Joe Rogan Experience #1494 - Bret Weinstein

if anybody sounded the alarm then all this madness was gonna come to fruition in the real world it's you sir you were you were the guy like you were the one who's saying this is what's happening at Evergreen and if you don't know go google it Bret Weinstein evergreen and now it spills out into the real world just like I said it was gonna you did I didn't I did I said it in several different places and pretty clearly you know it could have been a tiny bit more precision but I was highly accurate you are highly accurate and often maligned and mocked yeah people didn't think it was a big deal they think you were 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 yeah it's all about force and you know I've started to get calls in the last week or two the people who 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 I appreciate those those calls in those contacts because really that is the question you do now to pull it back yeah 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 this is actually the people who are catching up to the fact that Evergreen has now spilled over into the world I 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 with history I mean we're really staring at many scenarios that end in 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 that's it's really troubling what do you think these kids want not just kids what do you 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 gonna 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 mm-hmm 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 a an anarchist movement that was just simply hostile to civilization and it became absurd and so when I say this is occupied 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 with 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 I don't you think 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 are 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 that the thing that is trotted out as the example that tells us that defund the police which doesn't really mean do you fund the police it means abolish the police we are told that that's safe on the basis of something like the Camden example what Camden just did 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 it was a gentleman's name that was killed in the drive-in to drive through a fast-food place Rashard says his name who was just drunk and compliant and peaceful until they were telling him they were gonna arrest him even said get me an uber and what his point was there's a very good point why were the police even called for that this is a non-violent person who just happened to be drunk was he doing something he should have been doing yes but obviously compliant polite speaking well 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 gonna park your car sir or we'll have someone Drive your car to your house we're gonna call you an uber or we're gonna take you home and we're gonna just write you a ticket and work this out in court you're not gonna go to jail you don't have to be arrested you don't to be handcuffed you're gonna be treated like a monster you [ __ ] up you made a mistake but you're not a bad person you know as a person who's trying to hurt people the police should be there for robbers murderers rapists that's that's what we need the police for and this is another none of those things this is just a guy who [ __ ] up and he got drunk and he and then as they were speaking to him clear real clear not a bad guy like the way he's talking to cops just talking to him very reasonably even asked for an uber well look I am no fan of this aggressive style of policing you know 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 going to happen 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 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 will link 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 probe for training and what he said is that these cops have the the minimal amount of training it's a the tiniest amount of training and then they send them on the street he goes twenty percent of their time should be spent training twenty percent it should be de-escalation drills simulation drills educating them on how to communicate with people in various situations educating them as how if one cop is in a confrontation with someone the next cop should step in and say let's listen Mike let's go go deal with this over there and I'm gonna handle this and sir let's let's let's take this from scratch like let's work let's work this out in that having higher qualified police officers better trained police officers more well better compensated police forces so they're not taxed out is really the answer to all this and these people are there 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 gonna do this it's a you have a few that are gonna answer that call because they feel like it's they have a duty but you're gonna 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 so that's very bad for people with guns that 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 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 trained 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 all 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 in 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 and all the models that they operate under the what what they model themselves on is what they see around them which is all this crime and they they don't have this sense that there's a very clear path out of this well let's um 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 resin 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 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 and 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 and a lot of that emanates from these communities that have been 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 rep nation's 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 it we basically have set ourselves up for a confused response because there is a subtlety the fact that ancient races and people who are dead their racism still haunts us today through mechanisms of the reproduction of patterns of distribution and mind you and people here 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 in 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 political 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 from their share and they are being excluded but this revolution that is beginning in our streets is no more coherent or desirable than you know then Maoism and it's going to be brutal in in the Maoist way or possibly the way that it unfolded in the French Revolution or maybe it'll be some you know unique version and it'll get its own name but if we want the Republic to survive we're gonna have to prevent this from happening and because it's a leaderless movement who do you even talk to who'd be reasonable 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 and it's in all parts of the world people are protesting and in many ways I think that's it's probably because loved it or hated 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 expression and I see this leaderless movement and it seems so attractive to young people that do feel disenfranchised by the system so I 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 you talking about are you talking about George Floyd well that in that case it seems like that guy's gonna 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 what 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's 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 and an enemy that they can't 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 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 D 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 u.s. 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 it evergreen yeah 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 but 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 a moment of useful and necessary change I would argue overdue change but those people are instead of being leaders but they are as 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've got a conflict between rural people and urban people you a conflict between blacks and those who are self declared allies and Ally doesn't really mean a lie but 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 right and you know 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 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 allows us to lead it that reason is that the values that were described were honorable even if they even if we didn't meet them but what we aspired to be was great and I you know 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 Magga is just a finger in the eye for people and it was designed to be but the structure what it aspires to be as 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's also 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 this is so much going on it was so thoroughly all over my feed though but I'm discovering this there's stuff absent from my feed to that I should know about and I'm finding the same thing but here's the thing yeah I don't read my feet well you don't read your Twitter feed but you're plugged into enough people your 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 yeah I I've stepped away from almost all social media other than posting yeah it's actually 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 plugged in but but anyway the the thing that is really concerning here and I you know I I don't want this podcast to be all about concern there's thousands of scientists go on strike to protest systemic racism and 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 put people on social media are spreading word about the strike with the hashtag shut down academia mmm-hmm shut down stem and strike for black lives shut down academia is terrifying shut down 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 and stem what does it mean it's representation in terms of like the what are they saying so this is so sad because truly if you if you really wanted to to raise black people out of the quagmire the economic quagmire they find themselves in if you wanted to do it on mass you would arm them with the most powerful tools all right the most powerful tool and the tool that is best positioned to address biases especially subtle biases is science that's that's what the scientific method does that's 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 science as the word theory is basically pilfered right it's being used in the 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 say where 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 know you've had Jordan Peterson on your podcast many times once with me and you know he what he talks about with respect to these these are cultural Marxists and they are wielding this postmodern doctrine but he's talking about his critical theory right critical theory is basically a a Trojan horse that exists in academic departments that are dedicated to its study and what it does is it uninvent 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 shutting down academia shutting down stem abolishing the police all of this is standard fare in those phony departments when you say uninvent progress now what do you mean by that well I mean that we have a system and you know I'm as upset about what doesn't work about it as anybody but we have a system that accomplishes a great deal and this style of thought that 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 there like an autoimmune disease of the academic culture and by and large the scientific part of the Academy keeps his 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 the argument more or less is that the sciences are unfairly biased in favor of those who are currently successful and that that bias is actually preventing people who are not succeeding under current conditions from getting there and therefore we need to hobble these disciplines to level the playing field well imagine that America surrendered its advantage in the sciences in order to 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 but 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 this is clear evidence of racism yeah when is total nonsense what is it evidence of it is 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 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 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 the 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 we 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 that 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 to broaden you know so it is not true that privately scientists are harboring racist views and talking about them and then you know behaving themselves when they're around people who are of a different color it's not like that okay 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 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 um 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 in a in a proper science well what are you gonna do with it you're gonna 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 really I'll be like one in twenty 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 to place so the university has an incentive to get as many people 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 is 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 you claim that they are not actually workers that their students and they 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 in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense but this means that we over produce 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 grant spend almost full time doing that job and it's a racket mmm so in that what I wasn't aware of that at all I didn't know how it works yeah it's a racket and and the person you should talk to the person who knows the most about this is actually Eric my brother mhm so what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep the system running that in fact effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market to drive the wages down but all of these things mean that if you are coming from circumstances that have been challenging and you make 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 gonna voluntarily drown and it doesn't make any sense you're much better off even as bad as you know 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 impact 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 what do they propose a replacement of stem and academia so I'm what they want is so strange and preposterous that it damages my credibility to even say it I will I will answer your question okay but I know that what I'm saying sounds preposterous so the only reason that so certain of it is that I've talked to them directly and I watched this happen at every talk to them correct directly so you know this is actually what they want well I can't say they because or 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 you know there was an it there was an example at Evergreen where we were in a faculty meeting and I said that the proposals that were 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 as a problem well so here's here's what I say to two people who asked me about this students in particular the Enlightenment was a European project right it definitely had a light skin tone right it was 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 discovery in Europe and arguably the discovery in Europe happened because of unfair exclusion of other people but at some level who the [ __ ] cares those are the most powerful tools ever and you you can't uninvent them the thing to do is distribute them as broadly as possible mm-hmm 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 or 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 from 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 it'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 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 as a young woman named Odette Odette is half black her mom is afro-caribbean she was known to be my student and heather 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 what did they say when say you're a race traitor for studying science what what's what specific discipline well she was studying evolutionary biology with Heather and me and and they said you were a race traitor for studying evolutionary biology because because science is racist it's nonsense and I hear you're trying to parse it as if it makes sense and I think they 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 I'm it may be James Lindsay who is the originator of 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 gap says any place where that we see a success differential the explanation is inherently racism so if we see an absence of black people in math obviously the answer is racist 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 a debt for a second trying to parse what they're saying as if it has content logical content is a mistake mm-hmm trying to parse it as a tactical move makes a lot of sense okay 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 eh now they have a potentially powerful ally right a black person former student of or at that point I guess current student of Heather in 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 man being bullied by that would probably cause a lot of people to cave in to that and give in to that just for conformity just so the people who 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 is nothing that they could have said or threatened her with it 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 shut down 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 hmm because I didn't see anything on his feed that suggested you know he hadn't made a statement I thought it would be powerful him to do for him to do it he was totally unaware of what's 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 we're in tremendous danger and what what do you think their motivation is power power well again what happens we'll 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 um 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 a my cousin line I know you 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 communities that have been systematically frozen out and I put I would put American blacks and American Indians at the top of the list because I believe they have a special claim is a particular vehicles 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 maybe but I think that there's something very special that happened with blacks and with Indians yeah or not 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 yeah that doesn't it makes them unlike anyone other America yes yes 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 what this movement is is an attempt to create a slant in every single interaction that does the job of reparations its reparations 24 hours a day seven days a week in every room in every institution in every context right now that will be the uninvented 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 broadcasting to 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 of the 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 uninvent in America and substituting a reparations program for it which it just couldn't possibly be a bigger hazard and think think for a second if you're trying to imagine what the hell I'm talking about mm-hmm imagine the courts right now there is a problem there's a process 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 but that show trial mentality I mean it would be a perfect fit for the the maoist part of this of this movements 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 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 some lack of discipline when they promote this people that are in recognition that there is a problem in this country there is a situation this country and to voice any sort of disagreement with this movement that seems to represent the idea that there is a problem you you become a part of 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 it's gonna 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 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 when always imagines brainwashing to be this very aggressive thing but the incremental nosov 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 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 right you could write that essay I can write did I say there's no moral compromise in write that essay or the other example was you know 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 we're really the concession was just you're gonna 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 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 talked 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 on two 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 I saw Dave Chappelle's 8:46 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 do you think he got wrong well what are you 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 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 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 they say 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 and but you saw it on the ground the problem with seeing it from a distance is you can minimize many things when you're 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 [ __ ] and what we see here in America such a combination of factors right you have Co vid 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 I mean if you really know how long 8 minutes and 46 seconds is with someone leaning on your neck you would know how [ __ ] 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 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're 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 made 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 [ __ ] going on yeah and I you know like I said at first I was on board with this and I thought there was something right about it and you know I even thought the leader lessness 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 you know in revolutions are not started by a bunch of intellectuals who have some idea what system they want to correct rights people who are fed up and so that's what Dave Chappelle was responding to and I totally get it but the problem is we are all in danger of being marched in the direction of things that are anti-american that are in fact anti black because we are trying to to grant the right concessions on the right points and it's a it's a case in which you can't track what's really happening well enough to do 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 of graves I'm not sure 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 they had had problems when they worked together because Derek Chauvin was a [ __ ] to customers and he was violent to customers if 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 well-being of the world and from the point of view of us all processing this right 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 gonna bring George Floyd back 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 do you think that it's not murder this is what so 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 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 am 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 we're at the case that he was having a heart attack he had apparently methamphetamine and fentanyl in his system at the time weren't the case that he was having a heart attack you mean same system is it 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 I don't know I don't know either so let's let's leave it so again I am NOT rooting I understand what you saw him to be the reason why I bring that up is coming from someone who works very closely with the UFC and you saw one of the things that I'm finding out is that their methods of detection now are insanely sensitive and you can detect entire incredibly small non-psychoactive amounts months and months and months after use okay well then it's obviously not relevant the possibility that 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 there was a tussle and he's just exhausted and he couldn't breathe but or that reports that he said he couldn't breathe before he was on the ground or erroneous that's all suppose could be a lie you wouldn't you look at what that man did when you look at what Derek did - 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 he's a radically change no it may be that the policy killed George Floyd because the galaxy allowed him to do that yeah well maybe it even required him to do it I don't know but what 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 thing there's another problem with the way he did it with there's a drain there you see that Cement drain and his neck is laying on the edge of the cement drain that it's like a bone when you choke man you know you you don't use the meaty part of your body you use the bone and that's essentially that divot that that drain is laying right where his neck is I don't know if he placed him there on purpose yeah but I wouldn't doubt it well I'm not saying Derrick 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 what I'm saying is that we don't know in the public based on what we have seen we don't know this to have murder because if this was Derrick 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 right doing the policy as the policy is laid out based on the criteria that would trigger the policy have you read any of this about the policies I've read a bit what have you read I read so it said I'm going to struggle for the words that the acronym stands for there is a a situation called e XDS extreme boy I don't have it maybe Jamie can find it okay 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 the courtroom with due process well isn't it through autopsies because independent autopsies did find that it's fix iation and the cut-off of the blood supply to the brain we're responsible for his death now there was a police department autopsy that was refuted by two individual independent attorney independent examiner's you know what you need what you need a court you need a court 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 right 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 judgement 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 nobody anticipated this or saw that but right it speaks to the powder keg of circumstances that we were talking about all this different packed dynamite of covet 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 after Civil War catastrophic so if that is the case what I believe is likely to happen is that he's likely to be victory respective 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 most 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 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 uninvent 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 are in 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 [ __ ] magnifying glass to look at it if I am I'm an expert on choking people you know I understand what happens to the brain when you cut off the blood supply I've had it done to me what that guy is doing is torture and I think I could I know I could kill a man that way I know I could yeah if I 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 gonna 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 weight on your neck you're a dead man okay so that's what we saw well III 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 I wanna 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 unamerican for that to be the way he was convinced 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 forth doesn't mean when you roll in jiu-jitsu class generally 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 [ __ ] 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 his 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 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 got 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 there's not a threat that guy wasn't even moving I want to be 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 go sir can also use two type of neck restraints in less severe circumstances one is called 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 has changed 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 a great active aggression well doesn't do that he was begging for his life he was calling out for his dead mother's mother I know Sallie rific [ __ ] 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 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 but it's 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 chokehold that was a chokehold but here's the thing about the Eric Gardner case they should have never [ __ ] arrested that guy in the first place he was just selling loose cigarettes like what kind of a world we're living in we grabbed 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 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 a hundred 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 and yeah we can say the same thing for George Floyd right we're talking about yeah counterfeit $20 bills 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 count 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 the the prison system as well here's where I'd argue with you about that okay that is 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 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 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've got a monster who just wants to [ __ ] 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 and 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 well 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 [ __ ] piece of [ __ ] and that's what that guy did well 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 Experiment of course experiments which of course have been sort of discredited in some ways that they actually probably wanted out of it 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 people have just unchecked authority over folks they tend to they tend to use that it's a it's a feature of human beings Oh believe me I mean like I said before I only told you the the simpler story of my run-in with the cops right I know that 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 it's very dangerous yes but I still 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 further you get down the economic ladder the less opportunity there is and the greater the danger of you are falling off the bottom right in some communities you start off off the bottom yes and you cannot access the ladder up in such cases it is not surprising that people resort to crime the reason most yeah do not resort to crimes that they have better options right or wired to pick better options so let's talk about a couple things okay 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 all 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 a you know prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that so there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had we were in the new world and a substituting of a version that was not as much of a threat to the slaveholding population right and at the point that slavery comes to an end it is not as if frankly even we you know we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms it wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the to the body and also the the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different I would argue is the systematic hobbling of the on board the inherited evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to two reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture and in the case of Africans it was you know breaking a part 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 yes yes okay you're speaking about this almost purely from organ evolutionary biology perspective yes I'm and I'm afraid that it's not it's not probably 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 you know conquistadores who came into the new world and were forcing catholicism on the inca for example right so there's this there's always this attempt to to hand off culture that serves the powerful and undermines those who might rebel against right okay now let's 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 you have rules that freeze certain people out of opportunity and then you have a system that is capable of incarcerated 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 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 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 well I think those things are in many people's are so distantly connected you know what they look at the economic disparity in 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 what your your connection and what the what you're saying about the the fact that the hobbling of these communities is so systemic it's so it's so a part of how they're established and set up and there's and it's repeating itself over and over and over again generation after generation you know that in many people's eyes it doesn't doesn't seem related it doesn't seem related exactly and this is this is why you need those Enlightenment values and the tools that arise out of them right to be able to look at it scientifically right if this is this is causal yeah you have to go dispassionate in order to make a compassion they can't see they can't be taboo subjects that can't be breached by white people because of your privilege right so what I am 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 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 right they're complaining about something that doesn't exist this is this is nonsense it's chaos and we it has to be shut down and so anyway that the truth is neither of those things the the movement is advancing wrong ideas but the energy that fuels the movement is about real legitimate complaints yeah 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 right 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 discussed jobs and unemployment and you know and and boosting up the economy and like when Trump discusses the fact that you know when the economy was doing well before Co vid that there was black unemployment was at an all-time low and that you know he was all these great things were happening it's like addressing you're not dressing the foundation you're the 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 the 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 you these are temporary patches the real issue is is very clear the one of the ways I've looked at it is in this is a very simplistic way that I sort of say if you really wanted to help America be 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 a 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 give people you you set it up so people have if not the same advantage of far superior advantage that then they have now in terms of their ability to make it through the navigate the 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 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 that they've had this problem for decade after decade and nothing's been done about it and so they hear all this this talk from politicians about black unemployment and this and that but meanwhile the [ __ ] neighbor was exactly the same no one's done anything to fix it no one's done anything to - I mean and I think it's a tremendous problem in terms of like what effort needs to be done to fix it and I'm a [ __ ] I'm not the guy to fix it I don't I don't understand how it could be done I don't know but I don't 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 and some some people that have you know that are philanthropists sort of 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 one's no president has ever made an address even Obama what 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 gonna do to fix that 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 to corrupt parties both of which are hell-bent on stealing well-being from them and transferring it to their actual constituents I agree so yeah that's 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 incidentally I do want to talk to you about okay we are facing a global pandemic we are facing rioting in the streets a movement that's showing signs of a Maoist challenge to the most fundamental aspects of the West right and we're gonna have to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden what right neither one of these people is capable of or inclined towards the kind of leadership that you have just described we would need a grade so that means that a very 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 the president would be essential to changing our course right and this is just built into these parties now right 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 his administration and at a policy level is 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 break their stranglehold and you know in fairness Trump was a challenge to that two-party duopoly he's not really a Republican right right but he's also not really an alternative it's like a third crime family right yeah you've got the Republicans the Democrats and now they 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 any of it there was ever a time where an independent party has a chance now is 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 gonna do it you break those down the 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 shells 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're not they don't have to give it they don't 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 see none of those out there you haven't encountered a big part you know they don't exist all right you want to hear the plan sure okay the rock and jock were willing well you know let's put that okay let's put that to the side it's not part of the plan but it actually could fit okay so here's the 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 that's it okay center-left in 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 okay 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 continued 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 and then that person has to be replaced so we have a patriotic team governing together from center left and center right well you say drafted that's the problem like someone has to be motivated to ruin their [ __ ] lives to try to run this country that's what happens to everybody that does it I agree but then that's an obstacle you're spelling out or an obstacle that I would argue is solvable that we know these people who okay so okay let's just say that's the plan so far you can talk about what problems it solves as much as you want you're welcome to have it 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 okay but my proposal would be Admiral William McRaven on the right you know who that is no I don't ok 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 yeah you're gonna know oh yeah your president to me yeah it looks like a president to me too you know who else looks like a president to me Oh Andrew yang I'm down with that okay so like what you're saying now good so here's my point those two guys together those two 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 heard the job of vice presidents 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 her office yeah you know faced appallingly stupid obstacles that in my opinion may in 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 Raven McRaven but Andrew Yang has some really good ideas yeah I mean and reasonable ideas across the board and when in terms of many things not just universal basic income which was the thing that he was most popular for but but even law enforcement he's got some great ideas about a lot of things he thinks outside the box a brilliant guy open to anything yes I'm sorry reasonable so I would suggest one last part 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 gonna do about health care and how they're going to pay for 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 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 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 an office and we also know that doesn't work right they just do whatever they're gonna do in ranch place so my point would be look I will I will literally vote for any competent courageous Patriot I actually don't care in what direction of their 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 the 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 the you know you're the Supreme Court you're voting for someone who's not going to reverse Roe vs. Wade that's what I keep hearing from my friends on the left and you know they've basically just they 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 speech is 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 that it didn't show his decline and I was I was trying to look at it in a way that it made sense I was trying to be rational about him like okay maybe he's just exhausted or maybe this or maybe it's pressure you know sometimes people get really tongue-tied and panic under pressure and words come out all [ __ ] up that 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 it's you're seeing it 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 right that doesn't make any sense so like 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 the thing they did it to us before kovat and they did to us before the looting and before the damage it was this moment these things think they thought it was gonna happen the way it happened I thought they when they if I thought that I feel like they felt that if they got Joe Biden in there if none of this stuff had happened you would just be dealing with one solution to the problem that is Donald Trump right but even if we are if we bend over backwards to be generous to the Democratic Party yes it did this in a moment when we didn't know that kovat 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 well why we need a cogent leader it was obvious that this could happen under any presidency but there's a lot of other things 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 will 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 was highlighted the problem of Donald Trump's ego yeah you know I mean people would say these egos 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 like almost to the point where he can't handle it anymore you know like some people can run at a pace of 5 miles an hour but when you force him to run at a pace of 7 miles an hour things get slippery you know you start you start feeling cramps you start looking for a way out and he's right now about 9 miles an hour and it's not looking good nothing's I mean he's tweeting about not falling down a ramp and why were you walking like that he's all the fake news media doesn't was a slippery ramp and I'm not gonna give them a ring like what the [ __ ] are you even paying attention to yeah 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 [ __ ] slippery dress shoes on those shoes suck I never wear wear those I went to a cowboy boot store the other day and I was like what do 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 [ __ ] things on now they're for dancing so you can yeah you slip around with that claim but that's what dress shoes are yeah they wear those leather soles dress shoes that slip like crazy there's no tread on them they're not that's what that guys wearing walking on a ramp well and you know she boosts a nice pair of Adidas with some good traction I agree I always wear practical shoes because you know when you're on [ __ ] goes down exactly yeah exactly so they eat the ego is you know it highlights which it gets it gets really magnet or 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 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 gonna be able to see clearly anything until we are 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 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'd 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 all that kind of [ __ ] that 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 Brydon crazy Hillary Clinton lyin Hillary you know he crazy Ted lyin 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 he's a political genius yes yes well a manipulative genius in the sense that he understands how to use the media because he's been in it forever these [ __ ] people have been in in this bush-league way like you you don't even know what it's like they 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 a blistering takedown of someone like Trump or someone like Biden he's easy easy both those guys you know they're vulnerable is [ __ ] 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 and I is he doing right now I don't know I think I think he may have retired after he left the the transfer position probably right now digging a bunker somewhere outside of Waco [ __ ] this place but you know I mean look the way the way you would draft somebody like that is you would let them know that we'd have their back mm-hmm right yeah we 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 jute was it the 16th 15th what is today 16 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 yeah you ain't kidding 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 in because it through all the [ __ ] wrenches into the gears every race and into the oil into the eyes yeah it's [ __ ] crazy I'm going stark raving sane mmm yeah me too yeah I think so you want to talk about Co vid I do what are your what are your thoughts on that what do you thoughts on the lockdown yeah well let's put it this way I'm 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 Cove - 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 yet 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 half way 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 imagine at this moment being free of SARS Cove - yeah they nailed it but they also have so few people no 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 mean 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 when we came out what was then called novel coronavirus was just beginning to be discussed and it so we became aware of it as we came out of the Amazon's like oh what the heck is not huh 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 isn't I tweeted I don't know enough about the story yet but looks to me like the Wu hen on 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 corona virus transmitted to people possibly through pangolins maybe through some intermediate hosts 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 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 Han Institute of biology but there's another lab in Wuhan it it may well have escaped and we may be dealing with consequences are the root of the the fact that it was manipulated in the lab so one of the techniques that labs who study viruses like this they 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 passages where a virus is infected and 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 and 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 the enhancements of one of the enhancements there is a something called a foreign site a fern site in the genome of this virus fern 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 its conspicuous in that it is in the genome is 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 gonna 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 the inclusion of an arginine is variable and the two arginines are coded for in a way that is not seen in 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 fern site that I refer 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 right 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 kovat 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 and then things they're not even thinking about occur there's adaptation to the laboratory environment the people who work in labs are on 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 a 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 and fire that actually it could relearn that trick that we should take it we a we need to be outdoors for various reasons one it appears that vitamin D is very protective in the case of kovat 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 anytime we allow it to be transmitted outdoors that is going to that creates a 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 gonna lose it if we're not careful which is why I'm very careful and why I wear this thing around so that you know 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 and why is it easier for it to trend do we know why don't know 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 it's weird for those of us who learned how viruses work from the the usual textbook diagrams where a virus gets into a cell and triggers and 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 or you're constantly breathing air that they're exhaling then your chances go up up up and up and that's so there's a possibility that just exposure to UV light as people 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 Sun like that it kills the virus's ability to transmit it's possible I don't know that when you think about things like your you know what a SteriPEN is Oh like a UV it like it yeah it's a UV wand the backpackers used so they can drink creek water yeah it's crazy if you ever seen one it's not doesn't even take that long yeah you take this wand you put it in like a bottle water bottle and you spin it around in this creeks water and it kills all the bad stuff totally and it's weird man it's weird the 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 you know he's basically claiming to get the light put it in the body somehow the body disinfect the cleansing you remind me of Sarah Cooper when you knew he was 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 Inc into what they have been intubated when they are on this ventilator this tube will go down the same tube that the air is coming through yeah and actually flood the lungs where they're infected with kovat 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 the cove at 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 surprised to discover it and then I heard the president say this and 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 of promising therapy bla bla bla bla bla uv-light bla bla bla bla bla and he just walks out the door and riffs on which is why Sarah Cooper is so funny because basically she exposes the I don't know who Sarah Cooper oh you know maybe I do you've probably seen her she's um making these videos where she lip-synchs Trump oh that's no she's not the one who did the thing where was it a doctor faking Stein or the fake inning put Trump's face on a baby have you ever seen that one no I haven't seen that well that one's wonderful the best ones ever you haven't run into circular I may have I've seen so many people mark him it's so hard to keep track of who's who okay but there she is yep let's give me some volume on that more for the black community than any other president and let's take a pass on Abraham like him because he did good although it's always questionable you know in other words the entries that we are free mr. president but we Honest Abe is because you say you in general that is the dumbest [ __ ] thing a person's ever said has been in office well that may he's done more than maybe Abe Lincoln who freed the slaves he's giving a blink in a pass because he did pretty good how crazy is a it's crazy right 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 Valenta to 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 so I absolutely [ __ ] and saying 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 swinging 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 a baby one the baby ones amazing if you don't have it I could I could airdrop it to you the baby one you need to say okay I guess it's [ __ ] amazing current somebody it either the faking or dr. fakin Stein do you know who 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 changed the words that someone caught a baby doing something and they talked to the baby and the baby was trying to live 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 here go ahead this is the original baby Rachel's first yeah yes you did you touched its food it's adorable so now President you said the virus was just like the flu you did you also said the virus could go away by April you said it would disappear like a miracle you have to see it if you find it folks anybody'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 in the dark but still their covert stuff yeah we have a really kidding um yeah so what I would say is first of all I do think I am very much in favor still of driving this thing to extinction by being properly sober about it briefly tonight pause and address this one issue that seems to be sure 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 for we've been poisoned by these these ideologies when it comes to conspiracy or whether or not something is actually but we've been fed the wrong information that 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 and have you faced that oh of course I faced it I've been I'm 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 it admits that it wasn't from the seafood market do that oh yeah what do they say it's from well 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 there 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 pandemic it already had experience now how it got that experience we don't know there are evolutionary waves this could have happened right it could be that we have not found the initial population that it's 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 in your list of things to do you could also passage it through human tissue in order to effectively 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 biology 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 be there may be things that we could understand about what its nature is that would help us fight it but see 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 there for 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-traveller 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 so 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 you know it's the lesson of pulling off the band-aid we're not doing ourselves any favors by pulling it off slowly so what do you think we should do right now well I would say I mean the problem is this a much harder argument to make now than it was at the beginning because we're all so frickin 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 kovat 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 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 you know 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'll be short and then intense contact tracing but we've done the lockdown with essential businesses open well we've done that's all real lock they'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 you don't come into work if you don't pass this test and if your work puts you in contact with other people were 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 pushing open back up you ought to be pushing things that would make opening back up as safe as possible but our 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 kovat yes except that we can effectively know that what they were really I don't even want to give him credit for really saying it the the motivation for saying that nonsense was that they were trying to preserve masks for people who needed it most that's what foul she said so they basically lied to it they lied to us flat-out which some 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 know what's cool bank robber I'm the Mojito Bendita 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 professional it's cute it's also it's also more comfortable though yes 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 using that Gator mm-hmm yeah you wear them when you're hunting your 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 or your face they really just slip it back down again and pull it back up but it actually stays in place that makes total sense but I do 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 never heard of a net Gator no I'm heard of a net Gator for other things but not for hunting oh yeah oh super common yeah you pull up there's 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 one of the few places where you could say it's mandatory to hunt animals because they have an invasive species called access deer that's me see that that thing on my face that's a net Gator and it's actually in the Sitka the hunting gear that I'm wearing it's actually built into the hood so in in 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'd 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 there it's an invasive species they were brought there and given to king kamehameha by the but by India in like the 1800s and there's no predator so they're just out of control you've never seen anything like 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 so I've got videos of these things where in arrows coming at them from eighty yards and as the arrow is about you know 15 yards away they hear it and they're get out of the way they move so fast like they're the fastest deer I've ever encountered in my life by far like nothing's even close to them and you know you you have to be sneaky to get close to these things yeah that's why you dress like that that's cool in some sense so actually can I connect that the the viral questions or okay so the connections 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 but and seals but there's uh there's only one terrestrial mammal trying to guess what that Bay yeah a mammal terrestrial mammal well terrestrial may be misleading here I just mean on land Oh seal nope no well they're seals but that's it's an aquatic mammal okay it's a bat oh right so here's the thing Hawaii is as remote from mainland as anywhere there is really isolated you know 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 you know you know 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 all 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 mmm 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 very small deal to them they just call for a couple days and then it's no big deal yes well so I've been advocating from the start that we should be much more aggressive in the way we are studying this that in fact you remember the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt had an outbreak and it docked in Guam mm-hmm 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 and 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 percent I think so all I can say is that makes no sense to me right 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 attested positive from at least Jamie you would know better than me and was at one particular team where these athletes were for two or four guys on that team two or four guys on the team out of 15 16 and they were always symptomatic I don't think anybody got really sick that I've heard of it yeah I would like them to be studied because their 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 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 in 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 you give that to David Goggin for instance someone who can run 100 mile races and and and do them back-to-back you know someone who's extreme cardiovascular fit it's like Cameron Haynes or something like that sure and we want to see that we could learn a lot about what this thing is really up to as it is we're we're grasping at straws yeah got a large list of symptoms we've got people who seem to be a somatic and yet 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 haphazard nosov response to it you know like why are we screwing this up so badly so you don't you think that it's we didn't know what it was when it happened and then when it did happen there was a lot of competing information and there was China was giving us bad information for 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 that we know now that that's not the case well but think about how [ __ ] up our situation is right imagine that you 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 virologists might circle the wagons in order to protect their access to grant money so the very people who need to tell you holy [ __ ] 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 kovat 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 I mean we can't live that way this is that 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 and all the how do you how do you eliminate all the [ __ ] that we're dealing with and how do we filter it out and what what would be like the best pure information where would it be distributed from well the you know this this is weird because it's going to sound self aggrandizing 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 okay and so you know the telomere story is that story writ large let's tell that story because we discuss it on a podcast with your brother but a lot of people might not have heard it so let's let's let's talk about what you discovered and what what you mean by this okay so I was a graduate student in evolutionary biology my specialty was actually bats well that's what I said I studied tent making bats which was great and by the way I think the danger of virus is 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 them 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 suggests 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 char's because if I was going to deviate a soft 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 gonna [ __ ] on them and they got insanely sick from some hemorrhagic virus and wound up dying like shortly afterwards you know of his story I don't know the story I'm now feeling bad about having laughed that they got crapped on by these bad no I should have I should have warned you that it was a bad story but I remember reading this story that you know they talked about the millions and millions of bats that flew at us can't believe it was in Africa they flew out of this cave and that they [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] 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 so there's 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 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's also flix people in the poultry industry um 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 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 mmm now there is also the 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 an ammonia there was something like six miners who came down with 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 bread so only 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 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 yes 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 was 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 so we discover you know after the Deepwater Horizon accident we discovered 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 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 gonna 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 trade-offs that's my signature thing and there was a very good piece of work from a guy new George Williams great evolutionary biologist about the evolution of senescence that is to say the process by which we grow feeble and inefficient with age but 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 gonna pay when you're old but you're not gonna 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 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 playa trophy 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 in 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 all 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 in a 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 to lamb race we can cure cancer all right I put two and two together and I said this is the missing playa trophy 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 not in 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 it 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 his tissues really well and it should it should it should age very very slowly so I thought there's got to be something wrong with this the hypothesis answers to many questions for that obstacle to be real and I thought maybe it's 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 we had been looked at were coming from one source that there was a laboratory in Bar Harbor Maine called the Jax 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 it that 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 woman named Carol Greider who's 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 must spread us 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 gonna test the hypothesis she put her graduate student Mike Heymann 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 the other problem may be 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 4050 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 the way we test whether a drug is safe for long-term use or whether 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 a little shorten the 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 in definitely a toxin that will harm you by killing TIFF you 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 all 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 docked and 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 the Vioxx scandal which was it was a drug for arthritis correct yeah gay people strokes yeah it did heart damage yeah and so anyway heart damage is actually probably not heart damage and 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 you know killed every 10,000 cell or every thousand 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 so you would expect that if we had substances that were body-wide toxins and we released them into the public having 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 hmm so anyway the the government studied this problem after after Vioxx and it put together a report and the reports 300 pages it doesn't mention mice it doesn't mention the genus Massa 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 you know 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 I 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 ok I'm very interested in the story I'm gonna pursue it I'm gonna 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 it's 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 the breeding protocol and they fixed the problem you still have all those drug tests that they've done for you 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 right 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 tell him 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 they their enthusiasm evaporated at the point they make a phone call so did 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 a 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 it on the line we're 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 labra 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 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're the heroes and they are protecting us from something but I 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 yeah it's it's a it's a really huge problem and the response of the system generally to shut down the lone individual trying to point out a serious problem is it's just breathtaking and when you've when you've seen it when you lived it you you never go back you know you've looked into the eye of something that is willing to ignore I mean it's willing to ignore it 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 [ __ ] comedians podcast why is this not front page the New York Times why is this not leading on the news when you're talking about the safety of pharmaceutical drugs huh how is this not something that's an enormous story well this 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 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 and when Carol Greider who refused to acknowledge my contribution got her Nobel Prize I wrote what I think was a generous op-ed in 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 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 guy named Mike Brown who used to he was the former CFO of Microsoft really good guy I made a ton of money because he was at Microsoft in the ground floor and he used to hold something he called science camp in 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 had that I'd run into and you know they were blown away it was you know it's it's jaw-dropping stuff and afterwards Eric and Mike took me aside and they said you know 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 the story it's preventing you from doing what you need to do and I didn't like hearing that 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 you know it's very hard to do but I let it go now at that point I was a 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 three hundred thousand Twitter followers a hundred and thirty thousand 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 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 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 his 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 the raw version it is possible that we are now going to get the bell to ring but 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 were 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'd need some someone else in media to press the scientific community and say what's going on here the press the pharmaceutical industry and say address this is this an issue or is it's 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 this is 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 I don't know the answer to your question I do think you know your point about the foundation being the important place to dealing with you know the 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 they you know science for example is too delicate to allow market forces to government 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 gonna keep doing self harm and on that note you know Joe I was really hoping that this would be funnier I had a I had a tight ten minutes that I was gonna dribble out over three hours and I think didn't do it he brought up some awesome stuff really very very important points across the board very brave points to and I always appreciate you man really do Thanks and I really appreciate you two 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 have you no idea how it happened let's just keep doing it all right thanks man thanks brother bye everybody [Music]

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 7,684,935

Rating: 4.5470595 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, Bret Weinstein, JRE #1494, comedian

Id: pRCzZp1J0v0

Length: 186min 48sec (11208 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/junglehypothesis]

It’s a no brainer really, bloody obvious. Question on my mind since January is what do reparations look like? I suspect many countries will sue China, of course China ignores, countries win based on scientific evidence, countries get to cancel Chinese debt to order of billions, or trillions.

[u/dogluvr222]

Wow, it's weird to see your former biology teacher talking to Joe Rogen about all of this

[u/dgunn11235]

Agree

[u/matt7744]

Also is very knowledgeable on the cult that’s popping up. Intersectionality

[u/Exciting_Reason]

So called "academics" have been proven wrong at every claim about this virus.

The bias is disgusting. They outright deny things without even looking at evidence because going against the groupthink means lack of funding.

Within 5 minutes of the original paper coming out of india on the origins of the virus the claims were refuted by the checkmark mob. Hint: they didnt even read it.

It's pretty obvious this virus has been manipulated. The genetic code is twice as long as SARS and we still dont know what all that extra crap does.

I'm no biologist or researcher. I don't need to be one to understand this

[u/fudrukerscal]

I would listen to people who are very ingrained into that field of virology https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/ is a great set of virologists for instance

Vincent R. Racaniello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Racaniello

Dickson D. Despommier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickson_Despommier

Rich Condit http://mgm.ufl.edu/faculty/faculty-home-pages/condit-richard-c/

Danial Griffin https://parasiteswithoutborders.com/daniel-griffin-md-phd/

While i think the idea sars covid 2 came from a lab could be worth perusing as an escapee that was being held there i doubt we will ever know. The people that work in the field of virology laugh at the idea it was engineered in a lab though so keep that in mind and really look at these podcasts they are very informative and a great resource for the higher educated minds that can wrap around what they are saying.

[u/miraoister]

i thought joe rogan stopped uploading to youtube?

[u/TheyGonHate]

Its right here where it and the rest of these viruses came from: https://youtu.be/_txYMXL9NJ0

[u/mymymyl]

Well no shit.