The ABC's for Franchisees | Entrepreneur's Jason Feifer

Transcript

This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show. Today on the James Altucher Show. Matt Ridley is one of the smartest people on the planet. I don't know if he would like me saying that, but his books have literally changed the way I think about history and events and politics and economics and people in general. So the rational optimist shows how you can be an optimist rationally based on increasing innovation on the planet and how it solved different problems through not only the past recent years, but the past recent centuries. Evolution of Everything shows how every industry evolves, and that influenced a lot of my thoughts about money, for instance, and crypto. How innovation works influenced me about creativity, and all of these books talk about what I have labeled, idea sex, the idea of how innovation often happens when you combine 2 disparate ideas into 1. And his most recent book is Viral, and it's The Search for the Origin of COVID 19. He cowrote it with Alina Chan. We speak about COVID innovation, what's going on in the world. I'm always so excited to talk to Matt and always feel so invigorated afterwards. Here it is. Matt, where where is everybody? There's no employees anymore. I know. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Where'd they go? I I I quite agree. Our economist friends, you know, were they were telling us mass unemployment by now. We've got the opposite. And I don't think they've got a very good explanation for it. I mean, they keep muttering about people who are enjoying working from home. You know? They're downsizing their jobs and things like that. And that must be the explanation. I mean, it must be that a lot of people have decided, I don't really need to work so hard. I'll just stay at home or something. I guess, in general, maybe people during the pandemic had a chance to try out a different lifestyle. Maybe they moved to the country which is cheaper, or maybe they I I don't know. And maybe they just shopped for cheaper things. They realized they didn't need to go out. They didn't get addicted to shopping every weekend or whatever they do. So people hear, oh, I need less money, so I don't have to I could do other things. I could work from home. I could live off my savings. But it seems like in every industry from restaurants to, you know, banks and law firms, people have stopped going to work. It's extraordinary. It really is. And as you say, I suspect it'll end up putting us in a better place. You know, the mad commuting, ordeal that so many people put themselves through for so many years just doesn't feel sensible anymore. I'm actually doing the same myself. I think I'm gonna spend more time outside London back at home. You know? I'm not gonna, get get on the 3 hour train to London every week like I used to. I just don't see the point. But then I'm 63 years old, so that's, you know, why not, you know, time to slow down anyway? Yeah. But it's always hard to slow down. You feel you get addicted to the the tempo, but but the pandemic maybe forced us to get rid of our addictions. We we had first, we had, withdrawal, and then we were cured. And then now there's there's also the supply chain issues, which, you know, has led to this inflation. Some economists say it's permanent because of monetary stimulus. Other people say it's transitory because, eventually, those ships that are stuck will get through. But and this this ties in very nicely to the the rational optimist where, you know, if I were to take the rational optimist view is that society figures it out. If if there's a lot of people stuck at the port, then we're gonna start using other things, and it'll figure it out. But what's what's what's your view? Yeah. Well, I think, the it you it's no great comfort to say society will figure it out when you've got a crunch like this. You know? It can take a long time, and it can cause a lot of pain along the way. So, and I do think, I I mean, I do think we're in for significant inflation. I I think this transitory you know, it's a classic princess bride thing. I don't think that word means what you think it means. I don't think it's gonna be transitory. But but then, you know, the cup last couple of years have reminded us of the impossibility of forecasting what happens. I mean, I'm sure humanity is gonna be fine in the end. I'm not I mean, you know, I don't think we're gonna be screwed, but I think we've we're clearly gonna debauch our currency in the west. And, that'll help people who owe money, and it won't help people who, lend money. You know, so we're gonna go through one of those episodes where we, redistribute money in probably undeserving directions. What do you mean? How how will that occur? Well, if there's if there's high inflation, that's what happens is that debts get wiped out and interest rates don't compete with living standards. And so people trying to live off their savings end up short changed, whereas people who are borrowing a lot of money end up doing quite well. It's interesting because, as you said, it's been very hard. And in the intro, by the way, I'm gonna go over all your books and how they changed my life. I wanna tell you, by the way, the rational optimist totally changed my way of looking at the world. And the the evolution of everything really I had to really think afterwards and then step back and look at the world and think. Because it was it was so interesting. It changed my view of of money because, you know, money evolves. It changed my view of education because education evolves and and so on. That's really good to hear because that book did not sell very many copies. Nobody was terribly interested in it. And, therefore, people who appreciate it go up in my estimation even more, so I'm I'm really grateful. But you're right. It's it's it's that wonderful phrase that Dan Dennett used. He said, natural selection, once you sort of get your head around it. It's like universal acid. It just dissolves everything. You know? And you have to sort of start again in your understanding of the world. And I do find that. I find you know, I just sort of see things through a different lens now. I mean, because you look at everything. Like, I I started thinking this was in 2017. I I read the book, and, I think that was it. And I started thinking about things like investing and and, for instance, crypto and and and Bitcoin and how money over the centuries has evolved to solve kind of the problems of the previous generation. And here's now this this asset Bitcoin. What does it mean? What what problems is it solving? And it gave me a different insight into into new these new industries that are that are developing. And then, of course, this all intersects you know, you you've written, you know, books about the genome and then the Red Queen. And, you know, you you have an interest in biology and an interest in kind of economics, and these sort of merge together. And your latest book, Viral, about the history of COVID or the search for the the origin of COVID, this is kind of the intersection of of all of these things. And so so let me ask you. With with your the rational optimism, a lot of the problems usually have to do with, you know, problems in resources or problems with, you know, war intentions. And and you described how historically, although doom and gloomers get there's more and more of them. They're they're you know, the the natural optimism tends to defeat reality and history tended to defeat these doom and gloomers time and time again. I'm wondering was something like not only the COVID 19, but then the reaction to it, like the economic lockdowns, which drastically have have fundamentally changed the world economy in ways we don't really understand. Tell me tell me where the optimism is now. Well, it's interesting because every, the every year since the rational optimist came out, I've been giving talks in which there's an element of rational optimism. And I've always had people come up to me and say, well, that's all very well, but you can't possibly still be a rational optimist now. I mean, have you seen what's happened in the last 12 months? I mean, look. You know, there's a euro crisis or there's a civil war in Syria, or have you seen what's happening in Ukraine, or have you heard about the Ebola crisis? Come on. You can't possibly still be a rational optimist. And I've always said, well, things look bad, particularly if you're in Ukraine, Syria, you Ebola or wherever, but this will pa*s. And it's only a small part of the world, and the rest of the world's actually doing better. Have you seen what's happening in Africa? You know, they are defeating malaria far faster than they ever did before. They're seeing economic growth across the continent. There's much less warfare. You know? It's been a great decade for that continent, compared with many previous ones. And just because it's not making the news doesn't mean you can ignore it. So I still say that with respect to the pandemic. Yes. This has been a global hit of a very uncomfortable and painful kind. But as the economic numbers show, we've bounced back pretty quickly in terms of living standards in most countries. We're still not out of the woods yet. You know? Europe's having a 4th wave now and all that kind of thing. It's it's just miserable the way we can't seem to shake this thing. And to some extent, I think that's because we're too smart. We took too many measures. We did lockdowns, and that ended up just delaying the inevitable. You know, it meant we had 4 waves instead of 2 or something like that. I'm not saying that was necessarily the wrong thing to do because, actually, you know, more people might have died in in 2 waves than 4. But, I I don't see anything going on at the moment that derails my general view that if we allow human beings to do what they do best, which is exchange, specialize, and innovate, then our grandchildren will be much better off than we are, except one thing. And that's this this whole cultural revolution thing where we're kinda turning our back on the enlightenment, and that does bother me sometimes. But I I'm determined not to give in to pessimism. So there you go. You know, but but it it's interesting, though, because I'm gonna quote from your book, how innovation works, which, by the way, also blew my mind. And and I I will there's a there's a lot of great ideas in there. What but one idea which I think really is, stands out is that people often the inventions often happen before the science, which we can talk about later. But that's a very, counterintuitive thing, which I which I wanna talk about a little bit. But there's also a quote, though. You you talk about how why do empires often fail to innovate or often decline in innovation? And you mentioned as time goes by and the central power ossifies, technology tends to stagnate, elites tend to resist novelty, and funds get diverted into luxury, war, or corruption rather than enterprise. And I wonder if, we're hitting that that kind of sweet spot of stagnation among the world's empires, particularly America, combined with the problems presented by the pandemic, whether it's the the illness itself or the economic lockdowns. And although we had massive innovation in terms of the vaccines and and medical technology, I'm wondering if in other areas, AI and the regulation around that or stem cell research and the regulation around that, the the stagnation is gonna be too much. We'll reach a tipping point of stagnation. Well, I think that's a real problem for individual countries, including the US, including the continent of Europe, particularly. And increasingly, I suspect it'll be a problem for China, which is, clamping down on the kinds of freedoms that led to its rather spectacular growth over the last 40 years. So I can see that this imperial senescence, if you like, is affecting lots of parts of the world. And, indeed, I document in how innovation works. The fact that we aren't living, at a golden time for innovation. It's not accelerating. It's if anything, slowing down, if you look at the turnover of firms in the, Fortune 500 or whatever it is, if you look at the age of entrepreneurs, you know, it's going up. You know? We're we're becoming a much less innovative society, and we're we're living through a, an innovation famine rather than innovation feast, I argue. And some of that's to do with too much regulation, too much precaution. You know? Look at the way we've turned our back on, genetically modified crops in Europe. It's a really dumb thing to have done, but we've we've we've done it, etcetera. And, so, yes, I can talk myself into arguing that we are losing the mojo that gave us living standard improvements. But then I remember that what happens in the past when this happens is that someone else picks up the the ball and runs with it. Some other country somewhere says, well, okay. If you're not gonna lead the world in innovation America, then I'll do it. Is it Brazil? Is it India? Is it, I don't know, Africa? And I I pin my optimism to that possibility because the the idea that the entire world can behave like the Roman Empire and sort of give up on the things that made it great doesn't feel right to me. It feels like there's always gonna be someone somewhere who sees an opportunity to be the sort of free trading, free innovating pioneer in the world. I hope so. Well, you know, you you bring up a great, example in the book how innovation works in terms of transportation. Like, since you and I were born, planes do not go from New York to California any faster. And to go from New York to London, it's actually gotten slower on average for commercial flights because of, you know, there's no more Concorde. You know, there are hints that that might reverse soon, but it's the the rising regulation and precaution. We we have achieved 0 commercial deaths, and I think you mentioned 2017 from from commercial flight, but which is great. But we're not getting places faster, which is stunning to me. Isn't it extraordinary? I I often reflect on this. My grandparents, you know, who were born around the turn of 20th century, lived through incredible changes in transport. I mean, they, you know, they were born before the motorcar and the airplane, and they died with a man on the moon and Concorde in the air and and, you know, helicopters and all sorts of things. But they didn't see much change in computers and communication, I argue. You know, they had the phone when they were born, and they had the phone when they died. It was a lot better, but it wasn't, you know, radically better. I've had the opposite experience. I've lived through a period in which I mean, you know, the 747 has only just retired after 50 years of operation, and the 787 is it doesn't look that different from the inside to me to a 747. So, you know, where are the, personal jet packs, routine space travel, all that kind of stuff that we were told in around 1960 to expect in the future? The transport innovations didn't happen, but the computing and communication ones were amazing. I mean, I've got a wonderful picture, which I sometimes show, of of a 1958 cartoon of what the world is gonna look like in twin in the year 2000. And it has a bloke delivering mail, ordinary post, but he's doing so with a rocket strapped to his back. So we haven't invented email, but we have invented jet packs. And, of course, that's exactly the wrong way around. And by the way, what that tells me about the next 50 years is that it's probably not all gonna be about computers and communication, actually. That might run out of steam too, and it might be that the next 50 years is all about biotechnology or something else. Well, let let's think about that because I think people underestimate that. And, again, I do wanna talk about your your great book Viral. I did speak with, your coauthor, Alina Chan, about it, and it was a fascinating conversation. But, biotech seems to me underestimated in terms of the research that's happening and how people are predicting the future. Like, if we can truly use technologies like CRISPR to use gene editing, which which can solve essentially every disease and and and, you know, create better you know, at an extreme, you could start creating superior humans depending on how you define superior and what metrics you use. Like, what's what do you think is going to happen in the next 10, 20 years with with gene editing, which I mean, we're talking about life extension, ending cancer, you know, creating a a a super race. I hate to use that word, but that's what people talk about. What and and yet people aren't talking about any of these things even though the technology is essentially there. Yeah. I I I don't myself see the kind of germline genetic engineering you're referring to there happening, gene editing, I should say, because I think that is still a step too far to say we are gonna produce human beings that are different from scratch in deliberate ways, so as to have superior genetics apart from, obviously, correcting genetic deficiencies that lead to, unpleasant diseases and things like that. I I don't think we've got the social permission yet to to to start breeding superhumans. But but that's that's a limitation as opposed to if Well, fair enough. We were just allowed to run unhampered, what can what can happen? I was gonna say, but we we are gonna do that with pigs and cows and chickens, I think. You know? And I I think and we're gonna do it with plants, and I think it's gonna have incredible opportunities in agriculture, gene editing. It's gonna enable us to wean agriculture off chemicals to a significant extent, vastly increase, the environmental, acceptability of farming, etcetera, etcetera, reduce our footprint on the planet, bring a lot of farming indoors. You know, there's all this kind of stuff. Then when you get the medicine, I think cancer is the big prize. Is CRISPR gonna lead to opportunities to use messenger RNA vaccines, immunotherapy techniques, and others to defeat cancer? Yes. I think it is. I think it's already happening. I think, you know, surprising number of cancers that were not survivable a few years ago are starting to become so. So I think there's an enormous opportunity there. I think we can tackle allergies, which are a really big problem, you know, and they're a growing problem, basically, because we've got rid of all the worms that used to infest our bodies. That's why we all have so many more allergies. I'm convinced that the evidence is very strong on that. You know, why not let's work out how to give our bodies the antigens they need to dampen down the immune system without actually having the unpleasantness of having real worms in our guts? And, sorry. This is not a pleasant topic to to Worms and guts? That's what this podcast is all about. So so I I I I I'm very bullish about what CRISPR gene editing techniques can can think. And just to illustrate the point, I've been involved with a wonderful project called revive and restore started by 2 Californian entrepreneurs, which is about trying to bring back extinct species. And CRISPR is critical to this, and it's being very actively, researched already. I suspect we're still at least a decade away because CRISPR can make 20 changes to a genome. It can't make, a 1000000 changes, which is what you would need to do for most of these extinct species. What you do is you take the most closely related living species, and you just go in and edit its genome. And you and we can do this because we can read the genomes of extinct species quite easily now, to some extent, anyway. Some of them, better preserved than others. We're not talking about dinosaurs. We're talking about mammoths and passenger pigeons and and great orcs and things like that, things that went extinct in the last couple of 100 years. So, you know, I hope to live long enough to see an extinct species returned to life. Now that's a marvelous thought, isn't it? What What if we bring back Neanderthals? Because we could edit our genes to have a Neanderthal children. Yeah. Well, Svante Paabo did sequence the enhanced genome about 10 years ago, and so it can be done. There's no question about it. It's a big difference. You know? It's not a you know, we're 400000 years separated from Neanderthal. So so it's not it would take a lot of genetic engineering. We couldn't do it now, but we might be able to do it in 20 years. Ethically, there's enormous pitfalls in that, and I don't imagine it will happen because, you know, what do we do? Give them a job? Put them in a zoo? You know, I don't know. Yeah. No. That's well, you know, here's what I wonder, though. If some countries have ethical concerns, others don't. So for instance, you mentioned China's stagnation, but China is willing to not have ethical concerns, and they'll do anything with gene editing. And could that put them in a position where they become so far ahead of the US and other countries in in this technology that we get overwhelmed by that in some way? Well, yes and no. The the there was an incident a few years ago where Chinese researchers edited the genome of a an embryo so that the child was born with what they alleged was a genetic protection against HIV. And that, you know, I mean, that was kind of pointless experiment anyway because why were you thinking this person was gonna have a particular risk of HIV in their life? But all the same, there was such a backlash from scientists outside China and inside China about this effectively. The the the issue is consent. You know, how how do you decide before a human being enters the world that you're gonna alter their genome? This scientist was drummed out of polite society. I'm not sure he wasn't even prosecuted in China. So it's not true to say that the Chinese state has no concerns about this and no limits on what can and can't be done. Nonetheless, I think there is undoubtedly for a start, it's easier to get permission to do stuff quickly in China in all sorts of fields, you know, like building a factory. You know, you you can do that much quicker as long as you're friendly with the right officials and all that kind of thing. So, yes, there is a there's gonna be a tendency for for China to steal a march on the west here. And as we've seen with research into viruses, which is what our new book is about, there has been a willingness to push the envelope in terms of doing experiments that really aren't very wise, whether this led to the pandemic or not, experiments that we shouldn't have been doing. You know, making, taking genes out of 1 virus and putting them into another virus and then growing that virus in humanized mice with human genes in it and finding that it's 10,000 times more infectious or lethal in that mouse. These are, you know, frankly, irresponsible experiments, and they have been going on. We can't prove that that's where the the pandemic came from, from a lab leak, but, it doesn't seem impossible. And it does, it does mean that the world as a whole has got to stop and think, are these experiments really what we want to be doing? And I say that as someone who is fanatically pro biotechnology. You know? I mean, I'm not saying quite a lot of the people who are worrying about this are people who've always opposed all forms of biotechnology. Whereas I'm coming here saying this is a fantastic technology. It can be used to do a lot of good. Please don't ruin its reputation by doing something really stupid with it. This brings up 2 threads of thought in your books. You know, one is is that positive movements in one technology might lead to bad effects in other areas of life. And and this is particularly related to pandemics and vaccines and so on. You mentioned in the 1900 really how increases in public health, for instance, clean water, led to a rise in things like polio among children. Because now instead of these viruses just sort of accumulating in our water and we get naturally immunized by drinking slightly unhealthy water, now people started getting at a higher age where it became more dangerous for them to get diseases like polio. And and perhaps the same is true for for something like COVID or whatever. There's also the idea that the invention often precedes the science. So you mentioned how in in the early 1700, by putting the pus of smallpox into your you know, cutting open your skin, putting the pus of someone's smallpox into your body, you essentially could cure or prevent smallpox. It's like the first sort of vaccine. So from there, brings us to your book Viral. You know, not only increases in technology might have created a super infectious disease, but increases in in lifestyle, like travel, allowed for the spread of this pandemic, you know, went from it's interesting that it went from Wuhan at first to the wealthiest parts of the world. Like, Milan was the was the, you know, the fashion kind of capital of the world. You know, California, New York City, and and, you know, Macau and and so on were the first to get really infected with this pandemic. So so let let's let's go to viral now. Like, where where do you think this virus started? And and you you bring up a story how in 2012, a very COVID like illness was discovered in a bat cave when minors got covered with guano. But that wasn't ultimately COVID, but it was about a 97% match with the the genetic sequence of COVID. Yep. The central question that you have to answer, in my view, is how a bat virus this is there's no question this is a bat virus originally. How it got from southern Yunnan and, Southeast Asia, where, bats carry this virus, to Wuhan, a city more than a 1000 miles to the north, where bats do not carry this virus. They've been tested, bats in that area, for over many years, and they've never found these kinds of viruses in and around Wuhan. So the, you know, the the the question we've got to answer is how it went from one place to another. And much the same question was asked about SARS, except in that case, it went from, west to east. It went from Yunnan to Guangdong province, but a similarly long distance. And it turned out that the answer to that was very quickly obvious. In the weeks months after the SARS outbreak began, it became clear that the people getting infected and the people with antibodies were food handlers, were people in markets or chefs, in restaurants or things like that, and that the animals they were picking it up from were palm civets and 1 or 2 other animals as well. Okay? So, then it took quite a long time after that to work out that these palm civets had got infected by bats. That's a that took longer. But, nonetheless, the immediate source of the pandemic was very the epidemic in that case was was very clear. Same with with MERS, a similarly a very similar coronavirus that, breaks out sporadically in Arabia, and is originally also a bat disease, but, is spread to people by camels. Camels get infected, and then they give it to people. That's what we think happens anyway. So very quickly, you can work these things out, and that's before you get modern technology. So, you know, we've now got CRISPR gene editing. We've got huge advances in diagnostics, in testing, in PCR, in all these things. So we ought to be in a position to crack this one even quicker. And yet here we are almost exactly 2 years today since the first cases as far as we can tell, which is a long time to still fail to solve the problem. Well, what do you what do you mean by solve? Like, what would be a solution? Well, if we can find that animals were for sale in the Wuhan, seafood market, which some of them were, not very many, but some, and that those animals actually had a virus in them, and that's how people started catching it, then fine. We we've solved the problem. That has not been the case. They've tested 80,000 animals all across China now, and they've never found this virus in other animals. And as you mentioned in the book too, many of the people who regularly went to that wet market also did not have they were not the first recipients of this virus. Right. It's it's it's only a proportion of the early cases who were associated with that market. And if you look at the stalls within the market where people got infected, it it there's no particular pattern. You can pick up signs of that virus on surfaces, in the sewage, doorknobs, and things like that in in the in the market, but you can't pick it up in any of the meat samples or any other, samples that were for sale. And that's that was a surprising fact in the early weeks. You know? I thought they would solve they would get an answer for of that kind very early on. So at that point, the the evidence for a direct animal to human contact of a natural kind just doesn't emerge. And then there was a paper published this morning saying the fact that one of the early cases was working in the market and that we know animals were for sale in the market constitutes very strong evidence that this is the case. I'm sorry. After 2 years, that's not good enough. You know, it's not very strong evidence. It's zero evidence. You know? There is Can't you tell from the sequencing of the people who were in the markets how many generations they were away from the the first case we know about? And there's there's been some very interesting analysis of this. There's 2 early lineages. You can work out when they converge. It looks like mid November, but it might be October, but it's certainly not December, which is where these cases that are being discussed in a paper today are from. And, you know, the paper admits that. It says that 18th November is the median best guess of the of the first case. And the earliest case that was retrospectively diagnosed was 17th November. That was in a document leaked to the South China Morning Post, which we've never been allowed to see since. You know? So that might or might not be significant. And the, intelligence agency says they have evidence that at least three research workers in a laboratory were hospitalized for treatment, of this kind with ground glass opacities in their lungs, which is a diagnostic feature of of COVID, in November of 2019. Now I can't independently verify that. I I don't have, you know, clearance, so I don't know how good that evidence is. So you say. If you had clearance, you wouldn't say you had Well, that's true. Yes. Exactly. But it it it is one of many lines of evidence that lead us to say we need to take another hypothesis seriously as well, and that is that the the research going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and other labs around in Wuhan was of such a nature that it could have led to this outbreak. Why do I say that? Because there is one laboratory in the entire world that has done more research on SARS like coronaviruses from bats than any other lab in the world. It has published more papers, collected more samples, sequenced more genomes. It is the main source of knowledge about these viruses. It's called the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It's not in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's not in North Carolina. It's not in London. It's in Wuhan. Right? And that is if that's a coincidence and it just so happens that Wuhan, which doesn't have a very big wildlife trade, was infected by the wildlife trade, but not by the institute that was studying these viruses, then it's an enormous coincidence, and it's a surprising coincidence. So we do at least to take the possibility seriously that this is what this is where it's coming from. You know, I talk to people and they say, well, of course, there was a lab there. That's where the viruses are. They're researching it. No. The viruses are thousands of miles away. They go and collect them 1800 mile 1800 kilometers by road to this mineshaft that that you mentioned, and bring them back. They made 7 trips to that mineshaft. They brought them to Wuhan. They sequenced the the virus that's closely related in 2018, although they initially told us they only did it after the pandemic broke out. But then they changed their story and said, yes. We admit we did it in 2018. So, it doesn't seem to me, and an awful lot of ordinary people, that senior virologists saying don't be so stupid. We know what we're talking about. It couldn't have come from the lab. We're friends with the people who run the lab. We know them. They're they're our chums. They would never do something like this. It's good enough. We need proper drains up investigation about when what went on here. And I say this as a as a say, as as a friend of science. You know, I want this kind of, research to happen, but safely. I don't want it to be banned, and I want science to investigate itself so that it isn't left to other people to do it. So what wouldn't you say, though, the the simplest answer? Like, if I was to completely guess and and knowing and we've known all along that this laboratory, has investigated SARS like diseases for a long time. What if this this the Occam's razor solution be okay. They were testing something. Perhaps they were editing it for for research, and then accidentally, things happen, it leaked. Is that the simplest solution, or are there other simpler solutions? Well, it's worth noting at this point that laboratory accidents are common. They're not, you know, they're not they don't happen every day in every lab, but there's so many labs around the world that they do happen. If you take SARS, for example, SARS escaped from a, infected a worker in a laboratory at least 4 different times, twice in Beijing, once in Taiwan, and once in Singapore in 2003, 4. And we, you know, we can tell this because there wasn't any SARS out there in the community. So you can't when somebody gets infected who happens to have been working in a in a lab on SARS, it's pretty obvious what's happened. But in each case, except one, they didn't know how it happened. They thought they'd followed all the right procedures and so on. And yet, you know, suddenly they fell. And in the Beijing case, there were about 11 people got sick, and one of them died. You know? It was a significant minor outbreak long after the SARS epidemic. These things can happen. They will happen. Was there concern about experiments being done in the Wuhan Institute of Virology in relatively unsafe conditions? Yes. There was. We've heard a lot about the biosecurity level 4 lab there, which is the highest biosecurity level lab. But the work on bat coronaviruses in cells was done at biosecurity level 2. And as far as we can make out, the experiments in mice were done at biosecurity level 3. Now how do you dispose of the mice at the end of the experiment? Are they incinerated, or does someone go and sell them in the market or something? And, you know, why do I say that? Because just about a year ago, the Beijing government promulgated a new law saying people should not sell laboratory experimental animals in the market. Why would you suddenly produce a law like that unless someone's been doing it? In the book, what's the connection necessarily between the bat cave where we had in 2012 a virus that was 97% similar to COVID 19 and the actual eventual COVID 19. Because COVID 19 is not a mutation of according to Alina, who was on the podcast, and she was provided so much excellent insight, The COVID 19 we know and love is not the same it's not a mutation of the SARS like illness found in this bat cave. Yeah. No. No. That's true. The virus they collected in 2013 and brought back to the lab, which as you say is 96.1% the same as SARS CoV 2. It's not SARS CoV 2. It's not a progenitor, but it's one of at least 9 viruses that they collected from bats in that mine shaft after an outbreak where 3 people died of a suspected SARS like illness, and it was brought back to Wuhan for experiments. Was it possible that other viruses came back too as well as those 9, in, later expeditions which haven't yet been written up? Yes. It is possible. Was one of them even closer to SARS CoV 2? Was there deliberate genetic manipulation in the lab to take one of those viruses or a similar one and swap in a gene from a different virus, well, we don't have any evidence they were doing that with a SARS COV 2 like virus, but we have lots of evidence they were doing it with SARS like viruses. And they did apply for research funding to do it on so called novel coronaviruses, which presumably would include one like this. Essentially, there is a database of 22,257 samples and sequences that that lab has, which went offline in September 2019 and has never been brought back online. And the purpose of building up that database was to forestall the next pandemic. It was to be in a position to be able to recognize a virus quickly when it appeared in human beings and say, we know this guy. We know how to defeat him. We know how dangerous he is. We can detect him quickly, in cities and prevent it spreading. So the point of the thing was to deal with a pandemic. Which pandemic are they waiting for before they allow us access to this database? Not this one, obviously, because they keep saying, no. No. You can't have access to it. And when we say why not, they say, oh, it's because people are trying to hack into it. What what? In September 2019? And I surely, you know, it's a public data. It's a it's a list of viruses. Why not what's wrong with someone hacking into it? You know? Isn't it there to be used? It's the most extraordinary state of affairs that you do all this work to try and avert a pandemic, and then a pandemic comes along and you don't use the data you've got. So what do what do you think happened? Do you think, maybe somebody got the virus or a leak happened in September or even earlier. They got panicked. And I and not to be defensive for them, but I understand why the Chinese government might wanna hide these things is they don't want you know, they're in charge of the world's supply chain, and they don't want people to stop buying goods from them, so they're gonna hide all this stuff. I don't want to speculate too much because I think one can get in a muddle if you start saying, you know, here's a scenario that might have happened. You know, talking about a potential accident in 20 in September 2019 that they then thought they'd got under control, and then it turned out they hadn't by November and so on. You know, that kind of stuff. I I I don't wanna go down that rabbit hole. But I think, it is easily possible that when the pandemic began at the end of December 2019, they thought, oh my god. Is this caused by one of the ones we've been working on in the lab? We know that because they said that. Shi ZhengLi, the professor in charge, said, my first thought was could it have come from our labs? That that's a quote she gave to Scientific American. Right. So, you know, they they had to have that thought. How would they react if they had that thought? Well, their first instinct would be to check their lab records, see if there was an incident or an accident. They they said they did that. They probably did do that. They satisfied themselves that nothing had happened. But they can't be entirely sure because, as I say, you can quite often have a lab incident where somebody gets infected, and they don't even realize it. They might get a very mild case of something. They didn't drop a flask. They just breathed in a bit of air too close to a mouse that was breathing out some air. So how would they react in in other ways? They would try and control the situation. They would con try and control the the information coming out of the laboratory and make sure that it didn't feed conspiracy theories, that they were working on a bioweapon and things like that. And remember, in the 1st month, they're not expecting this to turn into a global story. They're not expecting to have to defend themselves in front of the world's media. They're expecting that it'll all be over in a few weeks. It'll be a Chinese story, and we got it under control, and we don't need to look any further into it. So some of the measures they might have taken in those 1st weeks to sort of keep a lid on everything, including keeping that database offline in case it got looked at by people with anti Chinese, motivations or something like that, some of that, you can sort of understand. And you can then see that by March, they're kind of hoist on their own petard, and they can't row back and say, okay. Yeah. Sorry. Look. We really do need to show you guys this database. But, you know, it does still feel very odd if you shared your 22,000 entry database with us and said, look. There is no virus in this that is close enough to SARS CoV 2 to be the progenitor. And all here's a list of all the experiments we've done, and we've never swapped a a spike gene into a similar virus. You know, here it is. Here's the evidence. That would go a long way to allaying our fears. And the fact they don't do that after 2 years is still pretty surprising. And so, you know, this this COVID nineteen has been often described as almost the perfect storm of a virus in that it you know, you could have it for 10 days without showing symptoms, which means you're out and about in society transmitting it. It's not as fatal as SARS 1, and so as is known, a a virus has no use for a dead body because then it can't be transmitted. It's much better if a virus is not so fatal. I mean, this is very fatal and dangerous, but not as much as other viruses. So it gives it more opportunity to spread among health care workers and and and so on. And there's other attributes, like it it it affects organs differently, so it's hard to, fix once it's really raging in your in your body. So it does I think that led to early concerns that maybe it was weaponized. And what I don't know, you know, if it's been proven not to have been weaponized or if you can tell if a gene's been manipulated. But, potentially, for instance, this 2012, bat virus could have been manipulated, I guess. What's your what are your ultimate views on that? Right. Well, on the whole, I take the view that mother nature is a much better genetic engineer than we'll ever be. And in terms of designing a particularly, clever infectious virus, she will have done the bulk of the heavy lifting. She's done the hard work. There are only two respects in which human intervention might, in this case, have, tweaked it in such a way as to contribute towards, it, being particularly infectious and particularly good at spreading. The first is that if the virus was originally a bat virus and it liked bat cells and the entry receptors on bat cell surfaces, then it will have needed a period of training on human cells to get good at infecting them. And it's possible that it got that training in a lab. I mean, if, for example, it was in humanized mice, that is to say mice with human genes in them, then it is it's getting an evolutionary training in attacking human receptors. Okay. So in that sense, it's a natural phenomenon. It's a it's natural selection that is making it good at infecting human cells, but it's doing it in an artificial setting that we have provided for it. And the other way in which human intervention might have played a role was that very early on, a biotechnology entrepreneur called Yuri Dagen said, look. There's an odd feature of this virus. Others have noticed it too, but but he particularly drew attention to it. It's called the furion cleavage site. It's a an insertion into a key point in the spike gene, and it's it's effectively what makes this virus capable of infecting lots of different types of cells very efficiently. So without it, this virus would not be able to maintain a pandemic. It's what makes the virus so dangerous. And he's saying this feature doesn't appear in any other SARS like coronavirus. And the other virologists came down on him like a ton of bricks and said, don't be so ridiculous. Would we just haven't found them yet. There's bound to be one out there with it. It it appears in other coronaviruses, just not in other SARS like coronaviruses. Well, 2 years on, we still haven't found it in any others, and we have found a long record of scientists deliberately putting furin cleavage sites into viruses to make them easier to grow in the laboratory and to study the functions of of furin cleavage sites. And that includes, we now know from information leaked only a couple of weeks ago, plan to do that with SARS like coronaviruses for the first time. Now we don't know whether they did it, but they were looking to juice up viruses to be able to study them more easily in the case of SARS like viruses. And here's this furin cleavage site sitting right there, and it's not found in any wild relatives. And by the way, when the genome of the SARS COV 2 virus was first described by the Wuhan Institute of Laboratory, they drew attention to lots of features of the spike gene, but they didn't mention the furin cleavage site. And they cut it out of a diagram. As Alina put it, this is like describing a unicorn and not mentioning the horn. So what's a positive reason why they might have genetically inserted this? You're saying so that they don't run out of samples of the virus, like, they it'll infect enough. They don't have to worry about running out of samples in mice to study it further. Or Yes. It's not quite that, but it's very difficult to grow these viruses in the lab. You know, you you you bring it from the wild and you you infect a cell and it doesn't really catch on and you do the experiment again and again and and so on. And eventually, you succeed. So, you know, and you harvest very few viruses and then the line pieces out and things like that. You know, these aren't easy experiments to do, and most of these viruses don't turn out to be very infectious in laboratory conditions. So, one of the purposes of putting furin cleavage sites into viruses is to make them easier to grow in the laboratory. Another purpose is to study what furin cleavage sites do, to understand in particular, remember that in this case, they kept finding bat viruses that couldn't infect that couldn't latch on to the ACE 2 receptor on the surface of human cells. So they say, right. This can't cause pandemic because it can't latch on to to the cell. But how easy would it be for it to do so? How much change would be necessary before it could do that? How many mutations would it take? If it's only 1 or 2, then it's on the edge of being capable of causing a pandemic, and we wanna be able to publish that and tell people and warn that. And, you know, I think they were that was what they were trying to do. They were trying to do the right thing. But to do that experiment, you've gotta make it capable of infecting human cells a bit. And one way to do that is to put a furin cleavage site in. So that I think is the motivation. But it's also driven just by pure good old fashioned scientific curiosity. Let's let's, you know, let's try and see what we can do here. Let's see how clever we are. A lot of the early experiments putting furan cleavage sites into spikes did it with isolated spike genes, not whole viruses, not live viruses. So it it you then test whether that protein from that gene can bind to the ACE 2 receptor, and you're getting useful information, but you're not actually producing a dangerous virus. But you can also put this into viruses that have no bad effect on the body. I mean, there's plenty of viruses out there that you could get that won't make you sick and won't make you die and so on. Have those experiments been done and successfully? Yes. And and one of the most successful experiments with a furin cleavage site inserted into a live virus was done by scientists at Utrecht University collaborating with a university in a play a place called Wuhan by chance, but it wasn't the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It was the Huazhong Agricultural University in in Wuhan. And they're working on a virus that infects pigs. So it's not and it's, you know, it's not easy for human beings to catch this virus. And the purpose of that experiment was to understand the biology of this virus, which is a problem in agricultural practices, and putting the theory in cleavage site helped them to do that a bit. You know, the motivate the the the justification for these experiments isn't that great, but you can see it. So that's a an example of doing an experiment where where you're probably not increasing a human risk at all, but you are doing the experiment. But and, yeah, you say do it in one which is a harmless virus. The trouble is you might turn a harmless virus into a harmful virus by doing this. Ultimately, why do we wanna find out I mean, again, curiosity. But other than that, why do we wanna find out what the actual origin of COVID 19 is? As and, you know, I know we're very much focused on curing it as well with with vaccine technology and so and pills or whatever. But what what was your motivation in really tracking down the origin of this? Well, I think there are 3 big reasons why we need to do this. The first is to honor the memory of the millions of people who've died. I don't think we should just turn away and shrug our shoulders of after you know? I mean, this has killed as many people as the holocaust probably now. You know? We're getting into that kind of range, at least in terms of orders of magnitude. The second is to prevent the next pandemic. So if this pandemic was caused by a laboratory experiment, then the fact that currently similar laboratory experiments are going on with MERS, which is a very dangerous virus, kills a lot of people when it gets into a human population, with NIPA or NIPA. I'm not sure how you pronounce it, but it's a bat derived virus that has caused occasional outbreaks in the Indian subcontinent. And, you know, do we really want to continue with these experiments, or do we want to review them, improve the safety protocols, decide which experiments we shouldn't be doing? We need to learn that lesson. Likewise, if we find that it came from the wildlife trade or from traditional Chinese medicine, you know, bat guano being ground up, to make eye medicine, you know, that happens. Then let's find that out. Let's That guano is may used for eye medicine? Yeah. I I discovered that when I was writing the book. There's a horseshoe bat called, the greater horseshoe bat whose guano has been used as an ingredient in a medication you put in your eyes. I don't think that's the cause of this because the guano is heat treated and, you know, chemically and blah blah blah. I think the chances of a live virus surviving that process are pretty well zero. So I'm not here to raise an alarm about that, but, you know, maybe there's other practices in traditional Chinese medicine going on that that that are the cause of this. So so that's the second reason. The third reason why we need to find out is because this episode is being watched by rogue actors, by bad actors, by rogue states like North Korea, by, bioterrorists, and they probably haven't got the capability for doing this kind of thing. But I would be amazed if malevolent people aren't sitting there thinking, wow. We can cause huge havoc if we get the right virus and release it. And when we do so, the World Health Organization is gonna take a year to even start an investigation. And then when it starts it, it's gonna sort of nod and wink and say, yeah. I I don't I don't think we really have anything to understand. It probably came in on frozen food from somewhere else in the world. You know, so I'm really spooked by the lesson that the poor investigation of this is teaching some people in the world. Looking forward, now we've seen it mutate again many, many times, and some of these mutations have created these even more malicious variants, the the delta variant, the lambda variant, whatever other variant. Are we living with this forever? And are current vaccines going to have to change every single year to handle the new wave of variants? Like, do the old vaccines, the original vaccines work on, you know, the new variants or whatever the next variants will be? I think that this I I think it will be endemic. I don't think we'll ever stamp it out. You know, a neighbor of mine, has, had COVID in the last couple of weeks and has recovered, but, her cat has now got it. You know? So it's gonna be bouncing around in our animal populations, in wild animals too now. So it it it I don't think we'll get rid of it. But there are four forms of the common cold. Most common colds are caused by rhinoviruses or adenoviruses, but there are 4 of them that are caused by coronaviruses. And they give you classic common cold symptoms. And they've been in the human species for, certainly, 100 of years. One of them only about a 130 years, we think. And they don't kill very many people. You know? They they might kill a few vulnerable old people, but not not on the whole. So it does look like when they become endemic, these viruses settle down to be low virulence. There are 200 kinds of viruses that cause common colds. Very few of them kill you. And there's a good reason for that that, you know, as you say, they want you walking around, going to parties, meeting people, going to work, etcetera, so that they have better chance of spreading on. That logic isn't true for all viruses. It's true for respiratory viruses spread by coughing and sneezing. They want you healthy. Viruses spread by insects actually want you dying because then you're not paying any attention to the mosquitoes that are biting you. So yellow fever and things like that can be a very serious disease. It doesn't get more mild. But I still think and this is slightly unfashionable. A lot of virologists don't agree with me on this. I still think that respiratory viruses do tend, other things being equal, to evolve towards low virulence. And therefore, I think this virus will settle down into being a common cold. And I think delta has already, to some extent, done that. Its symptoms are a bit more like the common cold than alpha was. You know, it the runny nose is now a commoner symptom, apparently, with delta. But, you know, I can't promise that I'm right about that. And, also, what I can't promise is what effect all these vaccination programs and lockdowns have on it. Do they prevent it evolving to a low virulence form, or do they encourage it to evolve towards a low virulence form? We don't know the answer to that. I'm not even gonna speculate about which of those is is the case. But I think it's possible that we have given ourselves a longer number of waves of the epidemic than we would otherwise have had by locking down societies several times. That doesn't mean it was the wrong thing to do because, you know, those waves I mean, more people might have died if we'd, had 2 huge waves than if we've had 4 smaller waves. But it it does it this is a kind of thing that we don't know the answer to. Yeah. And we also don't know what what an what's the answer to well, how has the world economy changed, and and what other deaths from other causes have have occurred, whether there was more or less. Like, again, this was a centralized policy across every country, which said lockdown, and that was very scary for a lot of people. Like, in the US, 55,000,000 people were were laid off. And what are the psychological effects of that, the financial effects of that? I'm not arguing either way. I'm just I think there are a lot of questions unanswered. That's exactly the way I feel about it. I really I I hate being put on the spot and made to say, you know, are you pro lockdown or against? I, you know, I I thought the 1st lockdown was probably necessary. By the time of the 2nd lockdown, I was more skeptical, and I said, so, you know, so somebody said, oh, you're anti lockdown. Well, you know, I'm just I'm really worried about the effects on people, of missing When did you start to get scared about what was happening, whether it was with the virus or the lockdowns? I got scared with the virus not immediately. In fact, to start with, I was going around saying, oh, it's probably just another version of the common cold. You know, I was stupid in that respect. But by the end of February, I was saying to people people kept coming up to me saying, you're a rational optimist. You say this stuff. Nothing to worry about, don't you? And I was starting to say no. Actually, I am quite worried about this. Because I remember this because, you know, I've got several colleagues who said to me, if you're worried, we need to be panicking. And Well, you're a rational optimist, not a blind optimist. Well, exactly. Exactly. And and by the way, in the rational optimist, I had a line in there saying, look. I think it's gonna be a great century, but that doesn't mean that, you know, I might be wrong that an asteroid might strike or a pandemic might break out. I said that. But then in the subsequent years, I also wrote stuff saying, actually, I don't think we need do need to worry about pandemics too much. I think our, diagnostic technologies, our genetic technologies have got so good that we don't need to to to worry about that anymore. So I was right, and then I was wrong again. Well, it happens to the best of us. So, you know, I wanna you know, and this is a slight shifting of gears, but it's related. You know, we just described why COVID 19 was so effective. I mean, it transmits very easily. You could be asymptomatic or asymptomatic for many days, allowing for easier transmission as you go out and about. Like, if it killed within one second, it's not gonna be a pandemic because it'll obliterate itself right away. And I wanna make the analogy with ideas. And and you do this so well in the evolution of everything and, of course, how innovation works. How does an idea go viral or or a thought or a philosophy, whatever, or or an innovation in ways that are similar to to COVID 19? Like, can we learn about the transmission of ideas by studying how COVID 19 transmits? I think that's a wonderful idea, and, surely, yes, we can. You know, super spreader events for COVID are paralleled in the world of ideas, aren't they? You know, a meme that goes crazy. I love, you know, the fact that we use the word viral is a close parallel already. So there are differences. You know, one one one mustn't get too carried away with metaphors here. But, I mean, I'm fascinated by the fact that in the seventies, the the Internet starts to get going or at least computers start to get going, and the very first computer viruses start. And I think they were first called worms, but then they quit quite quickly got called viruses. And, viruses are bad things. You know, let's not forget that that there is probably no such thing as a good virus, and there are there are, non harmful viruses. But the, you know, you don't particularly want there's no virus you want to catch unless it's, in the 18th century catching cowpox so that you don't catch smallpox. That's not true of our ideas. You know, the the best ideas spread because they benefit people, and I don't think there's a close parallel to that in in virology. So understanding how these things spread is is useful, but I wouldn't you know, there's something constructive about ideas. They they add to other ideas and meet and mate. So it's much more like the spread of good genes than it is about like the spread of of of viruses, I think. Yeah. So sorry. I'm I'm thinking on my feet here, but I'm Sure. I'm I'm coming to the conclusion that, yes, there are things we can learn, but we shouldn't overdo that learning. I guess one idea, which is you mentioned how, you know, these SARS like viruses hit this ACE 2 receptor, but maybe you can manipulate it so it hits other receptors or is more favorable to the ACE 2 receptor, perhaps an idea that has optionality. You know, people might like it for x reason, but they also might like it for y reason as opposed to an idea that which you just need to like it for this reason or you don't like it at all. Absolutely. The the the the history of innovation is littered with serendipity where you invent a thing for one purpose and then discover that that it has other uses as well. You know, even something as sort of obvious as the mobile phone, we think we're inventing a device for speaking to each other while on the move. Well, it turns out we're inventing a device for sending each other photographs. You know? Nobody saw that coming. So the the optionality does emerge very much so, and, and and, you know, that clearly happens in in virology too that that you you get you get viruses that start out being respiratory and they end up being I mean, curiously, actually, SARS CoV 2 seems to affect the guts of bats more than well, no. It probably affects the lungs too, but but, you know, it seems to cause, gastrointestinal diseases, a lot of the time, or at least a lot of these SARS viruses do in bats. So there there are you know, viruses can change their sort of I think the word is etiology, when they go from one species to another. It's interesting. And then I also wanted to ask, like and you you you just mentioned about the Internet and how that you know, suddenly we started having computer viruses and so on. In how innovation works, again, you you mentioned how the the invention often precedes the science. And that's often why government funding of specific science doesn't necessarily result in inventions because it happens in the reverse direction. Is the Internet and I we've talked about this before in the in an earlier podcast, but I always think this is an interesting question to explore. Is the Internet a a counterexample? Because, you know, the Department of Defense, funded the development of the first Internet. And even I believe, you know, some government body funded, you know, CERN, which where where the, you know, Tim Berners Lee worked and and developed the first web browser. So I'm curious what science versus invention there. There there's 2, different issues there. Does discovery lead to invention? Does science lead to technology is the first question. And the second question is, does government funding lead to, innovations? And to take the first question, yes, you certainly can get cases where you fund, pure research without expecting to get a, technology out of it, and then the technology does come out of it. It's called spin offs. It happens all the time in universities, etcetera. But it's surprising how often the opposite happens. You tinker with technologies and come up with new technologies, and out of that comes a science. So for example, you know, the science of thermodynamics came out of the steam engine rather than vice versa. A lot of the science of immunology came out of vaccines rather than vice versa. You know, we had vaccines long before we had any understanding of the immune system. There are lots you know, the science of chemistry came out of the dye industry and so on. And CRISPR gene editing, is a discovery made in universities in the last 10 years, but only because of work done in the yogurt industry in the previous 10 years, which was only possible because of work done on salt loving bacteria in a university before that. You know? So the the the often, it goes backwards and forwards between technology and science. But as for the question of whether or not the the the government funding is necessary for this kind of stuff and or or should deserves the credit, it's absolutely true that, you know, government funded CERN. Tim Berners Lee came up with the, World Wide Web at CERN. But that wasn't his day job. You know? It was it was a side product. And government funded, DARPA, and that resulted in the DARPA net, which became the Internet. But to say that, therefore, the government invented the Internet is, I think, a mistake because, you know, DARPA Net is a very primitive early prototype. Huge amount of work had to go into turning it into what it did, most of which was done by users over the next decades. It's a bit like an old story that Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser, used to tell, about a beaver saying to a rabbit as they look at Hoover Dam. No. I didn't invent it, but it is based on an idea of mine. And I think, you know, giving the government the giving the, DARPA the the credit for the Internet is a bit like giving a beaver the credit for the Hoover Dam. So and related to this, do you think, the government will be able to handle all governments will be able to handle kind of the economic ramifications of what's happening, whether it's inflation or these issues with supply chain, these issues with, you know, employment or, you know, there's there's many companies filing for bankruptcy. Again, we don't know. It takes years to figure out what the effects of these are going to be, and I'm worried. This is my worry is that we're not going to be able to there is a chance, maybe not greater than 50, but there is a chance bad things will happen. I think I agree with you. I mean, I I think human beings will handle these changes fine. You know, we'll work from home. We'll readjust our working patterns. We'll redeploy labor in different roles. A bit of a shakeup sometimes helps innovation, gets incumbents out the way, and gets new business models to come forward and so on. So human beings can do all that. But when human beings form these things called governments, they sometimes do some quite daft things to try and control the process or direct the process or predict the process. And I'm increasingly cynical about whether they know what they're doing in that respect. I'm all for them holding the ring in terms of, you know, ensuring that that people do fair dealing and all that kind of thing. But I do worry when they say, right. In the next generation, these are the technologies we want. These are the ones we don't want. These are what how we want people to work to run their lives, and these are the ways we don't want them to run their lives. I just think that that's too top down a way of trying to organize society. I mean, the beauty of just go back to that simple example that Frederic Bastiat came up with. A city like London or New York, north of 10,000,000 people are gonna eat lunch every day. Somebody's got to decide how much, you know, avocado, how much chicken, to make available in which parts of the city every day. And the yet people are gonna make up their decision about what to eat at the last minute. So whoever this guy is, this lunch commissioner, he's unbelievably good at his job. I mean, it's incredible because, basically, everybody gets what they want for lunch every day. How does that happen? I mean, who is he? And give give the guy a medal. Well, of course, the point is he doesn't exist. The point is it's individuals negotiating with each other saying, well, avocado is a bit expensive, so I'll have chicken today or whatever it might be. You know, it's it's a negotiation between supply and demand in something called a market that sorts this out. And I think that's you know, we we forget that society is a bottom up process. It happens like that. It doesn't need to be told by nanny what to do every 10 minutes. Well, Matt Ridley, again, it's always such a pleasure to have you on the the podcast. In the intro, I describe your your books. It was prerecorded, but I describe your books and how they've they've benefited me. But I literally think if someone reads your books in order, their their IQ or however you measure intelligence is going to go up. And I say this. There's very few authors I I think about in this way, but your books have have definitely changed my life. It's made me think about so many different things. I've stolen so many ideas from you that I don't give you credit for, so I'll give them That's fine. Credit for you here. I've done the same to other people. So, but thank you very much. And, and this book, Viral, the search for the origin of COVID 19, which you cowrote with our previous podcast guest, Alina Chan, is brilliant in your discussions and explorations of how you you you conducted this search for the origin, and I just highly recommend it. And and thank you for enlightening all of us here. Thank you so much, James. It's really great to be back on the show again, and, lovely to talk to you. Thanks.