a lot of this stuff and went on to work at the Who. And then Ralph Barrick is the top virologist in the U.S. at the University of North Carolina. What I'm here to tell you is they weren't experts, they were blockers. They acted exactly like FAA and Boeing and NASA did in these other

Starting point is 00:23:04 situations. And I'm going to give you four reasons why I know they're blockers. First, they're virology insiders. So as I said, there's going to be a natural instinct to circle the wagon when someone shines a spotlight on you. Two, they led a misinformation campaign to take us off the lead and to tell us not to search. I'm going to tell you about that in a second. Three, They were all outspoken gain of function advocates prior to COVID coming along. And if you don't know what gain of function is, it's when you take a virus and you make it intentionally more dangerous to animals or humans. They felt that that was smart to do. Obama had outlawed it.

Starting point is 00:23:45 They were constantly promoting to try and make it happen more often. Fauci in 2011 wrote an article in the Washington Post, an editorial where he said the pros outweigh the cons. Now, if you talk to any behavioral psychologist, if you've told the world we should definitely do this and the pros out way the con, there's zero chance you can be impartial when it comes to figuring out what happened because to go home at night and think that something you did contributed to the death of 15 million people would be impossible to go to bed. Your brain's much more likely to trick you into just thinking it didn't happen. You wouldn't be allowed on a jury if you had that kind of bias. And the fourth reason, and the most important reason I know they're blockers is because they didn't search. I tell you they stopped searching, but they never started searching.

Starting point is 00:24:32 And they should have been searching. They should still be searching. There are people that did search. They're not at large institutions. The two on the bottom. Drastic is a loosely affiliated group of scientists that came together and shared information. They have a website. You should follow them.

Starting point is 00:24:49 It's like 20 Nick Shirley's that are all virologists. scientist. U.S. Right to Know is a nonprofit that's filed the majority of the FOIA claims here, and you can donate to them, I have. But I want to tell you about these five heroes, they're heroes of mine, that have been actively trying to find out what happened from the very beginning. Alina Chan was one of the first molecular biologists that realized that the virus looks like it was designed for humans. She wrote a book with Matt Ridley, and here's some really good news. In the past couple of years, the New York Times has published two of her op-eds. I would rather it be the investigative team at the New York Times, but it's a start.

Starting point is 00:25:32 They're really good. Read both of them. Catherine Ebon was the first person to really stick their neck out and say, we're not looking at this the right way. She published an article, oddly in Vanity Fair, titled The Fight to Discover COVID Origins. And I think the title is important because the fight was about the discovery process. Emily Copp worked for U.S. Right to Know. She may know more than anybody.

Starting point is 00:25:56 She's been the one uncovering all of these documents, and we've been getting more and more documents each and every day, so we're learning more. Zaneap Tufeki is a professor at Princeton, who also writes sometimes for the New York Times. I'm going to tell you something she did recently that I think is super important. And then Allison Young wrote a book called Pandora's Gamble that looks at all of the lab leak failures that have happened,

Starting point is 00:26:21 to COVID, which is an interesting and relevant data point to study if you want to consider whether or not that was part of the problem. These five women have been attacked for sticking their neck out, some of them directly by the men on the previous slide. And I think that's completely unreasonable. I think they're heroes. Now there's two things I want to tell you about, and then I'll wrap it up. There's two pieces of information you should know about.

Starting point is 00:26:53 I said earlier that the five experts slash blockers had created a misinformation campaign to take us off the lead. I think that's an understatement on what they created a highly successful misinformation campaign to convince everyone that animal spillover was a decidedly determined cause of this, and that anyone that considered a lab lead even thought about or asked a single question was a conspiracy. theorist and they were successful at it. They leveraged the scientific journal community, which they understood. The Proximal Origins paper went out. This thing was written in like a week. There's no way you did an investigation. They just wanted to get it out there. And then the Lancet had a similar one. These papers have been cited over and over again. If you try and like go

Starting point is 00:27:47 through Wikipedia, you just always end up going back to them. So they were highly successful. They also somehow made this thing partisan. Using the word conspiracy theory with Trump, I don't know how it happened, but they were able to get people in their surveys and polls. People, what do you think cost COVID? And if you're Democrat or Republican, you have a different answer. That's nuts. There's no way that should be relevant in this discussion. Recently, more and more this information has come out, and so you have more understanding of how they came to write these papers.

Starting point is 00:28:22 And you can see inconsistencies between what they think and what they wrote. Zaynep put this on Twitter 45 days ago, and I think she chose her words very carefully. She said incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy to cover up and deny the possibility it well may be a lab mishap, orchestrated from the highest levels of the scientific establishment, and a self-serving group of scientists who deliberately misled to public. Those are strong words. She put that up 45 days ago. It has 400,000 views and zero community notes, at least today.

Starting point is 00:28:59 Maybe tomorrow we'll have some. Catherine Ebon was more terse but equally opinionated. She calls it manufactured consensus. If you feel strongly, you think you know what happened in COVID, you need to understand that this happened. It took people off the sense. Three years after COVID, the drastic team uncovered this document. It's called the diffuse proposal.

Starting point is 00:29:21 Who's heard of the diffuse proposal? Raise your hand. This is nuts. Look, it's like three people. Okay? No major journals ever covered the diffuse proposal. There was a survey of scientists who they said, what do you think caused it? If they said animals spillover, they said, have you heard of diffuse?

Starting point is 00:29:41 Only 22% had, 78% said they'd never heard of it. What's the diffuse proposal? three years after COVID, drastic uncovered this document. You can go download it. It's real. It was a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Dasick's company, that connects the top virologist at Duke in North Carolina with the top virologist at Wuhan, the bat lady, a Zhongli. And there's a proposal that they're going to insert a fern cleavage site

Starting point is 00:30:13 at the S1S2 junction of a bat coronavirus, because they think it will make it more viral in animals. And it's in a document. I went to AI. I said, let's do a clean session AI. That means don't look at anything I've ever told you before. If I were interested in helping to solve the origin of COVID, and I was using the scientific principles of Kappa to guide me,

Starting point is 00:30:37 how would I react to finding the diffuse proposal? Look at these answers. Direct investigational lead, highly critical, major investigative lead. Yes, that would be a high priority priority proposal. piece of evidence. Primary document evidence, highest tier evidence class. Most people don't know about this thing. And I would make an assertion, had this document been exposed in January of 2020, we would have had a very different conversation back then, but it wasn't. The searchers are aware of the document. Hopefully now you're all aware of the document. One of the thing I think I need to

Starting point is 00:31:14 say. If you ask these AI bots, what would you do next in your cap of profit process? They say you would go after documents at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. And the searchers have been doing that. Unfortunately, the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina are blockers. They're refusing to deliver the documents. And I would encourage, if any of you have connections to UNC or know anyone on the board, I would encourage you to make them think about whatever they're protecting and whether that's more important than preventing the next one of these. If you want to learn more about this, Matt Ridley just did an interview last March with J. Badacharya at NIH. It's a great way to catch up on everything people have been

Starting point is 00:31:58 learning. And as we look forward, and this is where I'd love your help, let's support the searchers. We have to find a root cause to this thing. We don't want this to happen again. I can't tell you that I speak for science like Anthony Fauci did, but I can tell you I speak for scientific inquiry. There's no one that should be telling you you can't search. That makes no sense whatsoever. You're not a bad person if you search. You're a good person if you search. You have to move through and around the blockers. I don't think you want to attack the blockers. I think Rand Paul is making a mistake, making it about prosecution. We should make it about root cause and prevention. This isn't partisan and should have never been.

Starting point is 00:32:41 If your view on what caused COVID is because of who you vote for, please reconsider that. I would ask the newsrooms to dive in, be like Monica Richardson, and then let's put a truly independent commission together. Let's find our cure a refinement. I'm going to leave you with a quote. I'm way over time. I'm going to leave you with a quote that's attributed Plato that sums up what I've been thinking here.

Starting point is 00:33:08 We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark, the real. The real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light. Thank you. Wow. I got to ask you a question. Stay out here. No, no, stay out here. Stay out here.

Starting point is 00:33:23 I'm going to do a question. Another standing ovation here. Bill, wow. You put a tremendous amount of effort into this. We've known each other for 30 years. I've seen you emotional, I think two other times. One was the Jason Isbell concert. Another time you live.

Starting point is 00:33:43 your top set got counterfeited or something, but this is emotional and this is personal for you. What they did to our kids is really clearly impacted you. Maybe you could talk about why it's so important that we consider the damage that was done to this generation. Well, I mean, for me, it's all back to prevention. Like, you have to stop it from happening again. I have zero confidence right now that if another pandemic started to, we'd have any better way to navigate it. I think we might do worse because of the misinformation campaigns cause a lack of trust. Next time you're not going to listen to them, there's not

Starting point is 00:34:23 going to build ability for anybody to lead. And I'm struck, as you can tell by the presentation, by the difference between the attitude of the people that searched in these other catastrophes, how they were viewed as heroes, and what happened to the people that were looking here. Yes. And it, you repeat. about the power of journalism, Pulitzer's, and investigative journalism specifically, which is different than clickbait journalism. There is something very virtuous about investigative journalism and those type of journalists. Maybe you could speak to that and then explain to us why people didn't go after the Pulitzer here, why they didn't put a large amount of resources to do, because that

Starting point is 00:35:06 seems incredibly suspicious. And I seem to have a recollection of Fauci getting a pardon, which also seems to be a red flag that you didn't bring up. So take those two issues. Well, yeah, so on the investigative part, I mean, one of the reasons I mentioned all the Pulitzer's was just to highlight that fact, right? There is a wonderful video on YouTube, if you're interested in this topic at the Brookings Institute. Three or four of the ladies that I showed led a panel to talk about why the press missed this. And both Catherine and Emily Cop pointed back to the misinformation campaign by the virology experts and how they kind of made it like a faux paw to actually ask questions. But considering the scale of the outcome, it's just horrible that that happened. And I would once again, I would encourage

Starting point is 00:35:54 them, like there's still work to do. There's still information coming out. We're getting closer. Like, come on in. Yeah. And there's something really tragic here in that if you asked questions this time, you were put into a conspiracy theorist who didn't trust the experts and you were the damage for asking questions this is pure evil It's crazy

Starting point is 00:36:18 I mean it's pure evil To take the people would just say Hey is it possible this came out of the Wuhan You guys have You in fact funded gain of research Why is that such a hard question for them to answer it's Well I said I think

Starting point is 00:36:34 A behavioral psychologist would tell you you're able to fool yourself to keep your own sanity. Now, I'll just end with this. Knowing what you've known, you've put thousands of hours into this. You and I have been talking about this for three or four years now, and this has been a passion project of yours, and I really appreciate you sharing it with the audience.

Starting point is 00:36:55 What do you believe, based on what you know now, is the most likely scenario of how COVID originated and what we can learn from it, just based on you being in the 0.1%. I would tell you I intentionally didn't take a side on that here. Sure. And because we haven't found root cause.

Starting point is 00:37:15 And I would celebrate, you know, anyone that's 100% convinced its animals spillover to do research there. I funded U.S. Right to Know. If you want to go search for the animals, I'll fund that too. You should know China has tested 80,000 animals and not found a single crossover. And they have a huge incentive to find. one if they could. Yes. The wet market theory would be absolutely free them from having fingerprints. Right. So there's a massive incentive why hasn't? But if you want to keep looking, go look.

Starting point is 00:37:50 Fauci in these documents that have been uncovered, admitted there were multiple cases prior to the spreader event at the wet market, which also is another problem you have to deal with. Yeah. Listen, Bill, I think this could wind up being the most important work of your life and as your friend. I'm just in awe of your passion and your doggedness. And any way we can support it, I think everybody here and in the audience that are all in, would love to donate to more research being done. So we'll tweet that in the future. Let's give it up one more time for Bill Gurley. Thank you. Thank you, brother. You crush it.

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg - Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

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