Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
20 transcript-backed records
01 / belief
“I would say that there are many things for which you do randomize trust, for good reason.”
02 / commitment
“I will, but I have to let you know there’s no ground truth, so you can just make it up, and there would be nobody who knew what it was supposed to be.”
03 / belief
“I feel like it was a stress test, and I think there’s going to be a first crop of books that put most of the blame on Trump’s lap, which is not unjustified. That administration has a lot to answer for, but I think the things that it has shown us are much bigger than one administration’s admittedly very real failings.”
04 / belief
“I know him. I would say he’s just about right because he’s past his peak. [laughter] Sorry.”
05 / belief
“The one argument that I make to people a lot — my most strong abstract argument that I think I can make is that you’re going to encounter this virus, either through infection or vaccination.”
06 / belief
“I think that’s partly because I have an immigrant’s view of the United States, which is, in some ways, more realistic. But I’ve lived in Europe, too, so I have, I think, a lot more positive feelings about certain things that might not be as apparent to somebody who’s looking at Europe from this side of the Atlantic because some things look good if you’re an American, but are not necessarily great if you’re living in Europe.”
07 / uncertainty
“I don’t know when you’ve last been there, but I was looking at the polls, and the current under-30s are saying they’re much less religious, so I wouldn’t really be completely sure.”
08 / belief
“I think the best way is to not read Weber because you do not want to start there.”
09 / belief
“The similarity there isn’t necessarily, I think, which religion or the strength of the religious beliefs as much as, once again, a strong, popular, populist, authoritarian-leaning person getting elected and then staying in power and making sure he stays in power for a very, very long time.”
10 / belief
“Another place that’s, I think, less known is the Black Sea region, where you have dramatic green hills meet the sea, not like San Francisco because the hills are very steep, and then you have a fairly little strip.”
11 / evaluation
“” I think that created a big backlash among not just the scientists, but the public, because it really did seem like deflecting the blame in many ways.”
12 / evaluation
“What I realized was they were just either silent, or parts of them had convinced themselves of really illogical things, like a mask might be harmful.”
13 / evaluation
“I think the fundamental mistake we’re making is not treating this like a biosafety crisis because we had one pandemic in 1977 that was indeed triggered because of a vaccine trial gone wrong.”
14 / evaluation
“Why didn’t the universities create their own advisory body, even if our own authorities weren’t functioning very well, partly because of Trump’s not great — I mean really negative influence.”
15 / uncertainty
“I’m agnostic in the sense that I don’t really know exactly the extent to which the algorithm works, but that’s similar to lab leak, where I don’t know what to say because whatever data there is, it’s in China, and we don’t have access to it.”
16 / evaluation
“” I think that really got a lot of scientists who had been just waiting and thinking this is not that big of a deal, in terms of the actual pandemic to worry about, to think, “You know what, if we do this and let this be what’s going to stand for science, it’s just going to actually damage science because letting that kind of report appear as the voice of science, and if we do find something out, or — as we do at the moment — we keep finding cover-up from the Chinese side, which is not at all reflected in what’s going on in that report, it makes science itself look bad.”
17 / preference
“Trying to be too clever, too smart, almost too contrarian sometimes — I would say that is something that I fight in myself because, like a lot of academics and a lot of intellectual people, I like the answers that surprise me.”
18 / evaluation
“Right now, they’re still functioning as EUA [emergency use authorization]. That is both causing people to think it’s experimental because it’s still emergency, and it is holding back some of the necessary things, like mandates, because which employer is supposed to say, “It’s an emergency thing, and it’s not fully approved, but I’m forcing you to do it”?”
19 / evaluation
“I think that’s something we don’t do enough of in the academy because we’re so siloed.”
20 / evaluation
“” Or it could have questioned the few things in the report. But the final report — written after the scientists had left the country, too — in my view was disgraceful that it was allowed to go out like that, instead of saying, “You know what, we can’t really do a great investigation.”