Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

Silicon Valley royalty. Legendary investor Bill Gurley. Track record's incredible. The legend who backed Uber and Zillow who's lived through every major tech cycle for over 25 years. You're not just a commentator, right? You've been an operator. I'd love to unlock this latent human potential. There's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. You can increase your surface area for luck. I'm not a big fan of these dystopian narrative. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can. Please welcome Bill Gurley.

It’s good to be here again. 3 years ago, I gave a talk on regulatory capture, and this group was quite kind in how they reacted and how that video was promoted. I’m very happy we got that word out into the public discourse. Obviously, today you hear it quite a bit.

I have a different topic I’m going to talk to you about today. I’m not going to talk about AI. It’s a serious topic, so there might not be as many fun joke parts in it, but it’s something that’s been weighing on my mind for the past 5 or 6 years. I’m thankful that the team here allowed me to come talk to you about it, and I’m hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well.

1. Bill's Presentation: Searching for Feynman

I’m going to start by talking to you about some catastrophes that have happened in the world and how humans normally respond to them. This is Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida. You may remember that in June 2021, the building suddenly collapsed and 98 people died. What happened? There were design errors from the very beginning, there was a poor maintenance schedule, and the board of the condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Those are 3 different things. That’s the institutional failure.

The technical failure was different, and you can see it here. This is a New York Times article. Hopefully, they can press play so you can see. It’s a 3D article. If they can’t make it play, you’ll have to watch it on your own. Here we go.

The reason I want you to see this isn’t to talk about the details of exactly how this collapsed. It turned out the pool deck was exposed to saltwater air, and it corroded. The pool deck collapsed into the basement, which took out the structural columns, and the building came down. What I want you to take away from this is that the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened, which comes from doing primary investigative work.

There were 4 other parallel investigations that happened. NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. After 9/11, they were assigned as a federal agency to go investigate what happens in a building collapse. These 2 individuals, Judith Mitrani-Reiser and Glenn Bell, would spend 5 years on this. Allyn Kilsheimer is the wolf of building collapses. He’s who you call when you want to figure out what happened.

The town of Surfside hired him. Katherine Fernandez Rundle would convene a grand jury in the state of Florida to investigate this. There were 17 victim lawsuits that got put under a single class. Tropin was the defender of the litigants, and Hanzman was the judge who did that. All of these different groups were doing investigations on their own, sometimes running into each other, sometimes helping each other out, but all trying to get at what caused the failure.

One particularly heroic group was the Miami Herald. They had just gone through bankruptcy and had a new executive editor named Monica Richardson, but they went after this hard. The beat reporter, Aaron Leibowitz, was on the scene within 2 hours. Sarah Blaskey would lead an investigative team. They would eventually find Dawn Lehman, who’s a professor at the University of Washington, and she would join the team.

They would staff up to 37 people on this. They had a 3D model that was equally impressive to the New York Times one, and they deservedly won a Pulitzer Prize for the work they did. When they won it, Monica Richardson, the executive editor, who also won an award for executive editor of the year from her peers, said, “We will continue to investigate the collapse to find answers to how this happened, to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again.”

Finding the failure cause doesn’t help if you don’t prevent it. This is a list of some of the changes that went into all the condominium rules in Florida, and thankfully, multiple other states, especially coastal states, adopted them. You have change that causes prevention. That’s what you want to have happen when these things happen.

The 737 MAX crash—unfortunately, there were 2 crashes, in October 2018 and March 2019. For those of you who don’t know what happened, let me give you the really short version. Airbus had come out with a plane that was incredibly fuel-efficient, and it was starting to take share from Boeing. Boeing wanted to respond.

If they built a new plane, it required tons of hours of teaching and training, and that makes it harder to sell. So they decided they would attach a fuel-efficient engine to an old plane, the 737. That’s how you get the name 737 MAX. The problem is that the engine was too big, and they had to move it forward on the wing. When you move it forward on the wing, the plane is imbalanced, and they had this problem during test flights where it would occasionally pitch up.

So they wrote a piece of software, secret software called MCAS, and put it in there without telling anybody. If the sensor went off and told them the plane was pitching up, the autopilot would push it down. The poor pilot who was flying the Ethiopian Airlines flight had a sensor malfunction. The software thought that the plane was tilting up, and it pushed it into the ground. That’s what happened.

There were many people who investigated this. I call them the 6 searchers. The U.S. government did a Senate investigation, a House investigation, and the DOJ went after it. KNKT is the Indonesian agency that had the right to inspect the black boxes. They could tell very quickly that the pilot was fighting the autopilot.

The press played a key role. Dominic Gates had followed Boeing for the Seattle Times for 16 years, and he would win a Pulitzer for his work here. Peter Robison wrote a book called Flying Blind. You can tell why it would have that title. Fifty-seven whistleblowers sent letters into the Senate to tell on Boeing.

The victims’ families showed up, were ever-present, and put pressure on Congress to make sure something happened. The head of the pilot union was very upset that they had put this piece of software in there and not told the pilots. Boeing tried to have a sit-down with the pilots union, and they secretly recorded what Boeing said and gave it to the press. When they wouldn’t respond to Boeing’s request, the pilots union issued FOIA requests against Boeing. It’s unheard of.

In these situations, where you have 6 searchers, you also have blockers. Unfortunately, in this case, both Boeing and the FAA were being unhelpful in trying to find out what happened. Boeing initially accused the pilots of not being trained well enough. The FAA refused document requests from the Senate panel.

One thing I would tell you about these big organizations is that when you put a spotlight on them, they can feel the weight of that spotlight, and they circle the wagons. I think part of it’s institutional. I don’t think they’re necessarily evil. They just have a sick sense about how to respond when they’re put on the spot like that.

The other thing that’s interesting here is that a lot of people came to think that Boeing and the FAA were working as one. Senator Ted Cruz, when he had the head of the FAA in front of the Senate, literally accused him of being captured. There’s our favorite word again. He even said to him, “Sir, do you know you don’t work for Boeing?”

One of the real failures here was that 45 days after the first crash, almost everyone knew the MCAS software was at fault, and no one grounded the plane. Boeing didn’t ground the plane. The FAA didn’t ground the plane. The first crash should have never happened because that piece of software should have been identified, which would have required retraining, but the second crash should have really never happened.

I wanted to share this with you. I don’t want to go through it in detail, but these are the 2 different committees in the House and the Senate. I just want to highlight that they were decidedly bipartisan. DeFazio was the head of the House committee and very active. Ted Cruz and Wicker were super active. No one thought this was anything that should be partisan, nor should it be.

It turns out the scientific community has a process they use when they want to do failure analysis. It’s called CAPA: corrective and preventive action. There are 5 steps: detect, investigate, confirm root cause, correct, and prevent. It’s all about prevention. You want to stop this from happening again.

But you can’t skip root cause. That’s a requirement. You don’t know how to fix it if you don’t know what actually happened. CAPA is required by law by the FDA in pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The aerospace industry has regulations that require this type of process if you have a failure.

Let’s move on to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Look at these stats. They’re horrible: 1,800 deaths, 400,000 people displaced, and $125 billion in damage. What happened here? The Army Corps of Engineers that built the levee wants you to believe that the water went over the levees, but that’s an act of God—a natural disaster.

This was only a Category 3 hurricane. What in fact happened was that the levees gave way from underneath. They washed under. What’s unfortunate is that this was a preventable accident as well. As with these others, you have searchers and blockers.

The House had a commission. The Senate had a commission. The press played a key role. Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid had written a series 3 years earlier about how this could happen. They would win 2 Pulitzers. I actually had a chance to talk with John about it.

The NSF, the National Science Foundation, cared so much about this that they did a bake-off to have another team conduct an investigation. These 2 professors from the University of California led that effort. The state of Louisiana hired a team out of LSU, and they all investigated. I talked to John sometimes, once again running into each other—sometimes blocking, sometimes sharing notes—and they all came to the exact same conclusion: This was a man-made error.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was the one that built the levees, and they naturally, as I talked about, are going to act as blockers. What's weird here is they asked the American Society of Civil Engineers if they would join the internal investigation. They paid them $1 million, and over time, they would get encapsulated inside the Army Corps and become blockers themselves.

When this dust all settled, Raymond Seed, the professor from UC Berkeley, wrote a 42-page report to the ASCE explaining all the times that they blocked. That document's on the internet. You can go see it. Forty-two pages—that's a lot of blocking.

The other thing that happened here that's great is prevention. These different investigations led to 90 recommendations. Those changes were made, and the seawalls have held. It was $15 billion. The seawalls have held now for 20 years, which is great.

Let me move through a couple more real quickly. This is Fukushima: 2,200 deaths, 154,000 displaced, and $200 billion in cleanup. What happened here is pretty simple. The seawall in front of the nuclear plant was 5.7 meters high. The water went over the wall, took out the generators, and the cores started to melt down. There was no way to cool them, and the disaster happened.

There were internal documents that showed they expected tsunamis in a 30-year window to be in the 10- to 15-meter range, and they buried the report. If you had simply raised the wall, this never happens. But it didn't happen. In a lot of these cases, there's a combination of a technical failure and an institutional failure.

The technical failure is what happens to the product, or the surface of the building, or the seawall. The institutional failure is: Why did the humans let that become a weak point here? As with the others, there are searchers and blockers. The press played a role. Martin Fackler at The New York Times spent 20 years in the Tokyo bureau. He would be a Pulitzer finalist.

Mr. Yorimitsu[?] took a third-place paper and added 20 investigators to his staff to go after this. It had a huge impact and won 2 awards. The Japanese citizens were out in force, both protesting and filing claims.

Just like the FAA and Boeing, TEPCO was the company running the power plant. NISA was the regulator, and they blocked. They got in the way. In fact, the failure was partially just a result of regulatory capture, once again—that they weren't playing the right role as regulator. They had almost become friends.

The real hero of this story is a guy named Kiyoshi Kurokawa. He was asked by the Japanese Parliament to lead the first-ever private investigation in the country's history. They had a lot of power. They were told that no one on the committee could have any institutional connection to the regulator or the power company. They had the full authority to go after anybody in any way, and they had a ton of meetings.

Kurokawa, when he kicked this off, said he had 3 mandates that he wanted to adhere to. First, he cared about human safety. He didn't want it to be a battle about nuclear energy. Second, he said the investigation should definitely result in recommendations. Third, he knew the weight of this because of Three Mile Island and Chernobyl from a global perspective, and he cared about that.

Interestingly, he's a medical doctor. He's not a nuclear physicist, but he led this commission with a level of grace and professionalism that makes him a hero from my perspective. All these searchers are heroes from my perspective.

He would publish a report 7 months later. Interestingly, they chose to publish it in English first because they were worried about global transparency and how they were perceived. In the first sentence, he says, “The accident at the power plant cannot be regarded as a natural disaster. It was profoundly man-made, and it could have and should have been prevented.” Powerful.

One last one. This is the Challenger shuttle disaster, January 1986. I remember where I was. It was a Tuesday. I was in college. It was a long time ago. Everyone, if you've seen the documentaries, knows what happened here.

The O-rings on the solid-rocket boosters weren't designed for cold. It turns out it was cold that morning in Florida, and that flaw caused a problem. Unfortunately, the subcontractor that had worked on that piece tried to object the night before, saying that they shouldn't launch, and he got shut down. So you have a technical failure and an institutional failure once again.

I could talk about a lot of searchers and blockers, but I'm just going to talk about one: Richard Feynman, who was already mentioned during the All-In conference this week. Richard Feynman was a professor at Caltech. When the Challenger blew up, Ronald Reagan created the Rogers Commission, and they added mostly insiders. They had Neil Armstrong, astronauts, generals, people from Washington, and NASA executives. But someone had the idea that they should put Feynman on there.

I think they wanted a stamp of approval from a physicist. The good news is that it made a lot of sense. He's one of the most famous scientists of all time. He won a Nobel Prize and worked on the Manhattan Project, so he had a lot of credibility.

What they didn't know is that he's fiercely independent. He's highly truth-seeking, and he has zero time for unnecessary diplomacy. They didn't know that was coming. He didn't want to do it. He said he hated Washington. I kind of get that. His wife talked him into it, but once he did it, he cleared his schedule. He took everything off his calendar for 6 months into the future. None of the other commission members did that, and he started investigating on his own before he ever went to Washington.

He was showing up at NASA facilities and asking to meet with people. When he got to Washington, none of the other members wanted to act that way. In fact, Neil Armstrong told him, “We just evaluate; we don't investigate.” It was too late. He was already doing it.

Three fun facts about this. First of all, there's a famous story, if you watch any of the documentaries, where Rogers runs into Neil Armstrong in the bathroom and says, “Feynman's being a real pain in the ass.” The second thing is that he staged a stunt on live television. He found some material that was similar to the O-ring and, in front of everybody, dipped it in ice water, pulled it out, and cracked it to show the failure. It infuriated the rest of the commission.

Lastly, when he submitted all his notes to the commission, they wrote a final report. They really smoothed over everything, and he was pissed. So he called Rogers and said, “You know what? Take my name off it.” Of course, he'd already done the thing on TV. There was no way they could take his name off it. They caved. Appendix F to the report is all of his notes included in their entirety.

Now, why am I talking to you about all these catastrophes and searchers and blockers and heroes like Kurokawa and Feynman? Because I want to talk to you about COVID-19. In December 2019, COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths, disrupted every life on the planet, and cost our globe $45 trillion. It was particularly hard on children. You've read about learning loss. My kids were in high school and college and missed 3 years of the most formative years of your life.

I never want to live through this thing again in my life. But guess what? For all the other catastrophes, I told you what the root cause is. Six years later, we don't know. So forgive me if I'm unafraid of what some AI guy's chatbot is going to do to humanity when you can't tell me what this thing already did. My P(second COVID) is way higher than my P(doom).

If their models are so smart, tell me what happened here. Let's get them working on this problem. I want to put this in perspective. I've added up all the deaths and cost of the 5 catastrophes I talked through with you, and you get to 5,000 deaths and $349 billion. COVID is 3,000 times bigger than that.

Feynman, in one of the documentaries, said someone was telling him he needed to be nicer, and he said, “But 7 people died.” If you have to get through niceties and seek truth when 7 people died, how are you supposed to behave when 15 million people die?

I can take it even further. I add up all plane accidents, all hurricanes, all nuclear accidents, all building collapses, and all space accidents. You still only get 1/3 of the way to what happened with COVID. We should want to know what happened here so we can stop this from happening again.

Here's what didn't happen. This is shocking because all these wonderful people, all these well-intended people, did this in the other cases, which were much smaller. They did it in a purposeful and meaningful way. There's no committed newsroom with over 30 investigators on COVID. None of the major papers did that.

There was no Gates or Schleifstein or Fackler—a dogged investigative reporter with the backing of his newsroom—going after this.

No bipartisan Senate or congressional committees like you had in Katrina and the 737 Max investigation. You didn't have a standalone investigation with someone like Feynman or Kurokawa. There was no science-funded investigation. NIST and NSF launched them in these other 2 cases. NIH didn't fund a third-party investigation here, and there was no massive victims' lawsuit to figure out what happened.

So, what went wrong? I'm going to share some thoughts with you, and I want you to be aware of a couple of pieces of information that I think are kind of new, or newly understood. But I want to make 1 qualification. This has been bothering me for a long time. I've read a ton. I'm sure there are people who are smarter than me on this, but I've got to be in the top 1% in terms of how much information I've consumed.

The first thing I would tell you is that these 5 people were relied on as experts. The first 2, Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci; Peter Daszak runs something called the EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that did virology research; Jeremy Farrar was the head of the Wellcome Trust, which funded a lot of this stuff, and went on to work at the WHO; and Ralph Baric is the top virologist in the U.S., at the University of North Carolina.

What I'm here to tell you is that they weren't experts. They were blockers. They acted exactly like the FAA, Boeing, and NASA did in these other situations. I'm going to give you 4 reasons why I know they're blockers. First, they're virology insiders, so, as I said, there's going to be a natural instinct to circle the wagons when someone shines a spotlight on you.

Second, they led a misinformation campaign to take us off the trail and to tell us not to search. I'm going to tell you about that in a second. Third, they were all outspoken gain-of-function advocates before COVID came along. If you don't know what gain of function is, it's when you take a virus and intentionally make it more dangerous to animals or humans. They felt that was smart to do. Obama had outlawed it, and they were constantly promoting efforts to make it happen more often.

Fauci wrote an editorial in The Washington Post in 2011 where he said the pros outweigh the cons. Now, if you talk to any behavioral psychologist, if you've told the world, “We should definitely do this, and the pros outweigh the cons,” there's zero chance you can be impartial when it comes to figuring out what happened. To go home at night and think that something you did contributed to the deaths of 15 million people would make it impossible to go to bed. Your brain is much more likely to trick you into thinking it didn't happen. You wouldn't be allowed on a jury if you had that kind of bias.

The 4th reason, and the most important reason I know they're blockers, is because they didn't search. I tell you they stopped searching, but they never started searching, and they should have been searching. They should still be searching. There are people who did search, but they're not at large institutions.

The 2 on the bottom, DRASTIC, is a loosely affiliated group of scientists who come together and share information. They have a website. You should follow them. It's like 20 Nick Shirleys who are all virologists or scientists. U.S. Right to Know is a nonprofit that's filed the majority of the FOIA claims here, and you can donate to them. I have.

But I want to tell you about these 5 heroes. They're heroes of mine who have been actively trying to find out what happened from the very beginning. Alina Chan was 1 of the first molecular biologists to realize that the virus looked like it was designed for humans. She wrote a book with Matt Ridley.

Here's some really good news: In the past couple of years, The New York Times has published 2 of her op-eds. I would rather it be the investigative team at The New York Times, but it's a start. They're really good. Read both of them. Katherine Eban was the first person to really stick her neck out and say, “We're not looking at this the right way.” She published an article, oddly, in Vanity Fair titled “The Fight to Discover COVID Origins.”

I think the title is important because the fight was about the discovery process. Emily Kopp worked for U.S. Right to Know. She may know more than anybody. She's been the one uncovering all of these documents, and we've been getting more and more documents each and every day, so we're learning more. Zeynep Tufekci is a professor at Princeton who also sometimes writes for The New York Times. I'm going to tell you something she did recently that I think is super important.

Alison Young wrote a book called Pandora's Gamble, which looks at all of the lab leak failures that happened prior to COVID. That's an interesting and relevant data point to study if you want to consider whether or not that was part of the problem. These 5 women have been attacked for sticking their necks out, some of them directly by the men on the previous slide. I think that's completely unreasonable. I think they're heroes.

Now, there are 2 things I want to tell you about, and then I'll wrap it up. There are 2 pieces of information you should know about. I said earlier that the 5 experts-blockers had created a misinformation campaign to take us off the trail. I think that's an understatement. They created a highly successful misinformation campaign to convince everyone that animal spillover was the scientifically determined cause of this, and that anyone who considered a lab leak, even thought about it, or asked a single question was a conspiracy theorist. They were successful at it.

They leveraged the scientific journal community, which they understood. The Proximal Origin paper went out like this—the thing was written in a week. There's no way you did an investigation. They just wanted to get it out there, and then The Lancet had a similar one. These papers have been cited over and over again. If you try to go through Wikipedia, you always end up going back to them, so they were highly successful.

They also somehow made this thing partisan by using the words “conspiracy theory” with Trump attached. I don't know how it happened, but they were able to ask people in their surveys and polls, “What do you think caused COVID?” If you're a Democrat or Republican, you have a different answer. That's nuts. There's no way that should be relevant in this discussion.

Recently, more and more of this information has come out, so you have more understanding of how they came to write these papers, and you can see inconsistencies between what they think and what they wrote. Zeynep put this on Twitter 45 days ago, and I think she chose her words very carefully. She said, “Incontrovertible proof of a conspiracy to cover up and deny the possibility it well may be a lab mishap orchestrated from the highest levels of the scientific establishment and a self-serving group of scientists who deliberately misled the public.”

Those are strong words. She put that up 45 days ago. It has 400,000 views and zero community notes, at least today. Maybe tomorrow we'll have some. Katherine Eban was more terse but equally opinionated. She calls it “manufactured consensus.” If you feel strongly that you know what happened in COVID, you need to understand that this happened. It took people off the scent.

3 years after COVID, the DRASTIC team uncovered this document. It's called the DEFUSE proposal. Who's heard of the DEFUSE proposal? Raise your hand. This is nuts. Look, it's like 3 people. Okay. No major journals ever covered the DEFUSE proposal.

There was a survey of scientists in which they asked, “What do you think caused it?” If they said animal spillover, they asked, “Have you heard of DEFUSE?” Only 22% had. 78% said they had never heard of it. What's the DEFUSE proposal? 3 years after COVID, DRASTIC uncovered this document. You can download it. It's real.

It was a proposal by EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak's company, that connected the top virologist at Duke in North Carolina with the top virologist at Wuhan—the bat lady, Shi Zhengli. The proposal was that they were going to insert a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of a bat coronavirus because they thought it would make it more viral in animals. It's in a document.

I went to AI. I said, “Let's do a clean session with AI.” That means, “Don't look at anything I've ever told you before.” I asked, “If I were interested in helping to solve the origin of COVID and I were using the scientific principles of CAPA to guide me, how would I react to finding the DEFUSE proposal?” Look at these answers: direct investigative lead, highly critical, major investigative lead. Yes, that would be a high-priority piece of evidence. Primary document evidence, highest-tier evidence class.

Most people don't know about this thing. I would make an assertion: Had this document been exposed in January 2020, we would have had a very different conversation back then. But it wasn't. The searchers are aware of the document. Rand Paul is aware of the document. Hopefully, now you're all aware of the document.

One other thing I think I need to say: If you ask these AI bots what you would do next in your CAPA process, they say you would go after documents at Duke University and the University of North Carolina. The searchers have been doing that. Unfortunately, the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina are blockers. They're refusing to deliver the documents.

I would encourage you, if any of you have connections to UNCC or know anyone on the board, to make them think about whatever they're protecting and whether that's more important than preventing the next one of these. If you want to learn more about this, Matt Ridley just did an interview last March with Jay Bhattacharya at NIH. It's a great way to catch up on everything people have been learning.

And as we look forward, and this is where I'd love your help, let's support the searchers. We have to find a root cause to this thing. We don't want this to happen again. I can't tell you that I speak for science as Anthony Fauci did, but I can tell you I speak for scientific inquiry. No one should be telling you that you can't search. That makes no sense whatsoever.

You're not a bad person if you search. You're a good person if you search. You have to move through and around the blockers. I don't think you want to attack the blockers. I think Rand Paul is making a mistake by making it about prosecution. We should make it about root cause and prevention.

This isn't partisan and should never have been. If your view on what caused COVID is based on who you vote for, please reconsider that. I would ask the newsrooms to dive in, be like Monica Richardson, and then let's put a truly independent commission together. Let's find our Kurokawa or Feynman.

I'm going to leave you with a quote. I'm way over time. I'm going to leave you with a quote attributed to Plato that sums up what I've been thinking here: “We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark. The real tragedy in life is when men are afraid of the light.”

Thank you. Wow. I've got to ask a question. Stay out here. No, no—stay out here. Can I ask a question?

Another standing ovation here. Bill, wow. You put a tremendous amount of effort into this. We've known each other for 30 years. I've seen you emotional, I think, 2 other times. One was at a Jason Isbell concert. Another time, your top set got counterfeited or something.

But this is emotional, and this is personal for you. What they did to our kids clearly impacted you. Maybe you could talk about why it's so important that we consider the damage that was done to this generation.

Well, for me, it's all back to prevention. You have to stop it from happening again. I have zero confidence right now that if another pandemic started tomorrow, we'd have any better way to navigate it. I think we might do worse.

The misinformation campaigns caused a lack of trust. Next time, you're not going to listen to them. There's not going to be the ability for anybody to lead. And I'm struck, as you can tell by the presentation, by the difference between the attitude toward the people who researched these other catastrophes, how they were viewed as heroes, and what happened to the people who were looking here.

Yes. You repeatedly talk about the power of journalism—Pulitzers and investigative journalism specifically, which is different from clickbait journalism. There is something very virtuous about investigative journalism and those types of journalists. Maybe you could speak to that, and then explain to us why people didn't go after the Pulitzer here, why they didn't put a large amount of resources into it, because that seems incredibly suspicious.

I seem to have a recollection of Fauci getting a pardon, which also seems to be a red flag that you didn't bring up. So take those 2 issues.

Well, yeah. On the investigative part, one of the reasons I mentioned all the Pulitzers was just to highlight that fact. There's a wonderful video on YouTube, if you're interested in this topic, at the Brookings Institution. Three or four of the women I showed led a panel to talk about why the press missed this.

Both Katherine Eban and Emily Kopp pointed back to the misinformation campaign by the virology experts and how they made it a faux pas to actually ask questions. Considering the scale of the outcome, it's just horrible that that happened. And I would once again encourage them: There's still work to do. There's still information coming out. We're getting closer. Come on in.

Yeah. And there's something really tragic here in that if you asked questions this time, you were painted as a conspiracy theorist who didn't trust the experts, and you were demonized for asking questions.

Yeah.

For asking questions. This is pure evil.

It's crazy.

I mean, it's pure evil to take the people who just say, “Hey, is it possible this came out of the Wuhan lab? You guys have, in fact, funded gain-of-function research. Why is that such a hard question for them to answer?”

Well, I think a behavioral psychologist would tell you that you're able to fool yourself to keep your own sanity.

Yeah. Now, I'll just end with this. Knowing what you know now, you've put thousands of hours into this. You and I have been talking about this for 3 or 4 years now, and this has been a passion project of yours. I really appreciate you sharing it with the audience.

What do you believe, based on what you know now, is the most likely scenario for how COVID originated and what we can learn from it?

I would tell you I intentionally didn't take a side on that here because we haven't found root cause. And I would celebrate anyone who's 100% convinced it's animal spillover and wants to do research there. I funded U.S. Right to Know. If you want to go search for the animals, I'll fund that, too.

You should know China has tested 80,000 animals and not found a single crossover. And they have a huge incentive to find one if they could.

Yes. The wet-market theory would absolutely free them from having fingerprints on it.

Right. So there's a massive incentive. Why hasn't China found one? But if you want to keep looking, go look. Fauci, in these documents that have been uncovered, admitted there were multiple cases prior to the superspreader event at the wet market, which is also another problem you have to deal with.

Yeah. Listen, Bill, I think this could wind up being the most important work of your life. As your friend, I'm just in awe of your passion and your doggedness. Any way we can support it, I think everybody here and in the audience at All-In would love to donate to more research being done. So we'll tweet that in the future.

Let's give it up one more time for Bill Gurley.

Thank you.

Thank you, brother. You crushed it.