Join Matt and Chris as they dive into the controversy-ridden world of the lab leak theory, accompanied by biochemist-turned-author Philipp Markolin. Philipp details his journey into the abyss of lab leak lore and sensationalist media, documenting how thorough research was pushed aside in favour of conspiratorial discourse. For those who dream of a world where science triumphs over sensationalism, this episode is your bittersweet symphony.LinksPhilipp's SubstackLab Leak Fever Book SiteNew Documentary Movie about the Lab LeakOur previous episode on the Lab LeakBad Boy of Science: Sam Gregson's channel that includes many interviews with Philipp and relevant scientists
Hello, I'm welcome to the coding the gurus, the podcast for a psychologist and an anthropologist.
Listen to various online gurus and associated weirdos, talk about nonsense and work out what they're trying to say.
In today's episode, we don't have a decoding.
This is not a supplementary material.
It is an interview episode.
We have somebody that will hopefully be more sensible than the majority of the gurus that we cover.
It's a low bar.
It's a little bar.
So first, hello Matt.
Who is who is that waiting now to join us?
Well.
So with this is Dr. Philip Markoven.
Philip has got a uh a background in biochemistry.
He's from the fair state of well, you live in Switzerland now, don't you?
But you're not originally from Switzerland.
He's Austrian, like Hitler.
Oh, yeah, like beautiful countryside though.
Uh the politics.
Um but uh you know Philip has shared our interest in monitoring the uh the discourse of uh the lab leak situation.
I know everyone else has forgotten about it now, but we cannot let these things go.
We're still interested in the discourse around lab leak.
Did it come from a lab?
Did it come from natural sources and the disconnect seemingly between the voices of credential scientists who actually work in this area and almost everybody else.
So Philip has written a book called Lab League Fever, and he's released it just recently and uh has currently come aboard the good ship decoding the gurus to tell us about it.
Uh welcome, Philip.
Hi, thanks so much for for finally having this conversation more publicly.
I think I've been in your Patreon feeds a few times uh and Chris always likes to uh to say, ah, Philip, come on, let's talk to all our people without any context.
So I I always feel a bit um pushed, but yeah, it's nice to do this.
And I mean, as you know, you have been interviewed properly also from my side for part of um the book or or at least to give some some context on the gurus that have been involved in spreading anti-science myths uh specifically surrounding the lab league,
amplifying certain uh actors that maybe are not most closely related to what the science actually says and yeah, and how this all fits together is basically what what I looked into in the book.
So what drove you to write it?
I mean it's a big job writing a book as me and Chris know we've been trying to write our own book and we're not getting terribly far.
It's mainly Chris's fault.
But so it's a big job.
What what sort of drove you to feel like you had to write it?
So I mean, I I never really wanted to write a book about this.
I never really wanted to participate in this.
It it really kind of, you know, you get captured a little bit.
I got interested in it in social media.
I was writing a blog about it, and then there was some pushback from you know uh lab league enthusiasts, I would say that was not very nice in the sense of like ah Philip, you're you know, you're you're a shell for China or for Eco Health Alliance or whatever.
When I was having just saying, hey, I'm a genetic engineer, at least I have some experiences there.
And it didn't seem to me that this was an engineered virus.
Doesn't mean it didn't come from the lab, but at least you know all the arguments brought forward in 2021 about this was an engineered virus didn't seem to make much sense from my personal scientific experience working with you know viral construct.
So this doesn't make sense.
I was also not the originator of this.
There was another science communicator called Sam Gregson.
He pulled me on um and and basically said, hey, let's interview a few virologists and and see what they have to say about some of these allegations pertaining to their work and virology.
And this is what got me started and you know it would have ended right there.
We would have had a bunch of interviews and the story would have ended.
However, on the world stage, uh things escalated with this lab leak story.
I also got kind of picked up by an Oscar-nominated filmmaker, uh and he basically said, you know, he read my blog and he wants me to to fly out to Southeast Asia, go meet the virologists that you know do the bad Sampling and you know go to the caves and interview them there as part of his documentary into the origins, and this is basically what brought me into deeper context with some of the key scientific protagonists in this controversy.
And at some point in 2023, I decided look, I've interviewed now you know people involved in this.
I understand enough of the science to give a bit of a good breakdown of it to really write a book and tell their side of the story, and this is what I wanted to do.
But in order to tell a book, you have to give a bit of an angle.
So I did something different, which is basically that I would also contrast not only the protagonists, which is like you know, many different scientific protagonists when they did a key discovery, but also what happened kind of in our information and social media online ecosystem in response to their findings.
And so I kind of had a lot of antagonists, and this kind of told the story almost.
This is what the scientists find, and this is how the antagonists are acted to have a bit of a uh storytelling element in this, and this is basically the book.
And for the antagonists, of course, um, we can talk about this maybe a bit later.
It's not easy to write a book that also features an honest look at antagonists, gurus are some of these antagonists because the lawyers very quickly start getting very uh icky about you know, you naming names about people not being very forthcoming and honest with uh what they are doing.
Actually, when you were explaining there, I was thinking Matt, in some ways, you're like a sweet summer child because of your desire to stay away from the discourse because you mentioned you know the lab lake, it's it's kind of like it's not top of the news right now,
and that but it never it has never went away, it's never been out of the cycle, especially with Trump there, and it's now essentially like dogma in the heterodox world that you know it is all but proof that it was originally a lablake and that everybody was vindicated.
I mean, very recently, Josh Zapps, his most recent episode is interviewing a person about the evidence for the labling.
Now, admittedly, the positive sign related to Josh is that he is interviewing someone who is making the case that the evidence stacks up for it not being a lablake, and he's kind of doing the just asking question things, but the point is he's doing that because that's the dominant position.
So, yeah, so related to that, Philip, based on what you explained as well.
I am kind of curious about this and don't know it that throughout the whole pandemic and on Twitter before Musk and after Musk and so on.
I saw you very much, you know, as somebody like that was willing to dig in and you know, you produced detailed blog posts setting out the evidence.
You were going back and forth with various nefarious characters on Twitter and in Lablik world, and you were like a mean villain for that that whole ecosystem.
And I I hear everything you said to Matt there, but I am just like curious why because you know, like Matt and I are advocates for science, we covered the topic as well, but like our reserves also are not unlimited in that respect.
And and just like with people fighting anti-vaxxers, I'm kind of curious how did you become that you were so involved with this and unwilling to like put the work into rebut that because it's not like you are a paid eco-health line shill to my knowledge.
So not yet proven at least.
Yeah, it's an interesting question.
Of course, I ask myself.
I mean, I have a family, I have a full-time job, you know.
Why put in so much time and effort in trying to correct this one thing, this one little thing that seems to be so prominently uh wrong about the public discourse, and I don't know if I have a good answer, but I think one of the answers for sure is that I got to know a lot of the virologists.
I uh put myself and also got put by luck and other circumstances in a situation where I was the one that held multiple kind of uh threads in my hands that nobody else seems to have.
Uh, which is you know, I had a lot of unheard testimony from from primary sources.
I had the right scientific background to understand the many complexities on this topic.
It's not just about virology, sometimes it goes into you know, genetic engineering, It goes into bioinformatics, uh sequencing analysis.
It goes also into a lot of you know psychology and and other features that you know how is science communicated in public, how is trust reflected in public?
And you had scientists on, you had Christian Anderson and Mike Warby and Eddie Holmes.
They are very gifted science communicators, on top of being excellent scientists, and somehow they were not able to break through.
And so for me, it's also a little bit about you know correcting the record and giving the scientists another chance to have their voices heard, maybe in a different setup than they usually get.
And this is what the book is about.
So the book is written basically like a novel, so people can just read it like you know, a novel, but it's it's a it's a non-fiction uh narrative format, and they would just relive the story, the controversy from the start.
What happened in Wuhan?
I talked to the head of the Chinese CDC, George Gao.
Um, I talked to the woman in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Sheng Li Xu.
And I think I'm the only person that ever did that, or at least the only person in the West that ever managed to do this.
And don't ask me about how I had to be creative to get this access.
But I feel like you know, if you have this unique access and you hear this unique testimony and see their side, it would be good to do something with it to write what I perceive as an historic injustice, what happened to the scientists.
So there's a bit of a moral obligation.
I also personally, I think my and I think you pointed this out for me, science is something that's a bit like a higher ideal.
And I I felt like science came so much under pressure based on this lab link narrative that has not a lot of evidence or has no evidence to support it, where all the evidence points in the other direction.
It just didn't seem fair to me that you know public trust is lost based on actions from from actors that are not based in evidence, that are not based even in reasonable doubt, but really in more, I would say, other motives that are more political, more psychological to a certain extent.
Not saying everybody is like you know a great manipulator.
Some people just wanted a bit of a cleaner answer that science was not able to provide in the moment, right?
But we are not in 2020 anymore, we are now 2025.
Science has done a lot of work, and this is also what the book captures the initial uncertainty, how things evolved, and how the uncertainties narrowed over time by doing more research and just telling the story, laying it out, I think was very important to me to have this somewhere.
I mean, I like that about the book, it it definitely does have that sort of narrative.
And one of the things that interested me was the personalities involved, like you said, and the scientists and researchers before the sort of great um Bruhaha, the great cataclysm of discourse descended upon them and their very narrow field of speciality.
I found their individual careers and the things that they've done as virus hunters, as as people trying to prevent infectious disease, pretty remarkable.
Did you want to tell us about just a few of the things that stood out to you in terms of their interesting personal stories?
Yeah, absolutely.
So I mean, this is this is absolutely true.
There is these researchers, they all have you know remarkable backstories, and you're not doing them justice by just saying ah, they are Chinese shells or whatever, when some of them you know have a long history either of dissenting from Chinese authorities or have being very individualistic or doing work for the public good that is not you know financially rewarding.
So think about let's start maybe with Christian Anderson, right?
He has been working, you know, in Western Africa, going there to the field labs when they had uh Lhasa fever outbreaks, a devastating disease or Ebola specifically, right?
I mean, these are people that really they live and breathe for public health and doing public health services, and you know, the idea that they are easily swayed because Tony Fauci told them, you know, ah, I don't, you know, we all gonna I don't know, cover up this is just absurd given that what these people stand for in their lives.
Um a lot of the book features, of course, the virus hunters that discovered uh the first SARS, the origin of the first SARS virus from 2003.
This is Peter Dashek, Sheng Li Shu, and Lin Fa Wong.
Uh Linfa Wong from Singapore, Sheng Li from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and Peter Dashek is the former president of Ecourse Alliance, e-curse alliance does not exist anymore given the political pressures they received.
And they have been basically working decades trying to map and Understand where do novel zoonotic viruses like SARS come from.
And they were, you know, they were developing research programs trying to figure out how do you even get to SARS, right?
And then, you know, if you talk to Sheng Li Xi, for example, they really had to kind of, you know, China is a huge place.
There are billions of bats, right?
And they didn't even know that SARS came from bats.
So how do you even start?
Right?
They started with random sampling of bats.
Uh, they couldn't find anything.
Then they tried to look not only for the PCR primer uh tests, which are very short-lived to catch acute infections.
They had to develop antibody tests to look for kind of more lingering antibodies in the blood of bats, and then they didn't know which species of bats, so they had to test different species of bad.
First, they thought it would be in fruit bats.
These are very large bats that can you know have a wingspan up for two meters because all the other viruses that jumped over in in recent history, like uh Nipa, like Hendra, they all came from fruit breads.
And turns out SARS-CoV-2 doesn't come from fruit beds, but from these Rhinophilous bats, which is the ones that have this weird, freaky, uh horror horrific noses, which of course is is not because they are ugly, uh, but because evolution adapted to them having very specific a echolocation.
And they basically, you know, they stumbled upon them by just let's test this new antibody essay on on the local uh horseshoe bats, and then oh, we got a signal, and then they drilled down, they went to all 28 provinces in China, Shangdisha, uh, and then they landed in Yunnan ultimately, and saying this is where the closest relative of the original SARS virus was.
And then they did, you know, years of longitudinal services until they drilled down into this one cave called the Shito Cave, uh, outside of Kung Ming.
And and there they found basically that all the genetic elements that would ultimately constitute the first SARS virus were in this cave, but in different viruses.
So, what was going on there?
Why why you find this different elements?
And what they discovered was basically that recombination, so the genetic exchange of elements between viruses was an evolutionary driver of creating ever new potentially very dangerous viruses for humans, and this is basically where they started.
And this is then why did it these experiments that later would be objected to and mischaracterized by ah, why did the word on chimeric viruses?
Because nature creates you know millions of chimeric viruses, and they wanted to just create in the lab some of these mechanisms to understand how much danger they really posed.
And this is also why they have been warning since 2013, latest, and you know, every year after that a new SARS-related coronavirus is gonna spill over, given that we are driving more human and bad interactions that you know, bats interact also with our livestock, and this is a uh a reasonable path that SARS was not the first one.
SARS-CoV-2 uh will come and potentially SARS-CoV-3 might come to in the future, unfortunately.
That's the that's the sad part of this.
One one thing to mention is like I think you have done an admirable job, you know, of helping to amplify a bunch of the scientists.
Like, I mean, I I believe you put us in contact with Christian Eddie and Michael Warway originally, right?
So, like we owe that episode to you vouching for us as non-maniacs.
Oh, and Chris, by the way, what since we're doing shoutouts, I I wanted to shout out Sam Gregson, who felt mentioned earlier.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Uh he's a bad boy of science and has a physics channel, and uh yeah, he's someone else who also has uh is passionate about the same kinds of things.
Yeah, and if you look online you can see Philip and him interviewing a lot of people.
We have a bit of a package deal, like you and Matt.
Yeah, that were that we're talking about, and he's similarly vilified by the the lovely community.
So I think we're gonna get into the impacts on the individual scientists and a little bit more of the story and also the online community around Lablik and all that kind of thing.
But I'm just thinking for our audience for people who might not have been keeping track of this issue, right?
And they just have it bubbling around in the discourse, they see it you know, show up whenever Bill Maher or Joe Rogan or whatever is talking about it.
And you mentioned, you know, we're not in 2020 anymore, we're in 2025.
So it would be unfair to do this to anyone else, but I feel like in your case, I'm allowed to do it.
So can you give a nutshell summary of where the evidence lies and the consensus position in the scientific arena for uh like zoonotic origin versus loblick and and where it lies, and then maybe if it's not asking too much, where you view the general public opinion on that issue versus like the scientific evidence?
Yes.
I think the first thing to say, and this is important to say, is that you know, people believing that the lab leak is possible is not a weird or you know out there idea.
This is something that even scientists in early 2020 took very seriously, including people like Christian Anderson that you had uh on.
So per se that the virus a novel virus could have escaped from a lab that collected bad samples is a reasonable hypothesis.
And there has been a lot of retconning about you know how scientists tried to suppress even just discussing this when in effect there's no support to do this.
In fact, scientists were looking into this hypothesis hypothesis early on.
However, immediately, and we had not talking about January 2021, we're talking about March 2020.
There were already some, I would say, indications that most likely this is another natural virus, not an artificially created virus.
And we can talk about, you know, when you look at the genome, you would see an artificially created virus would be often easy to spot just because you can see human intervention in the viral genome.
This is one of the indications.
The other of the indications is that you might find some features that are hard to explain outside of nature, or you might find viruses, and you know, people discovered very early some viruses in viral databases that were found pre-pandemic that seemed to be very close to SARS-CoV-2,
the famous pangolin viruses for people that that joined joined this uh discussion or heard about it, that very clear uh very soon make clear that you know the genetic elements constituting this novel virus are actually found in nature, and we have no records of any lab ever possessing them.
So this is kind of how it shook down.
I would say after the first few months of uncertainty, this is where we should how it shook down.
However, given that the pandemic was escalating over time, you had you know half of the scientific community, at least in biology, starting to work on SARS-CoV-2 related topics, not only you know, uh epidemiology and trying to, you know, navigate the pandemic, but also mechanistically, how does this virus work?
What does it do to us?
Historically, people went out more bad sampling, keen to find bad relatives of this as well.
So there were multiple programs, not just the Wuhan Institute of Virology, there was the Institute Basteur, there was Alice Hughes, um, for example, working in Xing Shuabana, so Alice Yuse is a uh young uh uh professor, uh a very famous bat huntress, I would say, but she's you know our age and she has a remarkable story.
So it's one of my favorite chapters is chapter five, which basically talks about her and her work in Xing Shuabana, where she really, you know, at the time when when Sheng Lixi was put on the stand for having a close relative of SARS-CoV-2, Red G13, she actually had found closer related bad viruses in Xing Show Abana in her backyard, basically in this botanical garden in Yunnan.
Uh, she found four close related bad viruses, making it very clear that you know the virus is most likely natural in origin and not artificially created.
But just to break it down a bit more to to the audience, while the suspicion that the virus could have come over lab is, you know, there are many scenarios is is reasonable.
We we have to at some point also talk about what is known.
And I feel like a lot of what happened in this discourse is that everything that has been known about the virus, everything that points in a certain direction has been ignored for as long as the scientists are saying, yes, in theory it's still possible that the virus came from a lab, you know, because this is not something like math where you do one proof, one experiment, and that's it.
So this is not how how outbreaks investigations work.
Outbreak investigations work differently.
You you start collecting data, you have to analyze it carefully, you have to get bits and pieces here and there and see you know what what do they point to.
And for a long time, I would say until 2022, until um Michael Warby and and Christian Anderson and the others published, you know, very detailed studies about the market origin.
I would say uh a lot of the lab leak discourse was a bit god of the gaps, because people were like, okay, it's possible, we we cannot close it scientifically, so we have to keep asking the question.
We have to keep looking into it.
And these dynamics, of course, persisted, although the scientific evidence quickly Caught up.
So in 2021, just to give you some highlights, we got closer virus ancestors of SARS-CoV-2.
We discovered the RPD in bats in Laos in 2021.
I think it was September or something of 2021.
This was Institute Pastor, which basically has this key for human infection, the RNA RNA-binding domain in the virus that can enable the virus to infect human cells via the ACE2 receptor.
This was discovered one-to-one basically in bats.
So clearly this element that we have never seen in a lab before that we could not really have designed in a lab because SARS 1 used a very different mechanism than SARS-2.
Suddenly this key to human infection was discovered in bats in Laos, right?
Again, strongly pointing to a natural origin for this capability in viruses.
Alice Hughes has discovered a few other close relatives that kind of for the first two-thirds of the genome part, we have a closer match than RATG13.
So the closest virus Sheng Lishi ever had in her lab basically got outcompeted by viruses we found later in the wild by other researchers, independent researchers.
So this again points that RTG13 was not kind of modified and you know cultured in a way that then created SARS-CoV-2.
This is actually not possible.
Uh if we learned about recombination, this is also something we only learned later.
Once we saw more viruses come online, people could do better comparison.
They could find out recombination histories and really drill down saying, okay, this is a natural genome.
This was all in 2021.
And then in 2022, what happened is basically the WHO mission also happened in 2021, and they already made their assessment saying uh we think the market is the most likely scenario.
We cannot exclude, you know, the cold chain hypothesis.
We cannot exclude the lab league, but we think this is a rather unlikely.
And then in 2022 came the market analysis paper where people really looked inside the market and outside of the market, how did the virus spread?
And I mean, you had a two-hour conversation.
I'm not, I'm not gonna be able to give any more input than that.
But I think they made a very compelling case, taking different genetic, phylogenetic, geographic, uh time epidemic simulation data uh together, and they all align on this picture that there were multiple spillovers at this wet market uh called Huanan market.
And I think this really closed the door of a lot of lab leak speculations because if the virus first, you know, starts in this market, spilled over in this market and created two different lineages uh spreading outward from this market.
The idea that the lab somehow is responsible for responsible for this is very much diminished.
So it's very much in the area of this might be a freak accident that does not really match with any other data.
So this is kind of where we stood in 2022, and then after that, of course, people kind of tried to slice the salami even thinner.
They looked into the market, so Chinese authorities were denying that there was anything uh in the market that could have caused the pandemic.
Turns out they were not truthful about this.
There were susceptible species.
Uh, you might have heard about the raccoon dogs, but there were also other species like you know, amour hedgehogs and some badgers and some other animals that could conceivably have carried this virus into the market and you know, spread it to humans from there.
And people found, you know, genetic disposition from animals co-located with virus positive samples.
They found that in the stall where the animals were housed, the environmental samples were very positive compared to any other place in the market.
They found that in the sewers where the animals, you know, animals in China, Chinese wet markets, they get butchered, you know, uh cut open the gut splash down on the floor.
They have open sewers that just wash it away.
And you find, of course, that this is where a lot of virus positivity was from environmental sampling in the end, and also in a stall that had no associated human case.
So you you have a very plausible and uh and I would say you cannot disprove the zoonotic hypothesis that it started at the market anymore, despite the scientists trying to disprove, right?
Science always tries to disprove.
They tried to disprove the market by saying, could it have been an ascertainment bias?
Could it have been that the Chinese authorities preferentially sampled there?
And when you look at the facts, this is you know, they tried to disprove the market and just made the argument for the market stronger and stronger and stronger, so that at this point we we have no conceivable way to disprove the market anymore.
We have susceptible animals in the right place in the right time, having genetic dispositions, showing signs of the animals themselves in their genetic disposition.
They look at the transcripts and they see the animals were most likely sick And leave a transcriptomic profile that looked like you know a transcriptomic profile we would get from virus infections similar to coronaviruses.
So it's very hard to make the argument that we can completely discard all of this evidence just in favor of what if you know it came from the lab and somehow migrated silently in Wuhan and we missed everything and then it surfaced not once but twice in this market.
So it's a very tricky argument to make from a plausibility standpoint and runs contradictory to all the evidence and it's still piecemeal evidence.
It's not perfect evidence because we never have perfect evidence and also outbreak investigations, but it runs counter to this.
So this was 2022, 2023, even 2024.
There was some other mechanistic studies done as well in 2022 that I want to mention around the Fourier cleavage site and some other data found around the Fourier encleavage site.
So the Fourier cleavage site is this one genetic element that people say looks very suspicious.
It seems to play a role in respiratory transmission.
And the worry was that because it looks like this element has been inserted in sequence comparison, it seems to be new there.
But also nature can do this insertions.
It doesn't have to be a genetic engineer.
There was a lot of suspicion around this till this day.
Turns out the Fourier encleavage site actually could not have been created by a designer because uh subtomechanistic studies later found that the Fourier encleavage site has this synergy to other proximogenetic elements that no designer did know about in 2019.
They couldn't have known about, they couldn't have designed, even if they knew about it, because viruses are very complex VD structures, right?
But nature can, of course, because nature, you know, has trillions of trials and errors, and sometimes you happen upon this synergistic elements and synergies that allow the virus to suddenly, you know, grow out and outcompete all the others.
So this is a very compelling argument, also that the Fourier cleavage site, for example, was not uh artificially created, but in the in fact was coming out of nature.
Let me just summarize to say that all the scientific evidence that is verified by Mutabubi Bemutable Studies that is internally consistent and coherent with everything we know about viruses, virology, genetics, engineering, whatever, all point in one direction and only in one direction.
There's not one, there's not a single piece of evidence that points in the other.
On the laboratory side, we have no supportive evidence as all we have a lot of evidence that contradicts it scientifically.
We have a lot of human testimony and human intel that contradicts it.
And all we have on this side at best is speculations and what if, like, you know, what if uh, you know, allegations, but there is no hard evidence.
Yeah, you did an incredible job there of summarizing a very complex thing.
I mean, that was really good.
I think um really helpful.
Certainly refresh my memory about a bunch of stuff I I once was vaguely aware of and is since forgotten.
I mean, a couple of ironies sort of stand out to me.
One of the ironies is that everyone's suspecting conspiracies and proposing cover-ups and so on.
And in actual fact, to some degree, there was a very bland and obvious, boring kind of attempted cover-up going on, which is that the Chinese government was not particularly happy about the wet market being the source of this virus.
In fact, they they enacted trade sanctions on Australia because Australia was calling for um more of investigation in into the sources of it for because it's you know culturally embarrassing.
It's not it's not the image that the the the modern powerful image they want to project on the international scene.
So it's it's kind of ironic that the conspiracy theorists uh they write in the sense, but they got the wrong as always, they picked the wrong thing.
Um the other sad irony is that as you briefly explained, that Wuhan Institute of Virology was there and doing that work because they've been aware for very for a long time about the severe danger of zotic spillover of viruses from bats and other sorts of populations.
And so they were there doing this work, which of course made it look like they were like in the minds of some to be with the smoking gun in their hand precisely because they were correct in their belief that there was a strong danger in that.
So, yeah, some very sad ironies there.
But the question I have for you is you've done a great job describing the gradual consolidation of scientific evidence and how consensus, for one of a better word, gradually gets achieved on any scientific problem.
And it's often represented in the public and in the media and conspiracy theorists that the scientific consensus is like some sort of like there's some decree handed down by by Fauci or someone else.
And then all of a sudden just say, oh, right, I'll better.
This is this this this is this is the party lining with and it's obviously not that it's exactly that kind of gradual triangulation of evidence and attempting to actively disprove the most preferred hypothesis until you simply can't anymore and you've you've sort of eliminated the other options.
Can I jump in on this one?
Because I feel like this is a very critical point to understand.
So some of the protagonists that are also in the book we talk about the Michael Warabi we talk about the flow de bar.
These are people that started on the lab leak side.
I mean, Michael Warby very famously wrote the letter in science saying initiated the letter and saying saying let's give the lablake hypothesis another scientific look because he was not satisfied with the outcome of the WHO mission.
Florence de Bar, she was part of the French commission on the origin of the virus, you know, also very strongly lab origin favored.
Both of them basically upon investigating deeper and deeper, they they could not accommodate any lab leak hypothesis anymore, and and basically contributed a lot also of work in understanding this evidence and saying, look, the evidence points in a different direction.
I mean, Mike Warby, I think he said that, you know, if it had turned out differently, he would have looked much better because he was the guy that initiated this lab leak thing that even caused the the intelligence agencies uh to have another look at it, right?
I mean, their science letter was part of the contributing factor that the Biden administration would then send the intelligence agency to do their 90-day assessment, right?
So Michael Warby was the guy there, and then he worked, you know, months and months and months in his basement in the summer of 2021, reconstructing each early case we had in December of 2019, trying to figure out who were these persons, how were they diagnosed, where do they live, and plotted each trajectory like from 150 to 50 early cases because he wanted to prove that they are not related to the market.
Turns out they were uh because they either had an epidemiological correlation to the market, meaning they were somehow shopping at the market, you know, related to the market, going to the market, or and this is the other thing, they were living around the market very close in geographic proximity because it started kind of community spread from the market outward, right?
And and if you think about, you know, it's good to have this heterodoxy and this controversy, I would say, up front.
Scientists were not all like, uh, let's never look at the label hypothesis because it look might look bad.
It's the opposite.
They're like, this is an interesting idea, let's follow up on it, let's try to disprove it.
So I think this is a lot of baked in, and it is suggested, especially by guru types and others, that uh scientists are not like that, that they have a preferred net narrative that they want to support, when in fact that's not the case at all, at least in this specific story that I investigated very deeply.
We had many scientists that started on the lab leak side.
Christian Anderson is another example.
He was the first one to raise the alarm already in the beginning of February.
They got the intelligence agencies involved.
Eddie Holmes reached out to the Australian intelligence services to say, oh fuck, this looks like it could be engineered, you know, given how little information they had in the beginning of 2020.
They escalated it to the FBI, to the MI6 uh to uh the Australian Intelligence Services to raise the alarm to bring this on the map.
And now people turn around and say, ah, these people are all part of the cover-up.
So it's it's uh it's it's really a historic injustice sometimes how some of these scientists have been treated.
That I feel like if people just read the real story and understand, you know, what happened in this chronological fashion, and you know, you have the primary testimony, what they said, what they said to colleagues.
I mean, we I I had to kind of also, you know, I I never have like a journalist, you cannot have just one source telling how things were.
I always had to kind of figure out and match, yeah, like the Fauci teleconference, this famous teleconference.
I talked to multiple people that were part of it.
I I everybody I asked them, hey, tell me your side, what happened there?
And then I I compared notes, right?
What did they say to me?
Then I looked into the FOIA uh released documentations.
Ah, what emails did they write?
Did this match what what people told me, right?
So you really have to reconstruct some of these events, and they have no big mystery.
So, you know, once you interview people that were in the meeting, when you see what was the output and why they wrote things the way they did, it all is very coherent, and this book tries to create a bit of this coherence that you don't get by hearing only parts uh of the allegations.
It's like, ah, you know, one famous allegation is like our Christian Anderson was waiting for a grant from Anthony Fauci, and so of course he switched his mind to to go with the preferred zoonotic narrative.
And then actually, this is not how grant making works.
Anthony Fauci has no control over this grant making requests.
Anderson was completely on the other side, and he changed his mind given the evidence came in at this particular day.
I mean, we have the dates and throughout the dates.
Eddie Holmes sent him, you know, ah, I have this former postdoc student, he found this pangolin sequence.
Have a look.
Ellis Hughes sent uh via uh a different Chinese collaborator, uh, I think I should not name him here.
They identified this close ancestor that it's very close to SARS-CoV-2 in two parts of the genome.
They sent it to Eddie Holmes, Eddie Holmes sent it to Christian Anderson and say, look, and then they're like, oh my god, now it's clear the mystery is solved that you know, if if you have this in nature, then clearly recombination accounted for it.
So this is how they changed their mind, and then they published this proximal origins paper.
It was not anything Fauci said.
Fauci didn't say much at the teleconference at all.
They he and Francis Colin, they were sitting back and letting the scientists have a debate, and then they say after the conference, say, ah, we are like 50-50, let's keep an open mind, let's keep investigating.
And then they did investigate, they collected evidence, and then they came out with proximal origin that said we cannot exclude a lab origin, but there's a bunch of evidence that points the other direction.
That was it.
And this was such a huge controversy then after uh made to look like uh this is where they uh came together to do the cover up.
The thing with the proximal origin paper as well, and it it just always struck me as like uh illustrative of the nature of um the discourse around the topic is like you know, you have figures like Nate Silver and others who are really really villainizing the proximal origin paper and calls for retraction, all this kind of thing.
But first of all, there's the issue that none of them, almost nobody that I saw online that is commenting on that paper, seemed to bother to read it.
It was like four pages long.
It's very short.
The way the way that they characterized it was that it ruled out that there can be any further investigation on the topic.
It completely claimed that it had found conclusive evidence, and like you can literally read it saying this is the current where the current evidence stands, this is where we've drawn this conclusion.
Of course, if more evidence comes that you know contradicts any of this or the new evidence comes to light, we need to revise it.
And in any case, we should continue investigating because we're you know in the early stage.
So they said on our assessment of the current evidence, is this the so this is why we don't think it's likely, but you know, more evidence may come to light, or and we may need to revise if additional stuff comes.
And that's it.
And and that is presented as if, well, that was you know, the scientific community forbidding any future research.
And you can tell that they didn't do that because lots of the people involved went on to do additional research exactly on that question.
But the other aspect of that, that proximal origin paper, and I think this relates to you did a very good job, Phil, like Matt said, of laying out, you know, a whole bunch of of evidence.
I know there's so many moving parts here, but in terms of the reaction and the public discourse around it.
So things were like the proximal origin paper becomes totemic, or Anthony Fauci becomes like the single figure.
He's the only person really that matters for you know, kind of Joe Rogan or people like that.
And if the proximal origin paper was retracted, right?
Like if it turned out that actually they had of you know been scheming behind the scenes and they misrepresented what they actually thought, and they they were doing it all for political reasons.
It wouldn't undermine any of the other vast amounts of independent evidence lines that have occurred for the lab lake, but the people in the lab link world seem to regard you know, individuals and single papers as these kind of linchpins that like if they can just discredit that, that will completely destruct the whole edifice um that is kind of being manufactured in order to silence the dissent.
And it this speaks to me, and it was kind of one of the things that I was curious about is given what you've just described in some of your previous answers around the continuous build-up of evidence of independent lines pointing in the same direction, the same location.
How is it that the public discourse has not gone that way, right?
That like to me, there's a clear disconnect from the way this issue is perceived and uh opinion polling and whatnot shows, you know, I think the majority of the American public think that it came from a lab.
Certainly the majority of podcasters think that's the case.
So why do you think that has occurred, right?
That like basically to a certain extent, it seems like scientists and science communicators lost the public information battle.
And I know you're fighting back, so I'm I'm not saying it's completely hopeless, but just I I wonder what your thoughts are around that.
So I have a lot of thoughts about this.
I mean, this is also this is kind of the key theme of the book, right?
I mean, the science is kind of smuggled in because I know people would not necessarily read a science book.
People would read a book that's a bit more spicy about you know media manipulators, about disinformation campaigns.
And I collected some of these, and some of these were not necessarily as public, or they are not put in the right context, some of these events that happened in major media outlets with some of the gurus, uh, with some genuine disinformation campaigns.
I mean, one of the big highlights I would say that I uh worked out a bit deeper is for example, the whole story about how did the bioweapon myth start.
And um, this has everything to do with the MAGA movement.
This has to do with uh Steve Bannon uh and Miles Guo.
Miles Goo is a uh exiled Chinese real estate mogul, a billionaire that had to flee China after Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign was basically sowing his uh influence and power.
And so before they arrested him, he basically fled, and he found a new home in uh Mao Lago in the Mao Lago crowd uh in the MAGA movement in the US.
And in 2018 already, he and Steve Bannon worked together, and I think he paid Steve Bannon like a million or so to go into the media business, and he created Guo Media, which is this network of fringe outlets to a certain extent, conspiratorial outlets that would also kind of um provide information in Chinese for the Chinese diaspora, so expats uh in China against the communist party, right?
It's like an anti-Chinese communist party like epoch times kind of thing, like the epoch times, exactly.
I mean, that they are also connected somewhat in some they have overlapping characters there in their right-wing MAGA movement and this anti-communist anti-Chinese uh party affiliates.
And it's not to say that the Chinese communist party is great, I'm just saying uh this is uh how they positioned themselves.
Important qualifier.
Yeah.
And what happened basically is that um there was this postdoc in Hong Kong called uh Dr. Li Meng Yang, and she had this suspicion early on that it could have been a bioweapon created by the Chinese military based on very limited information again on bad viruses that were found by a Chinese military academy that seemed to be related to SARS-CoV-2, but much more distantly related than the other viruses that we talked about, too distant to have created SARS-CoV-2.
And so she spun this theory and and kind of got in contact with one of the chief propagandists of Mares Ghost's media operation called uh a YouTuber called uh uh Lou D. And he basically picked her up and they started amplifying her suspicions and and her bioweapon kind of allegations more and more.
And then, you know, the the coup behind this whole thing was of course that Miles Go and Steve Bannon organized for this whistleblower to go away from London, they bought her a first-class ticket to the US, they housed her, they they uh they trained, they had a media trainer because her English was not good to train her, and then they put her somehow.
And I tried to investigate how exactly the first appearance happened on Fox News, but she immediately got a kind of an interview with Fox News, probably arranged via this network somehow, and immediately exploded into the scene.
I mean, the New York Times would later report that Miles Go and Steve Bannon created a right-wing media sensation.
This is what uh she was, right?
In this critical election year of 2020, the pandemic was not shaking out well for for Trump for the for the Republican movement, so they needed a counter-narrative.
And uh Scarlett was elevated to this counter-narrative by blaming not the failings of the pandemic response on the Trump administration, but blaming the whole pandemic on China, and so a lot of the 2020 discourse was shaped by the most powerful man in office to basically say, ah, the pandemic is not my fault, you know, voters should not blame me, they should blame China.
And there was a coordinated campaign behind this, and ultimately we had a lot of the bioweapon stories escalating throughout 2020 that won a lot of partisans over.
And once you have a certain force, I would say, of of believers, then it's very hard to get rid of a narrative again, especially something that's emotionally so capturing is like what caused the pandemic, who is to blame.
So this is I I would say that one part of this.
And just to finish on the story.
So what people don't understand is what did the manipulators in the back gain from it, right?
Of course, it was a media stunt to help the Trump administration, but it was also a huge fraud on the Chinese diaspora and the MAGA movement that got sucked into this uh Goo media ecosystem because he would then you know advertise them to crypto schemes, investment opportunities, uh you know, Gi member Platinum leadership.
They created this cult around this Chinese tycoon that are we gonna take down the the CCP and replace the Chinese government, and so people bought into that, and ultimately the Southern District of New York charged Miles Guo.
I think it's still ongoing.
What's gonna happen to him?
Uh, or if he could get a pardon, most likely, unfortunately.
But they defrauded basically these believers in the bioweapon story, they defrauded them up to the tune of a one billion dollars.
And Miles Go would buy, you know, a yard for 300 million and a villa for I don't know, 35 million and would rove expensive cars based on abusing this emotional story about the bioweapon to reel in more and more people, putting Scarlet onto Fox News and Tucker Carlson, you know, so that people would come into their media universe and get you know offered all these lucrative investment opportunities, get rich quick schemes and similar.
So this is the dark underbelly that I also look into why some of these actors were not, you know, interested in the controversy as much as manipulating people for their own strategic and financial gains.
And we see this, of course, then with other influencers that during the pandemic, you know, became very famous and expanded their power by being very contrarian to vaccines, pushing either MATDING, miracle cures, and then also jumping on the lab leak story.
And unfortunately, I have to report that many of these actors that played the role or tried to hedge their reputation to the lab league, are now in power.
I mean, Che Batacharya, very uh he he is now the head of NIH.
The lab leak story has been used to justify funding cuts to the NIH.
J. Batacharya was part of BioSafety Now, which is this extremist organization that's supposedly for biosafety, but it's an anti-biotechnology, anti-virology pressure organization, basically.
And he he is now in power.
Um, Radcliffe, uh, John Radcliffe is the head of the CIA now, who was been, you know, working ever since with the Trump administration to push the bioweapon story to work with the Heritage Foundation, the authors behind Project 2025.
Uh, he was working for their origin uh commission to basically blame the pandemic on China to escalate tensions with with China as part of their politic policy agenda.
So you see these characters, they they benefited a lot from pushing this narrative, and this story is not usually told, it's usually told in a way of like our scientists, you know, the devil accept uh this opportunity.
No, it was never really investigated, and all the good people that ask questions were censored by the Biden regime and similar.
And in reality, you know, there's a lot of power blaze that happened in the back that people were not aware about.
And so the book also does this.
And maybe this is a good point to also point out.
And this is what got me into trouble with my publisher in the US ultimately when they got back into power.
So I had the publisher in the US, very small press that was associated with uh with a very prestigious college in the in the United States.
They loved the book.
The editor said, ah, this fantastic, the story needs to be told, right?
And then the Trump administration won, and these people that are sometimes characterized in a book, not you know, over overtly negatively, but just pointing out this is what we have, what these people did.
They are now back in power, and and uh the lawyers basically killed the book after that.
They said, Look, uh, first they were like, I I said, you know, given this, you know, should we get better legal insurance just to be protected for the book?
And then the lawyers were like, you know, just outline, please on each chapter, you know, where you think there might be a concern.
And so I gave them basically a list of my antagonists for each chapter.
We have one to three antagonists, and I give them the list.
Yeah, I think like not even half a day later, they were like, Nope.
And the editor, uh, the chief editor, not the editor that still tried to get the book to a bigger publisher to try to get it, but the editor was like, nope, we're not gonna do that, it's too risky.
And unfortunately, they were correct, given how the crackdown on academia and science and defunding of universities, any kind of negative spotlight could defund them.
And they were afraid for their jobs.
They were afraid for lawsuits that would not entangle just the printing press itself, but the whole college.
And this is what the lawyer wrote me, right?
You know, we cannot publish this book because this would put not only our jobs but the whole college into jeopardy.
And so the book got killed.
Otherwise, the book would have been out a bit sooner.
Yeah.
Yeah, I I think it's worth noting that Philip in a a little bit more detail just to make the comparison because like the individual success of a particular book, whatever.
You know, I mean, obviously for you, right?
It would be a significant blow.
But like the context there is fears about an administration that will attack with the tools of the state and the resources of just large amounts of money and whatnot, like to put pressure on people who want to report about what they did, right?
This is the same thing as uh Jonathan Howard published a book documenting what people were saying during COVID, and a lot of the people, you know, reacted very negatively to that.
But he was just documenting the various claims they'd made and how they hadn't held up.
And this includes people like Vinay Prasad, who also went on to get a position in the Trump administration.
So the interesting thing is like all of the lab league discourse rests on, in my view, there's like so many parallels with other conspiracy communities.
Like I noticed at the very early stages, this looks a lot like 9-11 truth for movement, it looks a lot like the anti-vaccine movement.
There's a lot of the same characteristics occurring there, and then you have within that the kind of emergence of like the celebrity figures, right?
The people that are buoyed up by it and get reused profiles.
And if you compare your experience with, say, for example, Alina Chan and Matt Ridley, who not only had a book published, which is strongly leaning towards lab league being the actual place, but did a media tour, you know, promoted across large but much larger podcasts than us, notably, you know, like Sam Harris, and that's part of the reason that we had the original guys on.
But but in all those cases, their profiles were raised, and in comparison to the way they presented that they would be hounded out of positions, they wouldn't be allowed, right?
But Jay Badachary was not removed from his academic position.
Vinay Prasad was still in this position as well, and they were all rewarded.
So while you have faced and other people, you know, have faced like the potential for if not just harassment, just you know, various obstacles being put in in the way.
Yeah, I have to say uh if I can interrupt here, uh so this is something that that really also was shocking to me, is like, you know, I'm in Switzerland, nothing really can happen to me here, nobody cares, not so heated here.
You guys are neutral.
So that's why I can still speak out.
But that doesn't mean that you don't have these extremist communities that try to, you know, my old boss uh from my road company got contacted about you know trying to get me fired based on just me advocating for giving the science on the origin, basically taking it seriously and giving it another look, right?
I had reporters investigating uh with Peter Dashek uh whether from the New York Times, because a conspiracy theorist said that Eco Elf Alliance would pay me.
So he had to basically do a QA with the New York Times reporters uh to prove that he actually did not pay me, that there is no correlation between you know, there's no quid pro quo that I'm just naive and idealistic and talk about this out of my own volition and my own agency, that this is not a big conspiracy theory.
And so it's very hard to if if you're just you know, like this and you are already, and there's countless memes about me and you know, harassment and whatever.
I don't care about all of this.
So I'm I'm in the fortunate situation, I don't have to care about this.
But for the scientists, especially people in the yes, I mean, they had to change addresses, they had to scrap the internet of private information for worry that people would come and shoot them up.
Peter Dashek specifically, I mean, he had the FBI guy that he's encountered.
He said he never seen anything like this, right?
There's threats he gets from domestic uh terror organizations, white powder letters, swatting, like swatting Is when basically people call and you say, like, ah, I'm a scientist, I have my wife, you know, in the basement, and I'm gonna kill her.
And so the police comes with six police cars in the middle of the night raiding his house, right?
And you know how they come.
They say, I have a gun, they come in, guns blazing.
If we react poorly, could end deadly.
So this is called did that happen.
This happened to Pitadesh, I guess.
So, in that contrast, and like with the things that you pointed out.
So the book documents it, but for those that haven't read it, um, and you've just talked about it briefly.
But the impact on the scientists, right, involved here, you know, as as you outlined as well at the beginning, these are the scientists that have dedicated their lives in many occasions to trying to for public health public help, prevent viruses from becoming pandemics, and the reward for that in part was to be publicly relevant and targeted.
So you mentioned like uh, you know, Peter Dash and the SWATING and yourself, right?
Facing harassment online.
But are there any other examples that come to mind of stories or illustrated cases of what scientists face for being involved in this?
Yes, I mean, there's there's many, and we collected many of them, and it's um, you know, we talk about Christian Anderson who got dragged in front of Congress by Republicans uh for a pony show.
And I have to say they really did well, right?
So they they were in the testimony, they really didn't give the Republicans anything, they defended themselves super well, and then as a retribution, the Republicans abuse their power to subpoena their private Slack messages and leak this to client propagandists as associated with them to hear private messages from scientists.
Let's look if you can find something, and basically smeared them in that way.
This is Michael Schellenberger and others, uh Meta Ibi that basically do client they then created this story that basically still up to today tarnished the reputation of a Christian Anderson based on the contextual private messages that nobody ever read.
But you know, this is I read them you're at them, and you see there's a suspicious in these uh uh private messages.
And there's the organization called US Right to Know, which is originally a left-leaning anti-GMO organization.
This is their playbook.
They basically go, they they fire uh communications from scientists looking for anything they can decontextualize and pick to kind of do character assassinations of these scientists uh publicly.
And unfortunately, all of the scientists that are somewhat in this topic and had somewhat of a public profile, they all got swept up into this tornado, they got their reputations tarnished.
Uh sometimes, you know, funding was cut, people lost their jobs, especially when we talk about equal alliance and their environment, but also others.
So, you know, universities that had nothing to do with this.
There were programs that in the beginning of the pandemic were funded.
Uh I think UC Davis and others that were trying to do more virus hunting, more virus sampling in order to better predict this risky animal human interfaces.
The funding got pulled rapidly once the once people started pressuring agencies to remove funding for these programs, right?
So there's there's a there's a long tale of bad consequences for scientists that go beyond the person or that go towards systemic suppression of research fields, sabotaging of public understanding, manipulating the public, and now I mean the whole dismantling of the NIH is partly argumented for first because they are too woke and pro-trans,
and the second big argument, and these are the only two arguments ever put forward, is because they did they did the pandemic, they they they funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they did the research, Rif Bark, blah blah blah, uh whatever, they created the pandemic.
This is completely at odds with all the evidence we have.
We can very strongly exclude any engineering having any role in this, but this is still used to basically defund the agencies, take away all the independence of scientific organizations and scientific agencies trying to go to war with university.
This is all justified as part of this larger anti-science aggression we are seeing, and the lab league story is the one thing that people always fall back to when people push against this, when they say, Look, is this justifies this well?
And they say, Ah, they did it, did it the lab leak?
This has now been proven, blah, blah, blah.
Actually, it has not been proven.
The opposite is all but certain, I would say.
So, yeah, it's a it's a very dire environment that people operate in, and it's also beyond the US, right?
It's scientists like Marion Koopman's uh who was part of the WHO mission facing very similar problems, having her students interrogated by right-wingers in parliament, because unfortunately, this is also part of what the book says, you know, uh, we're interconnected now, and these story tropes they spread across countries across across languages, and scientists all around the world uh face consequences.
Eddie Holmes sitting in Australia, you know, nice chill place, as Matt will tell you.
He gets sabotaged by you know, people taking his institutional email address and you know, um, basically registering him every day to a bunch of uh fraud and scam services, basically completely inactivating his academic email address because every day has to has to get the scam stuff at the height of the congressional investigations.
You have the murder comedia empire hitting down on Eddie Holmes.
He had a security incident as it at his house in Australia, because the murder press was putting him with Christian Anderson and the other proximity authors as ah, they did it, they had they hit it, right?
So all around the world you you you see this, and of course, we haven't even talked about, and this is also very sensitive to talk about the scientists in China themselves.
They are not all part of the cover-up.
Many Chinese scientists try to keep you know conversation open with their Western collaborators.
Some of the best information we got out is via some back-handed kind of channels to Western collaborators from Chinese scientists, and they face the prunt of it.
I mean, uh, we outlined Alice Hughes that had to basically flee China on foot because you know, she might not have made it out otherwise, crossing the border to Hong Kong uh by food with just a backpack full of 34 hard drives with our research data.
Um, because there was such a severe pressure on her from the Chinese state to not do bad sampling, to not investigate the origins any deeper, the natural origins.
They didn't do that for the labling because in China themselves, the lablick story was working in the favor of the state, because it was seen by the Chinese population as uh Americans just you know doing bioweapon stuff that's clearly not true, and it was countered with saying, ah, it came out of US biotechnology, Jeff Sachs is a person that you know the Chinese state likes to amplify about this.
It came out of Fort Dietrich, it came to Wuhan, they are the victims.
So the Chinese state adopted a kind of victim narrative that the pandemic did not start in China, it was brought into China and started there.
We were the first victims, and so it doesn't match when scientists say, look, the wildlife trade, bats in China have you know close ancestors of this virus.
The Chinese state doesn't want to hear any of it, they don't want to hear any about the wet market potentially being the uh the source of the outbreak.
The Chinese state very clearly doesn't want any of this to happen.
They censor it also actively.
You have we chat messages deleting.
I mean, I I we I have testimony from people I cannot name from also independent Western journalists in China that say, look, there's there's a huge suppression effort that nobody can say that the pandemic started at the wet market.
That censorship doesn't happen when it comes from the lab somehow, because that's the works in the favor of public perception.
I don't understand all the games they are playing, but this is seen as unreasonable, so that's that's why it's allowed to stand.
What is seen as reasonable is not allowed to stand.
So um there is more to this, and I I don't want to go too deep into this because the book does not rely on you know Chinese sources too much.
It doesn't rely on unverified Chinese evidence, it doesn't need to rely on it, luckily, because of the evidence we accumulated outside and other testimony, and we have a lot of evidence that is verified independently that originally was produced by Chinese authors, but we don't go into politics.
I try to, because I'm in Switzerland, you know, I'm in a famously neutral country.
There's a clear interest from a Chinese state to push a certain origin narrative, and there's a clear interest from the US government to push a site an origin narrative.
And I'm in Switzerland.
I can be the neutral part in that sense, and you know, extrapolate between what are they saying, what I actually assigned is saying, what does the evidence support, and what did we learn on on the other side, you know, what were the antagonists doing, what was their basis for doing it?
And it was not a strong basis.
Usually there was a financial, strategic, a political and ideological motive to push the lab leak story to gain popularity, to gain profit or gain power.
And this is what the book outlines.
And I think this is why it's not you know picked up by people that profited from spreading the lab leak theory because they probably are not super interested in in hearing the other side of this story.
Yeah, it's definitely one of those situations where you Have all of these vast political media and social psychological forces at play pushing in certain directions, and they're not all kind of nefarious ones, you know, some of them are just normal everyday human ones.
So this was an important point for my book.
It's not about blame.
So I I was part of this documentary movie called Blame, where it kind of lays out how every pandemic is followed by blame and conspiracy theories.
So this is somewhat natural.
Humans want to have an age into blame.
And this is also very important for me to understand that people who might believe a lab origin is likely or believed you know their good points being made.
These are not conspiracy theories.
This is not the people I talk about.
I really talk about the people that spend 16 hours a day doing propaganda, trying to convince others actively by creating fraudulent arguments, fraudulent papers to buy into this worldview.
These are for me the people that my scorn goes towards, and they're amplifiers that do it for personal gain.
Normal people, most people don't care realistically, the one way or the other.
You know, many people ask me, what does it matter?
I mean, the pandemic unfolded, doesn't matter if it started, you know, with the first infection from my bat or first infection from my lab.
We still could have reacted a bit differently together.
But yeah, this this focus on blame and focus on our natural tendency and how it is abused by manipulators.
This I think is a key theme of the book, and this is how the gurus come back into it, because they are masters in picking up the emotional salience of certain narratives and know how to play to their audience to convince them of their story, of their worldview.
And this is something that scientists completely like.
Scientists cannot do is they say, ah, you know, all the evidence points in one way, but you know, there is no strong proof because we cannot prove it, blah blah blah.
And people are lost emotionally.
And then the others come in that say, Oh, I understand something has gone wrong for years now, you know, or the pick up on the grievances, the pick up on that, and then they start spinning their own narratives.
We've seen this with the vaccines, of course, and we've seen this with the story.
And now I want also to let you talk a little bit about your observations about this, because this was really helpful for my book, and especially chapter nine, where we really talk about how the guru sphere, the secular gurus, were key in getting the lab league narrative kind of cemented in public discourse.
Well, obviously, I think you're right.
Um, everything you just said is is correct.
Um, you know, it's both things all at once.
On one hand, you have the natural human tendency, you you want to find an agent, preferably one you already kind of dislike to blame on the bad thing.
It's very unsatisfying for it to be a bit nebulous.
All of the scientific evidence is very boring and too technical, and you know, stuff around bats is not emotionally compelling.
And as you said, public figures, whether you're writing a book like viral, the search for the origins of COVID, like Alina Chan or Ridley, or whether you're the gurus hosting a podcast or whatever.
They're tapping into the same energy.
It it sells one narrative sells well, and the other one doesn't.
Actually, at the moment I'm reading a book called The Great Mortality by John Kelly, which which is about the black death in in Europe.
And you know, as everyone knows, the infection and the deaths was was quickly followed by some of the most vicious killings of Jewish people, programs and so on that are quite harrowing to read, you know, just awful.
And you know, you had the same thing there, like you had some actors like who are faking documents and making up uh you know stories about them poisoning wells and things like that, but then you had the populace who wanted to believe, you know, and you know, the Jews are a perfect, perfect scapegoat there.
But look, we we could go on about this all day.
I mean, one good thing for people, it's a misfortune for you because of the uh publishers being afraid of the legal action, but it's a benefit for people who are interested in your book because I believe that we can link them to an online copy that they can read for free.
Is that right, Philip?
That is correct.
So um I long give up on making any profit out of this book.
This was never the goal, anyways.
This was something that I feel I have to do to, you know, to correct the record and um to get this injustice somewhat remedied, at least the little I can.
And I always wanted this to be as widely accessible as possible.
I always offered people, even when the book was there, that I would send them, you know, any information, any copy, all the information I gathered if they're interested in.
But now, since the publisher is gone, I don't have any limitations, and the internet is like why not put all the book online.
I I made a serialized novel out of the book now.
So I have 12 chapters each week.
I publish a new chapter.
I think now we are almost done.
We are like at chapter 10, and people can uh listen to it.
So I have an AI audio translation because some people listen to books then read it, and I have it also online.
I have you know, each chapter is a PDF version, high quality with you know fancy quotes and stuff like that.
Uh, people can just go on their on the website, lab leak Fever, and and and download it for free.
I have the book as a Kindle version, uh like ebook version, and there's a print version.
There I on Amazon, I cannot influence the price.
So the problem is if people want to read the book and they they still will have to go on Amazon and buy some.
But if there are people like in Brazil in India, you can reduce the ebook price to like you know, I don't know, two rupees, very little or two re-ish in in Brazil, so people can get it basically for the equivalent, I don't know, of 20 or 50 cents or something like that.
The ebook if they want to read it.
So for me, it's really important to make it accessible so that people who really because the pandemic hit all of us, they hit all communities, it changed us in ways we have not fully understood.
Having one account, one honest answer of people really trying to understand where it came from, I think is important.
Yeah, I think it's a great story.
I mean, it's sad that in the current situation the the bad guys have kind of won in a way, the anti-science movement is is currently winning.
But um, this this kind of thing is gonna happen again.
You know, this isn't the first time there's been dramatic public misunderstanding of scientific evidence, hasn't it?
And it's gonna happen again.
And I think the best way we can encourage people to resist it is by reading books like yours.
So um, yep, we we endorse it here on the code in the gurus and Philip, you've you explained it all incredibly well.
I think you've uh and your book is is just as compelling to read.
So thanks very much for coming on.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, and it's hopefully not the last time that we see you, but maybe uh over the long haul, Philip.
So I'm I'm currently doing my next big thing, so don't worry about it.
It's gonna be another five years.
I feel the the overall goal, you know, like I've I've heard people talk about this, and like are we doomed that historically the conspiracy version will win out that like the the narrative is that the scientists restricted everything and that you weren't allowed to talk about the potential of lablick, and that's what actually occurred.
But I'm more optimistic.
I don't think so.
I don't think so.
I think um, you know, cooler heads will prevail in the long arc of history.
Exactly.
You know, only if people like me at least give one account of how it could be different, right?
And exactly, at least locally in Switzerland, there's now a big uh journal from the like one of the most renowned uh journalistic outlets for high quality journalism.
They picked up now my book and uh they also interviewed some of the scientists again to kind of tell this uh story based on because they read my book.
So you see that there is some there is some movement, at least in some circles.
I'll also give you an optimistic note related to what I observe around the gurusphere and and the discourse is that whenever something becomes you know widely accepted, or the the discourse is that that this is the case.
This gives journalists and long form writers the chance to say everybody thought that this was like this, but actually when you look at it, it was misrepresented.
So later down the line, or you know, in the coming years after the Trump administration, fingers crossed, I think there will be retrospectives where people say, Oh, you know, like the the kind of another wave of discourse, which is just like the waves that go through the New York Times saying, Oh, it looks like Lamlik was vindicated, or you know, is it's much more plausible.
There will be eventually, I feel a time when people are like actually the common perception of this is wrong, and um people like writing those articles.
So that might the contrarian wave may eventually um hit the lab lake people, but as the the only point on the guru discourse I'll make and and this is uh like a pessimistic note to to uh this uh it is now done that the labl will ever go away.
It is now conspiracy lore like JFK assassinations or the moonland, any number.
It's it's now it's conspiracy lore.
And for that reason, it also serves as an indicator often about you know people's kind of susceptibility to a whole range of things.
Not entirely, but um, yeah, when people are hardcore lab leakers, it is rarer that that's the only issue where they have that view on.
So yeah, so continue continue your work, Philip.
And I will post links to all the materials that people can see.
There's a like online book format that you can get from Amazon and there are the individual chapters on the website.
And yeah, it's I appreciate you taking the time with us, and uh yeah, we will see you again.
I'm sure we will see you again.
Yeah, yeah, I I would be in your Patreon again at some point.
Oh no, not I may have to watch the next project or that kind of thing, but yeah.
Oh, the next project, yeah.
I mean, this is fantastic, but I cannot tell too much, but you know, just talking about you know, very renowned people talk to the cyber minister of top one.
