Speaker 1: Hey, guys, ready or not, twenty twenty four is here,
Speaker 1: and we here at breaking points, are already thinking of
Speaker 1: ways we can up our game for this critical election.
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Speaker 1: But enough with that, Let's get to the show. All right,
Speaker 1: Good morning, Welcome to Counterpoints. S'm Ryan Grim here with
Speaker 1: Emily Jashinsky. We've got a lot to get into today.
Speaker 1: Former President Trump might go ahead and get himself arrested
Speaker 1: either later today or later this week. We've got real
Speaker 1: safety legislation that we're going to get into. Google's coming
Speaker 1: out with this chat GPT, huge news on the China
Speaker 1: and Russia front as the leaders met this week. There's
Speaker 1: a lot to breakdown when it comes to that. For
Speaker 1: President Biden's first woke veto the Federal Reserve meets later today.
Speaker 1: For a long time, the Fed had been expected to
Speaker 1: hike rates by another half point, but the kind of
Speaker 1: tech bros taking down Silicon Valley Bank has trimmed the
Speaker 1: sales on the aspirations the FED a little bit. People
Speaker 1: are expecting now it'll be a quarter point increase, which
Speaker 1: actually amounts to, you know, billions of dollars in extra
Speaker 1: kind of easing flowing into Silicon Valley. So job well done.
Speaker 1: They taking that bank down. A job brownie. And you know,
Speaker 1: there was some speculation that perhaps they wouldn't raise rates
Speaker 1: at all, but then there was reverse speculation saying, oh,
Speaker 1: but then that will panic people because I only thinking,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if the FED isn't raising rates at all,
Speaker 1: how scared is the FED about the what do they know?
Speaker 1: And then it sparks, it sparks a run. So it
Speaker 1: is difficult. You have to you know, it is very
Speaker 1: difficult dealing with humans. You're what you're saying is that
Speaker 1: you're glad you're not Powell. Well it's probably a lot
Speaker 1: of fun though, right, just to have the fate of
Speaker 1: the world at your fingertips. Right, No, it sounds exhilarating, No,
Speaker 1: sure it is, so go to wait for that. Speaking
Speaker 1: of things being exhilarating, big news in the Republican twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four presidential campaign front as Ron DeSantis run to
Speaker 1: Sanctimonius run. You could go down the list is talking
Speaker 1: about President Trump. I wouldn't say he's going on offense.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say he's even hitting back that hard. He's
Speaker 1: been pressed by Piers Morgan in a new interview that's
Speaker 1: set to air on Thursday on Fox Nation. We have
Speaker 1: the first clip to show you right here. Take a look.
Speaker 1: He is your favorite nickname that Trump's given you so far?
Speaker 1: Is it run to sanctimonious or meat bull rong? Well?
Speaker 1: I can't even he went off meat bull wrong, but
Speaker 1: I can't. I don't know how to spell the sanctimonious.
Speaker 1: I don't really know what it means. But you know,
Speaker 1: I kind of like it's long, it's got a lot
Speaker 1: of valve. I mean, so we go with that. That's fine.
Speaker 1: You know, you call me, you call me whatever you want.
Speaker 1: I mean, just as long as you, you know, also
Speaker 1: call me a winner, Okay. Right. The reason is that
Speaker 1: he's not pushing back too hard or going on offense
Speaker 1: is because Piers Morgan really is trying to pull this
Speaker 1: stuff out of him. It doesn't look like Ron DeSantis
Speaker 1: is super eager to be talking about Donald Trump, but
Speaker 1: he is. He is. This is the preview that we
Speaker 1: have of the De Santas versus Trump campaign. This interview
Speaker 1: came a couple of hours after Dy Sanctimonious had made
Speaker 1: his public comments making fun of Trump for having an
Speaker 1: affair with a porn star. So he was kind of
Speaker 1: worked up when he sat down peers. But this is
Speaker 1: my favorite kind of populism, when a Harvard and Yale
Speaker 1: graduate pretends that he doesn't know what words mean and
Speaker 1: that there are lots of vowels. He said he did
Speaker 1: not as spelled to Sanctimonious, which, to be fair, that's
Speaker 1: species because Donald Trump spells things in many different ways.
Speaker 1: My favorite was when somebody spelled little Marco with t's
Speaker 1: and trump correct and no, no no, no, there's d's. It's
Speaker 1: a little little Marco simply correct. So Desanta's has said,
Speaker 1: you know, he was asked what the differences are between
Speaker 1: him and Donald Trump. He says, well, I think there
Speaker 1: are a few things. The approach to COVID was different.
Speaker 1: I would have fired somebody like Fauci. I think he
Speaker 1: got way too big for his breeches, and I think
Speaker 1: he did a lot of damage. And then he went
Speaker 1: on to say, you know, we don't have if you
Speaker 1: bring your own agenda into my administration, you're gone. The
Speaker 1: way we run the government, I think is no daily drama,
Speaker 1: focuses on the big picture and puts points on the board.
Speaker 1: And I think that's very important. Let's put the country
Speaker 1: first rather than worry about any personalities or any type
Speaker 1: of individual. Again, I don't think Rodes Saints is super
Speaker 1: excited to have to make this contrast. I don't think
Speaker 1: either of them believes it's ideal that the other is
Speaker 1: in the race. But and Rodasants has been really careful
Speaker 1: about needling Trump, looking like he's needling Trump. This to me,
Speaker 1: the big takeaway from this is that he's very close
Speaker 1: to an announcement. That would be my perspective. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: he told he told Pierce Morgan, how does he keep
Speaker 1: getting these interviews? By the way, he's amazing. He just
Speaker 1: asks about I'll so, Yeah, he told he told Pierce
Speaker 1: Morgan this interview which will air tomorrow on what is
Speaker 1: Fox Nation or something like that, which is their attempt
Speaker 1: like the CNN plus effects successful. It's unthirsty. People are
Speaker 1: partying with their money apparently for Fox Nation. He said,
Speaker 1: stay tuned. So basically he's he's going to unless unless
Speaker 1: he backs out at the last minute, but in some
Speaker 1: ways he's just no match for Trump when it comes
Speaker 1: to these insults. You watch at the end of that clip,
Speaker 1: he says, I don't care what you call me, just
Speaker 1: call me a winner. So cringe. Yeah. Really, but this
Speaker 1: is why nobody is a match for Trump, and I
Speaker 1: do think DeSantis is smart enough to have recognized that
Speaker 1: for months and months and months, which is why I
Speaker 1: think the big takeaway from this interview is really that,
Speaker 1: I mean, we kind of knew what this was going
Speaker 1: to look like with the contrast thattas DeSantis's vantage point
Speaker 1: at what the contrast is. We knew that what that
Speaker 1: was going to look like the broad outlines of it.
Speaker 1: But I think the big takeaway here is that he's
Speaker 1: very close to making an official presidential announcement because he
Speaker 1: spent so much time avoiding exactly this, and again I
Speaker 1: don't I think he's not eager to do it in
Speaker 1: the same way that Trump is eager to go after
Speaker 1: him and crystln Zacer talked about some of the very
Speaker 1: interesting ways that's unfolding yesterday, But I think he knows
Speaker 1: that nobody can really take on Donald Trump. We saw
Speaker 1: all of these candidates fall one after one after one,
Speaker 1: after thinking they had finally they'd figure out the way
Speaker 1: to go mono and mona with Donald Trump, and it
Speaker 1: never panned out. So I think that's where you're seeing
Speaker 1: caution on DeSantis's part. But the fact that he finally
Speaker 1: took on some of these questions instead of deflecting them,
Speaker 1: which is when he had. It's not as though he
Speaker 1: hasn't gotten these questions in the past, he's just deflected them.
Speaker 1: So the fact that he's taken them, I think means
Speaker 1: he's about to make his announcement right and to show
Speaker 1: how like poorly matchis in this kind of fight. Trump
Speaker 1: responded to him, I don't know if we have this,
Speaker 1: but he on his little truth social he writes back,
Speaker 1: and this is just a perfect way that just Trump
Speaker 1: ups it to nuclear left. He says, Ronda sanctimonious will
Speaker 1: probably find out about false accusations. Wait, how would we
Speaker 1: say about false accusation? I can't do it, Trump, false accusations?
Speaker 1: How's your Trump? It's a little better sometime in the future,
Speaker 1: as he gets older, wiser and better known, when he's
Speaker 1: unfairly and illegally attacked by a woman, even classmates that
Speaker 1: are underage or possibly a man parenthesis exclamation point. I'm
Speaker 1: sure he will want to fight these misfits just like
Speaker 1: I do. So it's like, Okay, you don't like to
Speaker 1: name the sanctimonious, how about I accuse you of partying
Speaker 1: with underage men, of being gay? Yeah? This is so
Speaker 1: classic Donald Trump. But where do you go from there?
Speaker 1: Like when he's ratcheted up there? Right? Yeah, Well, call
Speaker 1: me whatever you want. Make sure you call me a winner,
Speaker 1: make sure you call me straight. Is where it's going next. So,
Speaker 1: speaking of where things are going next, Donald Trump, we
Speaker 1: have all been waiting with beta breath in the media
Speaker 1: and in the country at large for a possible arrest
Speaker 1: if he is indicted by a grand jury in New York.
Speaker 1: That could come today. Reports seem to be suggesting that
Speaker 1: it actually will happen next week. Ryan, just on the timeline,
Speaker 1: let's pause here for a second. Donald Trump is the
Speaker 1: one who gave us the Tuesday Day, which was yesterday,
Speaker 1: but that obviously didn't pan out, and now looks like
Speaker 1: they heard from their last witness yesterday, which is why
Speaker 1: some people expect it could happen today. There are reports
Speaker 1: from the Daily Mail that it's going to happen next week.
Speaker 1: What do you make of this timeline? When do you
Speaker 1: think it's likely if he is indicted, that an arrest
Speaker 1: takes place. And it seems like Trump's intel on a
Speaker 1: Tuesday arrest was coming from the fact that Monday was
Speaker 1: supposed to be a last like you said, witness, then
Speaker 1: the grand jury has to vote. There's twenty three members
Speaker 1: on a grand jury. As long as there's a majority vote,
Speaker 1: then a sealed indictment is produced. But then Bragg has
Speaker 1: to make decisions from there, like it's not a fata
Speaker 1: complete at that point that he's indicted, and it's not
Speaker 1: a fatal complete actually that Bragg will ask for an indictment.
Speaker 1: He could still decide, you know what, I'm actually not
Speaker 1: going to go forward with this. There's some reporting that
Speaker 1: there could be another witness that comes before the grand
Speaker 1: jury this afternoon, but there is speculation that there will
Speaker 1: be a vote this afternoon. But like you said, that
Speaker 1: doesn't immediately lead to, you know, Trump getting cuffed. Trump
Speaker 1: has said that he will fly up from mar A
Speaker 1: Lago turned himself in, and then you'll go through this
Speaker 1: entire ritual of doing the fingerprints and the mug shot
Speaker 1: which to me is just so strange that you would
Speaker 1: need a mug shot of former President Donald Trump. I
Speaker 1: think the government has a photo of him. I'm also
Speaker 1: not sure he's that much of a flight risk. He's
Speaker 1: the most recognizable man on the planet. Fingerprints, I suppose
Speaker 1: then you can like check to see if he was
Speaker 1: handling these documents or something. But Bragg's case is all
Speaker 1: about the Stormy Daniels. While you still have the Document's
Speaker 1: case ongoing. There was a ruling in that just yesterday afternoon.
Speaker 1: They may be back in court on that one today.
Speaker 1: That's in federal court. And then you have the Georgia
Speaker 1: grand jury right that is still pursuing charges. And to me,
Speaker 1: the Georgia case is the only one that I get
Speaker 1: really interested in because it's about something substantial. It's about
Speaker 1: the stolen election. It's about Trump's effort to kind of
Speaker 1: steal it back to trigger ultimately January sixth. So that
Speaker 1: to me is something that is fair for Democrats to
Speaker 1: contest and for prosecutors to go after because it's so
Speaker 1: fundamental to the core value of democracy in the United
Speaker 1: States to invent kind of a rationale to say that, well,
Speaker 1: this payoff to this porn star used campaign funds, and
Speaker 1: you you should have listed it in your billing records
Speaker 1: as this expense, but you actually listed it as this
Speaker 1: expense to Michael Cohen. So we're going to combine all
Speaker 1: these and call it a low level felony when John
Speaker 1: Edwards was able to beat probably an even worse example
Speaker 1: of it. That doesn't clear the bar for me, and
Speaker 1: neither does like the document stuff. But that's that's because
Speaker 1: I'm more of a civil liberties person that thinks that
Speaker 1: there's too much that's overclassified and you have to kind
Speaker 1: of see what the documents are, so like somewhat of
Speaker 1: an open lind there. But yeah, where do you I mean,
Speaker 1: on principle, I think nobody's above the law, and if
Speaker 1: you've got the goods on a foreign president, then you
Speaker 1: should prosecute them. And you know, as you know, growing up,
Speaker 1: we were always taught like Richard Nixon wasn't above the law,
Speaker 1: except he did get a pardon, and that's there's something
Speaker 1: beautiful about that fact that nobody is above the law.
Speaker 1: At the same time, you don't want to gin up
Speaker 1: a case, right just be just for politics, just to
Speaker 1: prove nobody's above the law. I mean, if we want
Speaker 1: to start this game, you can do this. Show me
Speaker 1: the person, I'll show you the crime thing, depending on
Speaker 1: who's in charge of which prosecutor's office, who's in charge
Speaker 1: of the FBI at any given time. And by the way,
Speaker 1: we saw this with the raid on Trump, that was
Speaker 1: framed by the media and the political establishment as a
Speaker 1: clear cut criminal case, and then when it came to
Speaker 1: Joe Biden, it was not. You know, it came to
Speaker 1: Joe Biden in a similar situation, that same framing had
Speaker 1: just kind of tapered off. So I agree. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think anytime somebody is doing something wrong, whether it's
Speaker 1: unethical or unlawful, that is entirely fair game for people
Speaker 1: to investigate, and it's entirely a fair game for the
Speaker 1: media to scrutinize. But to ratchet something up to felony
Speaker 1: level is a really, really dangerous game. When I first
Speaker 1: saw this news, I think it was like last week
Speaker 1: that we were heading in this direction. I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but my stomach just dropped and there were
Speaker 1: these immediate you know, Trump talked about people taking the
Speaker 1: streets and protesting, and Republicans were really freaked out. About
Speaker 1: that and said, you know, basically, they're trying to ratchet
Speaker 1: this up, make these heighten the tensions and heighten the contradictions,
Speaker 1: and get you really ready to do something that's going
Speaker 1: to be problematic for your cause. And I don't know
Speaker 1: that it's intentional, but you can see that this would
Speaker 1: head in a very negative direction. Trump, according to a
Speaker 1: new report in the New York Times, is very apparently
Speaker 1: telling people he's very ready for this to happen. He
Speaker 1: thinks that there's some showmanship that can be played out
Speaker 1: if they He doesn't even mind, according to the Times,
Speaker 1: getting cuffed, and has sort of mused about whether it
Speaker 1: be better to smile, what the right kind of stylistic
Speaker 1: approach would be to that very physical situation. Now, if
Speaker 1: he does just turn himself in, Bragg doesn't have to
Speaker 1: go through that, they don't have to purp walk him.
Speaker 1: I think it's much better for the country that they don't.
Speaker 1: I think it's much better for the country that they
Speaker 1: don't create a felony charge, abricate really a felony charge
Speaker 1: on an obscure legal theory that this constituted a felonious
Speaker 1: campaign finance violation, because that's where you get into Banana
Speaker 1: Republic territory and the power starts to really get wielded
Speaker 1: in terrifying ways. And I would still love to see
Speaker 1: Trump prosecuted for something. But to me, what about selling
Speaker 1: US foreign policy to Saudi Arabia for billions of dollars?
Speaker 1: You could make that case if you actually cared, But
Speaker 1: they don't want to make that case because Trump only
Speaker 1: did it on a more aggressive and more brazen scale
Speaker 1: than everybody in our kind of political ecosystem does it.
Speaker 1: So I think the thing that has protected him from
Speaker 1: more serious charges is the fact that he's won. He's
Speaker 1: the most brazen criminal among a gang of criminals in Washington.
Speaker 1: He is more brazen about it. But if you go
Speaker 1: after him, then you're like, well, wait a minute, what
Speaker 1: about what about this selling of our foreign policy for
Speaker 1: this amount of money? Now we get that one too,
Speaker 1: which I'd say, okay, roll them all up. Republicans on
Speaker 1: the Oversight Committee last week released bank records showing this
Speaker 1: transaction between a Chinese energy company, a biden, a business associate,
Speaker 1: and then about a million dollars worth of payouts to
Speaker 1: different bidens in the course of a couple months, and
Speaker 1: so again, there is a difference in the brazen this,
Speaker 1: There's no question about it. But if we're going to
Speaker 1: start doing this, We're going to start doing this, There's
Speaker 1: no way around it. And I do think that the
Speaker 1: same standard should apply. I do think that it's incredible
Speaker 1: for Joe Biden to be able to that. The media
Speaker 1: lets Joe Biden get away and Democrats get away with
Speaker 1: claiming the moral high ground on all of this just
Speaker 1: because everybody hates Donald Trump. We look away from all
Speaker 1: of these other things. But when things are not at
Speaker 1: a felony level and you start looking at them that way,
Speaker 1: other things that aren't at a felony level are going
Speaker 1: to start being looked at that way, and it will
Speaker 1: feel like a banana Republic. And one of my favorite
Speaker 1: political analysts, Chris Rock, if we can put up his
Speaker 1: his comments here. This happened at some type of private event.
Speaker 1: So unfortunately we don't have the Mark Twain Awards for
Speaker 1: Adam Sandler, who absolutely deserves a Marked Award and is
Speaker 1: an American treasure. And unfortunately we don't have video of
Speaker 1: this because but you can, we all know Chris Rock
Speaker 1: so well that you can actually just imagine him. The
Speaker 1: AI in your head can just kind of produce the
Speaker 1: video for you, but you can do Michael Scott's impression,
Speaker 1: there you go, there you go. So his argument that
Speaker 1: basically this is going to actually help Donald Trump, using
Speaker 1: the Tupac Shakur argument that he's sold three million records
Speaker 1: while he was in prison, what's your guest? Trump's, as
Speaker 1: you were saying, seems to believe that himself, that this
Speaker 1: might actually kind of rebound to his benefit. Do you
Speaker 1: do you think that's right or does it depend? I
Speaker 1: think it rebounds to Republicans benefits, but not to Trump's
Speaker 1: benefit because there's a you know, if you're arrested, and
Speaker 1: that image is sort of indelible in the public consciousness.
Speaker 1: I think that's really hard to get away with or
Speaker 1: get away from. So I just don't I do like
Speaker 1: what Chris Rock says here. He says he slept with
Speaker 1: a porn star and paid off someone so his wife
Speaker 1: wouldn't find out. That's romantic, and Donald Trump is clearly
Speaker 1: not getting enough credit for being a romantic. That's true.
Speaker 1: It's really a soft side. It's so Donald Trump in
Speaker 1: that sense, Yes, it helps him, but no, I think
Speaker 1: it's it humanizes him. A little bit. Yeah, what a
Speaker 1: sweetheart he is, right, But that's you know, he's getting
Speaker 1: at why it's really hard to classify this as a
Speaker 1: campaign finance violation because you have to prove it was
Speaker 1: done in order to help your campaign and not your marriage. Well, ironically,
Speaker 1: the argument that Trump would have to make on his
Speaker 1: own behalf would be to say, I'm just such a
Speaker 1: flagrant cheater that you think that I actually care about
Speaker 1: my wife. No, this was purely about the campaign campaign.
Speaker 1: And that was a harder argument for Edwards to make
Speaker 1: that because you know, and Edwards was trying to you'll
Speaker 1: cover this up from his family and for reasons of
Speaker 1: personal embarrassment like that was that was clear that it
Speaker 1: wasn't just about the campaign. Donald Trump could be like, look,
Speaker 1: I'm a complete narcissist and kind of sociopath. I don't
Speaker 1: care what people think of me, Like I like bad
Speaker 1: news about me because it gets my name in the press,
Speaker 1: like he could, and he could call all of the
Speaker 1: therapists that have talked to the Atlantic over the years
Speaker 1: and they'll come in and say, yep, we have actually
Speaker 1: diagnosed him in the pages of the Atlantic. As all
Speaker 1: the things he says expert witnesses. He does not care
Speaker 1: what you say about him as long as you say
Speaker 1: something about him. So the fact that he covered something
Speaker 1: up that would have been in the news suggests it
Speaker 1: must have been calculation about a campaign. It's the only answer,
Speaker 1: It's the only thing that makes any sense. It's the
Speaker 1: only reasonable explanation. Now, Alania was pregnant at the time,
Speaker 1: and there is some evidence that that made him feel
Speaker 1: a little extra guilty. So maybe there is something underneath
Speaker 1: that sociopathy, that some human element that was touched. But
Speaker 1: this is why we can't trust the psychological experts the
Speaker 1: armchair in the Atlantic, because honestly, who knows, who knows
Speaker 1: what goes on there. It turns out you can't trust
Speaker 1: psychiatrist in the Atlantic just diagnosing off television who knew
Speaker 1: It's honestly, it's a good lesson for all of us.
Speaker 1: But it is also true. By the way, just one
Speaker 1: final quick thought that Trump, whether this hurts Trump or
Speaker 1: ultimately boosts him, I don't buy the argument it boosts
Speaker 1: him because I think it's possible that it sets him
Speaker 1: on an even more. We've seen his true social posts,
Speaker 1: which are I think a step up from his Twitter posts.
Speaker 1: Actually getting arrested this or psychological effect of that. Not
Speaker 1: to be an armchair psychiatrist myself, but actually getting arrested,
Speaker 1: I think it's possible sends him on a very different trajectory,
Speaker 1: and that's not one that'll be politically beneficial. It certainly
Speaker 1: wouldn't beneficial for the country, is my assumption. But I
Speaker 1: don't know. He's full of surprises as long as he's
Speaker 1: got a bootleg phone behind bars one of his androids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: text to Twitter or whatever, right, which is how some
Speaker 1: of us had to do it in high school. There
Speaker 1: you go, back in the day, back in the day.
Speaker 1: All right. So let's move on to the news out
Speaker 1: of Eastern Europe. There are new developments, obviously in the
Speaker 1: war in Ukraine that came this week as Vladimir Putin
Speaker 1: and Hijinping met for a couple of days. It didn't
Speaker 1: have a lot to discuss about the war itself, but
Speaker 1: certainly had a lot to discuss in general. The New
Speaker 1: York Times is reporting that the Biden administration vowed last
Speaker 1: month the crackdown on companies that sell critical technologies to
Speaker 1: Russia as part of its efforts to curtail the country's
Speaker 1: war against Ukraine, but the continued flow of Chinese drones
Speaker 1: to the country explains why that will be hard. Now,
Speaker 1: China has sold more than twelve million in drones and
Speaker 1: drone parts to the country, according to official Russian customs
Speaker 1: data from a third party data provider that's reporting from
Speaker 1: the New York Times Ryan and twelve million dollars in
Speaker 1: drones and drone parts to the country kind of a
Speaker 1: drop in the bucket. When you look at the budget
Speaker 1: of this war overall, what do you expect after this
Speaker 1: meeting that happened this week? Do you expect big increases
Speaker 1: right US support? At this point? What is closing in
Speaker 1: on one hundred billion dollars with a B and if
Speaker 1: twelve million dollars with an M, you know, from China
Speaker 1: over to Russia is going to tip the balance, then
Speaker 1: we might be in a match that we can't keep
Speaker 1: up with. Like that's I can't even do the mathm
Speaker 1: one one thousandth one hundredth of the amount that we've
Speaker 1: invested so far. These drones have become kind of an
Speaker 1: iconic part of this of the battle between Ukraine and Russia,
Speaker 1: as even the smaller ones used to help, you know,
Speaker 1: troops see what's what's in front of them. Each one
Speaker 1: gets like a couple of flights max. Before it gets
Speaker 1: shot down by the other side, which is why you
Speaker 1: have to constantly replenish them. But as experts saying that
Speaker 1: in this your Times article, this is not at this
Speaker 1: point the kind of sophisticated technology that sanctions and other
Speaker 1: controls are going to be able to keep out of
Speaker 1: the hands of China and Russia. Like they can make
Speaker 1: a drone like you can. You can practically make one
Speaker 1: in your garage at this point, and so it shows
Speaker 1: the limits of kind of the economic warfare tool that
Speaker 1: the United States is using. China's argument, and it's that
Speaker 1: it's making publicly, was we should stop using the global
Speaker 1: economy as a weapon and as a principle. Uh That's
Speaker 1: that's a fairly persuasive argument, because what I mean, what
Speaker 1: you're doing is you're you're using the suffering of the
Speaker 1: world's people as as a diplomatic tool, uh to to
Speaker 1: try to find a solution for particular or acute crises.
Speaker 1: And I think the bar to do that has to
Speaker 1: be extraordinarily high. Now China's peace plan, I can understand
Speaker 1: why Ukraine is like no, like China's peace plan was,
Speaker 1: let's do a cease five and lift all sanctions on Russia.
Speaker 1: It's like a world that's kind of exactly what Russia
Speaker 1: would prefer. And yet Russia didn't even actually say that
Speaker 1: they wanted that. That's Hijinping is not obviously promoting that
Speaker 1: charitable interpretation of what he's on. What he's saying, to
Speaker 1: your point, he undercuts exactly what he's saying, and he undercuts,
Speaker 1: by the way, a lot of what he says about
Speaker 1: the West when he does these photo ops and these
Speaker 1: very substantial from all we can tell meetings with white
Speaker 1: wine with Vladimir Putin. Did you see the picture of
Speaker 1: them toasting with the white wine. They're white wine drinkers,
Speaker 1: their white wine drinkers, at least at least this week
Speaker 1: they are. But he undercuts a lot, a lot, a lot,
Speaker 1: a lot, a lot of his credibility on the world
Speaker 1: stage when he's doing these photo ops with somebody who
Speaker 1: is engaged in an act of aggression and an invasion,
Speaker 1: the cost to civilians that have happened over the last
Speaker 1: war in the way that Vladimir Putin is right now,
Speaker 1: and it doesn't makes sense from a sort of real
Speaker 1: politic perspective, that China is closing up to Russia and
Speaker 1: that Russia is closing up to China absolutely one hundred percent.
Speaker 1: Xi Jinping has a vision of Chinese leadership on the
Speaker 1: global stage that goes beyond mere immediate day to day
Speaker 1: real politic right now or even this year. I don't
Speaker 1: know that this is a This is entirely helpful as
Speaker 1: as Xi Jinping then tries to take his tries to
Speaker 1: take his vision world to other world leaders in the future,
Speaker 1: but at the same time, maybe it signals that he
Speaker 1: realizes that's a lost cause at this point anyway. And
Speaker 1: what's disturbing from kind of a humanitarian perspective is that
Speaker 1: it seems like the world's big powers, China and the
Speaker 1: United States, both feel like it's in their interests to
Speaker 1: have Ukraine and Russia going to war against each other.
Speaker 1: For various reasons. The US likes to see Russia's Russia's
Speaker 1: capacity and power on a global stage reduced. We like
Speaker 1: to be able to sell all kinds of material uh
Speaker 1: into this into this conflict, even if we're using you
Speaker 1: borrowed or printed money to sell to sell it into
Speaker 1: their China I think likes to test out what a
Speaker 1: what a hot conflict looks like with NATO with the West.
Speaker 1: And also China still deeply skeptical of Russia, so in
Speaker 1: the background is kind of happy to see them, uh,
Speaker 1: see them suffering and see them see them weakened, and
Speaker 1: also happy to create an ecosystem with Iran, Russia, China
Speaker 1: to to develop the muscles and the sinews of sanctions
Speaker 1: evasion and of kind of creating an economy that is
Speaker 1: independent of kind of Western control. So everybody except for
Speaker 1: the the Russian soldiers on the front line and the
Speaker 1: Ukrainian soldiers and civilians around the world, who has major power,
Speaker 1: seems to want to keep this going. Yeah. No, it's
Speaker 1: a great point because specifically, the news recently that China
Speaker 1: had broken the peace deal between the Saudis and Iran
Speaker 1: really made headlines in the West as though the United
Speaker 1: States and the Western general had sort of lost its power,
Speaker 1: its moral power to be the power broker in negotiations
Speaker 1: like these, that they were no longer the ones at
Speaker 1: least having success and making these deals because China saw
Speaker 1: the power vacuum and knows how it can undercut the
Speaker 1: West and step in and do from its perspective, what
Speaker 1: constitutes a better job. And yet when you juxtapose that
Speaker 1: deal with hijinping side by side with Vladimir Putin claiming
Speaker 1: impartiality in the war, but talking about their growing friendship
Speaker 1: with a man who's engaged in a bloody humanitarian disaster,
Speaker 1: who started a bloody humanitarian disaster, and the aggressor in
Speaker 1: this invasion, When you see them standing side by side,
Speaker 1: it is a strange strategy. Again, in the real politics sense,
Speaker 1: you can understand where he's coming from. It is a
Speaker 1: strange strategy from shi Jin Pang to on the one hand,
Speaker 1: be sort of sense that his cash on the world
Speaker 1: stage is rising, his credibility in the world stage is rising,
Speaker 1: and then on the other hand, to cozy up to
Speaker 1: Putin and allow Putin to cozy up to him like this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: peacemaker sitting down with the guy who's making war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that could be a bit of a bit
Speaker 1: of a conflict that he needs to work out. And
Speaker 1: he also endorsed Putin, said Putin's going to win in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four. Putin has not said he's going to
Speaker 1: run again in twenty twenty four, and that makes his
Speaker 1: claims to impartiality utter bullshit, by the way, utter bullsh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's because he's now out there as that what is
Speaker 1: Putin doing right now. But yeah, I don't think anybody
Speaker 1: really believed that they were impartial in this conflict. No,
Speaker 1: But I mean it's important just to your point about
Speaker 1: his argument in terms of using the global economy as
Speaker 1: a weapon. He doesn't believe that because he he obviously
Speaker 1: doesn't because as part of China's strategy just says it
Speaker 1: is many countries in the West and has been for
Speaker 1: a very long time. So he's he sort of has
Speaker 1: this instinct about the public facing posture of China. And
Speaker 1: what's important is that he will get away with that
Speaker 1: when it comes to other countries and when it comes
Speaker 1: to the moral credibility if the United States a doesn't
Speaker 1: get its own act together and be better, be best,
Speaker 1: as Millennium might say. And secondly, if the United States
Speaker 1: lets them get away with that, with the hypocrisy, and
Speaker 1: we'll see how it goes with their like Saudi Iran
Speaker 1: thing turns out that might be tougher than it looks like.
Speaker 1: Good job, Like cutting that deal got the embassy's back
Speaker 1: over and got some commercial deals going. They're gonna complain.
Speaker 1: One of them is going to complain about the other
Speaker 1: soon enough, and then they're going to go to China
Speaker 1: and say they broke the deal. Now you need to
Speaker 1: be on our side on this. We'll see. It'll happen
Speaker 1: with putin two being a superpower and not as much
Speaker 1: fun as it looks someting. It's all fun and games
Speaker 1: until it gets real, all right. So moving on to
Speaker 1: Joe Biden's first veto of his presidency. This is a
Speaker 1: rejection of a rejection of a rule. So basically you
Speaker 1: know how this works is that if the if the
Speaker 1: administration in this case, through the Labor Department, institutes a
Speaker 1: new rule, Congress can undo that rule through through the
Speaker 1: kind of Congressional Review Act as long as they knock
Speaker 1: it down within a certain amount of time. So Congress
Speaker 1: passed a cr Law Congression Review Act saying that the
Speaker 1: Department of Labor rule around ESG policies is no good
Speaker 1: has to be undone. Biden then vetoed that, which means
Speaker 1: the rule stays in place. And what the rule basically
Speaker 1: says is that if you run a pension fund or
Speaker 1: a four to one K or something else. You are,
Speaker 1: if all things are equal, able to take into account
Speaker 1: an ESG score that's environmental social government governance. I think
Speaker 1: it's the E that is actually the thing that is
Speaker 1: driving all of the corporate rage about this, while it's
Speaker 1: the S that is kind of drawing the public kind
Speaker 1: of conservative outrage against it. Interesting that Biden chose this
Speaker 1: as his first veto. Curious for your take on this,
Speaker 1: because I'm highly critical of ESG as a kind of
Speaker 1: fraud oftentimes fraudulent approach. At the same time, I don't
Speaker 1: think it's the government's place to come in here and
Speaker 1: say that you you know where you can and can't
Speaker 1: put your investment dollars. Curious for your take on this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Reuters reported that industry itself was split on this
Speaker 1: because a lot of corporations are totally fine with ESG.
Speaker 1: In fact, they like it because, to your point, it
Speaker 1: allows them to perpetrate this fraud of having this public
Speaker 1: facing social responsibility that doesn't really mean anything at the
Speaker 1: end of the day. But on the E part, oil
Speaker 1: companies are very opposed to this, which I honestly where
Speaker 1: the rubber hits the road, and this is where to
Speaker 1: your question, this was both sides milking the culture war.
Speaker 1: For all that it's worth. This is Harvard Business or
Speaker 1: arm say, this is Harvard Law. They have a very
Speaker 1: long analysis posted on their website of what's going on
Speaker 1: with this rule, obviously designed as an explainer for stakeholders.
Speaker 1: They say, quote, it confirms the permissibility of ESG investing
Speaker 1: in pursuit of improved risk adjusted returns in accordance with
Speaker 1: prudent investor principles without mandating such an investment strategy. That's
Speaker 1: about the Biden rule, which was very similar to a
Speaker 1: Trump rule, And they say this is like very dense
Speaker 1: legal lee, but they basically are saying there were a
Speaker 1: couple of wording tweaks to the ESG mandate part that
Speaker 1: are not meaningfully changing. They are tweaks, but they're not
Speaker 1: meaningfully changing the rule from one administration to the next
Speaker 1: in terms of what a permissible with ESG investing from investors.
Speaker 1: So from my perspective, again, I don't like that the
Speaker 1: government's involved in this period. But it's just like Biden tweets.
Speaker 1: He invokes Marjorie Taylor Green in the tweet. Republicans, Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's play. Let's play Biden. Here's what he said as
Speaker 1: he vetoed this. I just signed this veto because legislation
Speaker 1: passed by the Congress would put a risk retirement savings
Speaker 1: of individuals across the country. They couldn't take into consideration
Speaker 1: investments that wouldn't be impacted by climate impacted by overpaying executives.
Speaker 1: And that's why I decided to be to it. Like
Speaker 1: how he whispered his way through that, Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: at the first take. It's probably like the seventieth and
Speaker 1: top it up a little bit for that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: So he invokes Marjorie Taylor Green in this veto. It
Speaker 1: is his first veto. He's publicizing it with a video
Speaker 1: with tweet itself. Republicans were really excited about this too,
Speaker 1: because he is they know, is a political winner and
Speaker 1: it is. And so to the extent that you can
Speaker 1: cast this as a big government Democrat mandate for a
Speaker 1: social justice agenda or for our left social justice agenda,
Speaker 1: they understand that that's a political winner for them. When
Speaker 1: you look at the actual substance of the changes in
Speaker 1: these rules, it doesn't warrant this level of kerfuffle whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I'm generally opposed to people denigrating the culture War because
Speaker 1: I think it has serious implications, and they're often class implications.
Speaker 1: But this was an incredible waste of time and energy,
Speaker 1: and I thought Biden's invocation of executive pay was smart.
Speaker 1: That's the G in the ESG. Within governance, you have
Speaker 1: some silly stuff, but then you also have some real
Speaker 1: stuff that allows fund managers say, well, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: you're paying the CEO twenty eight million dollars in stock
Speaker 1: options and they blew it last year, like we're going
Speaker 1: to knock at your score for overpaying all of your excs.
Speaker 1: You're just stealing money from us. I think that's completely fair.
Speaker 1: The irony, though, to me, of Republicans getting so worked
Speaker 1: up about ESG is that back under the second half
Speaker 1: of the Obama administration, one of the big fights was
Speaker 1: over what was called a fiduciary rule. This is also
Speaker 1: through the Department of Labor, where the Labor Department pushed
Speaker 1: through a rule that said investment managers have a fiduciary
Speaker 1: duty to not rip off basically their clients. In other words,
Speaker 1: they can't like purposely move them from one fund with
Speaker 1: a point zero five management fee into another fund with
Speaker 1: a point five percent management fee, which you can add
Speaker 1: up to billions of dollars, which clearly is not in
Speaker 1: the fiduciary benefit of the clients and actually just enriches
Speaker 1: the fund managers. That was a knockdown, drag out fight
Speaker 1: in Washington that played out behind the scenes, but with
Speaker 1: millions of dollars spent in lobbying fighting this, and so
Speaker 1: the bo administration ended up winning that one. It was
Speaker 1: one of the first rules that then the Republican Congress
Speaker 1: went after when they when they came back into power,
Speaker 1: and so to go from there to then say it's
Speaker 1: opposite that you one the opposite of this, all that
Speaker 1: you really all you care about is investors. It's like,
Speaker 1: maybe there's something else going on here. And I think
Speaker 1: a lot of this is really about climate and is
Speaker 1: about the intense amount of investor pressure on companies to
Speaker 1: move away from the fossil fuel supply chains and fossil
Speaker 1: fuel driven economies and and and then the fossil fuel
Speaker 1: industry pushing back against that. Well to that point, lobbyists
Speaker 1: obviously are are adept readers of this dense legalize and
Speaker 1: they know when a rule is meaningful and when a
Speaker 1: rule is not meaningful. So the fact that the oil
Speaker 1: and gas industry is threatened by something that when it
Speaker 1: comes down to it is at basque minor that these
Speaker 1: word changes, like one of the words is prevent. It's
Speaker 1: just reasonable. They're like these words being swapped out that
Speaker 1: they're spooked by. That tells you clearly that they feel
Speaker 1: that this is a high level of importance to their
Speaker 1: business model. I don't just beate that a lot of
Speaker 1: this is about climate. I think you're right though that
Speaker 1: from Republicans perspective, it's about the S, because I think
Speaker 1: that's easier, right, the S. Then you can as soon
Speaker 1: as you have the S and you start looking into
Speaker 1: the literature behind ESG, you get into DEI, you get
Speaker 1: into critical race theory, and the whole world opens up
Speaker 1: politically when you have that in there. The climate right,
Speaker 1: it's the tip of the iceberg, and what's beneath the
Speaker 1: surface of the water is honestly pretty academic, radical literature.
Speaker 1: And so when you can apply that, and you can
Speaker 1: you can pin that to any Democrat that supports what's
Speaker 1: happening with this, you realize you have a big political weapon,
Speaker 1: whether it's fair or not. And in this case, it's
Speaker 1: not meanwhile that Iceberg is completely melting. Well done, right,
Speaker 1: I like that Mike drop and move on to Chat
Speaker 1: GPT and Google Hair. So Google, under pressure from Chat,
Speaker 1: GPT and other AI products, has put out Barred. I
Speaker 1: signed up for the waitlist this morning. Bard was initially
Speaker 1: developed It sounds like starting back in twenty fifteen as
Speaker 1: a way to artificially produce poems. That's where Bard comes from.
Speaker 1: They have been The reporting is that they were basically
Speaker 1: pressured into releasing something they didn't quite want to release
Speaker 1: yet because Bing and Microsoft, following from chat GPT, released
Speaker 1: their own AI integrated it into BING and for the
Speaker 1: first time it was making real inroads against Google, or
Speaker 1: at least Google was perceiving the threat that they might
Speaker 1: do that. They issued internally what code read or a
Speaker 1: red alert that put all of their developers software engineers
Speaker 1: onto moving this as fast as possible and put a
Speaker 1: lot of pressure on their AI ethicists to clear the
Speaker 1: way for this to finally get rolled out. They're rolling
Speaker 1: it out in a much smaller to a much smaller
Speaker 1: circle of people than previously. But it does seem like
Speaker 1: this is the clearest sign yet of any that the
Speaker 1: AI arms race is really on right, And this is
Speaker 1: from Alphabet in The Wall Street Journal quotes them referring
Speaker 1: to this as an early experiment, and to unleash these
Speaker 1: quote early experiments on the world. I just think is
Speaker 1: a grave danger. It sounds like it's not that big
Speaker 1: of a deal. It sounds like the worst thing that's
Speaker 1: going to happen is we get some wrong answers and
Speaker 1: some cheating in school. It goes so far beyond that.
Speaker 1: We have so many vulnerabilities that we don't even know about,
Speaker 1: some that we do know about in terms of hacking,
Speaker 1: in terms of the security of our data, of our information,
Speaker 1: all of these things that can be targeted by artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence that is going to get more intelligent every single
Speaker 1: day as we open these tools up to the public. Now, generally,
Speaker 1: I think it's good that we democratize extremely powerful things
Speaker 1: like this. I do, however, think that when you see
Speaker 1: the nervousness among engineers, among tech executives about what could
Speaker 1: happen with this technology that they're referring to as an
Speaker 1: experiment and just unloading to the public. Let's take one example.
Speaker 1: We talked last week about Snapchat. Snapchat and the experiment
Speaker 1: the Center for Humane Technology ran with Snapchat's new AI,
Speaker 1: which is a four dollars a month premium feature that
Speaker 1: children can access. Well. Wappo repeated that experiment essentially with
Speaker 1: bart and they found they got similar inappropriate advice for
Speaker 1: teenaged users. This is from the Washington Post. After I
Speaker 1: told Bart I was about to have my fifteenth birthday
Speaker 1: party and wanted some advice on beer, it gladly provided
Speaker 1: me advice on how to hide the smell of beer
Speaker 1: and breath on my breath from my parents'. Tips included
Speaker 1: using mouthwashed, chewing gun, drinking water, and even quote avoid
Speaker 1: getting too close to your parents. Again, this is funny,
Speaker 1: and it is one experiment. What we saw with Snapchat
Speaker 1: and the Center for Humane Text experiment was they were
Speaker 1: telling a thirteen year old that was a little less funny,
Speaker 1: how to lose her virginity. This was AI walking through
Speaker 1: those steps. And again, if your kid has four books
Speaker 1: on a debit card to put in the Snapchat, it's
Speaker 1: there right now. I'm sure they've corrected it since that
Speaker 1: was publicized. But you have no idea where this AI goes.
Speaker 1: And that's part of the fear that Google has. And
Speaker 1: you can see it. You can read what they're telling
Speaker 1: their employees internally. Their memo was published, was published in
Speaker 1: the media. They're nervous about this stuff, and I just don't.
Speaker 1: I know a lot of people play around with chat,
Speaker 1: GPT and all of that stuff, but I just have
Speaker 1: a very hard time funny anymore because it seems to
Speaker 1: be going in a really dark direction really quickly. And
Speaker 1: what we don't even understand is what's going to happen
Speaker 1: when this artificial intelligence is directing people to do some
Speaker 1: really really dark stuff. The more we use it, the
Speaker 1: smarter it becomes. I have no fears about it becoming
Speaker 1: sent SENTI it whatsoever. It's artificial intelligence. It will always
Speaker 1: be artificial intelligence. But man, are we going in uncharted
Speaker 1: territory really quickly. The hacking part is deeply disturbing as well,
Speaker 1: extremely because there's been this race between encryption and security
Speaker 1: and the you know, hacker penetration intrusion technology. You already
Speaker 1: have the chat bots trying to kind of crack the
Speaker 1: new security piece that people put up, which is annoying everybody,
Speaker 1: but we recognize that it works where it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: find a picture with the cars and so far, the
Speaker 1: counter software has not been able to crack that, but
Speaker 1: artificial intelligence is easily going to be able to nucod's
Speaker 1: way right through there. Artificial you know, AI can take
Speaker 1: at this point handwritten a screw shot of cursive handwriting
Speaker 1: and turn it into text and analyze it. So it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be long before they can find a fire hydrant.
Speaker 1: And so that's that's just one example. The other security
Speaker 1: protocols that we have in place. Using your voice over
Speaker 1: the phone to talk to somebody, certainly the idea that
Speaker 1: you know last for your social and your mother's made
Speaker 1: the name are going to are going to be secure enough.
Speaker 1: And if you have customer service, which is then you'll
Speaker 1: completely run by AI, then you're gonna have you know,
Speaker 1: AI scams, AI hackers interacting with AI customer service. And
Speaker 1: so that's that's just how how do you how do
Speaker 1: you keep the kind of infrastructure of the Internet secure
Speaker 1: in that situation. It's to me, it seems like we're
Speaker 1: just gonna have constant outages, constant sites going down, uh
Speaker 1: and and constant fraud as people are just getting ripped
Speaker 1: off day after day. No, and again I don't dispute
Speaker 1: that there are some really good ways that this technology
Speaker 1: is going to evolve that. I mean, that's the case
Speaker 1: with every technology that has its upsides and its downsides,
Speaker 1: and there is a double edged sword. But it's unclear
Speaker 1: right now if the genie has sort of actually been
Speaker 1: let out of the so called bottle because or of
Speaker 1: the proverbial bottle. Because if that is the case and
Speaker 1: this technology, which is by all the reason they're releasing
Speaker 1: this technology, and they're in a race to integrate this
Speaker 1: technology into existing products. Google is so sensitive about its
Speaker 1: brand because they know that they're the top search engine
Speaker 1: in the world. They don't want to jeopardize that. It
Speaker 1: shows you how intense the pressure is to get this
Speaker 1: stuff out there that they're releasing and integrating it with
Speaker 1: Barred and doing this little quote early experiment. It shows
Speaker 1: you how high the pressure is. These are the same
Speaker 1: people that botched much less powerful technology with social media,
Speaker 1: and it's the same set of people and this is
Speaker 1: a much more powerful technology that is now going to
Speaker 1: be in the hands of anybody who wants to do
Speaker 1: bad with it. So we've talked about scams, think about blackmail,
Speaker 1: think about how code can be exploited. Like there are
Speaker 1: just things that as I've talked to people in the
Speaker 1: industry who have explained this to me, I would not
Speaker 1: have even considered the dangers of but the more they
Speaker 1: think about them. In some cases, they don't realize these
Speaker 1: vulnerabilities until other people exploit them, until the experiments are run.
Speaker 1: They're like, holy smokes, you can do that with AI too.
Speaker 1: Isn't it fun that we're all doing this in real
Speaker 1: time and that anyone can do it, even people that
Speaker 1: want to do us harm. So if the genie is
Speaker 1: out of the bottle, we're looking back years from now
Speaker 1: and saying, as of this moment in March of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, the genie was let out of the bottle,
Speaker 1: that this technology had been put in the hands and
Speaker 1: was advanced enough in the hands of those people who
Speaker 1: wish to do us harm to just start doing mass
Speaker 1: cyber attacks, advanced cyber attacks, hacking, all of that. It's
Speaker 1: such a sad moment that nobody learned from what happened
Speaker 1: with social media in the odds. Yeah, I'm going back
Speaker 1: to Vermont. Yeah that smart. Don't blame me. What's your point? Today? Today,
Speaker 1: the Senate is holding a hearing on railway safety as
Speaker 1: a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushes for a bill intended
Speaker 1: to prevent future derailments like the one in East Palestine, Ohio.
Speaker 1: To put it bluntly, you'd have to be an industry
Speaker 1: expert to thoroughly evaluate the merits of this legislation. It's
Speaker 1: deep in the weeds. Such experts are, of course few
Speaker 1: and far between in the news media and even in Congress,
Speaker 1: which is where lobbyists and unions step in to fill
Speaker 1: those knowledge gaps. Who do we trust to learn from
Speaker 1: East Palestine and spare other communities the same fate. No
Speaker 1: rail transportation system will ever be one hundred percent safe.
Speaker 1: Transportation of hazardous chemicals will never be without risk. We
Speaker 1: have to do both, so we have to accept some
Speaker 1: of that risk and except we can never fully eliminate it.
Speaker 1: The question then, is whether the risk right now is
Speaker 1: too high? If so, what would bring it down. The
Speaker 1: industry's latest data finds that for all railroads, the derailment
Speaker 1: rate is down thirty one percent since two thousand, but
Speaker 1: despite that longer term positive trend, it was up by
Speaker 1: five percent year over a year. A fact sheet being
Speaker 1: circulated by Senator jd Vance's office contends quote derailments in
Speaker 1: the United States are much more common than in other countries,
Speaker 1: and they specifically cite numbers from the EU and from Japan.
Speaker 1: So while we aren't in an urgent state of national emergency,
Speaker 1: there is probably more that we can do. Determining whether
Speaker 1: government regulations would harm or hurt those efforts becomes important here.
Speaker 1: The fact sheet being circulated by Vance's office makes reasonable
Speaker 1: arguments for each of the provisions in the bill, and
Speaker 1: makes reasonable rebuttals to legitimate points of contention. I uploaded
Speaker 1: the full thing over at the Federalists. You can read
Speaker 1: it there. Again, I'm not an industry expert, nor is Vance,
Speaker 1: nor are the editors of National Review who came out
Speaker 1: against the bill this week. But where the bill empowers
Speaker 1: the Department of Transportation, the measures appear very modest and
Speaker 1: within the real, realistic, if imperfect, scope of federal oversight. Here,
Speaker 1: the bill's two person crew requirement is eminently reasonable for
Speaker 1: obvious reasons, be it mitigation in East Palestine or prevention
Speaker 1: in other cases. If, as National Review claims, this will
Speaker 1: stall a transition to safer automated mechanisms, the industry is
Speaker 1: welcome to explain why it can't pay for those to
Speaker 1: ensure the interim period is properly staffed. Maybe they could
Speaker 1: pause some stock buybacks. It's true also, as NR says,
Speaker 1: should the bill pass, the railroads would adjust their behavior
Speaker 1: to any new regulatory burden. Unquote. The magazine claims that
Speaker 1: could come at the cost of safety by pushing hazardous
Speaker 1: chemicals into trucks. But if the regulatory burden is reasonable,
Speaker 1: that's not the faults of the government. It's the faults
Speaker 1: of an industry being subsidized to the tune of billions
Speaker 1: for putting profit over people. There's a lot going on
Speaker 1: when it comes to the economics of America's railroads. The
Speaker 1: right would correctly point out subsidies abound, distorting the true
Speaker 1: market forces at play. The left would correctly point out
Speaker 1: the cap of shipper problem that essentially gives companies monopoly power.
Speaker 1: Vance himself has actually noted both of those problems. Others
Speaker 1: might argue that this is an industry that needs both
Speaker 1: subsidies and some form of monopolies in order to function
Speaker 1: at all. Here's where the rubber meets the road. In
Speaker 1: a report on the NTSB's February findings that an overheated
Speaker 1: wheelbarer bearing likely cause the derailment. NPR noted quote. The
Speaker 1: spacing of hotbox detectors and the temperatures at which they
Speaker 1: trigger alarms are not currently regulated by federal law. Officials
Speaker 1: say Norfolk Southern and its crew appear to have actually
Speaker 1: followed all of the regulations. So both the market and
Speaker 1: the government failed here. Norfolk Southern has no incentive to
Speaker 1: get months of bad PR, and the government has no
Speaker 1: incentive to take a baiting from the public. But if
Speaker 1: an industry we all agree has safety implications that demand
Speaker 1: some government oversight, needs better oversight if it's cutting staff
Speaker 1: to maximize profits over safety. This is not a lemonade stand.
Speaker 1: It's a subsidized industry that handles life and death situations
Speaker 1: on a daily basis across the entire country. Hot boxes
Speaker 1: and crew mandates aren't going to kill its efficiency. It
Speaker 1: boggles the mind that establishment Republicans trust the business executives
Speaker 1: who spent years ratcheting up cultural tensions by devoting vast
Speaker 1: resources to stupid virtue signals like Norfolk Southern or even
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley Bank. At best, they're surprisingly incompetent, and that's
Speaker 1: just at best. With PSR and the labor negotiations lost fall.
Speaker 1: The industry has already shown in interests in profits over
Speaker 1: people and over safety. So earlier this month, Republican Senator
Speaker 1: John Thunstead of the bill. We'll take a look at
Speaker 1: what's being proposed, but an immediate, quick response heavy on
Speaker 1: regulation needs to be thoughtful and targeted. Tragedies are often
Speaker 1: exploited by special interests. They abuse the emotions and anger
Speaker 1: of the public to ram through bad legislation, creating a
Speaker 1: false sense of Catharsis also induce calls for action, for
Speaker 1: lawmakers to do something anything to help. Again, this web
Speaker 1: placed anger can create unintended consequences. Adding new layers of
Speaker 1: government control is sometimes easy because big business has money
Speaker 1: lobbying money to craft the regulation in their favor, especially
Speaker 1: over smaller competitors. For more on that, I really recommend
Speaker 1: him Carney's book The Big Ripoff. But none of this
Speaker 1: means government can't do better where oversight is actually warranted,
Speaker 1: where it actually has a duty to check big business.
Speaker 1: The Vance bill might not be perfect right now. Even
Speaker 1: great bills aren't perfect when they're introduced, but thoon standard
Speaker 1: of thoughtful and targeted measures appears to be much more
Speaker 1: accurate as a description of this case than the industry's claims. Otherwise. Hey,
Speaker 1: we're going to pick up where we left off last
Speaker 1: week exploring the origin of the Ebola outbreak in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: We're going to be joined by two authors of a
Speaker 1: fascinating article published in Independent Scized News, if we can
Speaker 1: put that up there, and so, this is Jonathan Latham.
Speaker 1: He's the editor of Independent Science News and he's executive
Speaker 1: director of the Bioscience Resource Project. The article was co
Speaker 1: authored by Sam Husseini, who is a journalist on Substack
Speaker 1: and elsewhere and was the co author of this story.
Speaker 1: Happy to welcome them both to Counterpoints today. Sam, doctor Latham,
Speaker 1: thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. So. I
Speaker 1: wanted to start out as we did last week by
Speaker 1: playing a clip from a podcast that included virologist Christian
Speaker 1: Anderson attempting to kind of debunk a conspiracy theory, but
Speaker 1: in the process making a fascinating admission. If we could
Speaker 1: roll that. The problem is that people see these coincidences.
Speaker 1: One of the new ones is the Ebola lab leak,
Speaker 1: which also is being blamed on us because we have
Speaker 1: been studying Ebola in Canaman Sierra Leone and Lo and behold,
Speaker 1: Ebola emerged just a few miles from there in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: right obviously across the border Guinea, but it's maybe one
Speaker 1: hundred miles or so away. And people then put that
Speaker 1: together and saying, oh, so that Ebola must have been
Speaker 1: reliably too, And it was Robert Gary and Christian Anderson again.
Speaker 1: And the reason why these names keep coming up, and
Speaker 1: the reason why we get grant money to study infectious
Speaker 1: diseases is because we study infectious diseases and have done
Speaker 1: so for many, many decades. And that's why the names
Speaker 1: keep coming up again. Right, It's not because there's some
Speaker 1: major conspiracy theory here where all of us have been
Speaker 1: sort of fiddling with the fields well prior to the pandemic,
Speaker 1: and so sam. The mainstream media's initial story of the
Speaker 1: outbreak of Ebola was that in Guinea, a two year
Speaker 1: old child was playing with bats, and then several months
Speaker 1: later you wound up with an ebola outbreak. What to
Speaker 1: you was so important from that interview that doctor Anderson gave, Well,
Speaker 1: my suspicions predated his recent statements of obviously, but it's
Speaker 1: remarkable that he would be saying this. At this point,
Speaker 1: they have been denying that they were working on Ebola
Speaker 1: this entire time. In their prior statements, Gary wrote an
Speaker 1: article his co partner as head of the Viral Hemorrhagic
Speaker 1: Fever Consortium. These are the labs in West Africa that
Speaker 1: Africans claimed might have been the source of the twenty
Speaker 1: fourteen Ebola outbreak. He recently denied it in an article.
Speaker 1: So for Anderson now to be seeming to admit in
Speaker 1: a very interesting and curious way that they were in
Speaker 1: fact working on Ebola is I think potentially an incredibly
Speaker 1: significant development. But the case against their narrative that it
Speaker 1: effectively pinning this on a to He wasn't even two
Speaker 1: years old. He was eighteen minutes old. This was over
Speaker 1: a thousand miles away from prior Ebola outbreaks. In prior
Speaker 1: Ebola outbreaks, there was always a die off of the
Speaker 1: local mammalian species. There was no such dieoff of local
Speaker 1: mammalian species. They even acknowledged that Fabian Lenders, who wrote
Speaker 1: the sort of what we would call the cover story,
Speaker 1: and who was also part of the Huhan Institute of
Speaker 1: Neurology investigation by the World Health organization. They acknowledged in
Speaker 1: their article that there were no bats that they could
Speaker 1: find in the village that they claim where the outbreak started,
Speaker 1: and they also acknowledged that there was no die off
Speaker 1: of the mammalian species. So there are an incredible number
Speaker 1: of holes in their dominant narrative. And the closer you
Speaker 1: look at this, the more it points to a concerted
Speaker 1: effort to effectively frame Guinea. Is this happened in you know,
Speaker 1: three countries, and there's a whole series of patterns in
Speaker 1: which they seem to have tried to pin this on
Speaker 1: Guinea just over the border from Sarah Leone to get
Speaker 1: it away from where the US labs were. Right, and
Speaker 1: doctor Latham want to bring you in here, what did
Speaker 1: What does the evidence as far as we know say
Speaker 1: about the where the most likely origin was, Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: the balance of evidence I would say favors Guinea, but
Speaker 1: there are some open questions about the provenance of some
Speaker 1: of the samples that were taken. So, for example, during
Speaker 1: the outbreak at the very beginning, MSF doctors without Borders
Speaker 1: alleged that the initial they were the people who identified
Speaker 1: the initial the very first confirmed cases. But what they
Speaker 1: argued was that those confirmed cases were in fact coming
Speaker 1: from across the border in Sierra Leone. And if you
Speaker 1: look at the phylogenetic research that has been used to
Speaker 1: pin the outbreak on Guinea, what you see is that
Speaker 1: some of the very earliest cases that are pinned on
Speaker 1: Guinea are probably actually from an outbreak in Sierra Leone.
Speaker 1: And so if you if you undo that misattribution as
Speaker 1: it were, then what you come up with is almost
Speaker 1: certainly an origin in Sierra Leone. And did it start
Speaker 1: earlier than has been publicly claimed the epidemic that is,
Speaker 1: or do we have evidence of that at this point? Well,
Speaker 1: the official start of the outbreak is the first diagnosed
Speaker 1: cases on March seventeenth, but what the people in Sierra
Speaker 1: Leoned identified was a start on May twenty fifth, so
Speaker 1: this is two months later, and they so they they
Speaker 1: for what they found when they first started identifying cases
Speaker 1: is that these cases were many mutations different from each other,
Speaker 1: which implies that there have been an outbreak in Sierra
Speaker 1: Leoned long before, But we don't know if there was
Speaker 1: an outbreak in Guinea long before that. That is the
Speaker 1: allegation of fabian Lean Dirts and the paper that that
Speaker 1: essentially found nothing in Guinea when they went to look
Speaker 1: at the purported outbreak site. So the claim is, the
Speaker 1: claim of Leanders, is that the outbreak started in December
Speaker 1: with the death of this young child. But there is
Speaker 1: essentially no evidence for that. So the children, the child
Speaker 1: doesn't have a confirmed diagnosis, none of his contacts has
Speaker 1: a confirmed diagnosis. There is no confirmed diagnosis for almost
Speaker 1: three months after that. So so for the scientific community
Speaker 1: to allege that that is the first date of the
Speaker 1: outbreak is frankly ridiculous. What else? What else could that
Speaker 1: child have died of? Like they say it was a bowler,
Speaker 1: what else could it have been? His father thinks that
Speaker 1: he died of malaria, and you know that his father
Speaker 1: didn't get anything. The healthcare workers in the village didn't
Speaker 1: get anything. His mother did also die, but that was
Speaker 1: apparently potentially for treatment that she got from and Bull.
Speaker 1: She was pregnant at the time, so she was in
Speaker 1: a vulnerable, particularly vulnerable state. I don't know if Jonathan
Speaker 1: could have more ideas on that. Yeah, Johnathan, do you
Speaker 1: have go ahead? No? I mean a great deal to
Speaker 1: add except that there are some suggestions that she might
Speaker 1: have had cholera too, but at the time there was
Speaker 1: no suggestion that she had a Bola virus. And obviously,
Speaker 1: you know people who had miscarriages. You know, viral hemorrhagic
Speaker 1: fevers are diseases associated with loss of blood, but obviously
Speaker 1: so are miscarriages, and so she died along with her child.
Speaker 1: And so so there's no real reason to think, so
Speaker 1: far as I can see that, to think that she
Speaker 1: had a Bola, because it can be misdiagnosed so easily.
Speaker 1: I mean, basically, the only way that anybody considers that
Speaker 1: you can confidently diagnose the bola is with a lab test,
Speaker 1: and no lab tests were done. And tell the middle
Speaker 1: of mind, and why, Sam, what do we know about
Speaker 1: this lab that was in SI early on? And why
Speaker 1: would there be this two month period in which it
Speaker 1: seems as if a bowl is circulating but it's not
Speaker 1: getting picked up. I'll let Jonathan speak to the second point.
Speaker 1: But this lab is headed by Robert Gary and Christian Andersen.
Speaker 1: Those names might ring about with people because they are
Speaker 1: the authors the two primary authors of the Proximal Origins paper,
Speaker 1: which came out in the spring of twenty twenty and
Speaker 1: asserted that COVID could not be a laboratory construct. It's
Speaker 1: very difficult to overstate the importance of this article. It
Speaker 1: really set the tone for the dominant mainstream media coverage
Speaker 1: of COVID that it couldn't possibly come out of a lab,
Speaker 1: and you were a nut job to think that it
Speaker 1: could possibly come out of a lab. So they had
Speaker 1: a massive confidence of interest to dismiss the possibility of
Speaker 1: lab origin, because the next question would be if the
Speaker 1: if the global public. Imagine if the global public understood
Speaker 1: in early twenty twenty that this plague ravaging through the
Speaker 1: world could have come out of a lab, one of
Speaker 1: the next major questions would have been what about prior outbreaks?
Speaker 1: And as a matter of fact, you know, I asked
Speaker 1: in February of twenty twenty the CDC if it could
Speaker 1: have come out of if COVID could have come out
Speaker 1: of a lab, and their response was a disingenuous And
Speaker 1: then when I followed up and I pushed, they said, well,
Speaker 1: we got to be careful about what kind of information
Speaker 1: we put out here, because remember what happened with the
Speaker 1: ebola in twenty fourteen, and we had to dismiss the
Speaker 1: possibility of the lab origin then in order to have
Speaker 1: people deal with the disease, which was a very weird
Speaker 1: way to put it. So that's a major thing that
Speaker 1: we have to keep in mind. There are all kinds
Speaker 1: of US institutions that are involved with this viral Hemorrhagic
Speaker 1: vi Consortium, and the the work done there was increasingly
Speaker 1: done on dangerous viruses, particularly after people might remember the
Speaker 1: anthrax attacks of two thousand and two. Turn O ba
Speaker 1: emphasizes this uh Serallionian journalists that there was a spike
Speaker 1: in that activity and massive funding for work on dangerous
Speaker 1: viruses and pathogens during that period. So we know that
Speaker 1: it was working on deadly pathogens, and we know that
Speaker 1: that they had safety issues. There were statements by some
Speaker 1: of the scientists there saying, you know, well, we can
Speaker 1: get so much work done here than we could in
Speaker 1: the United States because the safety concerns are not onerous
Speaker 1: from their point of view. They don't have to be
Speaker 1: in a BSL four lab and be in a you know,
Speaker 1: spacesuit kind of thing, So from their point of view,
Speaker 1: it's so much easier to do this kind of dangerous
Speaker 1: not not cost free. Yet Jonathan, to that second point,
Speaker 1: how would you have a two month outbreak in in
Speaker 1: Sierra Leone, that that doesn't get picked up and what
Speaker 1: did what did ms What was MSF's response to that. Well,
Speaker 1: the the similar answer to the first part is that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the beginning of an outbreak, there are not
Speaker 1: very many cases typically, so an abola doesn't transmit that easily,
Speaker 1: so so it would be possible to miss it. In
Speaker 1: between that and the problems with diagnosing a bola, which
Speaker 1: especially in its early stages, looks like many other illnesses
Speaker 1: like we've seen, like we've heard about malaria of cholera,
Speaker 1: but they also this is an area of the of
Speaker 1: West Africa that that is uh in which less of
Speaker 1: fever is endemic, So that's another disease that can be
Speaker 1: uh miss misattributed in this case. So so you have
Speaker 1: all these possible confusions and what ms F discovered when
Speaker 1: they went to the lab and also the World Health organizations,
Speaker 1: a series of organizations went to the lab after the
Speaker 1: outbreak started. This is the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium Lab
Speaker 1: in Canama in Sierra Leone, and they went there and
Speaker 1: they discovered all kinds of biosecurity breaches. There were allegations
Speaker 1: of needles all over the floor, that they didn't have
Speaker 1: UV decontamination procedures in place, and that samples were being
Speaker 1: you know, reagents were being reused and so forth. And
Speaker 1: we know that there was confusions. There was a group,
Speaker 1: there's a company called Metabiota, and there's a viral hemorrhagic
Speaker 1: fever consortium that were basically operating the same premises but
Speaker 1: essentially ended up in conflict with each other. And this
Speaker 1: conflict seems to have started in confusion. But there's also
Speaker 1: the possibility that, exactly like COVID, that there is a
Speaker 1: great benefit to anybody who leaks a lab to confuse
Speaker 1: the data around the origins, because then it becomes impossible
Speaker 1: to re establish what actually where it change up the
Speaker 1: contact chains and the dates of diagnoses and so far
Speaker 1: of the people who first get beyond it. And I
Speaker 1: want to move to the next the COVID origin discussion next,
Speaker 1: but real quickly, where should people go if they want
Speaker 1: to learn more about this? Well, our main article is
Speaker 1: on Independent Science News, which Jonathan is the editor of.
Speaker 1: I've been doing a series of smaller follow ups on
Speaker 1: my substack whoseaynt substack dot com just to put a
Speaker 1: fine point on what Jonathan said. When doctors out Orders
Speaker 1: finally got to Seria Leone, they talked about a quote
Speaker 1: unquote hidden epidemic that's in one of the reports they
Speaker 1: published correct time at the time because they were startled
Speaker 1: by the number of case there, and they attributed this
Speaker 1: to bungling by Metabiota, which is people might realize has
Speaker 1: been in the news in other contexts. But that's one
Speaker 1: interpretation that it could have been bungling. It could also
Speaker 1: have been part of a concerted effort to draw attention
Speaker 1: away from Sara Leone and effectively frame Guinea undercount the
Speaker 1: cases in Sarah Leone away where the US labs are,
Speaker 1: so that you can say the outbreak started in Guinea
Speaker 1: and pinned all on this toddler in an African advantage.
Speaker 1: And so moving on to the latest news on the
Speaker 1: COVID origin as we can put up this I think
Speaker 1: R six. This is the pre print that kicked off
Speaker 1: so much news coverage over the past week, beginning in
Speaker 1: the Atlantic, which are based on some interviews actually with
Speaker 1: Christian Anderson. Here we were just speaking of Robert Gary
Speaker 1: and others. Those are authors. Now this preprint The New
Speaker 1: York Times did two major pieces off of this publicist.
Speaker 1: But you know, that's the thing. I don't think they
Speaker 1: have publicists. I think they just have direct It's the
Speaker 1: credibility is that you're totally right. I'm kidding. So just
Speaker 1: swallow it, you know. And so we're still joined by
Speaker 1: doctor Jonathan Latham, virologist and the publisher editor of Independent
Speaker 1: Science News, Sam Husseini, reporter who writes on the substack.
Speaker 1: Husseini does substack dot com. Thank you again, guys for
Speaker 1: joining us, And so I'll start with you, doctor Latham.
Speaker 1: So now now that we've had this entire news cycle,
Speaker 1: as the cycle dies down, now we get the preprint, which,
Speaker 1: to be clear for non scientists including myself, is not
Speaker 1: a peer reviewed paper, but we but at least it
Speaker 1: is something that is written down on paper. And so
Speaker 1: as you've digested this preprint, how does it match up
Speaker 1: with the New York Times and Atlantic headlines that were
Speaker 1: so definitive in saying we can now link the origins
Speaker 1: of COVID to a raccoon dog in the Wuhan market.
Speaker 1: So I mean, right now what we get to see
Speaker 1: is how weak the underlying data is, right, and the
Speaker 1: fundamental the fundamental issue is that they find raccoon dog DNA,
Speaker 1: but they also find many other kinds of DNA. None
Speaker 1: of these, none of the raccoon dog DNA demonstrates that
Speaker 1: the raccoon dog was infected with a virus. This is
Speaker 1: an animal market where raccoon dogs are for sale, so
Speaker 1: finding raccoon dog DNA is a little bit unsurprising. But
Speaker 1: that the you know, what the data shows is that
Speaker 1: stars CoV two RNA nuclear tide sequences were basically all
Speaker 1: over the market. But the fundamental point for me is
Speaker 1: that the dating of this is all wrong. Right. We
Speaker 1: know that the that the outbreak almost certainly started in
Speaker 1: September or October, and maybe even earlier than that. That
Speaker 1: is approximately the consensus. We know that there were people
Speaker 1: sick in Italy, for example, there are samples from Italy
Speaker 1: and November, so we know that the outbreak started months
Speaker 1: before these samples were taken. Therefore, these samples are irrelevant
Speaker 1: to the beginning of the outbreak. And I would say
Speaker 1: that the huan Im market, there's no evidence even that
Speaker 1: the huen Im market was a super spreader event. It
Speaker 1: may simply have been representative of Wuhan city at that time.
Speaker 1: When there were thousands of cases of COVID in the city.
Speaker 1: And it's really obviously hard for a journalist in January, February,
Speaker 1: March of twenty twenty to know what questions to ask,
Speaker 1: to know to ask that questions about the samples and
Speaker 1: the timing and all of that. That doesn't excuse them
Speaker 1: not asking those questions. And Sam, I'll toss this question
Speaker 1: to you. You may both have thoughts on it, whether
Speaker 1: we're talking about ebola or cold The publicis thing is
Speaker 1: kind of funny because it's funny, but it's sad because
Speaker 1: it's so true that when people come with a preprint,
Speaker 1: put it in the media and give it their spin,
Speaker 1: reporters are susceptible to just swallowing that spin and running
Speaker 1: with it. So when you look at this preprint, now,
Speaker 1: when you look at how the media reports on difficult
Speaker 1: subjects like these, what disconnect do you see between the
Speaker 1: inability then of the press without medical expertise to translate
Speaker 1: that into information the public needs. I don't think that
Speaker 1: the public and the press should be have this deferential
Speaker 1: you know, this appeal to authority. You know, science, like journalism,
Speaker 1: is about observing the world and using reason to draw conclusions.
Speaker 1: It's a fairly simple proposition to say there's a lab
Speaker 1: that nearby, could that have something to do with it?
Speaker 1: And then when their response is oh, people thought the
Speaker 1: same thing when this other outbreak happened, when they're a
Speaker 1: lab nearby, the logical conclusion would be okay, so you're
Speaker 1: telling you there's another case, So maybe that's like that.
Speaker 1: That would be the reasonable way to look at it.
Speaker 1: But this establishment scientific community, and you know, the sort
Speaker 1: of John Stewart line that somehow science is the problem,
Speaker 1: that curiosity will kill us all. That's that's wrong too,
Speaker 1: because as I've looked at, for example, Peter Dazac, who
Speaker 1: funded the Institute of Virology dangerous lab work, the funding
Speaker 1: base for this is largely from the Pentagon and from
Speaker 1: USAI t This militarized view, you know, way of looking
Speaker 1: at things has perverted science. And you had scientists speaking
Speaker 1: up about this. I mentioned the anthrax attacks earlier. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and five, there was a letter of five
Speaker 1: of seven hundred scientists saying you're perverting our field to
Speaker 1: the NIH saying you're putting so much money, you know,
Speaker 1: studying these dangerous pathogens, you're messing up with our field.
Speaker 1: It's no longer becoming a scientific inquiry. And it was
Speaker 1: Fauci who told them to put up or shut up.
Speaker 1: The government has told us that they want this work done.
Speaker 1: This is what we're going to this is what we're
Speaker 1: going to do. So science isn't the problem. The problem
Speaker 1: is a militarized view of science. And in terms of
Speaker 1: the recent report there this this isn't the first. There
Speaker 1: have been a series of these highly publicized reports saying oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, it didn't come out of a lab. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: a year ago. There was one in August of last year,
Speaker 1: right before Jeffrey Sachs flipped on this, and and the
Speaker 1: I think the net effect of that is just to
Speaker 1: confuse the public. That is, people insiders are like, these
Speaker 1: guys are really burning their credibility, right, But it's to
Speaker 1: the net of effect of it is to confuse the
Speaker 1: public mind so that the public doesn't demand answers. That
Speaker 1: the public thinks that this is you know there, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe it's nothing after all. Muddy the water, totally muddy
Speaker 1: the waters. And it really reminds me of after twentieth
Speaker 1: and ards, after the Iraq War, after the Iraq invasion.
Speaker 1: People might recall there was a series of stories where
Speaker 1: they claim to have found the WMDs that all ended
Speaker 1: up falling apart. Why did they do that? They did
Speaker 1: that to muddy the waters so that there was never
Speaker 1: a moment of reckoning. And I think that that's what
Speaker 1: a lot of these scientists are really hoping, that there's
Speaker 1: never a moment of reckoning. And doctor Latham, all of
Speaker 1: all of these reports that we're talking about tend to
Speaker 1: be driven by, roughly, it seems like half a dozen
Speaker 1: kind of key virologists. And I saw somebody, a biologist
Speaker 1: saying on social media the other day that he felt
Speaker 1: like he was able to engage in this converse in
Speaker 1: a more open and dispassionate way because he's not in
Speaker 1: the field of virology, and so his career would not
Speaker 1: be negatively impacted by his scientifically coming to a conclusion
Speaker 1: that is in politic within his field. So I'm curious
Speaker 1: for you, as a virologist, what has been the reaction
Speaker 1: over the last three years to you raising questions about
Speaker 1: what these half doesen virologists have tried to say is
Speaker 1: kind of settled science. You know, my challenge is a
Speaker 1: little bit different because I'm not in an academic department.
Speaker 1: So I have a PhD in virology, but now I
Speaker 1: run a nonprofit and so I don't have to face
Speaker 1: my colleagues every day and explain to them why I
Speaker 1: am contradicting, you know, what appears to them to be
Speaker 1: in their best interest. But do you see, you know,
Speaker 1: I can speak to some of the emails that we've seen.
Speaker 1: For example, there's a classic one in which some of
Speaker 1: Ralph Barrack's colleague, So, Ralph Barrick is at the University
Speaker 1: of North Carolina and collaborated with or proposed to collaborate
Speaker 1: at least or did, if I shouldn't say proposed, he
Speaker 1: actually did collaborate with the Wuhan Institute of Virology. And
Speaker 1: they email each other and they say, our jobs is
Speaker 1: to keep our heads down at this point, right, And
Speaker 1: they because they they know how weak these stories are,
Speaker 1: but at the same time they cannot stand up and
Speaker 1: contradict them for fear of their careers. And and the
Speaker 1: problem is that, you know, classically scientists have tenure exactly
Speaker 1: so that they can speak freely, but scientists in many
Speaker 1: institutions don't actually have tenure these days, or feel that
Speaker 1: they don't have tenure or feel that they will essentially
Speaker 1: lose everything if they if they speak out. And it's
Speaker 1: clear that that the you know, the Lancet letter accusing
Speaker 1: people who discuss the lably of being conspiracy theorists and
Speaker 1: having this published in a premiere journal and have a
Speaker 1: whole constellation a very prestigious scientist sign this letter. It
Speaker 1: constitutes a threat to the scientific you know, anybody in
Speaker 1: the scientific community who might consider speaking out on these subjects.
Speaker 1: So it's been clear that that to me that there's
Speaker 1: been a campaign of an intimidation. But I don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about it because I'm independent of that ecosystem,
Speaker 1: if you like. You know, there's been so much conversation
Speaker 1: about how are accusations that people who are suppressing the
Speaker 1: lablque debate are protecting China. To the point you just made, Sam,
Speaker 1: it actually seems to me the real problem is that
Speaker 1: people like Anthony Fauci, who weaponized these charges of racism,
Speaker 1: which is really an interesting juxtaposition with what happened with
Speaker 1: the Obola outbreak, you know, may have been a situation
Speaker 1: that was the other way around, and gets to how
Speaker 1: cynical all of this is, but when you look at it,
Speaker 1: it actually seems as though what they were really protecting
Speaker 1: was the United States, because the source of this funding
Speaker 1: time and again goes down to the Pentagon, goes down
Speaker 1: to groups like Ecohalth Alliance that are primarily funded or
Speaker 1: largely funded in many cases by the United States government.
Speaker 1: So it's been strange to see that narrative play out
Speaker 1: that this is all about protecting China, when in fact,
Speaker 1: if anything, it seems to be protecting the US. That's
Speaker 1: absolutely correct. There are sort of two strands of the
Speaker 1: US establishment. One wants to target China and the other
Speaker 1: one wants to make sure that the United States government
Speaker 1: continues with this dangerous lab A terrible development to your
Speaker 1: point recently is that a large part of the public
Speaker 1: now thinks that Congress unanimously passed and Biden just signed
Speaker 1: legislation that would declassify all information regarding COVID origins. This
Speaker 1: claim was made on Fox, this claim was made on
Speaker 1: US the Washington in the Washington Post. It's been made
Speaker 1: by the sponsors of the legislation. It's not true. If
Speaker 1: you read the legislation, what it says is that we
Speaker 1: direct the director of notional intelligence to declassify all information
Speaker 1: pointing to the Wuhan Institute of Arology. So that would
Speaker 1: mean that they wouldn't have to declassify the information pointing
Speaker 1: to other institutions or potentially even information exonerating in some way,
Speaker 1: as unlikely as that might seem, the Wuhan Institute of Urology.
Speaker 1: And meanwhile the public is being told we're declassifying everything
Speaker 1: pertaining to this. So that is a setup for a
Speaker 1: very dangerous situation. The public thinks that what's being declassified
Speaker 1: as everything, when that's not the case at all. As
Speaker 1: a matter of fact, there's massive even unclassified information isn't
Speaker 1: being Foya the Intercept did a fair amount of this,
Speaker 1: A US Right to Know did a fair amount of this.
Speaker 1: I was just at the State Department asking them why
Speaker 1: they still have not responded to Foye's from almost three
Speaker 1: years ago by US Right to Know, a transparency group
Speaker 1: which had to start litigation. So there's massive, you know,
Speaker 1: withholding of information while the public is being led to
Speaker 1: believe or you know, we're opening up the books here.
Speaker 1: And I saw a video of Sam yelling at net
Speaker 1: Price to release that information. Sam. If you recognize Sam
Speaker 1: it's because you've seen some of his viral videos. He's
Speaker 1: often in the State Department briefings tangling with the State
Speaker 1: Department spokespeople. Yeah, it's very it's enjoyable stuff. I've told Sam,
Speaker 1: I'm going to start going to State Department briefings. Those
Speaker 1: look more fun than the White House. You know, the
Speaker 1: more cantankerous the hearing room, the more peaceful the outside world.
Speaker 1: Philosophy and doctor Latham, one last question. It was wanted
Speaker 1: to put to you kind of the best case that
Speaker 1: the market origin types make and see what your response
Speaker 1: to it coming out of this this preprint that we
Speaker 1: just put They put up a heat map in there, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, in their article that shows kind of an
Speaker 1: intense amount of kind of COVID r N a sampling
Speaker 1: coming from the exact same portion of the market where
Speaker 1: where they can show that now that these raccoon dogs
Speaker 1: were being sold, and they say that that's very strong
Speaker 1: circumstantial evidence that why would you have more COVID here
Speaker 1: than you would have in the rest of uh of
Speaker 1: the market. So what what's what's your reaction to there
Speaker 1: that that claim that that the circumstantially that this is
Speaker 1: strong evidence. Well, I mean, there's two issues. One is
Speaker 1: that we you know, we don't know if we have
Speaker 1: access to all the data at this point. And the
Speaker 1: second issue is that I believe there's also a toilet
Speaker 1: at that part of the market, so people are coming
Speaker 1: and going and using that toilet and and basically potentially
Speaker 1: hanging out there maybe ALIGNE. We don't know. There's so
Speaker 1: much that we don't know, and and I think that,
Speaker 1: you know, the the basic issue comes back to the timing, right,
Speaker 1: I don't think we can ever get away from that.
Speaker 1: The timing of this uh of this of this stuf
Speaker 1: playing is so late in the pandemic that it really
Speaker 1: can make no sense to identify raccoon dog DNA. I mean,
Speaker 1: even if you take the best case scenario that that
Speaker 1: was a raccoon dog infected with with STARS two in
Speaker 1: that market, the likelihood is that that raccoon dog called
Speaker 1: it from a person and not the other way around.
Speaker 1: And so the evidence, the evidence that they're putting forward
Speaker 1: all told, is ridiculous to me. Right, it doesn't explain
Speaker 1: how a February infection could spark a September, October, or
Speaker 1: even November or December. And in fact, I'm a time
Speaker 1: travel expert. It couldn't even spark an outbreak in January.
Speaker 1: The breadth of Brian's knowledge. I'm surprise. I'm going to
Speaker 1: call the Atlantic with that and see if I get
Speaker 1: an article printed. Jonathan Sam, thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us. Really really appreciate it. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Thank you. All right, that's it. That'll that'll do it
Speaker 1: for this Wednesday edition of Counterpoints. Thanks everybody for joining us.
Speaker 1: Any any final words, any final thoughts. Just always appreciate
Speaker 1: people tuning in. And Ryan, I'm so glad you checked
Speaker 1: the lead on these segments because it's important information that
Speaker 1: nobody's talking about. Good stuff. Thanks and thank you guys
Speaker 1: for the great work that you've done. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much trying. We'll see you soon.