YouSaid · the spoken record

Jamie Metzl

lines on the record: 283
first: 2021-12-08
most recent: 2021-12-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Good, good, good. So the WHO is an absolutely essential organization created in 1948 in that wonderful period after the Second World War, when the United States and Allied countries asked the big, bold questions, how do we build a safer world for everyone? And so that's the WHO. Although there are many critics of the WHO, if we didn't have it, we would need to invent it because the whole nature of these big public health issues and certainly for pandemics, but all sorts of things, is that they are transnational in nature. And so we cannot just build moats. We cannot build walls. We're all connected to each other. So that's the idea. There's a political process because the United Nations and the WHO as part of it is”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. All right. I hope you don't mind. I'm going to have to talk for a little bit of extra time. I love this. I love this.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not going to know what happened, assuming that the people in China are like bumpkins who on their own aren't don't know how to trace the origin of a virus. And the opposite is the case. So I think there are people in China who at least know a lot. They know a lot more than they're saying. And the best case scenario is the Chinese government wants to prevent any investigation including by them. The worst case scenario is that there are people who already know. And that's why, again, my point from day one has been we need a comprehensive international investigation in Wuhan with full access to all relevant records, samples, and personnel. When this, again, deeply flood. Can I give you a little history of this WHO process?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two things. One is I think somebody and people probably know. And then two, it's been incredibly curious that the best virus chasers in the world are in China and they are in Wuhan. And when, I mean, we can talk about this deeply compromised now vastly improved World Health Organization process. But when they went there, the Chinese, the local and national Chinese authorities say, oh, we haven't done, we haven't tested the samples in our blood center. We haven't done any of this tracing. And these deeply compromised people who were part of the international part of the joint study tour when they came out with their visit early this year and came out with their report, they had, in my mind, just an absurd letter to the editor in Nature saying, well, if we don't hurry back, we're”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because, as I mentioned earlier, the genetics of virus are constantly recombinating. So that what that means is if you don't have very many total outlier viruses in a bat community because these viruses are always mixing and matching with each other. And so if you have RATG13, which is relatively similar to SARS-CoV-2, there's a pretty decent likelihood there was other stuff that was collected at this mine called Mojang Mine in Yunnan province, maybe in Laos and Cambodia. And that's why we need to have that information.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I'm saying is the essential point is if we had access, if we knew everything that was being, every virus that was being held at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan CDC, we had full access. We had full access to everybody's lab notes. And we did just the kind of forensic investigation that has been so desperately required since day one. We'd be able to say, all right, well, what did you have? Because if we knew, if it should come out that the Wuhan Institute of Virology had in its repository prior to the outbreak, either SARS-CoV-2 or a reasonable precursor to it, that would prove the lab incident hypothesis. In my mind, that's almost certainly why they are preventing any kind of meaningful investigation. So my hypothesis is not that what RATG-13 says is”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“China or in Laos or Cambodia because that was with the Eco Health Alliance proposals and documents, their plan was to collect viruses in Laos and Cambodia and elsewhere and bring them to the Wuhan Institute of Virology so that there are people. As a matter of fact, just when I was sitting here before this message, before this interview, I got a message from somebody who was saying, well, Peter Dazak is telling everybody that the viral sample, the Banal 52 from Laos, proves that there's not a lab incident origin of the pandemic. And it actually doesn't prove that at all because these viruses were being collected in places like Laos and Cambodia and being brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what I mean just the specific virus, which I mentioned R-A-T-G-13, and there's a whole history of that because it had a different name and it looked, and Shijang Li provided wrong information about when it had been sequenced. I mean, there was a whole issue connected to that. But the genetic difference, even though it's 96.2% similar to this RAS-COVID-2 virus, that's actually a significant difference, even though that and a virus called Banal52 that was collected in Laos are the two most similar, there still are differences. So I'm not saying RITG-13 is the backbone, but is there, I believe there is, a possibility that other viruses that were collected either in that mine in Yunnan in southern”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, lab lake. That's probably the easiest. No, no, but if you just go to Jamie Metzel.com, J-A-M-I-E-M-E-T-Z-L.com, then there's just a thing. It's COVID origins.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, there's just so many, there are so many scenarios, but if I again connect it to my 85% number, I think in the whole category of laboratory related incidents, whether it's collection, waste, something connected to the lab, I think that's the most likely. But there are other credible people who would say they think it's not the most likely. And I welcome their views, and we need to have this conversation.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For disease control, they went down there to collect and they got infected asymptomatically and brought it back. Could it be that they were working on these viruses in the laboratory? And there was an issue with waste disposal. And we know that the Wuhan CDC had a major problem with waste disposal. And just before the pandemic, they put out an RFP to fix their waste disposal. in early 2019, they moved to their new site, which was basically across the street from the Huanan seafood market. So could there have been issues of somebody infected in the lab of waste disposal? Could a laboratory animal, their experiences in China, actually China just recently passed a law saying it's illegal to celebratory animals in the market because scientists, or one scientist who was selling laboratory animals in”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blood samples from them were taken to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and elsewhere. And then after that, there were multiple site visits to that mine collecting viral samples that were brought to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, including among those samples was this now infamous RATG-13 virus, which is among the genetically closest viruses to SARS-CoV-2, there were other nine other or eight other viruses that were collected from that mine that were presumably very similar to that. And again, we have no access to the information about those and many of the other, most almost all of the other viruses. So could it be that one of the people who was sent from the Wuhan Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So one possibility is there some remote villager. Another possibility is there's somehow bizarrely there are these infected animals that come from southern China most likely. Maybe there's only one of them that's infected, which how could that possibly be? And it's only sent to Wuhan. It's not sent anywhere else to any of the markets there or whatever, and then maybe somebody in a market is infected. That's one remote possibility, but a possibility. Another is that researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology go down to southern China. We haven't talked about it yet, but in 2012, there were six miners were sent into a copper mine in southern China, in Yunnan province. All of them got very sick with what now appear like COVID-19-like symptoms. Half of them died.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That I, Jamie. So exactly. What is conscious? Exactly, exactly. So we could spend another three hours going into that one.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general principle, everyone, if we were honest, should be agnostic about everything. Like, I think I'm Jamie, but is there a 0.01% chance or 001% chance that I'm not, but could be? I mean, how about there's a lot?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think that's why that's why I'm calling the first person to show up to a hospital who's diagnosed with COVID-19. I'm calling that person patient zero. There's also somewhere the first person to be infected. And that person maybe never showed up in a hospital because maybe they were asymptomatic and never get sick. So got sick. So let me start with what I'm calling infectee zero. Here are some options. I talked before about some person who was a villager in some remote village. It's almost impossible to imagine, but possible to imagine because strange things happen. And that person somehow gets to Wuhan.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so just two points. One is it may be that there's infecti zero and patient zero. It could be that the first person infected was asymptomatic because we know there's a lot of people who are asymptomatic. And then there's the question of, well, who is patient zero, meaning the first person to present themselves in some kind of health facility where that diagnosis could be made?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hum a tune and she could play it on the piano. And so I said, all right, here's this tune, which I whispered in her ear. When I give you the signal, just play this tune over and over. And so I got these, I mean, there were the six of us and maybe 20 North Koreans. And we are all in a circle. I said, everybody hold hands and then put your, right? Just try put your right foot in front of your left and then left foot in front of the right going sideways. And I said, all right. hit it. And she played a North Korean version of Havanagila. And I think it was the first and only horror that they've ever done in North Korea. That's hilarious. I survived to. Was this recorded or no? It was not.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Kind of bizarre because North Korea is so desperately poor, but they were trying to impress us. And so we had these embarrassingly sumptuous banquets. And so for our final dinner that night, it really looked like something from beauty and the beast in the, I mean, it was like China and waiters and tuxedos and they had this beautiful dinner. And then afterwards, because we'd now spent two weeks with our North Korean partners, they brought out this karaoke machine and our North Korean counterparts, they sang songs to us in Korean. And so I said, well, we want to reciprocate. Do you have any English songs on your karaoke machine? It's North Korea. Obviously, they didn't. But there was, and I said, well, I have an idea. And so there was one of the women who'd been part of the North Korean delegation. She was able just to play the piano, just like you could.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“North Korea connecting to the world economy is an important first step. But having visited all of your special economic zone sites and having met with all of your or many of your officials, I don't think your plan has any chance of succeeding because you're trying to sell into a global market, but you need to have market information. And I gave examples of GE and other innovation can't only happen at one place. And if you want innovation to happen from the people who are doing this, you have to empower them. They have to have access. They have to have voice. I mean, nobody people after they kind of had to condemn me because what I was saying was challenging. So I certainly agree with you. And then just one side story of then that night. And it was just.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who were like really technical experts on how to set up a special economic zone, they were asking questions well, like, should you put the entrance over here or shouldn't you put it over there? And what if there's flooding? And I kept asking just these basic questions, like what do you think you're going to do here? Why do you think you can be competitive? Do you know anything about who you're competing against? Are you empowering your workers to innovate because everybody else is innovating? So at the end of the trip, they flew us to Pyongyang and they put us in this, it looked kind of like the United Nations. They probably had 500 people there. And I gave a speech to them. Obviously, it was in English and it was translated. And I figured, you know, I've come all this way. I'm just going to be honest. If they arrest me for being honest, that's on them. And I said, I'm here because I believe we can never give up hope, that we always have to try to connect. I'm also here because I think that”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I tell you a little story? True stories about North Korea. So a number of years ago, I was invited to be part of a small six-person delegation advising the government of North Korea on how to establish special economic zones, because other countries have used these SEZs as a way of building their economies. When I was invited, I thought, well, maybe there's an opening. And I certainly believe in that. So we flew to China across the border into North Korea, and then we were met by our partners from the North Korean Development Organization. And then we zigzagged the country for almost two weeks visiting all these sites. where they were intended to create these special economic zones. And in each site, they had their local officials and they had a map and they showed us where everything that was going to be built. And the other people...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Player, if they had let her accuse somebody from the Communist Party of sexual assault. And they said, okay, now people, you can use social media and you can have your MeToo moment and let us know who in the Chinese Communist Party or your boss in a business has assaulted you, just like in every society. I'm sure there's tons of women who've been sexually assaulted, manipulated. By men. And so I certainly hope that there can be that kind of opening. But if I were an authoritarian dictator, that's the thing I would be most afraid of.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's on the money because maintaining that fiction is the foundation of the legitimacy of the Chinese state. If people were allowed, just say what you want. Do you really think Mao was such a great guy, even though your own relatives are dead as a result? Do you really buy even on this story that China did nothing wrong, even though in the earliest days of the pandemic, these two, at least Chinese scientists themselves courageously issued a preprint paper that was later almost certainly forcibly retracted saying, well, this looks like this comes from one of the Wuhan labs that we're studying. Like if you opened up that window, I think that the Chinese government would not be able to continue in its current form, then that's why they cracked down at Tiananmen Square. That's why with Feng Shui, the Tanzanian”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they can't. I mean, the thing is, if they open up freedom of speech really in a meaningful way, they can't maintain their current form of government. And it's connected, as I was saying before, to the origins of the pandemic. And if my hypothesis was right, that was the big choice that the national government had. Do we really investigate the origins of the pandemic? Do we deliver a message that transparency is required, public transparency is required from local officials? If they do that, the entire system collapse. Pretty much everybody in China has a relative who has died as a result of the actions of the Communist Party, particularly in the Great Leap Forward. It's nearly 50 million people died as a result of Mao's disastrous policies. And yet why is Mao's picture still on Tiananmen Square?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your message, it shows both sides of the story. I mean, one, how petty authoritarian censors have to be. And that's why the messaging from the Chinese government is so consistent, no matter who you are, you have to be careful what you say. And that's why it's the story of Peng Shui, the tennis player, she dared raise her voice in an individual way, Jack Ma, the richest man in China, had a minor criticism of the Chinese government. He had basically disappeared from the public eye. Who's like one of the leading Chinese movie stars? She was seen as not loyal enough. And she just vanished. And so the message is, no matter who you are, no matter what level, if you don't mind everything you say, you could lose everything.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Self censorship. Because they almost have to have you think if I'm going to make any criticism, maybe they're going to come and get me. So it's safer to not do it. I mean, I've traveled through North Korea pretty extensively and I've seen that and in its ultimate form. That's what they're trying to do in China, too.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Censorship has to be petty because the goal of censorship Maybe you experienced in the Soviet Union is to get into your head. Like if it's just censorship, like you say down with the state and like you can't say that. But you can say all the other things up to that point, eventually people will feel empowered to say down with the state. And so I think the goal of this kind of authoritarian censorship is to turn you into the censor. And so the...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is particularly in that post war period, we put forward a model that was desirable to a lot of people. Certainly it was desirable to people in Western Europe and then Eastern Europe and Japan and Korea. It doesn't mean it's perfect. The United States is deeply flawed, as articulated to date. I don't think most people and countries would like to live in a sinocentric world. And so I certainly, as I mentioned before, I'm a huge critic of what Xi Jinping is doing, the incredible brutality in Xinjiang, in Tibet and elsewhere.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I feel that Xi Jinping has a very narrow goal of articulated, of establishing China as the lead country in the world by the 100th anniversary of the founding of the modern Chinese state. And it's ruthless and it's strategic. There's a great book called The Long Game by Rush Doshi, who's actually now working in the White House about this goal and are pretty clearly articulated goal to subvert the post-war international order and in China's interest. Maybe every leader wants to organize the world around their interests, but I feel that his vision of what that entails is not one that I think is shareable for the rest of the world. I mean, the strength of the United States with all of our flaws.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Respected, and now they're building a massive nuclear arsenal and all these other things to try to position themselves in the world with an articulated goal of being the lead country in the world, and that puts them at odds with the United States. There are a lot of real reasons that we need to be honest about for division. But if that's all we focus on, if we don't say that there's another side of the story that brings us together, we'll put ourselves on an inevitable glide path to a terrible outcome.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People and the Chinese people. I mean, maybe all people, but we have so much in common. I mean, yes, China is an ancient civilization, but they kind of wiped out their own civilization in the great leap forward and cultural revolution. They burned their scrolls. They smashed their artworks. And so it's a very young society kind of like America is a young society. So we have a lot in common. And if we just kind of got out of our own ways, we could have a beautiful relationship. But there's a lot of things that are happening. Certainly the United States feels responsible to defend the post-war international order that past generations helped build. And I'm a certain believer in that. And China is challenging that. And the Chinese government, and they've shared that view with the Chinese people feel that they haven't been adequately.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's really, and so for me, you talked about my website on pandemic origin. So when I launched it, I'm not a Chinese speaker, but I had the entire site translated into Chinese, and I have it up on my website just because I felt like, well, if somebody, I mean, the great firewall makes it very, very difficult for people in China to access that kind of information. I figured if somebody gets there and they want to have it in their own language, but it's hard because the Chinese government is represented by these quote unquote wolf warriors, which is like these basic ruffians. And I personally was condemned by name, by the spokesman of the Chinese foreign ministry from the podium in Beijing. And so it's really hard because I absolutely think the American”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People like Peter Hessler who have really invested the time to live in China, to learn the language, learn the culture. Peter himself, who is maybe one of our best journalists covering China from a soul level, he was kicked out of China. So it's very, very difficult.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so on that, just first I completely agree with you. I mean, there is just an incredible beauty in Chinese culture, I think all cultures, but certainly China has such a deep and rich history, amazing literature and art and just human beings. I mean, I'm a massive critic of the Chinese government. I'm very vociferous about the really genocide in Xinjiang, the absolute effort to destroy Tibetan culture, the destruction of democracy in Hong Kong, incredibly illegal efforts to seize basically the entire South China Sea. And I could go on and on and on. But Chinese culture is fantastic. And I can't speak to every technical field, but just in terms of having journalists, and I'll speak to American journalists,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is no whistleblower provision. So if you're a guess is there are at least tens, maybe hundreds of people in China who have relevant information about the origins of the pandemic who are terrified and don't dare share it. And let's just say somebody wanted to get that information out, to send it somewhere. There's no official address. The WHO doesn't have that. Nobody has that. And so I would love you. You may as well ask. I don't think it's likely that there'll be a yes. But it could well be that there are defectors who will want to speak.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This question about did you know all of the work that was happening at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, not just your work? And can you confirm that U.S. intelligence has said that the military played a role, was engaged with the Wuhan Institute of Verology? Do you deny that the Chinese military was involved in any way with the Wuhan Institute of Virology? And as I said before, she said, this is crazy, absolutely not. It actually got that one question got covered in the media because it was like, I think an essential question, but I just think that since then, to my knowledge, he's not been in any public forums, that that's why most people would be shocked that to date there has been no”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anybody could, it was insane. And so, but I thought, wow, this is incredible. And so then it was unclear who got to ask questions. And so I was like posting questions and then I was sending chats to the organizers of the event saying, I really have a question. And first they said, well, you can submit your questions and we'll have submitted questions. And then if we have time, we'll open up. So I just thought, well, what the hell? I just sent messages to everybody. The event was already done. They were 15 minutes over time. And then they said, all right, we have time just for one question. And it's Jamie Metzel. And like I was sitting there in my running clothes, I was like multitasking and I heard my name. And so I went diving back and I asked.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All of them were kind of science conversations about the pandemic, including the origins issue. But I think that she, in her response to my question, it was kind of this funny thing. So they had this event for organized by Rutgers. And I went on, it was an online event on Zoom. But I got on there and I just realized it was very poorly organized. Like normally the controls that you would have about who gets to chat to who, who gets to ask questions, none of them were set. And so I kind of couldn't believe it. I was just sitting at home in my neon green fleece. And I just started sending chat messages to Shojiang Li.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think not. And I think the reason is because I think they would, one, be uncomfortable being in any environment where really unknown questions will be asked. And actually, I was, so as you know, on this topic, the Chinese, as I mentioned earlier, the Chinese government has a gag order on Chinese scientists. They can't speak without prior government approval. Xi Jeng Li has been able to speak. She's spoken at a number of forums. I mentioned this Rutgers event.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than to tell the truth. And everybody was incentivized to pretty much do the wrong thing. And so that's, I mean, that's why I think one of the big messages of this pandemic is that all of our fates are tied to everybody else's fates. And so while we can say and should say, well, let's focus on our own communities and our countries, we're all stakeholders in what happens elsewhere.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think for a lot of years, people have just been looking at U.S. politics, not because it's interesting, but because the decisions that we make have big implications for their lives. The same is true for ours. You could say that the lack of civil and political rights in China is up to the Chinese, not even people, because they have no say, but to their government and they weren't democratically elected, that they are recognized as the government. Some significant percentage of the 15 million people now dead from COVID are dead because in the earliest days following the outbreak, whatever the origin, the voices of people sounding the alarm were suppressed, that the Chinese government had, just like in Chernobyl, the Chinese government had a greater incentive to lie to the international community.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failed here. And it's failed here because of the inherent pathologies of the Chinese government system. We are suffering from a pandemic that exists because of the internal pathologies of the Chinese state. And that's why on one hand, I totally get this impulse. What we do it our way, they do it their way. Who's to say that one way is better? And certainly right now in the United States, we're at each other's throats. We have a hard time getting anything meaningful done. And I'm sure there are people who are saying, well, that model looks appealing. But just as people could look to the United States and say, well, because the United States has such a massive reach, what we do domestically has huge implications for the rest of the world, they become stakeholders in our politics. And that's why.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know about small acts of rebellion, but I'll try to answer your question from a few different perspectives. So right now, actually, as we speak, there is a special session of the World Health Assembly going on. The World Health Assembly is the governing authority over the World Health Organization where it's represented by states and territories 194 of them, tragically not including Taiwan because of the Chinese government's assistance, but they're now beginning a process of trying to negotiate a global pandemic treaty to try to have a better process for responding to crises exactly like we're in. But unfortunately, for the exact same reasons that we have failed, we had a similar process after the first SARS. We set up what we thought was the best available system. And it has totally...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although there was a startup years ago called Naked News. Did you ever hear about that? They just would read the exact news. No, after each story, they'd take something off until the end. I don't think it's”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quote unquote expert and former National Security Council official and other things. And I felt for me, I needed both keys to open that door. But if I only had the science key, I wouldn't have had the level of doubt and suspicion that I have. But if my starting point was only doubt and suspicion, well, it's coming from China. It must be that the government is guilty, like that wouldn't help either.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things. And so, and I think that's why so many, at least in my view, so many people in certainly in the Western world got this story wrong from the beginning. Because if your only prism was the science and you just assumed this is a science question to be left to the scientists, should Zheng Li is just like any scientist working in Switzerland or Norway, the Chinese government isn't interfering in any way, and we can trust them. That would lead you down one path. In my view, the reason why I progressed as I did is I felt like I had two keys. I had one key as I live in the science world through my work with WHO and my books and things like that. But I also have another part of my life in the world of geopolitics as an Asia.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story. When I asked her in March of 2021, March of this year in a Rutgers online forum, when I asked her whether the Chinese military had any engagement with the Wuhan Institute of Virology in any way. And she said, absolutely not, paraphrasing. I think she was lying. Do I think that she had the ability to say, well, either one, yes, but I can't talk about it, or I know there are a lot of things that are happening at this institute that I don't know about. And that could be one. Could she have said that the personnel at the Wanstit Institute of Virology have all had to go through classification training so that they can know about what can and can't be said? Like she could have said all those things, but she couldn't say all of those.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a human being Yeah, I respect her. I've never met her. We had one exchange, which I'll mention in a second in a virtual forum, but I do respect her. Actually, I think that she is somebody who has tried to do the right thing. She was one of the heroes of tracking down the origins of SARS-1, and that was a major contribution. But as we talked about earlier, it's a different thing living being a scientist or really kind of anything. It's different being one of those people in an authoritarian society than it is being in a different type of society. And so when Shu Jeng Li said that the reason the WIV database was taken offline in September 19 was because of computer hacks, I don't think that's the story. I don't think she thinks that's.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With people who have a different background is really essential. I'm on Fox News sometimes three, four times a week. And I wouldn't, in my normal life, I'm not watching that much of Fox News or even television more generally, but I just feel like if I just speak to people who are very similar to me, it'll be comfortable. But what have I contributed? And so I think we really have to have those kinds of conversations and recognize that at the end of the day, most people want to be happy. They want to live in a better world. They maybe have different paths to get there. But if we just break into camps that don't even connect with each other, that's a much more dangerous world.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source