The Joe Rogan Experience - #1494 - Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: June 18, 2020

Bret Weinstein was a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. He is now hosting "Bret Weinstein's Dark Horse Podcast" available on Spotify.

If anybody sounded the alarm that all this madness was gonna come to fruition in the real world, it's you, sir. You were the guy. Like, you were the one who was saying this is what's happening at Evergreen. And if you don't know, go Google it. Brett Weinstein, Evergreen. And now it spills out into the real world. Just like I said it was gonna. You did. I to. You did.

I did. You did. I said it in several different places, and pretty clearly, you know, it could have been a tiny bit more precision, but it was highly accurate. You were highly accurate and often maligned and mocked. Yep. People didn't think it was a big deal. They think you're much ado about nothing. You're making a big deal about some kids that are voicing their opinions on things. But what you recognized early on was that there was an authoritarian aspect of it, a forced compliance aspect of it that's very dangerous.

week or two, the people who mocked me and others, including you, for making too much of what appeared to be college kids going wild on college campuses, some of them have started to call and say, I got it wrong. What do we do now? And actually, I appreciate those calls and those contacts because really that is the question. Yeah, what do we do now to pull it back? Yeah. Get the genie back in the bottle, or as Douglas Murray says, how really that is the question. What do we do now to pull it back? Yeah. Get the genie back in the bottle, or as Douglas Murray says, how do you put the brakes on this thing? How do you put the brakes on this thing? Indeed.

Well, I have to tell you, I'm not optimistic. I think that this is actually the people who are catching up to the fact that evergreen has now spilled over into the world have not caught up to the fact that this is unstoppable at this point with the current configuration. The absence of leadership is going to prevent us from doing what we should do. And that means that the next set of predictions are far more dire. What is your next set of predictions? Well, I would say we are headed for a collision course with history. I mean, we're really staring at many scenarios that end in some kind of civil war. And while I do think it is still possible to avert that outcome, I don't know the name of

the force that gets in its way. It's really troubling. What do you think these kids want? Not just kids. What do you think the people that are facilitating chaos, what do you think they want? Well, I think there's some danger in casting them as one thing because I think we have several things fused together. And that until you understand what has joined forces with what, you're not going to, there's no way to answer the question. All right, let's break it down. Okay. So one thing that we're seeing is,

and we really have to take this back a number of years to understand why it happened, but we are seeing Occupy 2.0. Now, I participated in Occupy. Originally, Occupy made a lot of sense. It was a complaint about the TARP program and too big to fail and the fact that the American public was not protected when those who had created the financial collapse were. And that was a legitimate gripe. And it was also a legitimate gripe at the beginning of the Tea Party movement. Occupy then morphed into an anarchist movement that was just simply hostile to civilization and it became absurd. And so when I say this is Occupy 2.0, this is the anarchist version of Occupy that has now reemerged and it has fused with Black Lives Matter, which, as I've said, lots of different places. If Black Lives Matter just simply meant what those words imply,

I'd be on board with it. It doesn't. It means a great deal more than that. And we're beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks. What else do you think it means? Well, let's put it this way. For some reason, it means abolish the police, which is possibly the stupidest proposal I have ever heard. And it's not like we haven't seen what happens when you do that. Don't you think that that's just a fearful response to the obvious police brutality that we saw in Minneapolis? What's the best response? We got to do something. We need to defund the police.

And then everyone's like, good job. Great, great first step, at least. Well, no, it's a dishonest presentation. And I'm concerned that there, as I've also said in many places, the proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart. And so that is confusing to people, because when you hear folks in the street demanding that we abolish the police, you think, well, okay, that's never going to happen. If it even started to happen, it would be so complex to make it happen that it can't possibly be. They just need to blow off some steam. Nope, that's not right. The fact is, the police in some places can effectively be halted in their tracks. And really, if there's one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen

fiasco, it's that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we're also seeing in Seattle. Yeah. The defunding of the police, which is happening in Minneapolis, what are they doing in replacement of the police? Well, I don't know. And I will say the thing that is trotted out as the example that tells us that defund the police, which doesn't really mean defund the police. It means abolish the police. We are told that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example. that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example.

Well, Camden just – they sort of broke the police down but then built up a new version of the police, right? Yeah, they shifted it to a different jurisdiction. And look, I'm not arguing that we don't need massive police reform and frankly, I'd be up for a discussion of a total rethink of the way we do policing. But the idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane. Mark Lamont Hill had a very good point about the guy who was killed. What is the gentleman's name that was killed in the drive-thru fast food place? Richard? Is that how you say his name? Who was just drunk and compliant and peaceful until they were telling him they were going to arrest him. Even said, get me an Uber. And what his point was, it was a very good point.

Why were the police even called for that? This is a nonviolent person who just happened to be drunk. Was he doing something he shouldn't have been doing? Yes. But obviously compliant, compliant, polite, speaking just like very reasonably until it escalated into this tussle. And then he lost his life. If they had just had some sort of a program where they could, we're going to park your car, sir, or we'll have someone drive your car to your house. We're going to call you an Uber

or we're going to take you home. And we're going to just write you a ticket and work this out in court. You're not going to go to jail. You don't have to be arrested. You don't have to be handcuffed. You don't have to be treated like a monster. You fucked up. You made a mistake, but you're not a bad person. You're not a person who's trying to hurt people. The police should be there for robbers, murderers, rapists. That's what we need the police for. And this is none of those things. This is just a guy who fucked up and he got drunk.

And then as they were speaking to him, clear, real clear, not a bad guy. Like the way he's talking to the cops, just talking to them very reasonably. Even asked for an Uber. Well, look, I am no fan of this aggressive style of policing. I'm not a fan of the militarization of the police. I've actually, I mean, I've had run-ins with the police. I've been hit twice by cops. So it's not that I... What happened?

Well, one of these is a long story that goes back to my first research gig in Jamaica. And the other one was I was participating in a protest. I mean, I was very young. I was probably 20. And there was a protest about homelessness in Berkeley. And frankly, it happened without my awareness that there was going to be a protest, but I happened to be nearby and I was sympathetic. And so I joined it and I was coming down the street with the protest and the cop hit me with a baton, knocked me down. So anyway, I'm no fan of this stuff. I'm not defending it.

But that's not what this movement is really about. And even if it is, to the extent that it is what this movement is really about, it doesn't deal with the root cause. We're dealing with a symptom and it's not a symptom that you can treat in isolation. Well, I had Jocko Willink on the podcast on Monday, and he had a great point. Obviously, Jocko was a Navy SEAL commander and worked with the Navy SEALs to create programs for training. And what he said is that these cops have the minimal amount of training. It's the tiniest amount of training, and then they send them on the street. He goes, 20% of their time should be spent training.

20%. It should be de-escalation drills, simulation drills, educating them on how to communicate with people in various situations, educating them as if one cop is in a confrontation with someone, the next cop should step in and say, let's just calm down. Mike, why don't you go deal with this over there, and I'm going to handle this. And, sir, let's take this from scratch. Like, let's work this out.

And that having higher qualified police officers, better trained police officers, better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this. And these people are they're you know nobody wants to be a cop right now so who's doing this right who's the new generation from now out when when people sign up to be a police officer who's going to do this this it's a you have a few that are going to answer that call because they feel like it's a they have a duty but you're going to have a lot of people that just, they can't get other jobs. And so they choose that. And maybe they're not the cream of the crop. And that's very bad for people with guns and tell other people what to do. I hear two things in what you're saying. And one of them I

fully agree with. The implication of what you just said is that less funding isn't the solution. If anything, more funding is so that we get better qualified people, better training, train them, right? We get people who are better suited to the job in the first place qualified people and we train them, right? We get people who are better suited to the job in the first place, and then we train them better so they know what to do. And I agree with that. The part that I'm worried about is that I also, I think I hear you grasping at straws, and frankly, they're familiar. I hear everybody grasping at straws here. And what I think is not getting said is that brutal policing is a feature, not a bug, right? This is part of a system that is about something else.

And to the extent that I think we can all recognize that there is something absolutely organic about the anger that has caused people to spill into the streets in large numbers, that anger is the result of a process that does not begin with policing. It begins with economic phenomena and political phenomena. And one of the things that spooks me is this movement, in part because it is leaderless, and I would argue rudderless, it is not correctly addressing the actual problem. It is lashing out at things that it can see. It's lashing out at things that it can see. It's lashing out at anecdotes. But the only solution here, the only proper solution that actually saves the republic is a solution that addresses the core problem.

Economic despair, communities that are filled with crime and violence and gangs, and the people that come out of these communities with very little hope, violence and gangs and the people that come out of these communities with very little hope and all the models that they operate under, what they model themselves on is what they see around them, which is all this crime. And they don't have this sense that there's a very clear path out of this. Well, let's, I want to step back to something that will sound too remote to be useful, but I'm sure it isn't. I would claim that this actually goes back to a shift in the Democratic Party during the Clinton administration. During the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party effectively switched. It took up the Republican Party's business model, moving away from defending the interests of common people as its reason for gaining power.

And that created a problem. So during the Clinton administration, we saw the end to aid with family to families with dependent children, we saw NAFTA, we saw basically an abandonment of the core raison d'etre for the Democratic Party. Now, the Republican Party at that point was the party of business, but that doesn't really mean the party of business. What the Republican Party was, was the party of well-established large businesses, which frequently meant, as it was catering to their interests, that it was preventing small businesses from rising up that would threaten its constituents. Now, the Democrats took up this model. They went into influence peddling as well during the Clinton administration,

and they became the party of other businesses. So now you have two parties that are basically dealing with competing business interests, vying for power. But what that does is it excludes the interests of regular folks. And so regular folks have been getting the shaft ever since. Nobody is representing their interests. They're getting wise to it. And they're feeling the effects on the street. They are feeling the system is rigged. It's rigged against them.

It's not even evenly rigged against them. So, you know, in black communities, there's a perception it's specifically rigged against us. And you know what? It is. But the way it is is very subtle, right? It's not a matter of racism being ubiquitous, you know, inside every white head. It's not like that. This has very little to do with modern racism. But what it has to do with is a property of our system. So, you know, there's a cybernetic principle. The purpose of a system is what it

does. It means that don't listen to what somebody says that the system is for. Look at what it accomplishes. That's what it's for. And our system basically has two things that it accomplishes. It basically keeps real change from happening. And the reason it keeps real change from happening is because people who are winning in the present system will continue to win if the system continues to do what it does and they may lose if the system changes and starts doing something else so it creates what I would argue is a kind of organic conservatism. Those with power don't want change because it threatens them.

The other thing that our system does is it reproduces present patterns of distribution into the future. And what that means is racism that has almost died out is still alive and well in a sense because all you have to do is take people who are born into a neighborhood that is devoid of opportunity and continue that pattern. If no opportunity shows up, then people who were oppressed are now going to continue to be oppressed. And so it feels personal, but it isn't. It's just reproducing an existing pattern. disenfranchised and economically distraught from slavery. Like literally from that where we're dealing with the echoes of slavery and it doesn't get addressed. And when people do bring it up and they start talking about reparations, people roll their eyes and people go, oh, so long ago.

But the results of that are still alive today in the South. They're still alive today in many communities that were redlined as recently as the 1960s, right? That's exactly right. And so we basically have set ourselves up for a confused response because there is a subtlety. The fact that ancient racism, people who are dead, their racism still haunts us today through mechanisms of the reproduction of patterns of distribution. And mind you, when people hear distribution, they freak out because they think you're talking about wealth. I'm not talking about wealth and we can talk about why I wouldn't bother. But what we're talking about is opportunity.

Opportunity has been hoarded. It has been concentrated in some zip codes and almost totally excluded from other zip codes. And so you're right. The patterns of slavery moved into Jim Crow and now they've moved into a phase where they are very subtly infused into our system. And so it is causing people to have the sense that there is an enemy and it is out to get me when it's not exactly an enemy that's out to get you. It's a pattern, right? It's a pattern that definitely needs to be addressed. And so the natural place would have been the Democratic Party. But the Democratic Party, because it has taken up with big business, is not going to do it, even though it would be a winning political strategy.

The Democratic Party is more interested in serving the economic interests of its actual constituents than it is serving the interests of its nominal constituents. And so why are you seeing something that looks like a communist revolution beginning in the streets? For the natural reason, which is that people are feeling excluded from their share and they are being excluded. But this revolution that is beginning in our streets is no more coherent or desirable than Maoism and it's going to be brutal in the Maoist way or possibly the way that it unfolded

in the French Revolution or maybe it will be some unique version and it'll get its own name. But if we want the republic to survive, we're going to have to prevent this from happening. And because it's a leaderless movement, who do you even talk to? Who do you reason with? Yeah, that's what's fascinating about it, right? Because it's emerging not just in America, but it's also in England. It's in all parts of the world people are protesting and in many ways I think that's it's probably because love it or hate it America sort of takes the cultural lead for the world in a lot of

ways when it comes to movements and particularly art and and and you know and expression. And I see this leaderless movement and it seems so attractive to young people that do feel disenfranchised by the system. So I watch them. I mean, I've seen so many videos of these people out there screaming and cheering and chanting and they feel like they're a part of something, right? And they are, right?

But what is that thing that they're a part of? Like, what's the end goal? That doesn't seem to have been really clear. Like, there's kids out in, they were out in Woodland Hills out there chanting, no justice, no peace. And I'm like, okay, what justice are you talking about? Are you talking about George Floyd? Well, in that case, it seems like that guy's going to go to jail for the rest of his life. And I don't know if that's justice or not.

That police department has been disbanded. I don't know if that's justice or not. But what is justice and what is peace? It's just a slogan, but they feel good saying it. No justice, no peace. But I don't know what you're saying, but you feel very passionate about what you're saying and i i think if you pulled one of those kids aside and said what's your message and what are you trying to do i think a lot of them would have nothing to say

and that's what that's very concerning to me i'm very concerned about that because it seems like they're very enthusiastic and passionate about an invisible enemy, an enemy that they can't put on a scale. They can't tangibly describe it in a way that I understand it completely. It just seems like the structure of things they feel like is unjust. It is unfortunately a zombified collective fighting a boogeyman that they have invented, which again, doesn't mean that their frustration is not about something very real that does require a solution. But to the extent that these people have de-individuated and they've become a true mob and they are pushing policies that make no sense and endanger us all. I mean, there is no neighborhood in the US that is going to be safer for the

absence of the police. And it really doesn't even matter how corrupt the police are. The absence of the police is going to create a power vacuum and we're going to get warlords, as we're already seeing in miniature in Seattle, as we already saw at Evergreen. So it's not a coherent proposal. But I have a concern that the reason that this is leaderless is that something that I think is unrelated. I really think it's unintentional. there is something about the way that influence happens in this era that has taken all of the would-be leaders and it has trapped them in the gig economy. And so we have a lot of people who would be in an excellent position to steer this justifiable anger at an enemy that is actually worth attacking, to curb the violence and to make this a moment of useful and necessary

change, I would argue overdue change. But those people are, instead of being leaders, what they are is influencers. And influencers don't have the kind of power necessary to shape a movement, and they don't have the position to negotiate on its behalf. And this is very dangerous. Where do you think this escalates to? Do you have a map in your mind of where the territory is? Yeah.

I mean, I would say there are several ways it could go. But unfortunately, the dynamics look almost unresolvable if somebody does not speak for the movement. And with it being unresolvable, you foot soldiers on behalf of this movement and people who won't go along with it. And what I'm trying to raise people's awareness of right now is that there's something in us being raised in the U.S. There's something in us that thinks that the great leap forward in China cannot happen here, that what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here, that Nazi Germany cannot happen here, and the Soviet Union couldn't happen here. I don't know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don't think

it's impossible. I think if there is a characteristic think makes it impossible. I don't think it's impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure. It is the constitution, which I would argue is showing its age. But nonetheless, the values that America aspires to, the reason that the world does pay attention to us and still, even with all of our brokenness, does pay attention to us and still, even with all of our brokenness, allows us to lead it. That reason is that the values that were described were honorable, even if we didn't meet them. But what we aspired to be was great. And I resent Trump's Make America Great Again because there are populations for whom it has simply never been great, right? So I think that last A in MAGA is just a finger in the eye for people and it was designed to be. But the structure, what it aspires to be is great and heading in the direction in which it could be

great for everybody is obviously the right thing to do. But what we are now doing and the thing that troubles me most about this movement is that if you listen to it closely, and I have listened to it very closely, it is explicitly about disassembling the very things that make the West marvelous, right? It is anti-science, right? It does not want policy based on science. In fact, it wants- How so? Well, I mean, you saw last week, presumably, that it got Nature, the journal Nature, Science Magazine, Caltech. It got all of these just absolutely top-level scientific institutions to broadcast the hashtag shutdown STEM. What?

Oh, yeah. No, I'm not aware of this at all. Oh, well, and this is another thing. We're losing our minds because, to me, the idea that you would be unaware of this is hard to imagine because it was so— There's just too much going on. It was so thoroughly all over my feed, though. But I'm discovering this. There's stuff absent from my feed, too, that I should know about, and I'm finding the same thing.

Well, here's the thing. I don't read my feed. Well, you don't read your Twitter feed, but you're plugged into enough people. You have enough conversations in this room. Things have to be like almost nuclear before I'm paying attention to them these days. Just for my own personal sanity, I've stepped away from almost all social media other than posting. Yeah, it's actually – if I can say something perfectly weird. I don't really aspire to great wealth.

I never have. But there is part of me that wants to be wealthy enough that I can afford to ignore my feeds. Right? I can't now. I have to be plugged in. But anyway, the thing that's really concerning here, and I don't want this podcast to be all about concern. Here it is. Thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism in STEM. More than

5,000 scientists and two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the day to address racial inequalities in science. The strike follows two weeks of demonstrations spurred by the police killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white police officer. People on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag shutdown academia, shutdown STEM, and strike for black lives. Shutdown academia is terrifying. Shutdown STEM is equally terrifying. But I mean, like, what takes its place?

What do you expect? Well. If you shut down academia like what do they what are they saying when they say systemic racism in stem what does it mean it's representation in terms of like the like what are they saying so this is so sad because truly if you if you really wanted to uh to raise black people out of the quagmire, the economic quagmire they find themselves in, if you wanted to do it en masse, you would arm them with the most powerful tools, right? The most powerful tool and the tool that is best positioned to address biases, especially subtle biases, is science. That's what the scientific method does. It's

one reason for existing is that it takes that which you think and allows you to see why it is wrong, right? It takes your biases and forces you to see what's wrong with them. That's what science is for. Now, the reason that this movement is attacking STEM has to do with the connection of this movement to critical theory. And critical theory didn't come from the sciences. The word theory is basically pilfered, right? It's being used in a most ironic fashion. Critical theory is a narrative that's now becoming a religious movement and it is anti-STEM on the basis that it claims that STEM itself, science itself, is racist inherently. What do they mean when they're saying critical theory?

Yeah. What does that encompass? Well, my understanding is that critical theory was born as an honorable investigation of biases that exist inside of our court system, racial biases. And that it has now morphed into something that its originators don't recognize and don't respect, that it has become basically – I mean you've had Jordan Peterson on your podcast many times, once with me. And what he talks about with respect to these are cultural Marxists and they are wielding this postmodern doctrine. What he's talking about is critical theory, right? Critical theory is basically a Trojan horse that exists in academic departments that are dedicated to its study. And what it does is it un-invents progress in other fields. And that's a very uninteresting process when it's hiding away in some corner of your university where you don't have to listen to it.

But what has happened is it has now reached enough people that it has spilled out into public. And the nonsense that you hear about shutting down academia, shutting down STEM, abolishing the police, all of this is standard fare in those phony departments. When you say uninvinvents progress. Yeah. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean that we have a system and I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody. But we have a system that accomplishes a great deal. style of thought, all of these departments that end in theory, that don't actually function by normal rules of logic or the scientific process, these things are an attack. They're like an

autoimmune disease of the academic culture. And by and large, the scientific part of the academy keeps its head down and it stays away from people who believe in this stuff and it tries to do its work. But what has happened is that the dynamics, the demographics have changed such that these departments which weren't taken seriously by the sciences are now dictating terms to the sciences, which couldn't possibly be more dangerous because to the extent that the argument more or less is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of – even if you could level the playing field inside of the US by doing that, which you can't, but even if you could, this would so hobble us in the world that it would be an insane policy to pursue. Is there any debate going on about this? Clearly what they're saying is if you're looking at the vast majority of the scientists, they represent – what is it? European Jews are a lot of them. There's a lot of various people of European ancestry, Asian folks, less African-Americans, less Africans. So they're saying that because of this, this is clear evidence of racism.

Yeah, which is total nonsense. What is it evidence of? Well, it's evidence of a number of things. And, you know, I find myself in two places on a lot of these arguments. On the one hand, somehow I'm sitting here on your podcast defending academia when on any normal day I would be telling you academia was so incredibly broken and science has been so incredibly corrupted by its contact with the market that we have to fix these things because that is in and of itself a threat, you know, to the West. But we have to fix these things because that is in and of itself a threat to the West. Here, I find myself saying, wait a second. These people are actually telling you what they think.

They think science is the enemy. And instead of democratizing the tools of science and giving them to the people who need them most, they want to end science. So the problems are several. Unfortunately, they're not tremendously interesting. They're sort of dry inside baseball stuff. But I think we have to cover them, though, just to sort of take the legs out from under this racism argument when it comes to representation. Sure. So first of all, let me just say academia is tremendously liberal. And I mean that in both senses.

Let's take the honorable part of it, right? Inside of a university, there is every desire to bring people who do not look like the old white guys that have done so much of the past work in science. There is a desire to broaden. broaden. So it is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them and then behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color. It's not like that. There is a desire to have those people show up and get the job because for one thing, it takes the pressure off. To the extent that departments don't look like the demographics of the country in which these departments are housed, you know, that raises questions. And so there's a desire to bring in anybody who makes it clear that that's not going on. However, let's say that you were

black and you grew up in a neighborhood where the odds were stacked against you and you made it. Let's say that, you know, you had people who said wise things to you and they got you to focus on the right stuff and you managed to dodge the stuff that captures so many and you made it, right? Let's say you got into Harvard, you got a really good quality degree in a proper science. Well, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to go into academia? That would be insane because I don't know what the numbers are. I don't know what fraction of people who get PhDs actually get the job that they've trained for, but it's tiny. Is it really?

I'll be like one in 20. Really? Yeah. Because there's only so many positions and every year you're graduating hundreds and hundreds of people with those degrees. Well, but there's also a very good reason for this. I mean it's a terrible reason, but there's a very easily comprehended reason. So universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grants. So if you get a million-dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right?

So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can. And they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory, that is to say proper scientific theoreticians like me, and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments because big expensive experiments have big grants and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is you would want to free those people from teaching. And you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of

the university. And the way you do that is you bring them on as graduate students, and you pay them an appalling wage. You claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students. And they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university for incredibly low amounts of money. They live under poor conditions and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense.

But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university in order that the people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job. And it's a racket. So I wasn't aware of that at all. I didn't know how it works. Yeah, it's a racket. And the person you should talk to, the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running, that effectively a fake it, you don't want to go to graduate school in the sciences because it's a dumb move.

You're going to take having gotten your head above water and then you're going to voluntarily drown. And it doesn't make any sense. You're much better off even as bad as being a doctor has become. It used to be a great job. Now it's kind of a sucky job, but you're better off doing that because at least it's a job. You'll pay off your loans, you know, you'll make it. And so basically what we see is that there are lots of reasons that a rational person from certain demographics is less likely to go into the sciences. That's not racism in the sciences.

It's again, one of these echoes of a past racism or a past indifference that is having huge impacts on the present. Okay. So these people that want to, that think that STEM is racist and they want to dismantle it. What do they propose? Like what do they propose in replacement of STEM and academia? So what they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it. I will answer your question. Okay. But I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous. And the only reason that I'm so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly

and I watched this happen at every- You've talked to them directly, so you know this is actually what they want. Well, I can't say they, because undoubtedly there's variation, but I can say that to the extent that I've actually had these conversations with people, I was left completely shocked by – there was an example at Evergreen where we were in a faculty meeting. And I said that the proposals that we're moving through were a threat to the enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the enlightenment, but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.

What did they mean by enlightenment is a problem? Well, so here's what I say to people who ask me about this, students in particular. The enlightenment was a European project, right? It definitely had a light skin tone, right? It was European men. It was not a Jewish project. But I am not embarrassed about taking the tools of the Enlightenment and wielding. They don't belong to Europe, right?

They're human. They're human tools. They were a belong to Europe. They're human. They're human tools. They were a discovery in Europe. And arguably the discovery in Europe happened because of unfair exclusion of other people. But at some level, who the fuck cares? These are the most powerful tools ever. And you can't uninvent them. The thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible.

distribute them as broadly as possible. But if you're in critical theory, first of all, if you end up in critical theory, any one of these fields, women's studies, queer studies, whatever it is, you have already foregone this option. You don't end up in critical theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect, you have people who don't stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider because they wouldn't go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors. So let's take a sidestep here. Critical theory. When you're talking about gender studies or queer studies, why do you think those are not valid avenues for people to pursue? Well, because the method is non-existent. If you were to do these things properly, you would study them with the tools of STEM, right? But we know that's not what goes on

inside of these departments. And we also know that the product doesn't add up from the point of view of science. You can't take the claim, for example, that if a man decides that he is a woman, then he is a woman. That's not a valid claim. It just doesn't stand up. And you can't claim that sex is a spectrum either. That claim doesn't stand up. These are empty. And we could have a discussion about what we are to do in light of the part of gender that is flexible. But we're not having that conversation because we've got an ultimatum on the table. Either you agree sex is a spectrum or you're the enemy. or you're the enemy. So all I would say is just empirically this is what happens. Now I will also say one of the most telling incidents that happened during the Evergreen riots is now finally it's been covered by PBS. I've talked about it on my podcast.

A student of Heather and mine, an excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black. Her mom is Afro-Caribbean. She was known to be my student and Heather's student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened. And what I'm telling you is-

What did they say when they say you're a race traitor for studying science? What specific discipline? Well, she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me. Discipline. Well, she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me. And they said you were a race traitor for studying evolutionary biology because. Because science is racist. Yo.

It's nonsense. And I hear you trying to parse it as if it makes sense. I just don't understand as a person who spent three years barely paying attention in college, I don't know how it got to that. I don't know how that becomes an actual course. I don't know how that gets funded. I don't know how that you can get a degree from that. Well, so what I've heard of late, and it may be James Lindsay who is the originator of this phraseology, but there's a term, racism of the gaps. And racism of the gaps is a reference to the God of the gaps hypothesis. Anything we can't explain in science is explained by God, which is obviously nonsense. But racism of the gaps says

any place where that we see a success differential, the explanation is inherently racism. success differential, the explanation is inherently racism. So if we see an absence of black people in math, obviously the answer is racism. Do they apply that in areas where black people excel? No, because this is a self-serving modality. Like hip hop. Right. And so let's go back to Odette for a second. Trying to parse what they're saying as if it has content, logical content, is a mistake. Trying to parse it as a tactical move makes a lot of sense. Let's imagine that Odette was not the courageous person that she is and that she had caved. Right.

Imagine you're cornered, you know, you're alone, you've got a mob that's actually physically confronting you for studying science. If she was not a person of strong character, she might have signed up with them. If she had signed up with them, then A, now they have a potentially powerful ally, right? A black person, former student of, or at that point, I guess, current student of Heather and mine, who would say, yes, in fact, science is racist, evolutionary biology particularly. So I was in that class, yada, yada, yada. And people are easily influenced and that being bullied by that would probably cause a lot of people to cave into that and give into that just for conformity, just so that people accept them. Yes. And so thank goodness that Odette is somebody who is of incredibly strong character, who really got the message of evolutionary biology very deeply. And there's nothing that they could have said or threatened her with that would have caused her to make the move that they wanted her to make. But processing it tactically is important. What they're doing is tactical.

And what they did with shutdown STEM, tactical. They were proving their power, right? They were able to get the most important scientific institutions to broadcast a demand to shut down STEM. That's an amazing level of power. And actual scientists that are in disciplines that are legit, like evolutionary biology, went along with them? Well, you know, I contacted Richard Dawkins as this was happening, because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested, you know, he hadn't made a statement, and I thought it would be powerful for him to do it. He was totally unaware it was going on, right? So you have the most

important institutions broadcasting this thing. Something about our environment is not calling it to the attention of people who might be in a position to say something. And the whole thing is, it's setting us up. We're in tremendous danger. And what do you think their motivation is? Power. Power. Well, again, we have to be careful about- So what happens if they get through they shut down stem then what do they do how you know did they are they thinking

this far ahead they're not playing this long game okay I would just I would tell people who aren't aware of me and what I think and believe that I am very progressive. I am very interested in making a fair system. As am I. As am I. I know you are. So what I'm about to say sounds like one of those right-wing crazy things. What they want, well, imagine the following. Look, first of all, let's talk about reparations for a second. Okay. Okay? I am not a fan of the idea of reparations. I think it would be a terrible failure.

It would be a disaster. But I do believe that something of very substantial magnitude is justified. I just don't think reparations is the answer. I completely agree. Okay. I think reform in terms of communities. I think spending massive amounts of money to rebuild communities and give people hope. Yes.

Economic opportunities. Massive investment in communities that have been systematically frozen out. And I would put American blacks and American Indians at the top of the list because I believe they have a special claim. Native Americans are particularly distraught because they've been subjugated to this weird position when they're stuck on these reservations. So we'll come back to this in a second maybe. But I think that there's something very special that happened with blacks and with Indians. It's not exactly alike, but it has to do with their different origin stories, that these two populations have both suffered a parallel, I don't even know what to call it, an obstacle that doesn't – that makes them unlike other Americans.

So not in favor of reparations but I would be in favor of something that did the job that reparations are imagined to do. Okay. Okay. What this movement is, is an attempt to create a slant in every single interaction that does the job of reparations. It's reparations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in every room, in every institution, in every context. right? Now, that will be the uninvention of America. It is, in some weird sense, a mirror for the America that blacks and Indians have faced. They have faced an America in which everything was slanted against them. It has grown less so. But again, we have the echoes of that deeply slanted America that are broadcast into the present at a high level of intensity. But you cannot do reparations inside of every institution, every hour, every discussion. That is not a plausible plan. Even people who support the idea of monetary reparations as a solution, if they understood the dynamics of trying to infuse it into every

interaction, there is no way it could possibly work. And it invalidates all of the most important principles on which America runs. So we are really talking about uninventing America and substituting a reparations program for it, which it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard. And think for a second. You're trying to imagine what the hell I'm talking about. Imagine the courts, right? Now, there is a problem. There's a process called jury nullification.

called jury nullification. And Eric has pointed out that jury nullification is a huge hazard in an era where people are saying as much nonsense about who's guilty and who's innocent and what it has to do with race as we have, because effectively, you can instantly create a situation in which the law doesn't apply to certain folks because of the color of their skin, right? That would be an advantage. You could argue that it was compensatory for years of being on the other end of that deal, but it cannot be made to function. But the other thing is also possible, right? You can not only have the law not apply to people on the basis that they have a skin color that suggests they've had a raw deal, but you can also make the law apply to people because of their skin color. We can have show trials, right? I was effectively exposed to the equivalent of a show trial at Evergreen, right? I was convicted of racism. And it happened that for various reasons,

I knew damn well that the charge was completely empty based on my history as a human being. And so I felt I could stand up to it and withstand it. And I guess in a way I did. On the other hand, my wife and I were driven out of the college. So yes, I survived it. But I didn't survive it intact. Right? I made it somewhere else. I mean, it would be a perfect fit for the Maoist part of this movement's ethos. I mean, we're already seeing struggle sessions, people being forced to admit things that aren't true, right? Do you think part of the influence of this is that we, particularly white Americans, realize that there's a significant difference. There's a significant disparity between opportunity that people in these disenfranchised communities of color have versus us. There's a difference. And so when someone from these critical theory disciplines, should I even say discipline? Lack of discipline.

When they promote this, people that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country, that there is a situation in this country, and to voice any sort of disagreement with this movement that seems to represent the idea that there is a problem, you become a part of racism. So in order to stand out as not being racist, you are literally abandoning the ideas of science. You're abandoning all this just so that you don't get labeled on the wrong side of history. Yes. And I was alerted to something a few days ago that I was not aware of, which is going to sound far afield. But what I ran into was somebody describing what had happened to American POWs in the Korean War who were being administered by the Chinese. POWs in the Korean War who were being administered by the Chinese.

The Chinese had a very sophisticated mechanism for basically brainwashing. And the mechanism was something that I have seen in this movement, but didn't understand had a formal history. One always imagines brainwashing to be this very aggressive thing. But the incrementalness of the move that was arranged for these POWs was the key feature. So the first thing that apparently POWs were asked to do was to write essays. And it was really important that they write it rather than just say it. But that they write essays on topics that any reasonable person would think was fair. Like America is not perfect. You could write that essay. I can write that essay. There's no moral compromise in it. I'll write that essay. Or the other example was unemployment is not a problem

under communism. Okay. that doesn't strike me as a bridge too far. Communism has lots of problems, but maybe that's not one of them. So people were marched from these very tiny concessions where really the concession was just you're going to write what I tell you, right, rather than any part of the content to an absolutely massive shift in their understanding. And along the way, they were, for example, induced to write more substantial concessions with some very tiny reward, like a piece of fruit or something, something that's actually desirable. And if things are scarce, you can understand wanting it, but it's not such a big concession that you can

say to yourself, oh yeah, I said something I didn't believe because I got a lot out of it. So you actually talk yourself into imagining that you really do believe the thing you wrote. You must. Otherwise, you wouldn't have written it. So what I'm seeing is all sorts of excellent people making the first concessions onto or the first steps onto the slippery slope. And it's spooking the hell out of me. So, you know, I must say I saw Dave Chappelle's 846 thing. And like you, I thought, wow, do I get what he's saying?

On the other hand, I really thought he got it wrong. What did you think he got wrong? I really thought he got it wrong. What did you think he got wrong? Well, what he effectively said, what he effectively suggested was that he was on board with the movement. And it was clear that this was based on his massive frustration at how deaf the white population has been to black suffering, which I agree with. I think the white population has been largely deaf, at least in recent decades. But I don't know how much he knows about what the movement actually is and what it wants. In other words, I have the maximum respect for Dave Chappelle.

I have for a very long time. I think he's tremendously insightful. But I don't know. I mean, I think he's got the same problem tuning into the world that everybody else does, which is he gets some slice that's fed to him. Or maybe like you, he is not tuned into these things. And so he gets whatever crosses the threshold some other way. And maybe he's not seeing that this movement is A, spouting nonsense about getting rid of science. And he's not seeing that this movement is a spouting nonsense about getting rid of science and he's not seeing that it's behaving in a Maoist way. And he is seeing the videos that we all see that suggest to us that there is a very serious problem with race-based police brutality. And the problem with that, of course, is that you can't do that analysis with

anecdotes, no matter how egregious they seem. Is it weird to connect all those things together, though, when you're saying the movement, if this movement doesn't have any leaders, and you're talking about police brutality, but you're also talking about Maoist ideology that weasels its way into academia? Is that really the same thing? Is it all one thing? Well, I don't, you know, multi-headed Hydra. I don't think it is one thing, but I think it's like a coalition of things. And I think each of those things is comprehensible, you know, in isolation, and we can understand what happens when you fuse them together. And all I can say is we did see this in miniature at Evergreen.

And people did say, you're making too much out of it. And they were wrong. But you saw it on the ground. The problem with seeing it from a distance is you can minimize many things when you don't experience the emotions. You don't see the fear. You don't see people running through the parking lot with baseball bats looking for you like they were doing. You know, it's a different thing when you're actually there and you realize that this mass

hysteria does lead to pretty despicable acts and that there is sort of a mob mentality that grips people and it allows people to be capable of some pretty heinous shit. And what we see here in America is such a combination of factors, right? You have COVID, which shuts everything down. So people are stuck at home for all these months. Then you have this George Floyd thing, which is one of the worst cases of police brutality I've ever seen because it was so torturous the I mean if you really know how long eight minutes and 46 seconds is with someone leaning on your neck you would know how fucking horrific that is and then you have the looting yeah and then

you have the mass movement of all these people taking the streets saying we've got to change things we know things are wrong and on top of that you have looting and on top of that you have businesses failing because of the looting you have chaos people getting their lives destroyed you have so many things happening all together at once to call it a a movement it don't it's like one of the things we were talking about with black with uh excuse me occupy wall street back in the day was we were saying they don't seem to know exactly what's going on but it's like the immune system surrounding something that's wrong like it's like something's going on here like all these white blood cells are flooding into this area i forget who made that analogy it might have been me it was so long ago but we're like they don't necessarily know what to do or what it is but they want to

camp out around that area and figure out what the fuck's going on. Yeah. And like I said, at first I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it. And I even thought the leaderlessness of it was great for two weeks. And then it became very, very stupid. But yeah, it is an immune reaction. And that's a normal part of history. And that's a normal part of history. You know, revolutions are not started by a bunch of intellectuals who have some idea what system they want to correct. It's people who are fed up.

And so that's what Dave Chappelle was responding to. And I totally get it. danger of being marched in the direction of things that are anti-American, that are in fact anti-black because we are trying to grant the right concessions on the right points and it's a case in which you can't track what's really happening well enough to do it surgically. So I really – I'm so afraid to actually go down this next road. But you raised the case of, you know, George Floyd and what we saw on that tape. I want you to think about the question of what you actually saw on that tape and what it actually tells you, what you actually know and what you don't know. I'm worried. Look, best possible thing from the point of view of the well-being of the world would be that Derek Chauvin is guilty of murder and he is convicted of murder and he is sentenced for the maximum allowable time. That would be the best thing. Agreed.

I'm not sure that that's actually what is supposed to happen. Why is that? that that's actually what is supposed to happen. Why is that? Okay. The question is, did you witness a murder? Are you sure you saw a murder? What do you mean by that?

Well, murder is a crime. Yes. Okay. Presumably, there was a lot of complaint about the fact that Chauvin wasn't charged with first-degree murder, right? But he didn't – what story would make it sensible that he wanted to kill George Floyd, that that was his purpose? Well, you know – do you know that he knew him? You know he knew him in advance and that they had had words and they had had problems when they worked together because Derek Chauvin was a shithead to customers. And he was violent to customers. And he and George Floyd worked as bouncers in the same establishment.

Yep. And that's the, that's the, the word. Well, from the point of view of the wellbeing of the world and from the point of view of us all processing this in some sense, I mean,

you know, with the understanding that there is nothing that could possibly happen in an investigation or in a court that's going to bring George Floyd back. Right. Right. So with that in mind, the best thing that could happen is that he is actually guilty of something egregious. He's charged with it. He's convicted. Right.

But what makes you think that it's not murder? This is what's confusing to me. I'm not saying it isn't murder. It may well be murder. But I'm saying that what we saw doesn't tell us that it was murder. Why is that? Okay. saw doesn't tell us that it was murder.

Why is that? Okay. So there are several things about what we saw, what we didn't see but now know, and things that are possible. Okay. Okay. One thing is that it appears that George Floyd was complaining that he could not breathe before he was on the ground. Okay.

That he may have been having a heart attack before he was on the ground. Now, again, even if that's true, I would think he obviously was deserving of immediate medical attention. And so I'm not arguing that it would not be criminal if he was dying of a heart attack, and that's ultimately what killed him. But what I'm saying is that were it the case that he was having a heart attack, he had apparently methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system at the time, were it the case that he was having a heart attack- But when you say in his system, was it just because he tested positive for it,

or was it active in his system? Was it something that he had taken fairly recently, but the effects of it were no longer active? I'm not an expert, and maybe I misunderstood what I read, but I thought that these things were recently in his system rather than just detected at trace levels. I don't know. I don't know either. So let's leave it.

So again, I am not rooting for him to be. The reason why I bring that up is coming from someone who works very closely with the UFC and USADA. One of the things that I'm finding out is that their methods of detection now are insanely sensitive. And you can detect incredibly small, non-psychoactive amounts months and months and months after use. Okay, well then it's obviously not relevant. The possibility that he was having a heart attack is clearly relevant. It's possible.

I mean, if he did say he can't breathe, it also could be that he was struggling and that there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe. Or that reports that he said he couldn't breathe before he was on the ground are erroneous. That's also possible. It could be a lie. the ground are erroneous. That's also possible. It could be a lie. When you look at what that man did, when you look at what Derek did to George Floyd with his knee on that man's neck, I could 100% kill a man that way. Well, okay. So here's the problem, okay? Apparently, that technique is a technique that is authorized by the police department in question under some circumstances. And apparently those circumstances were present.

In other words, it may be that the policy of the Minneapolis Police Department – Needs to radically change. No. It may be that the policy killed George Floyd through Derek Chauvin. Because the policy allowed him to do that? Well, maybe it even required him to do it. I don't know. But the guy wasn him to do that? Yeah, well, maybe it even required him to do it. I don't know. But the guy wasn't resisting. That's the problem. When he's on the ground, he's just got his knee on the guy's neck. Did you watch the whole video? I did watch the

whole video. There's another problem with the way he did it. There's a drain there. You see that cement drain? And his neck is laying on the edge of the cement drain. It's like a bone. When you choke a man, you don't use the meaty part of your body. You use the bone. And that's essentially that divot, that drain is laying right where his neck is. I don't know if you placed him there on purpose, but I wouldn't doubt it. Well, I'm not saying Derek Chauvin didn't kill George Floyd. I'm not saying it wasn't racially motivated.

I'm not saying that this wasn't murder in the first degree based on prior interactions. I'm not saying any of that. was Derek Chauvin being a dick and using the policy of the police department and being indifferent to its effect, then that is for a court to decide whether or not it is murder. In other words, if he was doing the policy as the policy is laid out based on the criteria that would trigger the policy. Have you read any of this? What do you mean? About the policies? I've read a bit. What have you read?

What did it say? It said, I'm going to struggle for the words that the acronym stands for. There is a situation called EXDS. Extreme, boy, I don't have it. Maybe Jamie can find it. But again, the real point here is not that he is innocent. I don't believe him to be innocent.

My real point is that we are all acting as if we have seen with our own eyes something that is unambiguously murder. And I don't believe that we saw that. I believe we saw something that may well have been murder and may well not have been murder, and that the way that we determine whether it is murder is in a courtroom with due process. Well, isn't it through autopsies? Because independent autopsies did find that asphyxiation and the cutoff of the blood supply to the brain were responsible for his death. Now, there was a police department autopsy that was refuted by two individual independent

examiners. You know what you need? What? You need a court. You need a court to examine the evidence. You need a court to examine the evidence, and you need it to be done in front of a jury that is free to decide either way. And here's what I'm really concerned about. Because we all think we saw a murder, right? We think it's unambiguous. We think it's open and shut. The entire case is going to unfold in that context, right? And if he is exonerated, we are going to assume that this is a miscarriage of justice. Yes. Right? Which means, I mean, put yourself in the position of a member of the jury. If you don't think this was murder, you may well be the person who stands in the way of a judgment and causes who knows what to erupt.

This is, we're talking about Rodney King times a thousand. Times a million. Times a million. Particularly if you look at what happened just from the reaction to this one murder. Right. I mean, we've seen cops murder people and we've seen a minimal reaction by the public, just protests and people get angry. This erupted around the world.

Nobody anticipated this or saw that, but it speaks to the powder keg of circumstances that we were talking about, all this different packed dynamite of COVID, the lockdown, financial distraught. But can we agree that it could be that his being found not guilty would set in motion events that could be right up to civil war. Catastrophic. So if that is the case, what I believe is likely to happen is that he's likely to be convicted irrespective of the evidence. He's going to be sacrificed. Right?

And you agree that that might be for the best of everybody. Well, what I want to point out is that we don't behave that way. We don't behave that way. The center of what we are as Americans is a country in which you are entitled to due process in a court of law that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. that your guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And if we are going to start sacrificing people because there is a mob in the street threatening to turn the place upside down, then, I mean, you know what that is, right? That's the uninvention of America.

And, you know, you can't use the term lynching for it because of the racial connotations of that term. But if we are talking about sacrificing individuals because a mob has decided that they are guilty, then we aren't America anymore. I think when you look at the spectrum of probability, if you had a pie of is he guilty of murder? Did he murder him by leaning on his neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds, or did he not? I would say did he not is so small, you would have to have a fucking magnifying glass

to look at it. I'm an expert on choking people. I understand what happens to the brain when you cut off the blood supply. I've had it done to me. What that guy's doing is torture. And I think I could, I know I could kill a man that way. I know I could.

If I decided to lean on someone's neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds with all my weight, that's a dead person. There's no way you're going to survive. All right. If your neck, one side of your neck is on the concrete and the other side is 200 pounds of my body all focused on my knee and i'm balancing my my weight on your neck you're a dead man okay so uh but that's what we saw well right i i know what you're saying that maybe he also had a heart attack but the idea that those two are not related seems to me to be outside of the realm of possibility so So I want to make a trade with you.

Okay. Okay. I absolutely hope that you're right. Okay. I hope this is clear. But in exchange for that, I want the agreement that the American thing to do is to convict him by the evidence in a court of law. And if the evidence is not sufficiently compelling, that's not what's supposed to happen, that that would be un-American for that to be

the way he was convicted. I agree. And we are convicting him in the court of public opinion, but we're doing it based on a video of a man putting all his weight on this guy's neck for eight minutes and 40. That's, I mean, when you roll in jujitsu class generally a rolls between five minutes maybe 10 minutes or something like that and the idea of a man being on my neck the entire time is fucking terrifying oh i believe i saw a tremendous miscarriage of justice what i don't know and what i don't think any of us understand is what is the policy did he exceed the policy did he enact the policy i just can't imagine what is the cop would think that that was the way to do it it's one thing if someone is resisting arrest and they're very dangerous and you're you're handcuffing them and

you put your knee on your neck on their neck to hold them down in place and i think that is a valid move if you've a guy and he's got a gun or he's wired on PCP and he's very strong and there's a bunch of you trying to hold on to the guy and someone leans on his neck, I'm all for that. But then when you're done,

when you got him cuffed, let him go. He's not a threat. That guy wasn't even moving. He was just begging for his life. I wanted George Floyd to be taken to a hospital. It seems clear to me

that he needed to be taken to a hospital. But I don't know. Okay, here we got it here. Best I could find, I think. Officer can also use two type of neck restraints in less severe circumstances. One is called a conscious neck restraint, which is an officer applies light to moderate pressure to the side of a person's neck, but does not intend to knock a person unconscious.

That could be used against people who are actively resisting. So that alone just dismisses this whole idea, because that's not what was going on there. That guy was not actively resistant. The other neck restraint is one meant to render someone unconscious. That could be used when someone is exhibiting active aggression and for life-saving purposes. Again, this does not apply. Department policy said neck restraints can't be used against people who are passively resisting. So right there it says neck restraints can't be used against people who are passively resisting. So right there it says neck restraints should not have been used against George Floyd because he was not violently resisting. That's not what was going on.

He was not exhibiting active aggression. He wasn't doing that. He was begging for his life. He was calling out to his dead mother. His mother, I know. It's horrific shit. I am feeling the need to emphasize, I do believe I saw a miscarriage of justice,

but I know that the American thing to do is to have all of this out in a court of law where all of the appropriate arguments are on the table. I agree with you. I don't see a way where he wasn't guilty. But I do agree with you that he should be tried in a court of law. But just based on that,

I say he's guilty. And then we're also looking at the comparison between the Eric Gardner case, which I also thought was horrible. And I also said, as a person who's an expert in martial arts, that was a chokehold. They were saying it wasn't a chokehold.

It was a chokehold. But here's the thing about the Eric Gardnerner case they should have never fucking arrested that guy in the first place he was just selling loose cigarettes like what kind of a world we're living in where you grab a guy by his neck because he's selling loose cigarettes and when those guys did tackle him and take him down to the ground and held on to him when he said he can't breathe he also appeared to be in poor health and it was likely that the altercation, which probably wouldn't have killed you, killed him. And it was awful, terrible. But this was 100 times worse.

Well, can we come – you say what kind of a world are we living in where somebody selling loose cigarettes has this kind of interaction? Yes. And we can say the same thing for George Floyd, right? We're talking about – Yeah, a counterfeit $20 bill. It's nothing. Yeah, right. But I want to go back to what I said before.

Police brutality is a feature, not a bug. Yes, I agree with you. So what I mean by that is if you are going to freeze people out of their share of the well-being that is generated by society, you are going to have to keep them from revolting. And so what you do is you set up some sort of arbitrary administrator of authority that people run in contact with that they fear, right? You set up some force that disincentivizes misbehavior. And that force isn't just the police. It's obviously the prison system as well. Here's where I'd argue with you about that. That only applies if you only see that force exhibited towards poor people and disenfranchised communities, but you don't. What you see with

police brutality is you see police brutality being utilized on wealthy people. If they don't know, you see, if they don't know you see if they don't know that they can't get away with it do you know the case of the the young man that was killed in the hotel in arizona of course yeah it was horrific horrific in on video this guy being forced to crawl on the ground by this cop and then the cop shoots him in the back because he's trying to reach to pull his pants up yep there's no threat right clearly no threat no weapon no nothing is you got a monster who just wants to fucking shoot people and i think it points to what jocko was saying a lack of training a lack of quality people and a lack of a process of weeding out people that would be more inclined to use police brutality.

And that process, I think, should be similar to buds, like what Navy SEALs have to go through or Rangers have to go through. It should be something that weeds out people of weak character. So the police should be something that's a very difficult job to get, where you only get the cream of the crop of human beings of character of emotional stability people that would not do something like that who would recognize that man on the ground as being a father and a husband and a Human being is a part of our community and you don't gun them down just because you're a fucking piece of shit And that's what that guy did well look so it's not just a bug that's designed to keep people of disenfranchised

communities from speaking out and demanding their fair share it's a bug of human beings who have power over other human beings it's when you know the stanford prison experience of course experiments which of course have been sort of discredited in some ways that they actually probably wanted out of it and so they expect but the idea behind it makes sense to us, that if you give people power over people, they kind of tend to abuse it. When people have just unchecked authority over folks, they tend to use that. It's a feature of human beings. Oh, believe me. I mean, like I said before, I only told you the simpler story of my run-in with the cops.

I know that putting a badge on somebody and giving them a weapon and giving them all of that power, it brings the worst out in many people. And it's very, very dangerous. Yes. But I still see something systemic here that isn't being discussed. I don't think we disagree on that. I think that's there as well. I think there's multiple factors. Well, multiple factors, yes.

But let's put it this way. My claim is that opportunity is being hoarded, right? At the top of the economic ladder, opportunity is widespread. You can do very well. The farther you get down the economic ladder, the less opportunity there is and the greater the danger of your falling off the bottom, right? In some communities, you start off off the bottom, right? And you cannot access the ladder up. In such cases, it is not surprising that people resort to crime. The reason most people do not resort to crime is that they have better options and people are wired to pick

better options. So let's talk about a couple of things. And I do hope we get to some science at some point. We got a lot of time, brother. Good. All right. So let's talk for a second about why the black community has a special problem in America. Can we talk about that? Sure. All right. So I want to talk about two things. One has to do with the special origin story for the African-derived population of Americans. Obviously, slavery is where most African-Americans come from. They arrived through that mechanism. But slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being, right? So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software

reworked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Kalahari. You can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes. You can have any one of a number of software programs. Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language. So there was not one culture available. And it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things. But of course, there was prohibition against

teaching slaves to read and things like that. So there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had who were in the New World and a substituting of a version that was not as much of a threat to the slave holding population, right? And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if frankly even – we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all. the inherited evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture. And in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others whom they had the right language to talk to and all.

So in any case, that carries through to the present. It creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully bring, to fully update software. Am I making sense yet? Okay. You're speaking about this almost purely from like an evolutionary biology perspective. Yes, and I'm afraid that it's not properly going to come through. What I'm saying is that when you have one population in control

of how another population accesses the shared culture, that it's never fair, right? And so we saw this with conquistadors who came into the new world and were forcing Catholicism on the Inca, for example, right? So there's always this attempt to hand off culture that serves the powerful and undermines those who might rebel against them. Okay. Now, let's go back to the question of how opportunity is distributed.

Okay. So for some populations, you have very little opportunity and you have a tremendous hazard of falling off the bottom of the ladder and not having – there's not enough mechanism to allow you to get back to it. That creates crime. Let's say that those who control or who write the rules of the system do not want a revolt, even though this scenario would set them up for it, right? So one thing that happens is you create a tendency to incarcerate, right? that happens is you create a tendency to incarcerate, right? You have rules that free certain people out of opportunity. And then you have a system that is capable of

incarcerating massive numbers of them. And we incarcerate a much larger fraction of our population than any comparable nation, right? And a very disproportionate fraction of people in that system are black. So here's the part that I don't hear discussed. When you take men out of a population, it has a very predictable effect. You take men out of a population, it undercuts the bargaining position of women in mating and dating, right? So if you take men out of the population, it undercuts the bargaining position of women in mating and dating, right? So if you take men out of the population, it means that those men who are still present in that population are in very high demand, right? Now, men being men, if they're in high sexual demand, it is hard to get them to settle down, right? A man who has lots of options is much harder to persuade to become monogamous and participate

in traditional family raising. Okay? So what that does is it creates an environment in which you have many more single-parent homes, many more children growing up without their fathers present, which of course hobbles the kids who are raised in that situation because humans are so difficult to raise. They're so costly in terms of time and energy and resources that one person has a much harder time doing it than a team of two people. And this sets in motion all of the things for which white society imagines that there's some cause inside of being black when in fact it's a demographic

process, a demographic process that unfolds very naturally if you remove a disproportionate number of men from a population and undermine women's bargaining position. Is that making sense? Absolutely. Okay. So why are we not having that discussion and why are we instead talking about shutting down STEM? STEM is exactly what you need in order to understand how that process works and to figure out what you would have to do to fix it. You know, they look at the economic disparity and the crime and the gang problem and the prison problem and the incarceration problem. And they look at that and then they look at STEM as being a completely different thing. It's like your connection and what you're saying about the fact that the hobbling of these communities is so systemic. It's so a part of how they're established and set up,

and it's repeating itself over and over and over again, generation after generation. That, in many people's eyes, it doesn't seem related. It doesn't seem related, exactly. And this is why you need those enlightenment values and the tools that arise out of them. Right. You need to be able to look at it scientifically. Right. Without emotion.

If this is causal. Yeah. Yeah. You have to go dispassionate in order to make a compassionate policy. And they can't be taboo subjects. They can't be breached by white people because of your privilege. Right. Yeah.

So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on. Right. So what I'm watching is a train wreck in which we have a movement that is unhooking exactly the tools necessary to see what really is going on. Right. There really is a problem. And what this movement is doing is it is advancing a phony explanation, bad policy. And then on the other side, everybody who's not going along with this, you know, or a vast majority of those who are not going along are thinking, okay, those people are just crazy. They're complaining about something that doesn't exist. This is nonsense. It's chaos and it has to be shut down. And so anyway, the truth is neither of those things. The movement is advancing wrong ideas, but the energy that fuels the movement is about real legitimate complaints. And the people who are against the movement because they don't buy what's being said or don't understand the actual unfairness in our system are being emboldened by this. They're not being woken up to it. They're being deafened to the fact that there's actually a problem that needs solving and they're thinking the whole thing was phony to begin with.

So that looks to me like kind of worst possible. Like we're setting ourselves up not to be able to solve this. And if we don't solve it, we are headed to chaos one way or another. Even if this dies down, it'll be back. Yeah. I feel that always when I hear people discuss jobs, like when I hear presidential candidates discuss jobs and unemployment and boosting up the economy. And like when Trump discusses the fact that when the economy was doing well before COVID, that there was black unemployment was at an all-time low. And that all these great things were happening.

at an all-time low and that you know he was all these great things were happening it's like addressing you're not addressing the foundation you're only addressing like the windows of a house we keep the windows shut and this house is solid but if the foundation is rotten because of termites and you're just ignoring it and you just keep stacking boards up to level it out when one side sinks because the rotten wood gives way, you're not fixing that. These are temporary patches. The real issue is very clear. One of the ways I've looked at it, and this is a very simplistic way that I sort of say, if you really wanted to help America, if you're really patriotic, what's the best way to help America? Well, you'd want less losers. How do you get less losers?

You find the spots where the people have an unfair shot and you fix that. You fix those spots, whether it's the south side of Chicago, whether it's Baltimore, you find these disenfranchised areas and you fix them. That's the only way. You give people much more opportunity. You set it up so people have, if not the same advantage, a far superior advantage than they have now in terms of their ability to make it through, navigate the terrifying waters of being a young adult and getting through the system without going to jail and without making terrible mistakes and then having some

sort of an economic opportunity that it gives you hope that you actually strive for something and you get rewarded for your effort and you see other people get rewarded for that effort as well and that becomes the model that you're using you use use this model of, you know, the model that we see in a lot of upper middle class communities. You see, there's a path. Mike made it through. Look at Mike. Now he has a Corvette. You know, Tom made it through. Look at that nice house. And you see that and you just emulate that. Whereas in these communities that have been established, they've had this problem for decade after decade, and nothing's been done about it.

And so they hear all this talk from politicians about black unemployment and this and that, but meanwhile the fucking neighborhood is exactly the same. No one's done anything to fix it. No one's done anything to—and I think it's a tremendous problem in terms of what effort needs to be done to fix it. And I'm a moron. I'm not the guy to fix it. I don't understand how it could be done.

I don't know. But I do understand that there's not work being put into doing it other than through the people in the community and community activists and some people that are philanthropists that have tried to figure out a way to do their best to put a dent in it. It's never been addressed on a national level. It's not addressed like – no president has ever made an address. Even Obama, where they've sat down and said, here's the areas of this country where it's really hard to make it, and this is what we're going to do to fix that. Yeah, I agree, but I still don't think you're at the root. What's the root?

Yeah, I agree. But I still don't think here at The Root. What's The Root? The Root is a system that is so politically corrupt that it is not even interested in doing what it needs to do. It is interested in doing the bare minimum that it can do that prevents revolt. And now it's screwed up. Now it's got revolt on its hands. But if you actually wanted to solve this problem, you have to solve it at the causal level, right? You can't have a system in which people are choosing between candidates from two corrupt parties, both of which are hell-bent on stealing well-being from them and transferring it to their actual constituents. I agree. Yeah. That's a problem as well. I don't think it's a problem as well. I mean, imagine for a second, right? How did we get here? It's 2020. We are facing a global pandemic, which signs of a Maoist challenge to the most fundamental aspects of the West, right?

And we're going to have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden? What? Neither one of these people is capable of or inclined towards the kind of leadership that you have just described we would need. Agreed. So that means at the very least, if we do not divert our course, right, if November comes and we are choosing between those two, then that means we're putting off any solution at least four years because the president would be essential to changing our course. And this is just built into these parties now. Obama, I can't figure out why it's the case.

I really like Obama personally. He seems like the right guy to me. But his administration at a policy level was indistinguishable from Bush. In some ways, it was worse. So what we've got is parties that decide what we get to choose from. And the game is to prevent us from having any choice that could possibly solve the problem. So we have to fix that. We have to address that problem. And we have to fix that. We have to address that problem and we have to break their stranglehold. And in fairness, Trump was a challenge to that two-party duopoly.

He's not really a Republican, right? But he's also not really an alternative. It's like a third crime family, right? You've got the Republicans, the Democrats, and now he sort of co-opted their ideology to fit his needs. Yeah. But it's not a solution. Right. So we have to get that solution, which means we have to get by the parties. Trump proved that was possible. Right. I think if there's ever there was ever a time where an independent party has a chance now's the time if someone steps in and has a real solution and also for in terms of the distribution of that information now's the time because you could just post something on youtube where you're demonstrating like through a step-by-step process you could take hours to do it like this is what i want to do and this is how i'm going to do it you break those down to clips almost like a podcast and if someone was a person of substance that we really believed in, we said, that person can really do this. This actually could happen. Let's vote independent. It could happen. They don't have a monopoly on the distribution of information anymore. And that's terrifying to them because

they used to be able to count on the shills on the left and the right to get the word out for them but they don't have that anymore you have so many people that really don't have an ideological foundation in either one of them that are talking and they're reaching millions of people that's a rare moment in time and this is in my opinion the very best time for someone to step in that's not – they're not compliant. They don't have to give – they don't need that policy machine behind them or the political machine behind them. Well, I've got a plan. Okay. But we would have to find a really big podcast, I think, to get enough momentum.

There's none of those out there, though. You haven't encountered a big podcast? No, they don't exist. Okay. All right. You want to hear the plan? Sure. Okay. The Rock and Jocko Willink. Get them together. Well, you know, let's put that to the side. It's not part of the plan, but it actually could fit. Okay. So here's the plan. This plan needs a better name,

but the working title is the Dark Horse Duo Plan. And the plan looks like this. We draft two individuals. We find two people. One of them is center left and one of them is center right. And these people have to have certain characteristics, a minimum set. They have to be patriotic, they have to be courageous, and they have to be highly capable, right? But be courageous. And they have to be highly capable. But that's it.

Center left and a center right. And we pair them together. And we draft them with the following plan, that they will govern as a team. That is to say every important decision will be discussed and they will decide what to do as a team and only in cases where they cannot reach agreement or whether something has to be – whenever something has to be decided on a very short timescale like a military decision. Does the person who inhabits the role of the president govern alone? OK? We draft these folks and then four years down the road, they switch. And the one who had run for president now runs for the vice presidential spot, and the one who was vice

president now runs for president. And they continue this way until one of two things happens. Either we vote someone else in, or one of them has inhabited the office of president twice and is no longer eligible, and then that person has to be replaced. So we have a patriotic team governing together from center left and center right. But when you say drafted, that's the problem. Like someone has to be motivated to ruin their fucking lives to try to run this country because that's what happens to everybody that does it. I agree.

But then that's an obstacle. You're spelling out an obstacle that I would argue is solvable, that we know these people. Who? Okay. So let's just say that's the plan so far. And we can talk about what problems it solves as much as you want. I feel like I should have a drink and listen to this. You're welcome to have a drink.

It's probably a good idea. Kind of kidding, but go ahead. But okay. So here's my proposal. So the plan could be right and my proposal for who we draft could be wrong, and I'm happy to see other people swapped in. But my proposal would be Admiral William McRaven on the right. You know who that is? No, I don't.

Okay. He is a Navy SEAL, former Navy SEAL. He was until 2018 the Chancellor of the University of Texas. He is a very cogent center-right Republican. He was the lead on the bin Laden raid and he is, I think, universally respected by people who know him. I've never heard anybody say negative things about him. On the center left – Let me see this gentleman. I'm going to look at his face.

Yeah. You're going to know. There he is. Oh, yeah. I have seen that guy before. I like it. He looks like a president to me. Yeah, he looks like a president to me too.

You know who else looks like a president to me? Who? Andrew Yang. I'm down with that. Okay. I like what you're saying now. Good. So here's my point. Those two guys together. Is that camera on? Yes. Admiral, your country needs you. It really does. Never more than now. And I know that the job of president is a sucky one. I'm sure the job of vice president is even worse. But please consider this plan because the republic is in jeopardy. Now, we already know that Andrew Yang is up for the job because he ran for office and faced appallingly stupid obstacles that, in my opinion, may be the reason that he's not the nominee. So here we got two people. One of them I think will do so out

of duty. The other is crazy enough to want the job in the first place. And what are they? Well, they're both patriots, they're both courageous, and they're both highly capable. This is the road out. I don't know the Navy SEAL gentleman, but McRaven, but Andrew Yang has some

really good ideas. I mean, and reasonable ideas across the board, and in terms of many things, not just universal basic income, which was the thing that he was most popular for, but even law enforcement. He's got some great ideas about a lot of things. He thinks outside the box. He's a brilliant guy. Open to anything?

Yes. Very reasonable. of the plan, right? Which is that we Americans have to get over the idea that when somebody runs for office, especially the office of the president, that the right reaction is to ask them a million questions about what they will do in office, what policies they advocate. This is absurd. Presidents don't make policy. They certainly influence what policy is made. But the important thing about a president is that they listen to the right sorts of people and that they have a mind capable of processing what they hear so that they can integrate the information necessary. And in the case of this plan, we're talking about two people who would do that as a team. So what I would really be

interested in as they are running against Trump and Biden is hearing who it is that they would bring into an administration. How would they make decisions about the things that matter to us? And figuring out who they would bring in, I think is bound to be far more informative than dogging them about, you know, what they're going to do about health care and how they're going to pay for it. The thing about asking someone what they're going to do, though, is it does influence people whether or not they're willing to vote for that person. They want to see a plan. I know what you're saying is a reasonable person who understands the system. But for the average

American, they do want to see a plan to how to get out of a lot of the messes that we see. Well, you know, the funny thing is, we think a lot of things are true about what people want. You know, the funny thing is we think a lot of things are true about what people want. For one thing, we've been told that people are stupid and that, you know, they're hopeless. And if, you know, I mean, you're really one of the earliest innovators here. You have found that people that we've been told have an attention span so short that they can only deal with a sitcom are interested in a three-hour conversation about complex topics with people from all over the map, right? People are ready to listen. What I'm trying to say is we have a wrong idea, right, in our sense of what elections are.

And really that wrong idea isn't even about the fact that we think we want to hear the plan. It's about the fact that we know that our power in the system is so limited that the only way we could possibly exert any influence on the policy that gets made is if we can get somebody to promise us something into a camera enough that they're embarrassed not to do it when they get in office. And we also know that doesn't work. Right. As soon as they get in the office, they just do whatever they're going to do in the first place. So my point would be, look, I will literally vote for any competent, courageous patriot. I actually don't care in what direction they're ruling. Yes, I would prefer

that they were progressive because I believe we need to make progress or we will perish. But any courageous, capable patriot is good enough because a courageous, capable patriot will do way better than we are doing with the current method. Yeah. And I'm seeing this one thing that I keep hearing over and over again from people on the left that really disturbs me. It's this concession that what you're voting for is the cabinet. You're voting for the Supreme Court. You're voting for someone who's not going to reverse Roe versus Wade. That's what I keep hearing from my friends on the left.

And, you know, they've basically just made this concession in their head like, hey, you know, this is what I'm voting for now. They've given up. And the news media on the left has completely ignored all of these Biden speeches that clearly show some sort of cognitive decline. In fact, I've actually, like David Pakman, who I respect a lot, he was kind of arguing against it, that it didn't show his decline. And I was trying to look at it in a way that it made sense. I was trying to be rational about it. I'm like, okay, maybe he's just exhausted or maybe this or maybe it's pressure. Sometimes people get really tongue-tied and panic under pressure and words come out all fucked up. That is possible, but there's a trend.

And if you go back to when he was a younger man, that trend didn't exist. You're seeing a change and the idea that as you get older, you become less comfortable with the media, less comfortable with speaking publicly. That doesn't jive with me. That doesn't make any sense. So I agree with you. I see a decline. But irrespective of what that is, Joe Biden is an influence peddler. Yes.

He is not an idea guy, right? He's the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less. Right. So look, how dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment? Well, they did it to us before this moment happened. That's just be dealing with one solution to the problem that is Donald Trump. Yes, it did this in a moment when we didn't know that COVID-19 was going to spread, right? And we didn't know that there was going to be massive riots in the streets over who knows how many cities.

We did – we should have known that this was building, right? The possibility of a pandemic was always on the table. The fact that we have a pandemic and that that makes it clear why we need a cogent leader. It was obvious that this could happen under any presidency. Yeah, but there's a lot of other things. I mean, it's hard to say that the possibility of a pandemic is on the table, so we should have been prepared for it. I mean, the possibility of an asteroid impacts on the table, the possibility of a solar flare that wipes out the power grid, always on the table. Yeah, but you're making my point. My point is you can never afford to have somebody who isn't

a courageous, capable patriot in that office. How dare they play games with this thing? It's not theirs to screw up. Right. And this also has highlighted the problem of Donald Trump's ego. Yeah. You know, I mean, people would say his ego's, yeah, he's got an ego problem, but look, he's getting the job done. He's doing great things. But then in the face of this pandemic, when he's being criticized almost to the point where he can't handle it anymore. Some people can run at a pace of five miles an hour, but when you force them to run at a pace of seven miles an hour, things get slippery.

You start feeling cramps. You start looking for a way out. And he's a pace of seven miles an hour, things get slippery. You start feeling cramps. You start looking for a way out. And he's right now about nine miles an hour. And it's not looking good. I mean, he's tweeting about not falling down a ramp. Why were you walking like that? He's, oh, the fake news media. It's a slippery ramp, and I'm not going to give them a ramp.

Like, what the fuck are you even paying attention to? The fact that your ego is so fragile, you're paying attention to criticisms the way you walk down a slippery ramp. Like they would have ignored that. It would have been a non-issue, but it's an issue that you, your ego is so fragile that you have to address the fact that they're criticizing the way you walk down a ramp with fucking slippery dress shoes on.

Those shoes suck. i never wear them if you wear those i went to a cowboy boot store the other day and uh i i was like what can you do with these bottoms like i'm thinking if you got to get away from something some shit's going down you can't run with these fucking things on now they're for dancing so you can yeah they slip around with that but that's what dress shoes are. Yeah. They wear those leather-soled dress shoes that slip like crazy. There's no tread on them. They're nonsense. That's what that guy's wearing.

Totally. Walking on a ramp. Well, and, you know, you say— You should be wearing a nice pair of Adidas with some good traction. I agree. I always wear practical shoes because you never know when you're going to need to run. Yes, you never know when some shit goes down. Exactly.

Yeah. Exactly. But the ego is, you know, it highlights. It gets really magnetic. You find the weaknesses in the system when the system gets tested. And now it's being tested across the board. Across the board. And that insecurity, believe me, our enemies know it's there.

Oh, for sure. And they know how to exploit it. Yeah. So enough games. Yeah. We have to escape this. And, you know, to my friends who are still believers in the Democratic Party at some point, of which I have many, if you hate Trump, right, if that's really your cause and you're not going to be able to see clearly anything until we have removed him from office. That is also on the Democratic bill.

Hillary Clinton advanced Trump's candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you have Trump derangement syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament. Yeah, she legitimately thought he would be the easiest to beat. So she wanted him to run. She thought she was going to humiliate him. She severely underestimated people that were upset at the current system and that his rhetoric, this idea of draining the swamp would actually resonate with so many people. And also that people look at things in a very two dimensional way. You know, they're not looking at it in this really complex, nuanced way. And if you can paint a couple of good slogans together,

build that wall, make America great again, all that kind of shit, that is like, that's a brilliant way of manipulating people because that's the stuff they remember. And he's a master at it. Sleepy Joe Bryden, crazy Hillary Clinton, lying Hillary. You know, crazy Ted, lying Ted. He has all Bryden. Crazy Hillary Clinton. Lion Hillary. Crazy Ted. Lion Ted.

He has all these nicknames for people. I don't even remember most of them. But there's some brilliance in it. Oh, he is a political genius. Yes. He is. Well, a manipulative genius in the sense that he understands how to use the media. Because he's been in it forever.

These fucking people have been in it in this Bush League way. You don't even know what it's like to have a real master communicator in that role. Have you had someone that was a master public speaker in that role, really knew how to give a blistering takedown of someone like Trump or someone like Biden? Easy, easy, easy. Both those guys. They're vulnerable as fuck. They are.

And let's get them the hell out of there. As you point out, and you are dead right about this, if ever there was a moment, this would be it. Yeah, this would be the moment. But do you think you can get that guy to run? We have to draft him. It's a matter of duty. What's he doing right now?

I don't know. I think he may have retired after he left the chancellor position. Probably right now digging a bunker somewhere outside of Waco. Fuck this place. But, you know, I mean, look, the way you would draft somebody like that is you would let them know that we'd have their back. Right? Yeah. They would earn our loyalty and they would have to have it.

But if they did, then it's the perfect moment. Do you think there's enough time? Here we are in the middle of June. Was it the 16th, 15th? What is today? 16th. 16th of June. July, August, September, October, November, five months.

Actually, the world, we could be, you know, we could be speaking Chinese in five months. Look, Joe, you ain't kidding um look the thing about 2020 the thing about 2020 is i don't you can make an argument about what's possible but 2020 is not the year to make such an argument and because it threw all the fucking wrenches into the gears every wrench all the sand into the oil into the eyes oh my god it's fucking crazy i'm going stark raving sane yeah me too yeah uh i think so you want to talk about covid i do what are your what are your thoughts on that what are your thoughts on the lockdown yeah well let's put it this way i'm i'm uh i'm not speaking in a vacuum here. I've heard a certain amount of your take, and my take is a bit different.

I am very concerned about SARS-CoV-2. I am not concerned about it because it is as lethal as we feared it might be. It isn't as lethal as we feared it might be. But I'm afraid of it for other reasons. One, it is brand new to us evolutionarily. It just showed up in human beings. And so in my opinion, we screwed up the lockdown badly because we went halfway. That a very short, very intense lockdown could have ended it and that that would have been the smart thing to do. And unfortunately, the political will was not there.

But if you're – I am looking at New Zealand with utter envy. Can you imagine at this moment being free of SARS-CoV-2? Yeah, they nailed it. But they also have so few people. Oh, they definitely had it easier. But the point is, they did prove it was possible. Yes. So in my opinion, we should have locked down severely for six weeks or something along those lines, and we should have driven it to extinction. And the problem is that that runs afoul of all kinds of things, including civil liberties concerns, which I also hold. I hate the idea of a government crackdown in which they're dictating with whom you associate and all of the rest. I hate it as much as anyone. But we are dealing with a brand new landscape when it comes to a global pandemic. And what's more, we are dealing with a virus that I think is not what we have

been told it is. How so? So I have, initially, I thought that this was a bat-borne virus that had been transmitted to people from the wild, probably through the bushmeat trade, probably through the seafood market in Wuhan. In fact, Heather and I were in the Amazon where we had no connectivity to anything for a couple weeks. And when we came out, what was then called novel coronavirus was just beginning to be discussed. And so we became aware of it as we came out of the Amazon. I was like, oh, what the heck is that? And I looked into it. And immediately I saw the story adds up. You know, it's a coronavirus of a kind that's known to circulate in bats. There's a seafood market. And I thought, okay, I know what the story is. And I tweeted. I don't know enough about the story yet,

but looks to me like the Wuhan seafood market is the source that the virus comes from bats. And we have to talk about the bushmeat trade, which has always been a terrible idea. And immediately people tweeted back at me, so you think it's just a coincidence that there's a biosafety lab level four in Wuhan where this started? And I thought, what? That's a heck of a coincidence. And so I started to look into it. I retracted the tweet. I said, maybe I don't know enough about the story yet. And I started to look into it. And I went down the rabbit hole because as much as we have been assured by a huge range of experts that this has to have been a bat-borne coronavirus transmitted to people, possibly through pangolins, maybe through some intermediate host that we don't yet know, that story looks less and less likely. And the story that is looking more and more likely, what I would call the lab leak hypothesis, is looking ever stronger. And anyway, I've been in contact with other people who have reached that conclusion.

We have faced all kinds of pushback. But in a sense, again, we still don't know. It is possible that this came from the wild without human meddling. But the virus itself has several components that suggest that it is actually the result of manipulation in the lab and that it escaped probably from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but there's another lab in Wuhan. It may well have escaped, and we may be dealing with consequences of the fact that it was manipulated in the lab. So one of the techniques that labs was manipulated in a lab.

So one of the techniques that labs who study viruses like this use is something, so the research is called gain-of-function research. Gain-of-function research means you are taking a virus and you are adding a capacity to it in order to study how it works. And then one of the things that is done to study how it works is something called passaging, where a virus is infected, a creature is infected with the virus, and then the virus is allowed to pass between individuals of that species. It can also be done in tissues, in cellular tissues, where tissues are infected and the virus is allowed to spread from one cell to the next.

And what happens is evolution. So there is a strong possibility that this virus was under study, that it was enhanced in the laboratory, and that we are dealing with consequences that are the result of that enhancement that make it more dangerous than it would otherwise be. And what do you believe those enhancements are? Well, so one of the enhancements, there is something called a furrin site, a furrin site in the genome of this virus. Furrin sites are not known. It doesn't mean they don't exist, but they're not known from other beta corona viruses. And this fern site is conspicuous. It's conspicuous in that it is in the genome as an

insert rather than mutations of nucleotides that were there. It's like somebody spliced it in. That's one thing, which could happen naturally, but it may well not have. And it has a flanking sequence, which has – this is probably going to be hard for people to follow. But nucleotides, that is DNA, code for proteins, which are made out of amino acids. There's an amino acid called arginine, and there are two arginines coded for in the genome of this virus. But because there are so many possible codes, triplet codes, and only 20 or so amino acids, there's redundancy. And so which code is used to trigger the production of an, or the inclusion of an arginine is variable. And the two arginines are coded for in a way that is not seen in nature in this way very frequently. So let's just say there are elements of the genome that are conspicuous

and suggest possible laboratory manipulation. The furrin site that I referred to that has been inserted either by a natural process or by a laboratory process, greatly increases the transmissibility of this virus, which means various things. It could be the explanation for why this virus is infecting so many different tissues in people who get sick. The list of symptoms is huge here. And that's a very troubling thing from the point of view of treating it medically is all of the things that can go wrong with the body once you're infected. It also means that the virus is very good at jumping between people and that high transmissibility is obviously one of the things that makes COVID-19 such a difficult pandemic to control, right? It's hopping between people so readily that it just, it runs away. So in any case, and then there's a third question that I have, which is maybe that there's something about the fact,

I don't want to say fact as if it is a fact. But if this was an escape from the laboratory, then the virus, I mean, just as, you know, maybe we'll end up talking about the telomere problem in mice, which you spoke to Eric about when he was on your podcast last. But evolution to the lab, evolution in the lab takes place. And changes that the people in charge want to happen occur occur and then things they're not even thinking about occur. There's adaptation to the laboratory environment that people who work in labs are unaware of. And so one of the questions I have is this virus is highly transmissible unless you're outdoors. Then it seems almost not transmissible. That's very conspicuous. I mean, for one thing, bats live outdoors, right?

So is it possible that this virus has adapted to the laboratory environment, an indoor environment, and that it has forgotten how to get transmitted outdoors? And if we are casual about the outdoor environment, that actually it could relearn that trick, that we should take it. A, we need to be outdoors for various reasons. One, it appears that vitamin D is very protective in the case of COVID-19, prevents the transmission, and you end up way less sick if you have proper vitamin D. So in the Northern Hemisphere here, while the sun is shining, we should be outdoors. We should not be locking down those environments at all. We should also be very careful outdoors, right? Because any time we allow it to be transmitted outdoors, that is going to – it creates an evolutionary signal, a selective signal that's going to retrain the virus to be transmitted outdoors, which is not something we want.

At the moment, this might be an advantage that we have. And we're going to lose it if we're not careful, which is why I'm very careful and why I wear this thing around so that I can pull it up at a moment's notice if I'm going to talk to somebody. Because even though I think the virus is very difficult to transmit outdoors, which is something we've seen in the data of South Korea, for example, it could learn that trick. Why is it easier for it to transmit? Do we know? We don't know. Why indoors? We don't know. So we don't know the mechanism. And there's no good reason that we don't know. We should know. Because it could be that it's UV light. UV light is very powerful, destructive stuff. But if it's UV light, then that suggests it's difficult to transmit outdoors during the day, and it should be easy

to transmit outdoors at night. If it's not UV light, then that's not likely to be it. So there is something weird going on with viral load. Maybe it's not weird, but it's weird for those of us who learned how viruses work from the usual textbook diagrams where a virus gets into a cell and triggers an infection. But here it seems like if you talk to someone briefly, your chances of picking it up from them even if they're sick is pretty low. But if you talk to somebody for an extended period of time where you're constantly breathing air that they're exhaling, then your chances go up, up, up, and up. where you're constantly breathing air that they're exhaling, then your chances go up, up, up, and up. So there's a possibility that just the exposure to UV light,

even if they're outside talking for the same amount of time, just the fact that these particles are going through the air in the sunlight, that it kills the virus's ability to transmit. It's possible. I don't know that that's what's going on. When you think about things like, you know what a SteriPEN is? Oh, like a UV. Yeah, it's a UV wand that backpackers use so they can drink creek water. It's crazy.

If you've ever seen one, it doesn't even take that long. You take this wand, you put it in like a bottle, a water bottle, and you spin it around in this creek water, and it kills all the bad stuff. Totally. And it's weird, man. It's weird that light can do that. Oh my goodness. Well, the UV light is amazing stuff. Yes. Well, you know what happened when Trump said something about getting UV light into the

body. Well, there was an actual publicly traded biotech company that had an invention for when people are intubated taking this this tube with UV light and inserting it into the lungs of these people and they were actually pulled off of Twitter Twitter actually banned their account because they thought there was some wacky Trump supporter who was trying to substantiate the president the president just got lucky yeah he's basically when we get the light and put it in the body somehow, disinfect the cleansing.

You remind me of Sarah Cooper when you do that. He was on to something, though, in a weird way that this publicly traded biotech company had an idea that when people – they are on an – when they have been intubated, when they are on this ventilator, this tube will go down the same tube that the air is coming through and actually flood the lungs where they're infected with COVID-19 with UV light and kill it. Well, the thing is, I don't think he got lucky. I think he did something that he's routinely doing, which isn't very high quality in terms of leadership, but somehow he's getting briefings. He's tuned into some channels. There was discussion. I remember seeing it. There was discussion about how UV light might be used to treat a COVID-19 infection. And I was actually alerted by this discussion to the fact that there was apparently a lot of work on this technique previously, that actually UV light had been successfully used in various ways where it could be used to purify blood and things. And I was sort of surprised to discover it. And then I heard the president say this.

I thought that that's what he was talking about. My guess is something crossed his feed. Somebody in a briefing said, well, Mr. President, there is a promising theory, promising therapy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, UV light, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he just walks out the door and riffs on it, which is why Sarah Cooper is so funny because basically she exposes the – I don't know who Sarah Cooper is. Oh, you don't? Maybe I do. You've probably seen her. She's making these videos where she lip syncs Trump.

Oh, that's – no. oh that's no she's not the one who did the thing where was it uh dr fakenstein or the faking put trump's face on a baby have you ever seen that one no i haven't seen that one oh that one's wonderful are you telling me the best ones ever you haven't run into sarah i may have i've seen so many people mock him it's so hard to keep track of who's who. Okay, but there she is. Yep. Let's give you some volume on that. More for the black community than any other president. And let's take a pass on Abraham Lincoln because he did good, although it's always questionable. You know, in other words, the end result, we are free, Mr. President, but we did pretty well. You understand what I mean? So I'm going to take a pass on a honest abe as we call it you say you've done in general that is the dumbest fucking thing a

person's ever said has been in office well that maybe he's done more than maybe abe lincoln who freed the slaves he's giving abe lincoln a pass because he did pretty good how crazy is that it's crazy right it's just like he's stuck he said something and then he gets stuck trying to substantiate what he said He should have said except for obviously a blink of sleep freed the slaves and everyone would have been like yeah, okay It's braggadocious, but perhaps reasonable. It's wrong and stupid, but at least it's not crazy It's not absolutely fucking insane. Yeah, and then the fact that he's saying it to a black woman's like oh my god Yeah, well he so that's the thing is he's winging it.

He's winging it. So that's what she's doing? She's just lip syncing? Well, unfortunately, I don't know whether the audience saw it in sync or not. Find the baby one. The baby one is amazing. If you don't have it, I could airdrop it to you. The baby one you need to see.

Okay. I got you the baby one. It's fucking amazing. All right. Somebody – it was either the Fakenening or Dr. Fakenstein. Do you know who it was, Jamie? Do you remember? One of those fake artists who takes, you know, they use the face swap technology,

and they put Trump's face on this baby, and then they change the words. Someone caught a baby doing something, and they talked to the baby, and the baby was trying to lie and get their way out of it. It's like an old video, but then they put Trump's face on it, and then they changed it. Here, go ahead. This is the original baby. This is the original baby. This is the original baby.

Yes, you did. I touched Jude's food. You touched Jude's food. No, I'm not touching his food. It's adorable. I'm going to hire her to be my lawyer. Your Honor, may I? Yeah, fast forward to it. No, I'm not touching his food. So now.. Your Honor, may I? Yeah, fast forward to now.

Mr. President, you said the virus was just like the flu. You did. You also said the virus could go away by April. No, no, sir. You said it would disappear like a miracle. Yes. You said only 15 people have it. You have to see it. If you can find it, folks, anybody who's listening to this, you should see it.

If you can find it, folks, anybody who's listening to this, you should see it because it's really disturbing seeing a baby with Trump's face. It almost looks like Sam Kinison as a baby. Anyway. Anyway, which brings us back to McRaven and Yang and the dark horse. But still the COVID stuff. Yeah. I'm just kidding. Yeah. back to McRaven and Yang and the dark horse but still the COVID stuff yeah we have really kidding um yeah so what I would say is first of all uh I do think I am very much in favor still of driving this thing to extinction by being properly sober about it briefly can I pause

and address this one issue that seems to be when it seems to be an issue when someone says that it might have come out of a lab. This is a right wing left wing thing. For whatever reason, you get labeled a right wing conspiracy theorist if you think it came out of a lab. And you people on the left are so they're so willing to dismiss that without any real evidence. We've been poisoned by these ideologies when it comes to conspiracy or whether or not something is actually true, but we've been fed the wrong information. That stuff is, if you don't believe the official narrative that's being discussed on CNN, you must be some sort of a right-wing nut. Right. stuff is, if you don't believe the official narrative that's being discussed on CNN,

you must be some sort of a right-wing nut. Right. And- Have you faced that? Oh, of course I've faced it. And it's hard to escape it, right? So I've tried to be very careful. I have described it as a hypothesis, which is what it is. I have tried to show that there are different probabilities for the different origin hypothesis. Even China now admits that it wasn't from the seafood market. Do they? Oh, yeah. What do they say it's from? Don't they say it's from us?

I have not heard that. I have. But they – let's put it this way. There are – one of the things that is, in my opinion, the strongest piece of evidence that the lab leak hypothesis may be correct is that there is a missing phase in the evolution of this virus. When a virus jumps from one species to another, it is not well positioned. It is typically very poor at its job because it doesn't have any evolutionary experience with that host. So it's not good at leaping between that host cells, which means that it's always in very small numbers. And it's not good at leaping from one individual to the next. That's

the key question. When something leaps into a new species and then it becomes a pandemic, it's because it has solved that second problem. It has figured out how to infect that creature in such a way that the creature spreads it to others of its kind. There is no evidence in the case of this virus that that happened. It showed up in Wuhan and spread immediately. It became a pandemic. It already had experience. Now, how it got that experience, we don't know. There are evolutionary ways this could have happened, right? It could be that we have not found the initial population that it circulated in, right? Or it could be that it circulated in a creature that we haven't found either. But the fact that there is no evidence, that it shows up

in Wuhan and immediately spreads, tells us that this virus was well adapted to our cells and well adapted to transmit between individuals. And that is conspicuous. One way you could get there is if somebody, A, had added components to a virus in order to make it transmissible to humans. So the research in question would be research that was interested in discovering what a pandemic in humans of a bat-borne coronavirus would be like so that we could do something about it. Maybe we could prevent it. Maybe we could create a vaccine ahead of time. But if you're creating a virus that has enhanced capacity to infect humans in order to study what will happen if a virus ever escapes into the human population, then you are running the risk that the virus you are studying will escape. Would they have added something like a fern site?

Absolutely. It is established in the literature that the addition of a fern site makes the virus much more transmissible in human tissue. So if you were going to study it, this would be high on your list of things to do. train it on the infectious pathway inside of people, which again, we might be suffering the downstream consequences of that if it escaped the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So these things have an amazing impact. And I hear a lot that, what does it matter? It's with us now. We just have to deal with it, which is nonsense because A, we need to have it never happen again. B, there may be things that we could understand about what its nature is that would help us fight it. But C, we have a really serious problem now because all but a few of the world's leading virologists, the experts in coronaviruses in particular, have sworn that this must have come from nature and couldn't have come from the lab, which is nonsense. Why do you think they did that?

Unfortunately, this goes back to our earlier discussion. Our scientific system is broken. We need our scientists to be empowered to tell us what we need to know. And we need them, therefore, to be freed from a system where they are fighting for grant money in order to continue their work. This entire group of people is now in jeopardy because if this turns out to have been a leak from the lab, then we are all suddenly going to become aware that gain-of-function research puts humanity in jeopardy, that one accident in gain of function research can cause the evaporation of who knows how many trillion dollars. It could cause, and this is one

of the other things I wanted to say to you about the danger of letting this virus run its course. If we don't stamp it out, we A, don't know that people who have been infected are not going to continue to have outbreaks. We don't know that yet. We don't know whether or not people who've had it are going to be immune to it in the future. That's probable, but it's not certain. And we don't know that it's not going to become a permanent fellow traveler of humanity the way flu is. traveler of humanity the way flu is. And even if this thing evolved to become flu-like, if it became as unserious as the flu, the flu is very serious. And the cost that humanity pays for having flu circulate every year is immense. So even if the only thing that has happened in the long term, if we let it go and it evolved into another flu-like pathogen, then we have increased the number of flu-like pathogens that we have to deal with annually substantially.

And that would be a major loss to humans. My sense that we should be much more aggressive about dealing with this is really about the fact that I think we have a short time horizon in which to deal with it, that it will learn new tricks and it will become harder to defeat the longer that we play around with it. And so an aggressive short-term move, it's really – it's the lesson of pulling off the band-aid we're not doing ourselves any favors by pulling it off slowly um so what do you think we should do right now well i would say i mean the problem is it's a much harder argument to make now than it was at the beginning because we're all so freaking sick of lockdown i mean portland is still under full lockdown. But not when it comes to protests. Well, of course not. That's the other problem, right? There's a massive hypocrisy in the way we're treating

businesses versus treating protests. Oh, it's an epidemic of hypocrisy. Not only that, de Blasio in New York City won't allow people when they're asking people that have tested positive for COVID-19, you're not allowed to ask them whether or not they've been in a protest. So they're doing contact tracing without valuable data because they want to be progressive. That's insane. Oh, he's insane. Yes. So you asked me what I would do. I would, and again, I don't want to be in this position

months in here. I want to be in this position months in here. I want to be in this position months ago of saying the right thing to do is a six-week lockdown that will be unbearably painful but hopefully it will be short and then intense contact tracing. But we've done a lockdown with essential businesses open. Well, we've done – So that's not a real lockdown. We've done a half-assed lockdown. Business is open. Well, we've done – So that's not a real lockdown. We've done a half-assed lockdown.

And the thing that we've done that I find the most troubling is that we have not bootstrapped a mechanism for high-quality ubiquitous testing. Because if you want to do – if you did a six-week lockdown, a real lockdown, right? Hold your breath and get through it. And then you open back up with testing that's so high quality and so universal that you can spot anything that happens and you can treat it locally, right? into work if you don't pass this test and if your work puts you in contact with other people, we're going to test you regularly, right? If you did that, we could have driven it to very low levels and then we could have dealt with the flare-ups. But what we're doing now is we're just gambling and it's insane, right? We're gambling and there is no – that I can detect, there is no movement that says open back up and be very aggressive about things like masks. My feeling is if you're pushing open back up, you ought to be pushing things that would make opening back up as safe as possible.

But are masks really effective? Because one of the things that the CDC was saying was that you should really only wear a mask if you're treating a person with COVID. Yes, except that we can effectively know that what they were really – I don't even want to give them credit for really saying it. The motivation for saying that nonsense was that they were trying to preserve masks for people who needed it most. That's what Fauci said. So they basically lied to us. They lied to us flat out. Some of us were not. Some of us were not.

Some of us were shouting and saying, this is garbage advice. Yeah. And, you know, your question is, do masks really work? Masks work when both parties wear them. They work really well. So, you know,

and I don't know why we are pushing this madness of masks that scream medical, right? So one of the things, you know. Bank robber. Yeah, man. You're an old school bank robber. I'm the mojito bandito. Yeah, you've got a bandana.

I do. Yeah. But, you know, the fact is the bandana, all right, maybe I look like a goofball. But the fact is it's more fashionable, in my opinion, than a medical mask. Oh, you mean fashionable. That's cute. It's also more comfortable, though. Yes, for sure.

So the fact is I have it. I can pull it up as needed, put it down. It's not hanging on my ear. And that flexibility, the fact that I don't feel so terrible walking around with it, actually makes me use it when I should use it. The best is really a neck gaiter. Have you ever used a neck gaiter? Yeah. You wear them when you're hunting. You want to obscure a lot of your face, you know, so animals can't see it. It's all camouflage. It breaks up the pattern of your face. They're real easy. You just slip it back down again and pull it back up and it actually

stays in place. That makes total sense. But I mean, the funny thing is I'm an animal biologist, so the same thing should apply to me, but I've never heard that. You've never heard of a net gator? No, I've heard of a net gator for other things, but not for hunting. Oh, yeah. Oh, super common. Yeah. Pull up is a photo of me in Lanai wearing a full Sitka outfit.

I look like a ninja. Lanai is a very interesting place to hunt because it's one of the few places where you could say it's mandatory to hunt animals because they have an invasive species called axis deer that's me see that thing on my face that's a neck gator and it's actually in the Sitka

the hunting gear that I'm wearing it's actually built into the hood so it's not just something that you wear around your neck it actually is built into it so it slides up and it goes down on your neck if you like it to but then when you're moving forward it could slide down these animals that live there there's literally 30,000 deer on an island of 3,000 people and uh there it's an invasive species they were brought there and given to king kamehameha by the um like the 1800s, and there's no predator. So they're just out of control.

You've never seen anything like it. It is crazy when you're there. Like the mass populations, and it happens to be one of the most insanely delicious animals as well. Also super switched on because they evolved to avoid tigers. Also super switched on because they evolved to avoid tigers. I've got videos of these things where an arrow is coming at them from 80 yards. And as the arrow is about 15 yards away, they hear it and they get out of the way. They move so fast.

They are the fastest deer I've ever encountered in my life by far. Nothing's even close to them. And you have to be sneaky to get close to these things. That why you dress like that that's cool in some sense so actually can i connect that to the the viral question sure okay so the connection is going to be a weird one there is only one terrestrial mammal natively in hawaii there's only one terrestrial mammal species. Okay, there's aquatic, there's whales and things, and seals, but there's only one terrestrial mammal. I'm trying to guess what that would be.

Yep. A mammal, terrestrial mammal. Well, terrestrial may be misleading here. I just mean on land. Oh, seal? Nope. No? Well, there are seals, but that's an aquatic mammal.

Okay. It's a bat. Oh. Right. So here's the thing. Hawaii is as remote from mainland as anywhere. Yeah. It's really isolated. Yeah.

And that means that the story of how a terrestrial mammal gets there is pretty rare because think about the condition, how would almost any terrestrial mammal you can think of get there? So at some point, some pregnant bat probably got blown off course by a storm and probably barely crawled up on the beach. So they flew thousands of miles? Well, my guess is it almost never happens. But it did happen once with this bat.

But anyway, my point would be Hawaii is a tropical landmass. You would think it would have high diversity because it's tropical, right? Tropical places tend to have very high diversity. Hawaii has very low diversity because it's so far from everywhere, right? So the thing is, almost nothing can make it over the gap. That big saltwater gap is very hard for anything to cross. So what that means is that everything that's in Hawaii is very well adapted for things like crossing huge gaps and not very well adapted for everything that would compete with that capacity. So that sets Hawaii up for being invaded by any creature that you transport there. If you can solve the how do you jump the gap question by transporting on an airplane or a ship,

then the species that are there are not in a position to fend it off competitively because they're not adapted to compete. It's a low diversity environment where everything had to cross some amazing gap to get there. So it's a sitting duck for invasive species like the one you're describing. Okay. Now here's the connection to the viruses. If it is true that this virus originally came from a bat, was being studied in probably the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was enhanced and then escaped, was enhanced for the infection of human tissue and then escaped, it is the equivalent of us having transported something very dangerous over a gap it couldn't

have crossed on its own right and we are sitting ducks for this thing so this is why i'm really on high alert about this now what are your feelings when it comes to the high number of people that are asymptomatic or the high number of people that get it and it's a very small deal to them. carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had an outbreak and it docked in Guam. My thought was I want to see that carrier used to study the virus. It's too bad that it docked in Guam because they ruined a circumstance. And it's not that I wanted to see people infected, and it's not that I didn't. I wanted to see them get the highest quality treatment possible. But it was an isolated population in which you could have studied the spread of this virus. And because it's an aircraft carrier, you could also get anything you needed. You could have built hospitals

on the deck. You could have given them the finest possible care. And we could have learned a lot about how the thing is transmitted, what the symptoms mean, who is actually shedding live virus based on what symptoms they have, rather than studying this haphazardly amongst infected people in hospitals where you don't really know who they've been in contact with and all of that. So we missed that opportunity. We could do the same thing with military bases or any isolated population where you can actually have enough data to know what these things mean. As it is, we're left with all kinds of questions, right? It seems that some of the people who are asymptomatic actually have significant damage to their lungs. They have this ground glass opacity pattern in their lungs, even though they didn't show any symptoms.

What are the numbers of these people? Well, it's been at least a month since I've seen anything on it, but it was a fairly high percentage. It was like 30% or 40%, I think. Of the asymptomatic people. So all I can say is that makes no sense to me. You're talking about significant damage to the lungs. It seems like that would in and of itself cause a symptom.

Yeah, I think the people to study would be those NBA athletes because a large number of the nba players had tested positive from at least jamie you would know better than me was it one particular team where these athletes were four two or four guys on that team two or four guys on the team out of 15 16 and they were all asymptomatic i don't think anybody got really sick that i've heard of yeah i would like them to be studied because they're peak physical specimens, you know, the professional athletes and it's such a cardiovascular sport. You know, you're constantly sprinting and moving and you have to be in tremendous shape to play professional basketball at the highest level.

I would think, I would want to know what's going on with their lungs. Yeah. What is it like when you get an elite athlete and you give them this disease and why are they asymptomatic? Is it a function of their cardiovascular endurance? I mean, is there something about the capacity of their lungs? The fact that they're, I mean, what happens when you give that to David Goggins, for instance, someone who can run a hundred mile races and do them back to back, you instance, someone who can run 100-mile races and do them back-to-back, someone who's got extreme cardiovascular fitness like Cameron Haynes or something like that. Sure.

I want to see that. We could learn a lot about what this thing is really up to. As it is, we're grasping at straws. We've got a large list of symptoms. We've got people who seem to be asymptomatic and yet damaged. So it's hard to know what to make of it. It's also hard to know what to make of the haphazardness of our response to it. Like why are we screwing this up so badly? Don't you think that we didn't know what it was when it happened? And then when it did happen, there was a lot of competing information.

China was giving us bad information. For one case, the World Health Organization in January was saying that there's no evidence that it transmits from person to person. We know now that that's not the case. Well, but think about how fucked up our situation is, right? Well, but think about how fucked up our situation is, right? Imagine that you had some courageous, highly capable patriots governing, right? This thing gets detected. You call the right people into the room, okay?

You say, okay, what would a reasonable person do at this moment? But then we've got a problem, right? Now you see another part of our system that has become feeble and inept. You see the virologist might circle the wagons in order to protect their access to grant money. So the very people who need to tell you, holy shit, this could be very dangerous. Here's what may have happened. And here's what we would do to figure out what the epidemiology will look like, what the symptomatology will look like. Those people may be covering their asses at all of our expense. So what I'm really telling you is that, yes, we have to deal with COVID-19.

But we also have to bootstrap our way out of a predicament where our whole system has been overrun by perverse market incentives that is causing everybody to turn into a liar or a dupe. We can't live that way. We've got too many high-tech problems to be dealing with anything other than high-quality information about the nature of those problems and what the possible solutions look like. But how do we mitigate all these errors? How do you eliminate all the bullshit that we're dealing with? And how do we filter it out? And what would be like the best pure information? Where would it be distributed from?

Well, you know, this is weird because it's going to sound self-aggrandizing maybe. maybe. But what's happened is you've had the people who have the right characteristics for this moment pushed out of the system. They've been told to comply with various things. They've been forced to play games that corrupt them. And those who couldn't do it, the ones who will speak the truth even when it hurts them, get pushed out in one way or another. And so in some sense, this is the moment at which we have to figure out where those people went and we have to build a system that pays attention to what they've seen, what drove them crazy. And so the telomere story is that story writ large. Let's tell that story because we discussed it on a podcast with your brother, but a lot of people might not have heard it. So let's talk about what you discovered and what you mean by this.

Okay. So I was a graduate student in evolutionary biology. My specialty was actually bats. That's what I studied. I studied tent-making bats, which was great. And by the way, I think the danger of viruses leaping from bats to people is actually less than we are being told. The people who are selling the idea that we have to study these viruses with gain-of-function research are leading us to believe a virus is going to leap out of a cave at any moment and infect us. And the large number of people who study bats regularly and are not catching these diseases suggest that that's not really true. Were they the ones that were skeptical about this idea that it came out of this wet market? No.

I actually haven't heard from them. But what I can say is there are thousands of people who study bats, who handle them regularly, and they're not constantly getting sick. So I think what we're learning is that there are a lot of viruses that could potentially jump and could potentially adapt to humans. When they do jump, they almost never spread. Can I ask you a question before you continue? Sure. Because I know it's going to deviate us off topic. Was there, there was a story that I read a long time ago, and I think I read it in the New York Times. And it was a story about these people that were studying bats and they had parked themselves out in front of this gigantic cave to sort of film these bats coming out of the cave

and they didn't anticipate that the bats were going to shit on them and they got insanely sick from some hemorrhagic virus and wound up dying shortly afterwards. Do you know of this story? I don't know this story. I'm now feeling bad about having laughed that they got crapped on by these bats i know i should have i should have warned you that it was a bad story but uh i remember reading this story that you know they talked about the millions and millions of bats that flew out of this i believe it was in

africa they flew out of this cave and that they shit whenever they fly out and that these people didn't think about this. They just wanted to film this thing and they just got covered in bat shit and it got in their eyes. It got everywhere and they got a horrible virus from it. It was definitely a virus. No, I mean, I don't know. I just remember them getting really sick and dying shortly afterwards and them not being able to identify exactly what it was that killed them. So let me say a couple things on this front. One, there is a pathogen that people who study bats in caves, my bats didn't roost in caves, but people who study bats in caves sometimes

get histoplasmosis, which is a fungus. It's a fungus that also afflicts people in the poultry industry. So anyway, that's a danger. There are viruses, but the story that you're describing suggests the pattern that I'm suggesting, which is that sometimes things jump. They don't tend to spread. That jump and spread are two different skills. And the chances that something jumps are relatively small. When something jumps, it then has to spread, that jump and spread are two different skills. And the chances that something jumps are relatively small. When something jumps, it then has to spread. It has to accomplish both tricks in order to become a pandemic. And the likelihood of it doing both things well is pretty low. So most of the time it doesn't jump. And when it does jump, it doesn't tend to spread. And it sounds

like your example of these people, tragic as it is, represents a case in which something jumped but didn't spread. Now, there is also the lab leak stuff is extensive. But there is one of the pieces of evidence in that story is that there were some miners in Yunnan who came down with a pneumonia. There were something like six miners who came down with a pneumonia who had worked in a cave that had these horseshoe bats. So to the extent that the lab in Wuhan was known to be working on bat coronaviruses for the purpose of preventing a pandemic, they were getting their bat coronaviruses from this cave in Yunnan province, long way from Wuhan. And the cave was identified because these miners had come down with this pneumonia, of which I think three of them died. So it's again a case in which something jumped, but it didn't spread. No pandemic arose out of it.

So what we're looking at is the strong possibility that we were looking to prevent a pandemic at some place where something had jumped but had not spread. And then we took viruses from there and imbued them with the characteristics that allowed them to spread, solving its second problem. So that's a frightening story to me. It is frightening. And is it particularly frightening that it's coming out of China because we're not getting really good information from them because their propaganda is so strong. Yes and no. The Chinese have not behaved well. They have not informed us in the way we need to be informed. On the other hand, one of the reasons that this is a political football rather than a scientific question is that there is a perception, and in fact,

this perception has been amplified by the president that this is potentially, if this leaked from the lab, that this is a Chinese problem. This lab in China was part of an international community of virology researchers. The grant that they would have been working from came from the NIH, or at least one of them did. So this is really, if this is a lab leak, still not saying it is, but that's a strong possibility. If this is a lab leak, the failure is one of the international scientific community. In this particular lab, weren't they, didn't they get admonished for something that happened within like the last two years, they had gotten safety violations. Yes. And there was a 2015 paper concerned about gain of function research and the potential for exactly this sort of thing to happen.

So anyway, there was concern. But like so many things, I think it hovers outside of most of our awareness. awareness. So we discover, you know, after the Deepwater Horizon accident, we discover that we're drilling these really deep deposits that we can't plug a leak when it happens. After the financial crisis, we discover that we're using leverage in a way that can cause one of these catastrophic economic meltdowns. The Aliso Canyon disaster reveals that we're storing, you know, natural gas in these old oil deposits and that it can leak and not be plugged. Fukushima reveals to us what we've been doing with nuclear reactors and spent fuel. We always find out after the accident that we're engaged in some really dangerous thing. Now, people inside these industries know, but they also have a conflict of interest. So nobody warned us,

right? And we need to really get ahead of that problem. We need to start finding out what it is that we don't realize humanity is doing that's going to go bad on us next. Right. Okay. Back to the mice. Okay. So I was a graduate student studying bats in, I was in Michigan, and I was interested in evolutionary tradeoffs. That's my signature thing. And there was a very good piece of work from a guy I knew, George Williams, a great evolutionary biologist, about the evolution of senescence, that is to say the process by which we grow feeble and inefficient with age,

what most people call aging. process by which we grow feeble and inefficient with age, what most people call aging. And basically, this classic paper explained why it is that creatures like us get old and die. And the answer was basically this, that you have a genome that's complex. It's full of genes, but there aren't enough genes to have a gene for every trait that you have. In fact, they're a tiny fraction of the number of genes you would need to cover all of the various characteristics you have. So genes always do multiple things. And in the case when a gene does something that's very good for you when you're young, at some cost when you're old, selection tends to favor it because you may

not live long enough to suffer the cost. And so if you have the trait that makes you powerful when you're young and you've got some cost that you're going to pay when you're old, but you're not going to live to get it, it may be a freebie, right? So selection sees early life much more clearly than it sees late life, and it prefers things that help you early, even at a cost of harming you late. That's the basic answer. It's called the antagonistic pleiotropy theory of senescence. But at the point that I started working, we knew that this was right. We could tell that the hypothesis was true because it matched all sorts of observations about wild creatures.

Certain creatures live longer than others, even when you correct for things like body size. So creatures that fly live longer than creatures that are of the same type and size that don't fly. Why? Because they can fly away from danger. If you can fly away from danger, you're more likely to make it to an older age. The better selection can see the harms that afflict you when you get there. So selection doesn't prefer a bias in favor of youth if you can fly away from danger. Same thing applies if you're poisonous, if you have a shell. If you have a really good defense, then selection sees your late life better.

So we knew that this hypothesis was right. Okay, so we knew that this hypothesis was right. But what we had never found at the point that I was working in the very late 90s on this was a gene that matched the description. We knew that selection was finding these genes and accumulating them, but we had never found one of the genes in question. And that was very conspicuous. I called that the missing pleiotropy. So anyway, I was sort of on alert about this. It was a curious fact. And I saw a talk given by somebody who was talking about telomeres. And he was talking about telomeres and their relationship to cancer. So telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA at the ends of our chromosomes. And they grow shorter every time a cell divides, right? So it's like a fuse or a counter that ticks down each cell division, and it drops to zero. And in, or not zero, but it drops to a number that the cell refuses to divide after that. And some people were working in one set of labs on the possibility that this was

causing us to grow feeble with age, because if your cells can't divide anymore, then they won't replace themselves and your tissues won't be able to maintain, right? Another group was studying this question of telomeres with relation to cancer. And they were saying, Eureka, every time we look into cancer, it has this enzyme called telomerase turned on, which elongates telomeres. And these two groups were not talking to each other. They were each claiming that they were about to cure their respective disease. One group was saying, if we can activate telomerase, then we can lengthen your life. And the other group was saying, if we can turn off telomerase, we can cure cancer, right? And I put two and two together, and I said, this is the missing pleiotropy. Here we have something that is protecting us,

that's helping us in youth. We have a counter that is limiting the number of times a cell can divide and presumably preventing cancer, right? And the cost is you can't maintain your tissues forever, so you grow feeble and inefficient. So that made a hell of a lot of sense to me. I couldn't convince anybody else that this was sensible. I couldn't even get them to understand what I was saying because in evolutionary biology, there has traditionally been a bias against mechanism, the study of cellular biology. Not because there's anything wrong with studying cellular biology as an evolutionary phenomenon, but because early in the study of evolution, we just didn't have the tools to look into the cells. So evolutionary biologists got used to thinking about the form of creatures and the behavior of creatures, but not thinking about

the internal mechanisms because there just wasn't a lot that could be said. Anyway, I retained an interest in the cellular biology. I saw these two things that needed to be connected, and I started to work on the puzzle. It turned out that that hypothesis would answer a great many questions that were otherwise very difficult to answer with respect to how aging functions. But there was one huge obstacle. The obstacle was that a fact that was well known about mice did not fit with the idea that telomeres were fundamental to the aging process. And the fact that was known was that mice had extremely long telomeres, and yet they lived short lives.

So if it were true that the length of your telomeres dictated how quickly you were going to age, then a tiny creature with very long telomeres ought to be able to replace its tissues really well, and it should age very, very slowly. So I thought there's got to be something wrong with this. The hypothesis answers too many questions for that obstacle to be real. And I thought maybe one person has run a test and everybody else is just parroting it. And I went and I looked and that wasn't the case. And I finally realized that all of the mice that had been looked at were coming from one source, that there was a laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, called the Jack's Lab that was the source for all of the mice being used in all of the laboratories in the country.

And I started to wonder, is there something going on at that lab? Maybe mouse telomeres aren't long. The ultra-long telomeres of mice aren't real. Maybe that's a feature of laboratory mice, and wild mice would have short telomeres, in which case the hypothesis would make sense. And I called up one of the leading people in the field, a woman named Carol Grider, who has now won a Nobel Prize.

And I said, Carol, you don't know me. I'm an evolutionary biology graduate student. I have a question for you. Is it possible that all mice don't have long telomeres, that that's really just laboratory mice? And she said, well, I think mice have long telomeres. But it's interesting, if you order Mus spretus rather than Mus musculus, and you order them from Europe, then how long their telomeres are depends on what supplier you get them from. So this is interesting. So anyway, we both agreed that it was really interesting. She decided she was going to test the hypothesis. She put her graduate student, Mike Heeman, on the case. We exchanged some emails. And anyway, they tested it. And they got some mice that weren't really wild, but they were much more recently in captivity.

And lo and behold, they had short telomeres. Okay, so that was an amazing moment. My prediction had turned out to be true, which meant, A, that my hypothesis about senescence and cancer and aging might well be true. That was important. But it also raised a bunch of really difficult problems. One was, if it is true that all the mice that are being used to study physiology are broken in this way, then how are we blinding ourselves? Is it possible that we are using all of these mice that would be terrible models for wound healing, for senescence, for cancer, for a whole number of things? How is it that we are allowing ourselves to take these mice who have been

altered and using them as models for normal physiology? And the other problem, maybe even more serious, was that we use these animals in drug safety testing. And the way we use them is, if you think about, if you'd come up with a drug that you thought was useful and you wanted to test whether it was safe to administer it to people, you can't really afford to give people a drug and then wait 40, 50 years to figure out whether you've shortened their lives, right? So at the point that you start testing these things on humans, you're really in the final stage. it is safe for your long-term life based on short use, is we give large doses of it to small animals that live short lives on the assumption that if it's going to shorten your 80- or 90-year life by 10 or 20 years, that it'll shorten a mouse's life long enough to see it. But here's the problem. If you've altered a mouse in the laboratory environment by favoring the radical elongation of its telomeres, then it

has the ability to replace its tissues indefinitely. A toxin that will harm you by killing tissue may not harm that mouse. In fact, it may actually help it because these mice are very cancer-prone. So when we give a toxin that will damage you to a mouse that is highly resistant to tissue damage, you may slow down its tumors. And in fact, we've seen this a number of times where a drug is given to mice and we get back the paradoxical result. Not only is it not toxic, it actually makes the mice live a little longer, right? So my contention is that we had a problem where we were testing drugs to see if they were safe on animals that were predisposed to tell us that they were. And then when those drugs were released into the human population, it turned out they were not safe and people died.

Now, the problem is I was absolutely unable to alert the world to this problem for reasons that still elude me. I published my paper. I went through – I don't think we need to bore your audience especially if they've been through Eric's description with the details of what happened in the attempt to bring this to public attention. But the world of scientists working on the question was unwilling to respond to the discovery that their model organism had this fatal flaw that was going to predispose us to see certain things and not other things in the laboratory environment. The governmental commission that was charged with studying the Vioxx scandal, which I believe was likely the result of something like this, in its 300-page report doesn't mention mice. It doesn't mention- The Vioxx scandal, which was a drug for arthritis, correct? Yeah. It gave people strokes. Yeah, it did heart damage. And so anyway, heart damage is actually probably not heart damage. By that, what I mean is if you take a drug, a substance that damages tissues in the human body, it will show up as heart damage because of the special nature of the heart.

So let's say that you took some drug that killed every 10,000th cell or every 1,000th cell. That would be destructive all over your body. The heart, though, is a special tissue. The heart has a very low capacity for self-repair at a cellular level, very low for reasons we could go into if you wanted. But because it has a low capacity for self-repair, it is also very vulnerable to something that does some kind of general tissue damage. And it's also an organ that when it fails, it's absolutely conspicuous. tested them on mice and not discovering that they were dangerous, that you would see relatively young people die from heart conditions, which is where we would detect that there's a problem before we would detect it anywhere else. So anyway, the government studied this problem after

Vioxx, and it put together a report. And the report's 300 pages. It doesn't mention mice. It doesn't mention the genus mus. Do you think they did that to protect themselves? Well, what I know is that I attempted to call their attention. After the report came out, I looked at it. And it had a physical form, but it also had, it lives online. You can search it. And I could see that telomeres weren't mentioned, mice weren't mentioned, rodents aren't mentioned. And so I tried to alert them to the fact that they had screwed up and they blew me off. They wouldn't talk to me. So that is – it raises a question and I to this day cannot answer the question.

I can't even say whether or not. So when I've tried to raise this issue, I have run into various kinds of resistance. If I raise it with journalists, what I get back is typically I get interest back at first. And they say, okay, I'm very interested in the story. I'm going to pursue it. I'm going to make a few phone calls. And then they come back to me and they either, they go silent or they say, well, I talked to some people and they said it's been taken care of, right? Well, I don't know what it's been taken care of means. I published a paper that said here's a hypothesis about what's going on. Here's my – I proposed a mechanism whereby telomere elongation

would have happened in the breeding colonies in question. And – It's been taken care of is a very strange way to describe something that could be an enormous problem. Well, not only – let's say that it was taken care of, right? Let's say that they have altered the breeding protocol and they fixed the problem. You still have all those drug tests that they've done for – You've got all those drug tests. You've got all of the papers.

You've got my paper, which proposes a hypothesis. And I have a right to say, actually, it turns out to be correct or it wasn't. But so anyway, we got back all of these weird answers. It's been taken care of or even more curious is the argument. Well, everybody knows that the mice are bad models, which is insane because this telomere problem— You actually got that response? Yeah. From?

Several people. I went to several different journalists, and it wasn't that I was told who they contacted. What I was told was that they contacted somebody, and this is what they heard. And so their enthusiasm evaporated at the point they make a phone call. Were they not aware of the consequences of this problem with these mice? So again, this is, we have a serious problem. It's not about mice. It's not about virology, right?

It's a general systemic failure of reason. So what I encountered as a young, somewhat naive graduate student was an instance which frankly woke me up to the fact that my colleagues, even when human life was on the line, were going to pretend they didn't know what was going on. It's quite possible they didn't know until I had put out my hypothesis and Carol Greider, who later pretended she didn't know what I was talking about, published the empirical work that revealed that indeed lab mice are unusual in having long telomeres. After that work was out, there's no excuse for not investigating what the consequences were.

I cannot explain it except to say that the culture of science has become so rotten that this sort of thing is maybe standard operating procedure. Just protecting their ass and protecting the ass of those who give them jobs and all the work that's been done that sort of establishes that they should be doing these tests in the first place. I'm sure they tell themselves some story in which they are the heroes and they are protecting us from something. But I look at my own medicine cabinet. And even though I am aware of what likely happened, I am in no position to protect myself or my family. The only way to be protected from the downstream consequences of this error is to just not take pharmaceuticals. Jesus Christ. And the response of the system generally to shut down the lone individual trying to point out a serious problem is just breathtaking.

When you've seen it, when you've lived it, you never go back. You've looked into the eye of something that is willing to ignore, I mean, it's willing to ignore not only human life, but it is willing to ignore the requirements of good science. How could you leave an error like that? Undescribed. And how is this being discussed on a fucking comedian's podcast? Why is this not front page of the New York Times? Why is this not leading on the news when you're talking about the safety of pharmaceutical drugs?

How is this not something that's an enormous story? Well, this raises another question, something I actually wanted to set the record straight about. By and large, I thought Eric did a fantastic job of describing this. In fact, we're here at the tail end of this podcast, and we're both tired, and I feel like I've done a much worse job than he did describing the science. But I wanted to correct one thing, and I think it will help answer the question you just asked me. You asked Eric why I had not pursued this, and you said maybe was he afraid. And Eric indicated that that was some part of it. It's no part of it

and I think Eric has actually forgotten what happened. So I was dogged about this for a decade. I tried everything I could think of. I talked to every journalist who would listen. As I said I went to the Committee on Drug Safety, the Blue Ribbon Commission, I did everything I could think of. I wrote when Carol Greider, who refused to acknowledge my contribution, got her Nobel Prize, I wrote what I think was a generous op-ed to the New York Times saying that her Nobel Prize was deserved, but that we had this serious problem related to mouse telomeres and that maybe now this Nobel Prize would give us the courage to look at it. They wouldn't publish it.

So I tried everything I could think of. And at one point, a good friend of ours, a guy named Mike Brown, who used to – he was the former CFO of Microsoft, really good guy, made a ton of money because he was at Microsoft on the ground floor. And he used to hold something called Science Camp. And Science Camp involved gathering a bunch of really high quality people to talk privately where nobody was aware that we were even gathered, right? It really gave us the room to be frank. And I was there and I gave a talk on telomeres. I gave a talk about the science and I talked about the politics that I had run into. And they were blown away. It we understand why this is having the effect on you that it's having.

But you're wrapped around the axle. That was their phrase. You're wrapped around the axle about this story. It's preventing you from doing what you need to do. And I didn't like hearing that. And, you know, initially I thought, no, that's not right. And then I think they were right. And I, you know, initially, I thought, no, that's not right. And then I think, I think they were right. And so I let it go. And I started, I only talked about it with my students

from that point forward, I tried to teach the science as clearly as I could, and try to keep the politics as far away from it as I could. And I, you know, it's very hard to do. But I let it go. Now, at that point, I was an obscure college professor at an obscure college. I had 400 Twitter followers. I wasn't in a position to push the case if somebody didn't want to hear it. Eric is right that we are in a different era. I have 300,000 Twitter followers, 130,000 YouTube subscribers. I got powerful friends.

It is possible that that is enough to get this raised at the level that it would need to be raised in order to get it addressed. But I'm not convinced of that. My experience trying to get the topic addressed anywhere for more than a decade was that it was like having a big hammer and there's a bell and you keep running at the bell and slamming it with the hammer and there's no sound. It does not ring. There's nothing that you can do to make it ring. does not ring. There's nothing that you can do to make it ring. Now, maybe, maybe at this higher profile, there is now enough firepower to get that bell to ring. But Eric's podcast, which is probably among the best places if you want to know the scientific story to go to, you can listen to

the portal number 19. And you can hear him, you know, he catches me off guard. He forces me to tell this story, which I didn't. I should have seen it coming, but I didn't. So anyway, you get the raw version. It is possible that we are now going to get the bell to ring, but episode 19 of the portal did not cause it to ring. It caused a flurry of activity outside of mainstream scientific circles, but it did not cause anybody to sit up and take notice inside. And that is the thing I think we still don't know. We don't know what force we're up against. The pharmaceutical industry has mice that will tell us that drugs that they are advancing into the market are safe when they are not, and maybe that's the force that prevents the bell from ringing. I really have no idea.

But I guess the question is, is the era different because we're at a higher profile or isn't it? It seems like we would need more than just the scientific community. We would need someone else in media to press the scientific community and say, what's going on here? To press the pharmaceutical industry and say, what's going on here? To press the pharmaceutical industry and say, address this. Is this an issue or is this not an issue? Is he correct? If he is correct, what do we do about this? And what does this mean? What do we do about this and how many other thises are they? I happened on this completely by accident. I happened on this because I was a generalist who was interested in interesting things.

And I was interested in evolution. And this just happened to show up. And so, yeah, I pursued it. There were features of my character that caused me to pursue it when others would have let it go. But it still indicates that there may be many such things lurking that we have no awareness of and that the fact that systems are so good at shutting down a story like this means that it would be very unlikely that you would have heard that there was a flaw like this. So I don't know the answer to your question. I do think your point about the foundation being the important place that dealing with the rotten structure above is not where this has to go. It's got to go to the bottom level. What we are finding out is that in system after system, something has gone wrong. I think there are a small number of themes that explain why

these systems go wrong. I think we have taken the magic of market forces, which really are magic for certain things, and we have infused them where they do harm rather than good. In other words, in my opinion, markets are excellent at figuring out how to do things and they are terrible at deciding what to do. And we have put them in charge of both jobs. So we are so in love with the magic of what they can accomplish that we don't realize that the – you know, science, for example, is too delicate to allow market forces to govern it. If you let market forces govern it, it becomes like any other market and it turns scientists into salesmen and things like that. We have to get good at figuring out where we can afford to use the market, where we have to insulate something from the market,

and at the point we do that, we'll be in a much stronger position to protect ourselves. But until we do, we're just going to keep doing self-harm. And on that note. You know, Joe, I was really hoping that this would be funnier. I had a tight 10 minutes that I was going to dribble out over three hours, and we just didn't do it. You brought up some awesome stuff. Really very, very important points across the board.

Very brave points too. And I always appreciate you, man. Really do. Thanks. And I really appreciate you too. If it is not clear, your podcast, which you have built, is one of the few things of its magnitude that is not corrupt. Which is why I think you have so many good people willing to come here at the drop of a hat and talk to you. So I have no idea how it happened. We'll just keep doing it.

All right. Thanks, man. Thanks, brother. Bye, everybody.