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

“Exactly. And so, but I completely agree with you that we don't have to agree with everybody, but it's great to have healthy conversations. That's how we grow. And absolutely We live in a world where we're kind of, if we're not careful, pushed into these little information pockets. And certainly on social media, I have different parts of my life. One is focusing on issues of COVID origins, and then I have genetics and biotechnology. And then I have, which maybe we'll talk about later, one shared world, which is about how do we build a safer future. And when I say critical things like the Chinese government, we have to demand a full investigation into pandemic origins. This is an outrage, then it's really popular. When I say let's build a better future for everyone in peace and love, it's like, wow, three people liked it and one was my mother. And so I just feel like we need to build, we used to have that connectivity just built in because we had these town squares and you couldn't get away from them. Now we can get away from them.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I totally agree. And both of those guys are guys who I respect. And as you know, Brett, and again, as I mentioned, they're just a handful of us who were the early people raising questions about the origins of this pandemic.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important role in shifting our national and international institutions. And while that's better than nothing, it would have been far better if our governments and international organizations had done the right thing from this.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“15 million did. They're insulting the families and the billions of people around the world who have suffered from this totally avoidable pandemic. And whatever the origin, the fact the criminal cover-up carried out by the Chinese government, which continues to this day, but most intensely in the first months following the outbreak, that's the reason why we have so many dead. And certainly, as I was saying before, I and a small number of others have been carrying this flame since early last year, but it's kind of crazy that our government hasn't been demanding it. And we can talk about the World Health Organization process, which was deeply compromised in the beginning. Now it's become much, much better. But again, it was the pressure of outsiders that played such an”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's why, in my view, every single person who talks about this issue, meaning the right answer in my view, is we don't know conclusively. Then this is my personal view, the circumstantial evidence is strongly in favor of a lab incident origin, but that could immediately shift with additional information. We need transparency, but we should come together in absolutely condemning the outrageous cover-up carried out by the Chinese government, which to this day is preventing any meaningful investigation into pandemic origins. We have, if you use the economist numbers, 15 million people who are dead as a result of this pandemic. And I believe that the actions of the Chinese government are disgracing the memory of”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was my feeling. I felt like he was frustrating in general, but he was tilting. And again, your first question was, where do I fall? He was like, I'm 85% or whatever it is, 80, 75, 90, whatever it is in the direction of a lab incident. It made it feel that he was 90-10 in the other direction, which is still means that he's open-minded about the possibility.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a moment with Collins. And again, Francis Collins is someone I respect enormously. I mean, I live a big chunk of my life living in the world of genetics and biotech and my book, Hacking Darwin, Is About the Future of Human Genetic Engineering and his work on the Human Genome Project and so many other things have been fantastic. And I'm a huge fan of the work of NIH. And he was right to say that the Chinese government hasn't been forthcoming and we need to look into it. But then you asked him, well, how will we know? And then his answer was, we need to find the intermediate host. Remember I said before. And so that made it clear that he thought, well, we should have an investigation, but it comes from nature and we just need to find that whatever it is, that intermediate animal host in the wild, and that'll tell us the story.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So, first, let me say I've been on Joe's podcast twice, and I love the guy, which doesn't mean that I agree with everything he does or says. And on this issue, and I'm normally a pretty calm and measured guy, and when you're just out running with your air pods on and you start yelling into the wind in Central Park, nobody else knows why you're yelling, but well, you had.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there is a greater requirement for transparency now. Maybe there always has been, but there's an even greater requirement for it now because people want to trust that you're speaking honestly and that you're saying, well, here's what I know. And this is based on what I know here are the conclusions that I draw. But if it's just, and again, I don't think the words I'm science or whatever it was are the right words, but if it's just trust me, because of who I am, I don't think that flies anywhere anymore.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can live with that. And that's why we have regulation. And so all of us are doing kind of summaries. And then we have people in public health who are saying, well, we've summed it all up and you should do X. You should get your kids vaccinated for measles. You should not drive your car at 100 miles an hour. You should don't drink lighter fluid, whatever these things are. And we want them to kind of give us broad guidelines. And yet now our information world is so fragmented that if you're not being honest about something, something material, someone's going to find out and it's going to undermine your credibility. And so I agree with you.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But having said all of that, I do kind of, one, I have tremendous respect for Dr. Fauci, for the work that he's done on HIV AIDS. I mean, I have been vaccinated with the Moderna vaccine. Dr. Fauci was a big part of the story of getting us these vaccines that have saved millions and millions of lives. And so I don't think there's a lot to this story. And then the second thing is it's really hard to be a public health expert because you have your mission is public health. And so you have to, if you are leading with all of your uncertainty, it's a really hard way to do things. And so like even now, like if I go to CVS and I get a Tylenol, somebody has done a calculation of how many people will die from taking Tylenol and they say, well, all right.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thank you. Thank you. Jamie Metzel.com. And it's really unfortunate that our governments and international institutions for pretty much all of 2020 weren't doing their jobs of really probing this issue. People were hiding behind this kind of false consensus. And I'm critical of many people, even when I heard Francis Collins interview with you. I just felt, well, he wasn't as balanced on the issue of COVID origins. Certainly Dr. Fauci could have, in his conversation with Rand Paul, he wasn't even a conversation.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In April of last year, April 2020, it got a huge amount of attention. And actually, my friend Matt Pottinger, who was the Deputy National Security Advisor, when he was reaching out to people in the U.S. government and in allied government saying, hey, we should look into this. What he was sending them was my website. It wasn't some U.S. government information. And by the way,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you mind if I agree? With a great deal of what you said. And it's really unfortunate that certainly the Chinese government, as I said before, our government wasn't as transparent as I feel they should have been, particularly in the early days of the pandemic and particularly with regard to the issue of pandemic origins. I mean, we know that Dr. Fauci was on calls with people like Christian Anderson at Scripps and others in those early days raising questions, is this an engineered virus? There were a lot of questions. And it's kind of sad. I mean, as I mentioned before, I've been one, I mean, and certainly there were others, but there weren't a lot of us, of the people who from the earliest days of the pandemic were raising questions about, hey, not so fast here, and I launched my website on pandemic org.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And I get that it's really hard to do that because let's say you have one, you speak a paragraph and it's got four sentences. And one of those sentences is the thing that's going to be turning to Twitter.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A comprehensive investigation into this issue that certainly obviously looks at China, but we have to look at ourselves. We did not get this right.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I also think that Dr. Fauci and the NIA, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the NIH should have been more transparent because I think that In this day and age where there are a lot of people poking around, and this whole story of COVID origins, we would not be where we are if it wasn't for a relatively small number of people. And I'm part of, there are two, as I know, two groups. One is these internet sleuths known as drastic and a number of them are part of a group that I'm part of called, it's not our official name, but called the Paris group. It's about two dozen experts around the world, but centered around some very high-level French academics. So we've all been digging and meeting with each other regularly since last year. And our governments across the board, certainly China, but including the United States, haven't been as transparent as they need to be. So there's definitely mistakes were made on all sides. And that's why for me from day one, I've been calling for a”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What Dr. Fauci is doing is saying, Hey, what I hear, Dr. Fauci think, what I hear from you, Rand Paul, is you're accusing me of starting this pandemic and you're using gain of function as a proxy for that. And we have when there are Senate hearings, every senator gets five minutes. And the name of the game is to translate your five minutes into a clip that's going to run on the news. And so I get that there is that kind of game.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And one issue is just essential transparency because as I see it, it's most likely the case that we transferred a lot of our knowledge and plans and things to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And again, I'm sure that Shujang Li is not herself a monster. I'm sure of that, even though I've never met her. There are just a different set of pressures on people working in an authoritarian system than people who are working in other systems. That doesn't mean it's entirely different. And so I absolutely think that we shouldn't give $1 to an organization and certainly a Virology Institute where you don't have full access to their records, to their databases. We don't know what work is happening there. And I think that we need to have that kind of full examination. And that's, so I understand.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mistakes made. Sure. So on gain of function, there actually has been a lot of debate. I mentioned before in 2011, these first papers, there was a big debate. Mark Lipsich, who's formerly at Harvard now with the US government working in the president's office, he led a thing called the Cambridge Group that was highly critical of this work, basically saying we're creating monsters. They had the funding pause in 2014. They spent three years putting together a framework, and then they lifted it in 2017. So we had a thoughtful conversation. Unfortunately, it didn't work. And I think that's where we are now. I absolutely think that there are real issues with the relationship between the United States government and eco-health alliance. And through that, the eco-health alliance”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if that was the case, there is, I think, a colorable argument that that would be considered gain of function research even by the narrow language of that 2017 document. But I definitely think, and I've said this repeatedly, that Rand Paul can be right and Tony Fauci can be right. And the question is, how are we defining gain of function? And that's why I've always said the question in my mind isn't, was it or wasn't it gain of function as if that's like a binary thing, if not great? And if yes, guilty? The question is just what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What role, if any, did U.S. government funding play in supporting that work? And what rights do we all have as As human beings and as American citizens and taxpayers to get all of the relevant information about them.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Collins talked about that in his interview with you. But then there's a question that we know from now that we have the information of the reports submitted by EcoHealth Alliance to the NIH, and some of which were late or not even delivered, that some of this research was done on MERS, Middle Eastern.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it depends. I mean, I've obviously been very closely monitoring this. I've spoken a lot about it. I've written about it. And it depends on, I mean, not to quote Bill Clinton, but to quote Bill Clinton, it depends on what the definition of is is. And so if you use a common sense definition of gain of function, and by gain of function, there are lots of things like gene therapies that are gain of function, but here what we mean is gain of function for pathogens able, potentially able to create human pandemics. But if you use the kind of common sense language, well, then he probably did. And you read that language very narrowly, I think you can make a credible argument that he did not. There's a question, though, and France.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, humans are to this day better able to infect humans than any other species, including bats. And then from day one, there's this massive cover-up. And then on top of that, in spite of lots of efforts by lots of people, there's basically no evidence for the natural origin hypothesis. Everything that I've described just now is circumstantial, but there's a certain point where you add up the circumstances. And you see this seems pretty, pretty likely. I mean, if we're getting to 100%, we are not at 100% by any means. There still is a possibility of a natural origin. And if we find that great. But from everything that I know, that's how I get to my 85.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, of all the places in the world where we have an outbreak of a SARS-like bat coronavirus, it's not in the area of the natural habitat of the horseshoe bats. It's the one city in China with the first and largest level four virology lab, which actually wasn't even using it. They were doing level 3 and level two for this work, where they had the world's largest collection of bat coronaviruses where they were doing aggressive experiments designed to make these scary viruses scarier, where they had been part of an application to insert a furin cleavage site able to infect human cells when the outbreak happened, we had a virus that was ready for action to”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Definitely good. Definitely natural. That connects to you. Your first question, how do I get to my 85%? And here's a summary of that answer. And so it's what I said in my 60 minutes interview a long time ago of all the gin joints and all the towns and all the world, the quote from Casablanca.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Study process with the international experts and their Chinese government counterparts and used that as a way of furthering this, in my mind, fraudulent narrative that it almost certainly came from natural origins and lab origin was extremely unlikely.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's quite likely that that was the story that he was telling himself. But it's that lack of transparency. In my mind, it is fraudulent that we were struggling to understand something that we didn't understand. And that I just think that people who possess that kind of information, especially when the existence, like the entire career of Peter Dezak is based on U.S. taxpayers, there's a debt that comes with that. And that debt is honesty and transparency. And for all of us, and you talked about your girlfriend checking your phone for all of us being honest and transparent in the most difficult times is really difficult. If it were easy, everybody would do it. And that's, you know, I just feel that Peter, the opposite of transparent and then went on the offensive and then had the gall of joining, I know we can talk about this, this highly compromised joint.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Institute of Virology, and this is certainly the U.S. government position. There was the work that was being done in Dr. Shu's lab, but that wasn't the whole WIV. We know, or at least according to the United States government, that there was the Chinese military, the PLA, was doing work there. Were they doing this kind of work not to create a bioweapon, but in order to understand these viruses, maybe to develop vaccines and treatments? It seems like a very, very logical possibility. And then, so we know that we want instituted virology had all of the skills. We know that they were part of this proposal. And then you have Peter Dazak, who knows all of this, that at that time in February of 2020, we didn't know. But then he comes swinging out of the gate saying anybody who's raising this possibility of a lab incident origin is a...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which Dr. Tedros created in the aftermath of the announcement of the world's first CRISPR babies. And it was just basically the exact same story. So Ho Chong Kui, a Chinese scientist, it was not a first-tier scientist, but a perfectly adequate second tier scientist, came to the United States, learned all of these capacities, went back to China, and said, well, there's a much more permissive environment. I'm going to be a world leader. I'm going to establish both myself and China. So in every scientific field, we're seeing this same thing where you kind of learn a model and then you do it in China. So is it possible that the Wuhan Institute of Virology with this exact game plan was doing it anyway? possible? We have no clue what work was being done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It seems extremely likely that at Wuhan”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Category of viruses they had created a chimeric mixed viruses they had done, they had mastered pretty much all of the steps in order to achieve this thing that they applied for funding with EcoHealth to do. And so the question is, did the Wuhan Institute of Virology go through with that research anyway? And in my mind, that's a very, very real possibility. It would certainly explain why they're giving no information. And as you know, I've been a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“According, it's a really important point. According to their proposal, the actual work was going to be done at the lab of Ralph Barrick at the University of North Carolina, who's probably the world's leading expert on coronaviruses. And so we know that DARPA didn't fund that work. We know, I think, quite well that Ralph Barrack's lab, in part because it was not funded by DARPA, they didn't do that specific work. What we don't know is, well, what work was done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology because WIV was part of this proposal. They had access to all of the plans. They had done, they had their own capacity, and they had already done a lot of work in genetically altering this exact”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so eco health basically that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was going to go and they were going to collect these viruses and store them at Wuhan Institute of Virolog”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see a bat coronavirus with a furin cleavage site unlike anything that we've ever seen before in that category of SARS-like coronaviruses. That, well, yes, I mean, the DARPA very correctly didn't support that application.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And DARP is incredible. And among the things that they applied for is that we, meaning Wuhan Institute of Virology, is going to go and it's going to collect the most dangerous bat coronaviruses in southern China. And then we as this group are going to genetically engineer these viruses to insert a furine cleavage site. So I think when everyone's now seen the image of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, it has these little spike proteins, these little things that stick out, which is why they call it a coronavirus. Within that spike protein are these furine cleavage sites, which basically help with the virus getting access into our cells. They were going to genetically engineer these furine cleavage sites into these bat coronaviruses, the Sarbico viruses. And so then a year and a half later, what do we see?”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, not only that, so there were the people who, 27 people signed that letter. And then after President Trump cut funding to EcoHealth Alliance, then he organized 77 Nobel laureates to have a public letter criticizing that. But what Peter knew then that we didn't fully know is that in March of 2018, EcoHealth Alliance, in partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and others, had applied for a $14 million grant to DARPA, which is kind of like the VC side of the venture capital side of the defense department. where they do kind of big ideas, by the way.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I think that we all tell ourselves stories and also when you're a science communicator, you can't in your public communications give every doubt that you have or every nuance. You kind of have to summarize things. And so I think that he was, again, in this benign interpretation, trying to summarize in the way that he thought the conversations should go. Here's my indictment of Peter Dezek. And I feel like Brutus here, but I've not come here to praise Peter Dazek because while Peter Dazek was doing all of this and making all of these statements about, well, we pretty much know it's a natural origin. Then there was this February 2020 Lancet letter where it turns out, and we only knew this later, that he was highly Manipulative. Even though they were doing it, he didn't disclose a lot of information that they had.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's, and so then now I want to do my personal indictment of Peter Dazak because that's my view, but I wanted to fairly”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of these outbreaks. And even though, and this gets a lot more complicated, even though there are basic questions that anybody would ask and that Shu Zheng Li herself did ask about the origins of this pandemic, even though Peter Dazak, and I'll mention this in a moment, had secret information that we didn't have that in my mind massively increases the possibility of a lab incident origin. I, Peter Dazek, would like to guide the public conversation in the direction where I think it should go and in support of the kind of international collaboration that I think is necessary.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was lifted. It didn't affect the funding that went to the Eco Health Alliance. So when this happened in the beginning, and again, coming back to Peter's motivations, I don't think, here's the best case scenario for Peter. I'm going to give you what I imagine he was thinking, and then I'll tell you what I actually think. So I think here's what he's thinking. This is most likely a natural origin outbreak. Just like SARS-1, again, in Peter's hypothetical mind, just like SARS-1, this is most likely a natural outbreak. We need to have an international coalition in order to fight it. If we allow these political attacks to undermine our Chinese counterparts and the trust in this relationships that we've built over many years, we're really screwed because they have the most local knowledge.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Peter Dasik camp, and he got a lot of funding, particularly from the United States, who said, and certainly Collins and Fauci were supportive of this. And they thought, well, there's a safe way to go out into the world to collect the world's most dangerous viruses and to poke and prod them to figure out how they might mutate, how they might become more dangerous. With the goal of predicting future pandemics and that certainly never happened, with the goal of creating vaccines and treatments. And that largely never happened. But that was, so Peter Dazak kind of epitomized that second approach. And as you've talked about in the past, in 2014, there was a funding moratorium in the United States and then in 2017.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But forcing natural selection by just passing a virus through different cell cultures and then selecting for what it is that you want. So relatively easily, they took this deadly but not massively transmissive virus and turned it into in a lab a deadly and transmissive virus. And that showed that this is really dangerous. And so there were at that point, there was a huge controversy. There were some people like Richard Ebright and Mark Lipsich at Harvard who were saying that this is really dangerous. We're in the idea that we need to create monsters to study monsters. I think maybe even you have said that in the past, it doesn't make sense because there's an unlimited number of monsters. And so what are we going to do? Create an unlimited number of monsters. And if we do that, eventually the monsters are going to get out. Then there was the...”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, a few things. So what he thought he was doing was, and what he thought he was doing is itself highly controversial. Because in 2011, there were, I know you've talked about this with other guests, but in 2011, there were the first published papers on this now infamous gain of function research. And basically what they did, both in different labs, in certainly in the United States, in Wisconsin and in the Netherlands, was they had a bird flu virus that was very dangerous, but not massively transmissive. And they had a gain of function process through what's called serial passage, which means basically passing of vice like natural selection.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just on a human level. I think so. I think so. I mean, I've been criticized for being actually, I'm certainly a big critic of Peter Daisig, but I've been criticized by some for being too lenient. I mean, it's so easy to say, oh, somebody, they're like an evil ogre and just trying to do evil and cackling in their closet or whatever. But I think for most of us, even those of us who do terrible, horrible things the story that we tell ourselves and we really believe is that we're doing the thing that we most believe in. I mean, I did my PhD dissertation on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They genuinely saw themselves as idealists. They thought, well, we need to make radical change to build a better future. And what they described, what they felt was radical change was a monstrous atrocity by us.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Didn't mention that there were these virologists who had this fake certainty that they knew it came from nature and it didn't come from a lab. And they called people like me conspiracy theorists just for raising that possibility. But when Peter Dazek was organizing that effort in February of 2020, what he said is we need to rally behind our Chinese colleagues. And the basic idea was these international collaborations are under threat. And I think it was because of that because Peter Dasik's basically his major contribution as a scientist was just tacking his name on work that Shu Zhang Li had largely done. He was defending a lot, certainly for himself and his organization.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something happens there, it's going to come here. So very correctly, we have all kinds of partnerships with experts in these labs. And should Zheng Li was one of those partners. And her closest relationship was with Peter Dazek, who's a British, I think now American, but the president of a thing called Eco Health Alliance, which was getting money from NIH. And basically EcoHealth Alliance was a pass-through organization. And over the years, it was only about $600,000, so almost all of her funding came from the Chinese government. But there's a little bit that came from the United States. And so she became their kind of leading expert and the point of contact between the Wuhan Institute of Virology and certainly Peter Daisik, but also with others. And that was why in the earliest days of the outbreak,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people down to Wuhan to go and look at, well, at this laboratory. And they wrote a scathing cable that Josh Rogan from the Washington Post later got his hands on saying, this is really unsafe. They're doing work on dangerous bat coronaviruses in conditions where a leak is possible. And so then you mentioned Shujang Li, and I'll connect that to these virologists who I was talking about. So there's a very credible thesis that because these pathogenic outbreaks happen in other parts of the world, having partnerships with experts in those parts of the world must be a foundation of our efforts. We can't just bring everything home because we know that viruses don't care about borders and boundaries and so on.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The person who was the vice chairman of the project and a leading French industrialist named Mariu refused to sign off. And he said we can't support, we have no idea what this is, whether it's safe or not. And when this lab opened, remember it was supposed to have 50 French experts. It had one French expert. And so the French were really disgusted. And actually when the Wuhan Institute of Virology in its new location opened in 2018, two things happened. One, French intelligence privately approached U.S. intelligence, saying we have a lot of concerns about the Wuhan Institute of Virology, about its safety, and we don't even know who's operating there. Is it being used as a dual use facility? And also in 2018, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing sent”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Stay tuned. So France had this agreement that they were going to help design and help build this BSL-4 lab in Wuhan. And it was going to be with French standards, and there were going to be 50 French experts who were going to work there and supervise the work that happened even after the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the new location started operating. But then when they started building it, the French contractors, the French overseers were increasingly appalled that they had less and less control, that the Chinese contractors were swapping out new things. It wasn't built up to French standards so much that at the end, when it was finally built,”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to say, as I was telling you before, like when I heard your long podcast with Jeron Lanier and he talked about his mother at the very end, I mean, just beautiful stuff. So I don't know whether I can match beautiful stuff, but I'm going to do my best.”
2021-12-08 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #247 – Jamie Metzl: Lab Leak Theory · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source