SIO453: How Could Bret Weinstein Have Been So Wrong About COVID?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:15 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 453. I'm your host Thomas Smith, and I am so excited for what you're going to hear in the coming episodes. Finally, after a lot of work, we've got a three-part mini-series on what the fuck is a Brett Weinstein.

0:00:34 Thomas: Weinstein, uh, for anyone who doesn't know, is an intellectual dork web asshole who I actually covered when he first came to prominence. Uh, he taught at a little school called Evergreen, and he did a racism because he found it so appalling that black students would want to hold a day of absence. Uh, white students and white faculty wanted to honor that, that, and not come to campus that day. It was kind of a reversal of the typical thing that they used to do, which is a day of absence where the black students and some faculty would be absent from the campus to prove a point. It was a difficult particularly year, full of a significant police event nearby the school that year. And so the thought was to kind of show extra extra solidarity that they would reverse the normal dynamic, and white people would be absent from school for the day, but also could participate in seminars. And so it was all one of those things that is entirely reasonable on a human level until it gets blown into a culture war issue. And then it turns into a reverse racism and how dare you and all that stuff. And Brett Weinstein was a professor who could not believe that anyone would ever not want him somewhere and, uh, handle that well, and just the attitude that he ought to be leading discussions on race rather than perhaps listening or even just, I don't know, giving a shit, you know, that's also an option. If you don't agree with something, you just kind of let it play out and not have an opinion on it. That is always an option for these reactionaries. I always marvel. It's not like you have to be the super wokest of woke. I mean, I think you should do your best, but even if you just disagree or you aren't there, you can always just shut the fuck up. You can always just shut the fuck up. But anyway, Brett could not be silenced. And I covered that at the time and got a lot of pushback for the fact that I did not at all sympathize with Brett. I think lots of people would like to pretend they all saw through it too, but, uh, I'm on record, and lots of people, um, in a way that was, in uh... disbelief that I couldn't support this free speech warrior. Since then, Brett has done nothing but prove me right, which, uh, you know, I do love that the assholes just go out of their way to do that, you know, whoever, James Lindsay, Brett Weinstein, Musk, these Rogozian, these folk that for a while seem to be fooling some people, and then you call them out, and you feel crazy a little bit because people aren't seeing what you're seeing, and then, boy, they just go out of their way to prove you right continually. And when Brett Weinstein started his little dark... He left the university. Uh, they, I think they paid him off a little bit to leave, but it really wasn't much compared to what being a tenured professor is worth. I think, I mean, it's both of them. Both of them were he and his wife, uh, were tenured professors, I believe. And they took a little payout to leave. I feel like that was probably a good deal for the school knowing how much the fucking legal system costs. I'll never blame anyone for doing a settlement, even if it seems not ideal, because holy shit, that's a lot of money to just sit there and fight something that you may not even win. Leaving the university where he was a professor of evolutionary biology, he immediately went intellectual dork web and started his Dark Horse podcast, which is like a YouTube and a podcast. First guest was Andy Ngo.

0:03:45 Thomas: Of course, Glenn Loury, Douglas Murray, Sam Harris, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Coleman Hughes. It's just a murderer's row of the exact same fucking people that they all circle jerk with. Then COVID happens. As if he couldn't get dumb enough, he had opinions on COVID and the vaccines, and they were really bad. They were so bad, in fact, that that leads me to today's episode. Because beloved SIO guest, Dr. Eric Jaffe, who taught us about dinosaurs in a delightful way and genetics and all that stuff, they're watching when Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying were on Bill Maher back in 2021, I think. Yeah, early 2021. The interview was so bad that Dr. Eric Jaffe, somebody who kind of does know what he's talking about, how in the world this guy could even have a PhD in this. It's that bad. And so that's the start of our journey. Eric's going to take us through some of that interview and what was so alarming that he literally questioned how Brett Weinstein could have the sort behind his name that he does. And that led to some more digging, which will be parts two and three. But for now, part one, Dr. Eric Jaffe on Brett Weinstein. And if you'd like to get part two and three right away, go to patreon.com/seriouspod, hop on there and they'll be available for you. And without ad breaks for everyone else, you have to wait a little bit, but there'll be very soon. Thank you so much for listening and supporting. After this break, let's get on over to Dr. Eric Jaffe.

0:05:24 Thomas: And I'm joined once again by dinosaur creator and expert Eric Jaffe. How are you doing, Eric?

0:05:31 Eric: I'm doing so well. Just adopted a puppy, so kind of starting off summer break really right. Right.

0:05:35 Thomas: I have to imagine you're... you're doing turning the puppy into a dinosaur over time. Are you doing weird science to the puppy, or is it just ethical?

0:05:40 Eric: He would be more like turning it into a Dimetrodon, right? Because if we wanted to follow our evolutionary lineages, they already diverge past the dinosaur.

0:05:47 Thomas: So stupid. So stupid of me. I'm so dumb. Sorry. I can't believe I made such an elementary error like that. No, course, listeners, I think will remember the dinosaur episode because I got to tell you that loved the dinosaur episode. And I just want to say I did as well. And I'm so glad to have you back. So thanks for doing that. But we're going to be talking about something a little, a little less jolly, a little less delightful, I think this time around.

0:06:10 Eric: Definitely a different kind of dinosaur.

0:06:12 Thomas: So before we do, because I think maybe we need to, can you remind people kind of your, your background, your qualifications, just in case some of your fans know of this particular dinosaur tune in and want to know how you know what you're talking about?

0:06:24 Eric: Yeah, Of course. So my name is Dr. Eric Jaffe. I am currently a high school biology teacher for Mastery Shoemaker in Philadelphia. So shout out to my Shoemaker people. But before I was a high school biology teacher, I actually worked in the lab for about 15 years. So I spent a lot of my undergraduate and then kind of a couple of years before undergraduate working in influenza research and especially, as will be relevant for some of this talk, doing research into how to make a universal flu vaccine. Now, I was not the lead kind of scientist there. I was much more of a technician. But But as I was preparing for grad school, I Was still doing the research and following the papers and all that. Once I was in grad school I started really focusing on developmental biology, biology how we make ourselves from a small subset of programs and kind of principles like we talked about in the last episode and how that expands using those principles of evolution into the myriad of forms we see now that's really relevant because what we're really going to talk about today is how a certain person who also has a phd

0:07:21 Eric: In biology is not really. Talk well, yes, we will get into that, but the main point is, right, I feel very confident talking about developmental biologies, particularly in the neural tube that I study. As I mentioned, I got my PhD in developmental biology, kind of figuring out how we sew our brain and spinal cord together. And

0:07:21 Thomas: Allegedly no Oh shit. I didn't do that. Was I supposed to sew them together? I didn't, oh, was it, was that in the instructions or, oh, thank

0:07:44 Eric: If you are born and you don't have spina bifida, you have likely sewn your brain and spinal cord together properly.

0:07:51 Thomas: God. That is, that's a relief. Cause if anyone would forget to do that, it'd be me. It'd

0:07:55 Eric: It actually is a relief, you know, like how you're not supposed to share, you know, that you're pregnant until your first trimester is done. Major, major reason is because like the big stopgap is gastrulation, that early formation of tissues. But then the second biggest reason why your embryo will spontaneously abort is because of a neural tube closure defect.

0:08:13 Thomas: Neural tube closure defect. So, and how's that related to the spine? Whatever

0:08:16 Eric: That's that rolling up of, so like, you know how you start as like a flat kind of tadpole looking thing in the embryo?

0:08:22 Thomas: Feel like I'm flat tadpole looking.

0:08:24 Eric: What your body does, right, because you're a three-dimensional being, is it takes that flat sheet of cells and it rolls up and then sews itself together to make your brain and spinal cord. When that doesn't happen and it's left open, that tissue gets damaged and cleared by the immune system and you end up with missing pieces or places where the nerves aren't connecting properly. And that's when you get either spina bifida or anencephaly, which is those really devastating birth defects that end with infant mortality. It's actually, do you remember Governor Northam when did that whole late -term abortion thing that got demonized in the Virginia governor race?

0:08:55 Thomas: Oh yeah. Yeah.

0:08:56 Eric: That's what he was talking about is anencephalic babies which just made it so barbarous that they tried to make that into an attack ad because he was talking about ending life of people without brains and it was horrible he chose the only humane thing you can do in that situation

0:09:01 Thomas: It's awful. Wonderful. Absolutely. And that's not the topic. But yeah, I just, we've talked about it before. Like Lydia and I went through it. We didn't go through that, but we went through, you know, thinking we were having a baby and pregnant again, and then not, because of, I honestly might have just been something before, in the phases. But I just wanted to say that that's something that absolutely zero people should have any fucking say in other than you and your doctor of what's going on. It's like such a sad, tough, traumatic time. And so it's particularly just frustrating that that's politicized. But anyway, different topic for today.

0:09:12 Eric: Sorry the yeah well and it's interesting that's actually somewhat of a segue because this is going to be a little bit of a more political episode than my last one my last was more about about the wonders of science. This one's going to be about when people misuse it and frankly, don't communicate it well and the bad effects that has in the public. And we're going to focus on everyone's favorite person, Brett Weinstein.

0:10:02 Eric: Now, the reason why I gave that short intro of my qualifications is just like evolution, biology expertise has like a nested hierarchy to it, right? I am very good at talking about the developmental processes that form the neural tube. I am way less good at talking about the developmental processes that form the heart, right?

0:10:17 Thomas: Hmm.

0:10:17 Eric: I'm even less good at talking about the biophysics that goes into regulating the genes in the heart, right?

0:10:24 Thomas: Almost like it's very complicated, and people need to specialize, and they don't know, like, everything. I

0:10:28 Eric: Exactly. And so when Brett Weinstein is talking with assumed credentials and knowledge of vaccines about COVID, right, you expect him to have a certain amount of molecular experience, Swimming right. In those complicated waters. In the same way, I don't talk about ecology very often because I've not been on boats tagging orcas and seeing their effect, right? Was a different expert that you brought in.

0:10:50 Thomas: Because, for one, again, I myself, of Andrew over in Opening Arguments, I did notice that the real lawyers I talked to that helped me kick his ass were like, it is weird that he talks like he's an expert on everything, everything. And and There's perhaps a commonality there. Now, I want, but, very fair, because I do think being a science communicator and using your credentials to talk about a lot of areas of science, that seems like a valid thing to do. So how would you kind of draw that line, maybe even just you, like in your life, which I think you started to talk about, how would you draw that line between, okay, yeah, you know more than I do, probably, about, like, areas of biology that you're not specialized in, obviously, you're going to know more than like me. But how do you do that responsibly in a way that's not, you know, going to lead to Brett Weinstein?

0:11:36 Eric: That is such a good question. And one of the things I'm going to try and do is model that in this conversation, right? So a big thing is recognizing when you are uncertain. So I would say the GOAT of science communication that I've heard on podcast forums is Dr. Sean Carroll, right now.

0:11:50 Thomas: I I love Sean Carroll. I'm so glad you said, I was, I was literally, I was like, okay, please don't say someone who sucks. Please don't say someone. But no, he's great.

0:11:57 Eric: Here's why Sean Carroll is amazing, though. Have you ever heard him talk about biology?

0:12:00 Thomas: Only I've heard him interview people, but I haven't heard him just decide he's a biologist. Just know.

0:12:04 Eric: He almost always couches it with, you would think, or this is what I think, but I'm not an expert. Even when he's not talking about biology, right? When he starts talking about string theory, he goes, I don't really dabble in string theory. But these are my thoughts, right. So he always caveats it. And then he gives his credences. Nothing in science is 100 % or 0%. It's somewhere in that murky middle.

0:12:26 Thomas: And He's probably not going to be like, look, I'm not a string theorist, but here's why the entire thing is incorrect. And that's my, you know, it's like, you can talk about it and try to help people understand it. But if you're going to come in to not only just, just not a different field, forget that, like that you shouldn't be doing, but if it's, as you say, a different area of specialization, and you're gonna come in and say, like, every expert in it is wrong and you're right, that is just so obviously not the right way to go about that, right?

0:12:54 Eric: No, exactly. Right. Like, I'm Not gonna go to a herpes virus conference and be like, guys, guys, I think you're wrong about the latency period of herpes virus, because they would laugh at my face. I have no idea about the late C period of Herpes virus.

0:13:00 Thomas: They would laugh at your herpes-ridden, riddled face you

0:13:07 Eric: Well, most people have some form of herpies just as a fun.

0:13:09 Thomas: Have like an axe to grind just like totally open her no sorry

0:13:15 Eric: Like, you get my point, right? Like, is my expert of my expertise allows me to know that there is a latency period in herpesvirus. But I would never pretend to go beyond that second level. So that's even in that last episode, right, would say I'm not an expert in paleontology. I'm much more of a developmental biologist, or I think I remember this correctly, but these things might be wrong. Right.

0:13:17 Thomas: It's well made right right and He didn't make any claims that, like, actually, actually they're wrong about when all the dinosaurs were, like, you know, and so, okay, I think point made and point well taken, but it is something that I think too many people don't think about when they hear a quote-unquote expert. And it turns out you were, I guess, listening back in the day when I first started talking about Brett Weinstein with his, the Evergreen bullshit that he did. So I've never had the image of him as, like, a good scientist or science communicator, but I didn't necessarily think he couldn't talk about virality. Like, I was confused. I was like, well, shouldn't he know better? You know, and the average person, even someone like me who, you know, I spent a lot of time around scientists and talking to people like you, I, we don't necessarily know, lay people don't necessarily know, like, oh, what does biologist mean? Like, what does that mean that he does? Or what is, what do his precise credentials mean that he can talk about with actual expertise.

0:14:24 Eric: That was actually the exact journey I went on. So like you said, I first heard about Brett Weinstein on your show, right? But I didn't give it a lot of thought because Trump was in office at the time. I was in the middle of my PhD. So you have a lot other things to worry about about than following a random campus controversy that usually turns into nothing. Then COVID happened and he started using his platform to talk about science, right? I'd known he was a PhD in biology from your episodes. I was expecting him to at least talk intelligently. And then, and I am kind of loathe to admit this, it's a little bit like admitting you're like a Phish fan or a Dave Matthews band fan, but I did listen to Bill Maher.

0:15:00 Thomas: That's so unfair. That's so unfair to Dave Matthews. I'm so sorry. I'M SO SORRY. I AM ALL DOWN FOR THE DAVE MATTHEWS BAND AS DORKY DAD MUSIC NOW. I am down for it, but to compare that to the absolute menace that is Bill Maher, I am so sorry! No, no. That is too far. I'm taking a stand, sir, sir. Dave Matthews is just dorky. He's not a menace to our entire fucking society.

0:15:20 Eric: All right. Yes, he's not pernicious. You are absolutely right about that.

0:15:26 Thomas: I mean, some may disagree, but no,

0:15:29 Eric: The point was, right, I used to listen to bill Maher, this was actually the last episode I ever listened to. This was when I turned it off.

0:15:35 Thomas: My, we'll have to compare notes. Not that it's a competition. Mine was the second time he had Barry Weiss on in like two weeks. I can't remember when it was. It's embarrassingly later than I'd probably care to admit because I did like during the Trump administration. I liked that Bill Maher was both taking down Trump in a way that I didn't think other people were like in him on as a bully.

0:15:54 Thomas: But also he was talking to Republicans and I felt such a need for like, is anyone going to do this? Because I feel like we're so split. But anyway, point is, I very yeah, quickly he's gone much worse than than he ever was, and so I'm glad we're both rid of him, but okay, Weinstein, I'm sure is on his show all the time, I have to imagine,

0:16:10 Eric: So that's I can't mention anymore because the first time I saw him and he spouted nonsense, I just decided to turn it off, but basically when he came on, and this was, if I remember right, a couple of months into the pandemic. So, like, I would say June or July, right? He was talking about that lab leak hypothesis, which is the idea that COVID wasn't from coming from a natural reservoir in the wild that then spilled over into humans, but that it was either intentionally created or studied in a lab and then it escaped. Before we get too far into the deep end on this, I do want to be very careful about this. We don't know the origin of COVID right now, right? This is me admitting uncertainty and not trying to pretend we know things that we don't. What I can say is it's very unlikely that we will ever find the origin of COVID at this point, because those first couple of weeks identifying patient zero, all of those things are such key parts of that process that it's going to be very, very hard, especially because, and we'll get to this in a little bit, the thing that's mainly being accused, right, that these escaped from a gain-of-function, are meant to be experiments that mimic evolution. Well, if you're mimicking evolution, how are you going to compare it to what you expect evolution to do in the wild?

0:16:46 Thomas: I Right,

0:17:19 Eric: Does that make sense?

0:17:19 Thomas: Like any, any knowledge we would have about, like, okay, what would this do, I, I have to assume that's kind of what you're trying to model. Is that what you're saying?

0:17:27 Eric: Exactly. In fact, the point of those gain -of -function experiments is to passage it without manipulation and see what evolution pressures will do to the virus, right? It basically mimics what passage through the human population would look like.

0:17:41 Thomas: It's hard to not want to go because I'm very fascinated in this. I think it's such an annoying, complicated argument about the lab leak thing, because on one hand, obviously there was no reason to believe it specifically is a lab leak. And then a bunch of people were very sure it was. And then there's the counter, counter to the counter backlash, that it was like, well, it could be. And then everyone who said it definitely was, was declaring victory. And it's like, no, but you also weren't right. Like you're, you're not right. If you said it definitely was a lab leak and we don't, we still don't know anyway.

0:18:11 Eric: Well, that goes back to that science communication, though, and we will get to this in the video, but at the time especially, it is very irresponsible to say that you are certain of any of those hypotheses, right? Even now, I would not put any level of certainty on any hypothesis. What I would say is there's certain evidence that points one way, certain evidence that points the other way, but because of the entanglement of what we would expect to see, right, because evolution evolution in the lab is going mimic evolution in a way, and because we were dealing with a government that did not publish records of that initial outbreak, it's going to be very, very hard to pinpoint the origins.

0:18:44 Thomas: I would like to note that even, as much as these COVID conspiracy theorists think that everyone had this wrong, blah, blah, Dr. Fauci was asked in Congress the other day, hey, what about the lab leak. He's like, yeah, that's possible. He wasn't like, no, it definitely, we know it wasn't you're all asshole. No. He was like, Yeah, it's still possible. We'll never know.

0:19:02 Eric: But what they did was they waited until there was enough supporting evidence to make it a viable theory. I think what happens a lot of times, the reason why scientists lose to popularizers of science that misuse science is that whole saying that a lie spreads around the world by the time truth puts on its pants. Right.

0:19:19 Thomas: Yep. And the certainty, the certainty and confidence is compelling to people. And, even though it's, almost, only should be the opposite, if, you if someone's that certain, but it's also more complicated than that. 'Cause if I'm that certain that the world is round, it's like, yeah, we are that certain that the world is round. Like, the flat earthers are idiots. But, like, knowing which of those things is a thing that you can have that level of confidence on, and which things you can't, is difficult. And most people don't know that.

0:19:42 Eric: This is why this unit, with Brett Weinstein is so useful as a tool to both kind of teach about the pratfalls of science communication, but also to teach some basic principles that you can give yourself to regulate expert opinion. Opinion, because last we got into the weeds, right? This interview, we are not going to need to get into the weed. I'm going to go with, this is why I had to end up questioning whether he actually got his PhD. We're going to do very basic, just counter arguments. And we're going to go through kind of those cognitive routines that you should do when processing information to kind of give yourself a self-check.

0:19:54 Thomas: I love this. Oh, I love this okay So this is you not really knowing that much about this guy, and at this point in time when you heard, you know, when you watch this back, when we, you know, didn't hate Bill Maher as much, you're like, uh, the hell is this guy talking about, I'm excited. So we're

0:20:27 Eric: We are. So because this thing is riddled with error, you might as well start at the very beginning where Bill Maher says something like, this, this is the only lab in the world doing this research, it's unique, and we're just going to start right there. There is very little labs that they are the only Lab in the World doing a very particular research, right? Now, he might have meant that this is The Only Lab doing gain -of -function research on a particular strain of COVID that's probably not true, the other thing about the lab leak, on right, the one hand, the fact that Wu Wuhan has that institute of virology supports the argument of the lab, right?

0:21:07 Thomas: There's just a lot of labs and a lot of world and a whole lot of scientists. -hmm. Sure.

0:21:18 Eric: Every major city has an institute of virology pretty much because every place with a med school campus is going to be isolating viruses for patient samples for research, right. So what you want to do, and I think a lot of people understand that science is about not falsifying, proving things right. But I think people often take that to mean, can I prove my own idea wrong? That's one part of it, right? You have to also prove the other ideas wrong in order to privilege your hypothesis. Does that make sense?

0:21:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:21:46 Eric: If I reach into a bag and I'm trying to determine whether something is a baseball or not, I can't reach in and say it's round, right, that could be a grapefruit. That could be, you know, anything with that circular shape. But if I say it's got raised seams on it in an angle that makes an oval every so often, now I'm starting to separate baseball from other round objects.

0:22:06 Thomas: You still can't say, ah, if it is a baseball, it would be round. Therefore, I'm now certain it's that. You

0:22:13 Eric: That's exactly right. What happens in this interview a lot is they make predictions on, if it's this, it would be that, without accounting for the alternative explanations.

0:22:20 Thomas: Yeah. They would say like, if it weren't a baseball, it might be square, triangle, but it's circular. So therefore, and it's like, yeah, but you have to look at the other things that could be circular.

0:22:29 Eric: A good example of that, do you remember when you did the conceptual penis hoax?

0:22:32 Thomas: Oh, that was a long while ago, but yeah, the

0:22:34 Eric: Those authors, and they fall into the same traps that Brent Weinstein does a lot of times.

0:22:37 Thomas: Same fucking people.

0:22:39 Eric: Exactly. They sent in papers to one field of science, right? They might have proven proven their... Well, what I mean is like gender studies, right?

0:22:43 Thomas: Was it even science? I don't even think it was yeah whatever it was sure yeah just

0:22:49 Eric: Submitted their paper to one academic publishing house. Might've confirmed their hypothesis about that field, but they didn't distinguish it from other fields. In order to do that, they would've had to send mock papers to other fields, hard sciences, soft sciences, right. They did show was that there's a problem in academia. They haven't showed that there was a problem the field because they didn' do the requisite narrowing down of possibilities and ruling things out.

0:23:11 Thomas: For the record, I think they may have done a couple different journals eventually, but yeah, I take your point.

0:23:15 Eric: No, they did a couple of different gender studies journals. They didn't make different fields.

0:23:18 Thomas: What you're saying got your point yeah yeah for

0:23:20 Eric: They didn't indict the field itself. They indicted that journal, right?

0:23:22 Thomas: Not at all yeah yeah gotcha

0:23:23 Eric: And it's because they didn't do that exclusion part, right, they didn't rule out other things, when really that's what you should be doing in science. You have to try and rule out yours with all your might, and then you have to try and rule out others with all of your might, and then whatever is left standing is the winner. Okay, let's get started. Maher starts his interview by saying, this is the stuff of conspiracy, right. These are things that happen and we're not allowed to talk about. I I just want to put another quick note about the first thing your brain should do when you hear that. Says that this stuff is often talked about as conspiracy theory, right? I just wanna note, that's a defense mechanism when you know your evidence is inconclusive or weak, right. I had a student or a friend that I just visited a couple weeks ago, when he was a grad student, he did research on something called a mid body. There was very little evidence that this thing did anything in the cell or what its thing was. But when he wrote grants, he didn't say there's huge conspiracies around suppressing mid -body research, right?

0:23:43 Thomas: Hey yeah yeah

0:24:20 Eric: What he said was there's not very much evidence right now.

0:24:22 Thomas: It's like all right this is gonna sound crazy yeah

0:24:24 Eric: Right, exactly. You're having reasonable discussions about science, you don't have to use invective, right, you can just marshal the data and that will speak for itself. That's your first warning sign as a layperson that someone is engaging in polemic instead of in actual science communication. Brett then says, says in Because Bill Maher breaks into the interview and goes, thing I really want to talk about, and it's not talked about because it's like a conspiracy theory, is the possibility of a lab leak. Maybe I've spent a lot of time talking about why that is a really irresponsible thing to do as a science communicator, right? Right. You want to make sure that what you're doing is using proper weighting of probabilities. If he was absolutely 95% certain, there should not have only been one paper published about the COVID origin virus.

0:25:35 Eric: Right. He should have published his own paper and said, I have 95 percent confidence level based on this methodology in

0:25:41 Thomas: And then people could actually peer review it, huh? And like, you know, evaluate it properly.

0:25:46 Eric: Maher then says, we are so politicized, so polarized in this country, and I just want to put this in real quick. Spent 15 years in academia. Never once did anyone at a conference, giving a talk, at a poster, talk about the political implications of their research. They were so busy just going over the figures and talking about one pixel that may or may not be a filopodia, right. Science is myopic. They care about their individual grant proposals. They care about their individual research. Now, that does lead to problems in science. I am not saying science is perfect. What it's not is a grand conspiracy. It is a bunch of people following their individual incentives and interests to try and do research on a small scale that can then be stitched together into a grand synthesis.

0:26:29 Thomas: I think that's so, so important to say, because there are people who try to make the claim that, like, hey, science is political. It's like, no, it's not that it's political, I think you put it very well. It's not that there's no overt political conspiracy, like, that's not going to happen, but it's not political, like, there's going to be people with different biases and different whatevers. And also, as an institution, like everything becomes political in some ways or another.

0:26:50 Eric: They also reverse that causality a lot, though, right? They say that because all scientists are left -leaning, not all, but 80 % of scientists are left leaning, that it's a left takeover of academia, right. Right. The most parsimonious explanation of that, because it's clear that not everyone starting the Ph.D. program is liberal, is that as you learn more and more about the world, you start to get more liberal philosophies.

0:27:11 Thomas: What what happened to me? I'm not even a freaking scientist. I went to business school and I turned more liberal from college because they're

0:27:18 Eric: Should give conservative pause that climate scientists think that Democrats have the better climate policy, that biologists think they have the better health policies. Policies, right? If every expert is aligning with the sub -policies of an individual party over another, that's a good health check, again, that you can do as a non -expert to go, well, why are they siding with that party and not the other?

0:27:35 Thomas: All in on it. Eric, come on.

0:27:39 Eric: But minor stuff. Now we're going to start diving into science, right. Now that we've established that I'm not trying to do this as a political hit job, I just want to go over the science, we're going to talk about just how terrible Brett is in this interview when it comes to science. So the first thing they bring up is, you may have heard of this, but the COVID vaccine used this experimental technology using mRNA, right? Maer says to Brett, I think you should use the little virus, right, you're advocating for the little virus instead of the mRNA. And And he prevaricates a little bit, but what he ends up saying is something to the effect of, we know what the DNA in the virus is doing, we have encountered it it before. We have used it before, right? This RNA is new. We haven't used it before. This is really stupid if you have a PhD in biology. And here's why. This thing called the central dogma of biology. Very simply, all it means is that we store information as DNA. DNA then gets what we call transcribed, right, a little temporary note of it is made in RNA. Then it gets produced into the protein, which actually does the function in that space and time. The best

0:28:40 Eric: Way to think about this, how I would think about it, actually. You're at a restaurant, right? You have all your different diners, which are all your different cells. Because if you remember from last time, our skin cells and our liver cells are not the same thing. When they're eating lunch, they don't want the same food as when they get dinner, right. So your DNA is that all you can eat diner, you know, the ones that have like every single thing you could possibly imagine in food.

0:28:39 Thomas: So So the RNA is like Ram. Sizzler.

0:29:01 Eric: Yeah, something like sizzler, right, one of those all you can do. Any type of food is good. Got it all covered. RNA is the ticket that the waiter writes off of the people ordering from the menu, right? It's It's constrained in space and time.

0:29:13 Thomas: Okay, so it can't be a buffet. Sorry, I ruined it. It can't Sizzlar. That's a buffet, but it's a restaurant that makes everything. Okay? Sorry. I ruined your example.

0:29:19 Eric: The DNA stays day to day, right ? That menu goes the same day to day. The tickets for the individual orders are highly variable and temporary, right ? They're constantly going away. They're cleaned up at the end of the day. They are thrown out. And the food is the protein, right? The thing that actually does the thing that the ticket was telling is needed at that space and time. Reason why his aversion to mRNA is really, really stupid is let's say you want to be worried about long -term change. What's going to be more harmful for the long - term progression of that menu? Marking up the menu or marking up individual meal tickets during the day of service, right.

0:29:54 Thomas: That's very interesting.

0:29:55 Eric: Not only that, he then starts saying something like, well, we know what viruses do. We know how they travel. But this is just a RNA wrapped in a lipid package. Vesicle Right. Basically his words. It's going to be a little different on the video.

0:30:07 Thomas: What does that mean? Yeah.

0:30:09 Eric: Yes. We're about to. Yes. This most people, we're not quite at the part where like anyone can prove it wrong. We're still at, like, my PhD spider sense is tingling, right? This part, virus, by definition, is going to do a host of things, right, it's attenuated, but viruses, by recognition, have more than one gene, they're going to do lots of stuff, right. Have to bind proteins and reorganize the cell, they have to take over host machinery, they use your own body parts to build their own copies of themselves, things like that, right! Virus just uses the exact same thing that your cell membranes are made out of. All that happens when you send get and receive materials in and out of your cells is they need to be packaged, So right? Your cell membrane kind of takes a little gloop of itself, a little bit of those oil and fat bubbles, and they encase it around the thing that they're shuttling. But this happens hundreds of thousands of times a day to every one of your millions and billions of cells. It's just your cell membrane reorganizing slightly. It is one of the most benign, simple, regular processes that we do so often. To be afraid of a fat circle is basically to say that this soap bubble will harm me.

0:31:14 Eric: Really all that this virus is. It's a little piece of RNA, and then it's wrapped around some fat. And

0:31:19 Thomas: Well, okay. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page. When you say this virus, you mean like how they're using it for were the mRNA.

0:31:23 Eric: This vaccine, sorry. Yes.

0:31:26 Thomas: Okay. You meant this vaccine. Okay, gotcha.

0:31:28 Eric: This vaccine is just a little piece of mRNA and then that fat bubble.

0:31:32 Thomas: That the are saying this is because the people who don't know anything, they were able to make a plausible sounding argument that like, hey, every vaccine we've ever had, we take a little piece of the thing, take a Little Bit of the Bad Guy, and we disable it somehow. We give a little dose of it and bam you got your smallpox vaccine but this one they're doing something evil and different and dangerous too and so that's the context of what all this is right yeah

0:31:59 Eric: And right. And this is the less dangerous version, right? This is like, why am I messing around with a possibly, you know, let's say that attenuated virus regained some function because biology is weird, right, if you remember when the polio vaccine happened, one in every thousand polio vaccine recipients or something like that ended up paralyzed, Now, right? Are there no side effects? Of course not. Because the way vaccines work on a fundamental level is a training run for the real virus, Now right. An interesting thing is most of the time when you get sick from a virus, it's not the virus particles itself that's making you sick. Your immune system.

0:32:04 Thomas: Obviously yeah

0:32:36 Eric: Like Europe in World War Two, it'S collateral damage.

0:32:39 Thomas: And we've covered that a lot on this show of different immune system stuff with with some fun experts.

0:32:43 Eric: So glide most of that. But the main point being, right, that, yes, you're going to have side effects, but the side effects are going to be much less than a whole virus giving you those same side effects because you don't have the extra genes that are person messing up your immune system. Right. This is like the simplest, easiest way. This is the first step that I want listeners to start thinking about whether this expert is reliable or not, because while he makes this claim, when you talk through what we call the mechanisms of action. Right. Is very obvious that this is going to be more safe than a standard vaccine. Right.

0:33:16 Eric: Because there aren't as many ways, mechanisms for it to do wrong. Wrong. It's similar to like when there was that whole GMO scare, right? Am absolutely against a lot of the business practices of GMOs, but there is no mechanism for genetically modified organisms to harm you, provided we know what the genes are, right, as long as they're not producing a protein you're allergic to. Once your body eats that rice, it's breaking it down into the four base pairs anyway.

0:33:40 Eric: It is not going, did this come from a fish?

0:33:40 Thomas: It's like if they genetically modified it into cyanide then yeah that'd be bad but like

0:33:48 Eric: You are thinking about this. That's exactly right. Yes.

0:33:50 Thomas: Yeah no it's it's so frustrating.

0:33:53 Eric: That's my first point is you want to start getting your spidey sense when people start talking about this of like, what are the common things we know in biology around us that can easily disprove this stuff, And are they talking about specific ways or are they fear mongering? When people were worried about the flu vaccine or COVID spreading initially, we right, had mechanism for how COVID spread. We thought it might have spread on fomites, on surfaces. We taught it might've spread through aerosols, Because right. We were talking mechanisms, we could do studies that then narrow down those possibilities, right? Long as you are dealing with actual mechanisms and models, you can talk science. But if you are just saying this is weird and new, there is nothing for me to respond to.

0:34:32 Thomas: Yeah and it's tough because I don't know how much you want to go into it but But it is hard because it is very intuitive to say, hey, this is a new thing. And when you have a new things, there should be studies that look at how how are people reacting 10, 20, 30 years down the line. That was a very intuitive argument to a lot of people to say. Hey, yeah, wait a minute. Sure, maybe you tested it, you know for a few months or whatever amount of time you had to to see how it worked. But what about way down the line are we going to just turn into the fly from that movie and

0:35:02 Eric: The problem is, this is the equivalent, right, of asking, well, how was the restaurant affected by you writing a smiley face on every meal ticket for that one day, November 11th, 2015, right? One cares how the meal tickets were filled out that day. That RNA is gone within like 48 to 72 hours. It can't integrate into the genome because we don't have the ability to do that. So you wanna co -vaccinate that along with something like AIDS, which can integrate into your genome, then maybe, you know, you get some of that package into the AIDS. I would worry more more about the AIDS virus you now have, but that would be like one mechanism where it could integrate into your genome. If it has a virus that can reverse transcribe it. As we just talked about, this vaccine doesn't use a virus. Is just a piece of

0:35:13 Thomas: Geez yeah. And

0:35:45 Eric: RNA.

0:35:46 Thomas: Even though it doesn't don't have years and years of like specifically COVID -19 mRNA research we have other stuff they've tested via this method right like other yeah

0:35:56 Eric: Yes. Here's where it gets even better. The biggest complaint was it messes up your DNA, right? Viruses often go into the nucleus. You know what never goes into the nucleus? It only leaves the nucleus? Nucleus? Messenger RNA, also known as mRNA.

0:36:10 Thomas: Was going to ask what the M stood for because I forgot and that makes it even better.

0:36:14 Eric: It's the message of the

0:36:15 Thomas: Messenger RNA. Yeah. Okay.

0:36:15 Eric: DNA. Yeah. Doesn't actually enter the nucleus. There's no mechanism for it to integrate into the DNA now. Do you want to be concerned about long -term studies? Yes, but I would be more concerned about the long - term studies of a period of long COVID and chronic inflammation that our population has had, right? Those have have actual mechanisms for long -term harm. Vaccine just doesn't. And we have limited funding, we have limiting resources, we have unlimited time.

0:36:40 Eric: It is not a conspiracy to say there is no reason to think that this RNA won't enter the nucleus and integrate our DNA. Because everything we studied about biology, every preliminary test we've done in vitro and in animal models suggests that this won't happen. So why would we worry about that?

0:36:56 Thomas: Yep.

0:36:56 Eric: That is just not a conspiracy, it is prioritizing time.

0:36:58 Thomas: Biology is so complicated. You could come up with so many things to worry about if you wanted to, if you want to. Like, I'm sure you could tell us about stuff that we've never even thought to worry About. And then you could ask, why aren't they testing that? And it's like, because there's no reason to worry. About that.

0:37:13 Eric: Well, actually, I think your resident marine biologist could tell you more about ocean acidification. That's the stuff I would worry about. Anyway, they start talking about this, right? So they go through that whole thing about how the RNA is, you strange and these lipid vesicles are strange. And then Brett actually gets on point for a little bit, right, when Bill Maher starts asking him, what is the difference between between these things? Which one is safer to take in terms of your immune response? Brett actually does say that the two vaccines produce, he

0:37:40 Thomas: Does he he accidentally be a scientist for a while? I love when they do that.

0:37:43 Eric: Does, he says that the 2 vaccines produce the same protein. And here we're in 100 % agreement, right? Whether you got the virally attenuated or you got The mRNA vaccine, you are getting that same spike protein that produces the immune response, right.

0:37:57 Thomas: End of discussion. Cool. Thanks for joining us here on Bill Maher's Anti -Woke Bullshit Hour.

0:38:02 Eric: I wish he would have added is just you're getting the temporary version so it's safer, right?

0:38:07 Thomas: It's even safe. That's right. Yeah. Even safer. Yeah, yeah. It's almost like the people who designed the fucking vaccine wanted it to be safer and more effective, Eric. Is it almost like that because you know it wasn't as though who designed it were robots immune to disease hell -bent on killing us they were checks notes also human beings with families who would also like to survive this so frustrating

0:38:17 Eric: Almost like that. And it's almost like they actually have experience in molecular biology and understand what they're doing. Is a good segue into step two of your layman toolkit for are we doing things? The expert starts talking about a massive conspiracy, think about two things. What is the evidence for that conspiracy? And what is the motivation for that that conspiracy. Why does the person in NASA want to fake the moon landing when all he wants to do is figure out Newtonian mechanics, right? Makes sense if you always describe malice in conspiracy. Always want to go, what is the individual people in this conspiracy doing, and why would they be doing it? And when I worked in a lab, we were not talking about how to take over the White House. We just weren't.

0:38:38 Thomas: Yeah yeah

0:39:07 Eric: We've now gotten that the vaccine is a little bit bit simpler, it's more safe, right? We've talked about where it doesn't matter in terms of the N protein, right.

0:39:01 Thomas: Yeah

0:39:15 Eric: But then Bill Maher, and I believe Heather Heyer starts joining in here, goes, doesn't it matter if the vaccine is made in the lab versus natural, right, here's where I start to have a

0:39:15 Thomas: Oh god sorry the vaccine made in a lab Oh, oh, like, okay.

0:39:27 Eric: If the vaticine, and this is getting back to what we just talked about with the GMOs, right it does not matter if vaccine was made natural or in a lab as long as it has those RNA nucleotides, that

0:39:37 Thomas: You have a natural vaccine? Sorry, I don't understand.

0:39:40 Eric: You can do. So you can inoculate certain animals. So let's say when I was making a...

0:39:44 Thomas: It's talking about the old smallpox -y thing or?

0:39:46 Eric: Exactly.

0:39:47 Thomas: Okay, okay, okay? Guess I still wouldn't think of that as a vaccine made naturally. So they're saying the virus within the vaccine or whatever? Okay. Okay. Gotcha.

0:40:35 Eric: Pushing up against is that you're basically synthesizing this RNA and you're not deriving it from a natural source.

0:40:40 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:40:41 Eric: Like we just talked about with GMOs, your body doesn't care about that. It will not go, this is a synthetic uracil. Bill. No, F that, right? Now it starts to get really fun. And here's where we can start going to the part where I would say you can, as a layman, start realizing that this guy is nonsense. Because he starts talking about gain -of -function research, right. He talks about the dangers associated with gain -off -function search.

0:41:02 Thomas: What can you define that for or is that messing up your order of operations here?

0:41:05 Eric: We started to get some context text from Bill Maher saying, is this a bioweapon or is this natural research? And Weinstein does to kind of start this conversation is talk about the types of research they do on viruses in the lab and gain of function. Gain of funcion is, as simply as possible, is I want to know how a disease will progress over time, right? Evolution can take time.

0:41:23 Thomas: It'll evolve or progress in your body?

0:41:26 Eric: Evolve, sorry, yes, how it will evolve and progress over time. Evolution and passaging through the population can take a while. If I have a plate of cells in my lab, I can passage them once every 24 hours. I can regulate exactly which virus I'm getting, and I can sequence it over and over and over again and see how it's affected. I Can put it in animals if I want a more complicated study, right? I can passage it through those animals and see How the virus changes. A really cool study someone I used to work with did, was he put barcoded influenza viruses into a population of guinea pigs.

0:41:55 Thomas: How do you barcode a virus?

0:41:56 Eric: What the barcode was, was a specific sequence of RNA that would attack another gene. It would turn it off, right? He turned off every gene in the genome and then saw which virus survived, right. Viruses that survived and became most prominent were the ones turning down the genes that were most important for fighting flu, right? That's an example of the way you can passage viruses and learn about how they evolve in different situations. Gain -of -function is slightly different in that you're not trying to manipulate the virus at all. You're letting nature do it so that you can predict what will happen in the wild. Here's the big thing about that. Definition, what process are you trying to mimic if you're doing gain -of function research?

0:42:32 Thomas: Natural evolutionary process?

0:42:34 Eric: A natural evolutionary process. So what will be almost impossible to distinguish between a gain -of -function research and a natural evolutionary process unless you have those receipts, right?

0:42:44 Thomas: You put a barcode on it, I guess.

0:42:46 Eric: That's exactly, yes, that is what I meant by receipts. Unless you have evidence of bioengineering, going to be very hard to determine whether that was done by serial passaging, just replicating it over and over in the lab, or whether it was being passaged in a population. And gets even muddier because who knows when that virus was isolated? Maybe it was isolated after it already made the jump to human transmission. Maybe it Was isolated before, right? Point is all of these experiments are mimicking evolution, right. So what you can't do and what Heather does in like the very next sentence is goes, these would behave very different if they were lab created versus whether they were naturally derived, right, the whole point is they won't behave very differently. This is my first layman check of these guys don't know what they're talking about at a fundamental level of talking about evolution, right? The evolutionary constraints are the same, and they would be once that virus leaks from the lab or gets transferred from the zoonotic host, right, you don't have the ability to know the source of the sequence, that sequence will behave exactly the same regardless of that source, right.

0:43:47 Eric: Is going through the exact same evolutionary trial, regardless of whether it started in the lab, or whether it's started in a zoonotic host. They're going to behave exactly the same unless it's been altered in obvious ways, right? It's got an influenza thing that helps give it different tropism to other viruses, right. At the time, there was only one Nature paper about the origin of COVID -19, and there was zero evidence of any of this bioengineering being done. So already we're at a part where they're saying something very wrong and it's against what we have. They then keep going, right, Weinstein says. Says, it is unlikely that viruses can jump from animals to humans and then spread easily amongst humans. I agree. That's a very major hurdle, right? It's very unlikely for viruses to do that. But you know what there's a lot of in this world?

0:43:46 Thomas: What and viruses

0:44:31 Eric: Viruses, and unknown populations of animals that are somewhere nearby nebulously, especially in places like near Wuhan, right, where they have those open air meat markets and stuff like that.

0:44:40 Thomas: Like if we had gone through a pandemic once every hour for a hundred years you're like hey this makes no sense because this should be unlikely and yet it's happening every day but they're this is the second one in a century like It's going to be something very unlikely.

0:44:58 Eric: Exactly. This one's the anthropic principle. Right, there's some selection bias involved. We know about this virus because it made the unlikely jump. It's already bootstrapping those odds. So that's the thing that is just like straight up anyone with any basic understanding of biology can just be like, this is a nonsense argument, right? Are at the exact same constraints. They are doing the exact samestuff. But most importantly, it's just we don't actually have ways to validate the difference between a natural virus and a quote unquote lab virus. Okay. Thing he says that's really, really stupid, problem is, is that both of the tricks that being able to spread in humans and that being able to infect humans came very quickly. But But they don't know this because we don't know when COVID started, right? Have those first kind of surges in December 2019. But if you remember, the whole problem has been that there was like months of kind of trickling of people being sick, of even lab employees being sick.

0:45:29 Thomas: Could be an eight -hour seminar just on this interview. Hmm.

0:46:12 Eric: And so unless you have a patient zero and you can actually track the evolution down to a single strain, we don't know this stuff. We have some estimates actually that it was circulating a lot more than we previously thought, earlier than we previously thought. And the way you get those estimates is by doing science. You take the genomic sequence of different strains and you say, what is the normal rate of mutation in a virus in this population in this selection criteria, and you see what the difference in those strains are, and then you wind the tape back, similar to how we know how far birds and dinosaurs evolved from each other, right? There are ways to do this systematically, but they are not doing this at all. They are just talking out of their ass, because right, they don't have any of this information. Next thing he says that's really stupid, I think this was Heather, right.

0:47:09 Eric: And what they mean by that is its strength, right? Its ability to kill you, its ability to make you very sick. She's somewhat right there. Typically, viruses have a kind of two -pronged choice, right. I become more dangerous like Ebola, but become very hard to spread? Or do I become the common cold, where everyone in your daycare gets it every other day, but you're not having funerals for them either right right

0:47:29 Thomas: Yeah yeah and that that made a lot of sense early that was sort of inevitable. I did not know that there was another way to go. Like thought just just evolution wise, if you kill your host too fast, then you're not going to spread, right? Because like you're done giving them time. So it does seem like there's some kind of limits theoretically on what that should be, right. How's the way it can, it can go the other way where it's like super deadly. It just has to spread so fast that it can.

0:47:55 Eric: Got to be very very infectious and it's got to Be ways that like so like for instance the reason why Ebola spreads so much um and it doesn't spread like common cold but the reason Why it spreads at all is like if your family member is bleeding profusely right what is the only thing is a sane you know empathetic human you were going to do

0:48:11 Thomas: It's, like, the mechanism of spread. It was a certain way.

0:48:14 Eric: But the point being right it doesn't actually implicate the virus either way which way it evolves.

0:48:20 Thomas: Right, Right, right. Because Because once it's out in the world, like that's just natural forces acting on it, right?

0:48:25 Eric: And the other part that they forget is that COVID had a really long latency period, right? You actually didn't have to sacrifice as much virulence in the beginning because people were spreading it before they got really sick, sucks to end up on a ventilator, but they were still infecting three other people before they even started getting sniffles. So that's one thing, is that they were were fundamentally misunderstanding the signals that were coming about by the progression of the virus over time, right? They just keep layering it in with a lack of familiarity about how viruses work, how, honestly, evolution works at a molecular level, right. Says, it's really suspicious, right, the is passed in human or animal cells and that they can infect multiple tissues in the body. Lots

0:49:25 Thomas: I have no context for this. Is if I were just watching as not a scientist, like, oh, okay, is that true? So like, can you explain that claim a little bit? First

0:49:32 Eric: What saying is that COVID is suspicious because it doesn't attack one one type of cell. It attacks many types of cells. Now, this should give you pause. If you've ever been sick before, you know that often it's not just one part of your body that is feeling sick at that time.

0:49:48 Thomas: But isn't that your immune system anyway? I thought that was like your your immune system going, wait,

0:49:51 Eric: Can partly be your immune system, but it's also that viruses are going to target different cells, right? Influenza, you're largely staying in that upper respiratory tract, right. Why you're never getting stomach problems with the flu. If you have a stomach problem, you don't have the flu. You have something else.

0:50:02 Thomas: What the? So the term stomach flu is just not real.

0:50:08 Eric: A, yeah, it's one of my pet peeves in life, to be honest.

0:50:11 Thomas: Boy. Why didn't you tell us that sooner? I mean, I actually think I had heard that, but I wasn't super confident that it was like impossible.

0:50:17 Eric: What that one is, is an enterovirus, right? For gastrointestinal tract. Enteroviruses can both infect your stomach and they can give you common colds. That's an example of a natural virus that can infect more than one tissue. One that we just talked about, polio, can infect your respiratory system and give you a cold -like disease, or it can infect our nervous system and paralyze you.

0:50:39 Eric: None of these were designed in labs. I think Brett Weinstein would agree with that, So right? That's another clue that he just doesn't know what he's talking about when

0:50:46 Thomas: Where would you even get that idea? That's a weird one.

0:50:49 Eric: This is where it gets very, very stupid. Is the one where like, I honestly had to check his PhD after because it was so stupid. Here's what he said. It you clearly can pick up that you do not need a biologists PhD to come up with 50 different ways that this is stupid. I'm going to go with three major ones. First one, right? Do you think we have cold season winter and not summer?

0:51:12 Thomas: Are you talking about man yeah because cold gives you a cold no sorry that's just another pet peeve of mine yeah

0:51:31 Eric: Because we're indoors, right, we are packed closely together. So that you do not need a PhD in biology to give yourself that quick self serious check, right.

0:51:33 Thomas: Well hey it's suspicious that hiv spreads indoors better than out it's It's like, well, that's people are closer and doing things that would spread the virus, right? I mean, how you even have a virus that spreads better outside than in, like, like maybe if it was some weird temperature thing, like I can't even think of how that would work.

0:51:47 Eric: That was, yes, that was exactly the second thing I was gonna say. Not This one isn't even about PhD in biology, right? This is high school level physics. We learned about diffusion all the time back in the day, right. More tight your volume is, the more constrained the container is the less space you have to diffuse, right, if you are staying indoors for a long period of time, you are increasing your exposure time.

0:52:18 Thomas: I don't even thing you need to have taken a class to know closer means easier to transmit of anything, literally anything.

0:52:27 Eric: And even then we were getting spreading events outdoors, right I remember a certain Supreme Court party that was a super super spreader event when Amy Coney Barrett was inducted into the Supreme Court. The whole point after hearing all of these arguments was, how do you even practice biology, right? How can you practice biology when you seemingly don't understand basic principles of evolution, but more importantly, that molecular side of things, right, central dogma of DNA to RNA of protein just seemed fundamentally broken. And so I did what any normal person would do. I was so curious, I went on PubMed. I typed in his name and I looked for his papers.

0:53:02 Thomas: So at this point, you're like, I now I'm not sure this guy does have a PhD or how did he get a PhD? Like it's that bad.

0:53:09 Eric: Was that bad.

0:53:10 Thomas: Okay. So, that's how bad this interview was. You're now questioning whether this guy, who was a professor, we know that. Something. You're wondering, what could he possibly even have a degree? Does this work? And so, you being Being a normal, balanced person, we're like, I'm going to go through everything this guy's ever written. And we're going to have to leave this to a part two. Eric, but why don't you give us a teaser, maybe, of what you found?

0:53:29 Eric: Exactly. I two sentence teaser. Most PhDs is a summation of your work for about five to six years, right? Are experiments, there are data, there is lots of things that show evidence of you working towards this problem. Did not see a single piece of data in his entire thesis. Thesis. Read it twice. I found a couple of figures that were conceptual and then zero experiments and zero data.

0:54:00 Thomas: Holy shit. Okay. Well, now I want the part two now. How I get it?

0:54:04 Eric: I admit that this is a different field in a different program. It is possible I am missing something obvious, but I checked Heather's PhD, also from the University of Michigan. Hers does have figures. Hers doesn't have data. So I think this is really just that weird a thesis but

0:54:21 Thomas: Wow. We'll get into it in part two. Thanks so much, Eric. That was already a lot of fun. And I can't wait for part two,

0:54:28 Eric: Good and thank you for having me and