{"title": "Origins of the Coronavirus | Jari Kuikanmäki | Negotiator 398", "titleOriginal": "Koronaviruksen alkuperä - Origins of Coronavirus | Jari Kuikanmäki Sami Miettinen | Neuvottelija 398", "episodeNumber": "398", "guest": "Jari Kuikanmäki", "publishedAt": "2026-08-03", "duration": "1:05:36", "durationIso": "PT1H5M36S", "youtube": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9bDdT4SlpI", "fiCanonical": "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/824-koronaviruksen-alkupera-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanma", "originalLanguage": "en", "format": "full", "topics": ["free_speech_society", "geopolitics", "leadership_governance"], "description": "Recorded in English days after Anthony Fauci invoked the Fifth Amendment more than a hundred times before a Senate hearing, and weeks after journalist Jari Kuikanmäki's book on the pandemic's origins went to print. Kuikanmäki lays out the case he spent years building — that on his reading the evidence points beyond reasonable doubt to a research-related origin rather than a natural zoonotic jump — and Miettinen presses on the second half of the story: how national authorities, the WHO and the platforms handled dissent, why every country produced its own local truth, and what the collapse of institutional trust costs the next time an authority is right. Contested claims throughout are the guest's own reading of the evidence, presented as such.", "chapters": [{"t": "00:00", "title": "Fauci takes the Fifth, days after the book goes to print", "seconds": 0}, {"t": "02:05", "title": "A journalist becomes a true-crime author", "seconds": 125}, {"t": "04:10", "title": "Detective story: where the virus came from, and the cover-up", "seconds": 250}, {"t": "06:12", "title": "'Not a wet market' — the guest's reading of the evidence", "seconds": 372}, {"t": "08:15", "title": "Wuhan: how two rival states came to collaborate", "seconds": 495}, {"t": "10:16", "title": "Gain of function, the funding ban, and what it displaced", "seconds": 616}, {"t": "12:16", "title": "NIAID, 9/11 and the biodefence budget boom", "seconds": 736}, {"t": "14:17", "title": "Finland's strict line, Sweden's Tegnell, and the vaccine passes", "seconds": 857}, {"t": "16:21", "title": "Chaos, not a grand plan: what the internal documents show", "seconds": 981}, {"t": "18:22", "title": "The embargoed Wuhan data and what an earlier release might have changed", "seconds": 1102}, {"t": "20:24", "title": "Airborne, masks, and a policy response that looked random", "seconds": 1224}, {"t": "22:25", "title": "How the market story became the official truth", "seconds": 1345}, {"t": "24:25", "title": "Chinese sources, missing scientists and stories that do not add up", "seconds": 1465}, {"t": "26:29", "title": "The WHO investigation and Peter Daszak's place on it", "seconds": 1589}, {"t": "28:35", "title": "The DARPA DEFUSE proposal, leaked by a whistleblower", "seconds": 1715}, {"t": "30:39", "title": "Lethality, transmissibility, and why this one spread", "seconds": 1839}, {"t": "32:41", "title": "The scenario that worries them: a more lethal version", "seconds": 1961}, {"t": "34:45", "title": "Variants, and the limits of detecting engineering", "seconds": 2085}, {"t": "36:48", "title": "Vaccines, incentives and the humanised-mice timeline", "seconds": 2208}, {"t": "38:50", "title": "Fool or villain? Oppenheimer's line about the thoughts of men", "seconds": 2330}, {"t": "40:50", "title": "Each country's local truth, and obedient publics", "seconds": 2450}, {"t": "42:53", "title": "Platform bans, chilling effects and who checks the fact-checkers", "seconds": 2573}, {"t": "44:55", "title": "The cost to trust when authorities are eventually right", "seconds": 2695}, {"t": "46:58", "title": "Both men revise their own positions", "seconds": 2818}, {"t": "49:00", "title": "Nobody wants the post-mortem", "seconds": 2940}, {"t": "51:01", "title": "Biological weapons, attribution and a treaty from the 1970s", "seconds": 3061}, {"t": "53:05", "title": "AI in the mix, and the game theory of slowing down", "seconds": 3185}, {"t": "55:30", "title": "The book, its 400+ sources, and an open invitation to disagree", "seconds": 3330}, {"t": "57:35", "title": "Indictments, retirements and where the investigation goes next", "seconds": 3455}, {"t": "59:34", "title": "Transparency as the one thing the American system still has", "seconds": 3574}, {"t": "61:35", "title": "An invitation to the international audience", "seconds": 3695}, {"t": "63:35", "title": "A Finnish translation, and the case against a narrow Overton window", "seconds": 3815}], "sourceTranscriptType": "macwhisper_sbv", "subtitleMethod": "publisher-english-cues-imported-and-qa", "provenance": "Owner page assembled from the channel's English subtitle track (541 cues) and the cue-aligned Finnish track (541 cues, identical final timecode), checked against YouTube metadata and the neuvottelija.fi episode record. The episode was recorded in English, so the English track is the original and the Finnish one the translation. Chapter timecodes are taken from the English cues. The published English captions are the channel's own track, imported cue-preserving and reviewed. Note: the episode's central factual claims about the pandemic's origin are the guest's stated reading of the evidence and are attributed to him throughout rather than asserted.", "slug": "ep398-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanmaki", "guestsCanonical": ["Jari Kuikanmäki"], "guestPages": ["https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/guests/jari-kuikanmaki/"], "page": "https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep398-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanmaki/", "markdown": "https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep398-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanmaki/index.md", "captions": {"vtt": "https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep398-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanmaki/captions.en.vtt", "srt": "https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep398-origins-of-coronavirus-jari-kuikanmaki/captions.en.srt"}, "transcript": "[00:00] Yes, it's a Senate hearing and it is a culmination of years of investigation and I think things had been the news had already been tightening around Fauci I would say for the last couple of months but now just in the days before the hearing there was a trans of documents including Fouch's own diaries from the pandemic era which I think made it impossible for him to testify without perjurying himself. So that is uh that I see is the main cause of this dramatic turn of events. So yes, Fauci Took the Fifth over 100 times to every question by the Senate. We have Jari Kuikanmäki who has published a very topical book Origins of Corona virus and uh we discussed that uh in the US Senate Anthony Fauci in the middle of the covid pandemic was writing diaries and Rand Paul got hold of it and published it and it's very uh it's criminating against him and uh it also ties up very nicely with or a freshly tied book. I'm not quite sure whether he's uh Anthony Fouchi is a bad guy or just a egoistic uh bit player, but uh Jari Kuikanmäki, please introduce yourself and uh also your book. So I'm a journalist, a podcaster uh with some background in the Finnish national television also and now an author. And yes, for a true crime author, it's always nice when the cover character of your book pleads the fifth over 100 times couple of weeks after your book comes out to print. So, so yeah, it is uh it has been\n\n[02:05] very dramatic couple of weeks now. uh and you have studied in the London and um like rightly you you said you have been in the Finnish product television you have by the way also interviewed me there when in the Alfa television so that was very nice there's still something about the linear television even though the channels like us uh taking the market share oh yeah it has its own energy when you're doing it live and yeah definitely this topic uh I'm a little bit doubting the Finnish media is interviewing you the prime same time live television to discuss the mistakes we made during all those corona virus covid-19 years. It it somehow is is just like a it's a gray area in our history and the linear media didn't handle it well. The politicians didn't handle it well and there was lots of coverups. So you said this is a is it's a detective story. So this tells about uh how excuse my friends how [ __ ] up everything was on those times. Yes. But let let's start in the in the first topic origins of the corona virus. So was it some crazy bad wet market stuff or was it a lab leak? So yeah it is as you said this is a procedure like a detective story. So I just start from the kind of first day I heard of the virus in January 2020 and then then take the reader through the process of how we uh discovered all this evidence. Um and in the process it also became not just a question of where the virus came from but also as the subtitle says it's about the uh cover up of the century also. So not only where did it come from, but how has it taken so long that we are only now 6 years later learning all the sorted details of of what to but I have to insist I guess the crime scene is one China but wet market lap league\n\n[04:10] uh it's it's not it's not a wet market I can I can spoil that much now as as my um informed opinion having investigated the matter for a for a number of years. So uh to use this kind of uh legal uh terminology, I would say that it is beyond a reasonable doubt that the origin of the virus is research related. It is not a natural zunotic jump. But I let the readers look at the evidence and draw their own conclusions. And we have Anthony Fouchy in the middle of it and on his diaries he's also juggling with these two balls and but then he for some crazy reason decides with the US authorities and global authorities world health organization that let's go for this wet market story and for a brief period of time it was also uh forbidden to talk about lab leak and what is what is really shocking um of the new Fouchy diary uh revelations is that we are learning now the timeline that Fouchi in his own private uh diaries already concluded in January 2020 that the market is not the origin. So and then after that he started putting together those uh research papers or the teams who would write all basically all of our um essential uh scientific peer-reviewed papers starting with the proximal origin of sarskov 2 um to promote this wet marketer which f himself uh did not believe. Yeah. And then there's this fascinating uh scene Wuhan China and America. I mean we have a books like a chi uh China America or uh they're kind of this two-headed um beast China and USA working together but it's still\n\n[06:15] mindbgggles in this kind of bioweapon research how how did the two countries cooperate? Yeah. Yeah. It it is it is crazy like uh the truth is really stranger than fiction that if you had tried to pitch me this this story a couple of years ago I wouldn't have believed a word of it that it just cannot be true. Mhm. Uh but all all the evidences kept pointing to these very troubling um collaborations in Wuhan that involved uh both uh the Chinese side, the American side, international scientists from different countries, but also crucially uh the militaries of both both from the Chinese side, PLA and the Academy of U Military Medical Sciences and also Pentagon from the US side and various other agencies. is uh involved um in this uh uh I mean you depends who you ask what do you want to call it some talk about gain of function research others just say that that's like a shorthand for basically bioweapons research or biod defense research of of that kind but the end result is the creation of uh dangerous pathogens in the laboratories in Wuhan and and the potential cure for them as less they say We're just studying for a cure. And and I mean there may be some tr there may be some truth to that notion as well. But then the question becomes that is are the risks worth the rewards? And the this was in fact the gain of function debate that was already going on in the early 2010s with the uh publication of Ron Fushier's uh paper on the aven flu. And that already sparked the gain of function debate back then because that study which was done in Netherlands already received funding from Fouch's uh nei and that chain of events then\n\n[08:16] led to the gain of function moratorum a ban on federal funding of certain kinds of dangerous gain of function research which then led partially to the outsourcing of such research into places like Wuhan, China. Yeah. You mentioned Neide and then there's a US A then you have Anthony Foundry in the capacity of the US government. Yes. And and and like but he he's like he's connected to these organizations. Yes. So, so he is the uh he he was the longest uh serving director of the NIAD which is the infectious diseases and allergies um institution uh under the NIH which is the national institute of health which is the broader umbrella uh consisting of many of these uh agencies and uh so Fouch has been there a long time since the 1980s but really In this capacity, his um uh role grew and Neit's role grew significantly after the 9/11 and the Andrax letter attacks and that's when when the biod defense boom really started the budgets uh became huge and there was a proliferation of these kinds of labs and this kind of research and then we had the first SARS epidemic soon after and so that's the that's the kind of background. So he has really been uh this kind of uh zar of this kind of civilian biod defense. Uh so it's seemingly civilian. It sounds very you know almost boring some like allergy and things like that but in reality it has uh it has deep uh military connections and biod defense connections. Yeah. And then there's the totalitarian aspect of it which the all the governments jumped with the glee and um I aided\n\n[10:17] by world health organization. I remember vividly at the time uh we are recording this in Finland, but uh we took the very strict line with Christ uh guaranteeing the the biggest um area usima in now now we can say needlessly at the same time in the uh Sweden we had this technel who was proposing kind of a what looked to me then like a reckless society individual freedoms let's not use overly use guarantees is let's take the death toll of the older people which is inevitable in the beginning but then it it will smoothen out and it uh the public line was that that was totally reckless and uh the kind of the totalitarian response taken by every other country in the world China, USA, Finland was that um strict guarantees uh mandatory vaccinations u we even had this um vaccination pass I remember going to Norway and they wouldn't let me in if I hadn't had the two uh uh vaccination shots. And and then then of course China continued that long after everybody else had quit and uh gone to the Swedish line and uh they really used this total isolation and uh like a totalitarian uh checking and uh like uh doing all the log logistics. So that uh and uh that was fascinating and uh it it had its backslash as well. So there was something good coming from that but it looked on the hindsight like completely overblown. Yes we have of of course I guess primarily we have the of course the death toll from the pandemic uh tens of millions of uh lives lost and counting all the illness that came with it but also all these secondary effects of the lockdowns and uh uh economic effects effects on civil liberties uh uh all all in all so all these ripple effects are are still happening what I would say of those early months\n\n[12:21] um of the pandemic that uh like now looking through all the uh documents, all the evidence, it does still some people uh insist that there was this very like great plan in place and there were some plans in place in in in terms of how how the governments and the intergovernmental organizations react. But there was also uh lots of chaos. So that it was quite improvised for many parts and all these internal documents also show it. Uh part of the reason of that may be also that the pathogen in question the sarskov 2 is quite special in its properties. So whatever plans they had in place uh epidemiological models for example uh turned out to be wrong for reasons that people at the time most people at the time could not have known. M but then you also recovered we discussed that um there was logged in um reports from Wuhan and uh which were locked in the medical database which were matching the virus uh uh blueprint quite nicely and had those been used fully we would have probably had had a much better response using the data but that for some reason it was put under embargo and only several years later released and you had a bit of a uh Twitter or ex discussion around that. Yes. So that so that is actually one of the big questions when we talk about a cover up is that who were involved, when were they involved. So that now we know uh for example on the origins investigation we have now whistleblowers coming forward from like agencies like CIA and saying that oh we already knew in the agency let's say around 2021 or some agencies maybe later in 2020 that oh probably we are looking at a at a research related\n\n[14:22] um origin but we still have quite a bit of opacity in those early days and weeks and and months that when did they really know and would that have made a difference and I I think it's some it's somewhat quite disturbing uh some of the evidence looking at that both people in China and also some of the international researchers might have known about this already in 2019. Yeah. But then we had the stuff like um is it airborne and this whole mask craze everybody was wearing the masks and it looks to that uh had we correctly used the already mapped genetic properties of the virus we would have got a pretty good grasp that maybe it's not airborne maybe this is the most def efficient way to handle it and uh maybe in the background that data was transferred to Mona and who developed the eronai vaccine and and so on but look like uh policy response was completely random many for years. Yes. And absolutely if if one looks at the kind of research that was being conducted in Wuhan. So had there been transparency there uh that response would have been different. We would have understood the properties of the virus the furing cleavage site how it operates and so so that it's very uh optimized to infect humans. In fact, it is uh uh it infects humans better than any other uh mammals, better better than bats, which is a very unusual to say the at least for this kind of supposed zunotic jump. So, it came like straight out the gates, it was ready to infect humans and and uh be airborne. And many would say that it was designed for uh those properties. But then uh if there was this red herring of the of the crazy bats and\n\n[16:24] uh so it sounded a bit like the ids come came from apes who some gay people were [ __ ] Excuse my uh crude language here, but it sounded like a let's let's let's let's invent this crazy theory about bats and the wet market and uh how did that became like the truth? M so so essentially uh the the first cluster or this kind of first known cluster of uh early COVID cases was uh traced and located on the Huan seafood market in central uh Wuhan in uh around middle December or so 2019 and then the wet market was uh closed disinfected in early January 2020. 20 and then it sort of uh went from there. But it seems very probable now with the evidence we know that there was a cover up in the in the Chinese side in terms of the uh virus sequences of those early index uh patients that uh we now know with quite good confidence that the patient zero of the pandemic was not in that marketplace. So that the virus came into that marketplace earlier, the spread started earlier but uh it became um dominant due to actions of also people like Anthony Fauci in the west as well as the CCP and that local uh cover up response. So I think it was a cover story from the beginning but then not not everybody who who uh was proposing it were necessarily in on the cover up but like they were I think uh misled Mhm. by What about the I mean B zero are any of the Chinese people in the original lab alive and did you get hold of the Chinese sources for your book?\n\n[18:25] Uh no, there's there would be there would be very little point in uh trying to uh contact them, but we we do have some uh their retelling of of some of the events. uh US intelligence uh has uh um at least uh suggested they haven't proven that uh some of the early uh clusters of patients with symptoms consistent with COVID 19 would have been working inside the Wuhan Institute of Viology, but that has not been verified. Um but yeah, we we do have some uh uh interesting stories from some of the people inside and it it all uh those tend to be very inconsistent when you start looking at the gaps of the stories from people like Xiang Lee for example from the Wuhan Institute of Viology who was the main collaborator with with organizations like Ecoalth Alliance and and uh Ralph Barrick from University of North Carolina and then the US site. Um so their stories really do not add up but then again um under the circumstances they they may not be at liberty to to say what they know. Then there was also the uh case of uh Zoen the uh vaccine developer, the first person to file a uh Sarskov to um vaccine patent in China and uh he died uh somewhere around May June 2020 and that has never been disclosed. uh many people would suggest that it happened under suspicious circumstances let's say. M yeah and um this uh official institutions I mean all\n\n[20:29] these health organizations working uh and um what about the is is the world health organization did you did is was that part of the loop or they just took the lead of the US institutions? Yeah, unfortunately the World Health Organization is swayed uh quite uh powerfully by the two big players that are now most uh tangled in the Wuhan research that being the United States and China. So for example, one of the uh one of the ways in which the the WH origin investigation started going wrong very early on was the nomination of uh the president of the Ecoalth Alliance, Peter Dac into their origin investigation team, the international team that arrived in Wuhan in January uh 2021 and who basically ly say that oh there's no reason to investigate this lab leak theory further when in fact uh Peter Dac would be among the prime suspects uh had it been uh a lab leak in Wuhan. He was deeply involved in both the virus collection programs uh among them uh also the closest known relative virus of SARS COV 2 called RATG13 which was uh announced uh around February 2020. So that that virus was uh collected from a copper mine in Eunan and then brought to uh Wuhan over a 1500 kilometer distance. So that's like a 4-hour flight by plane uh with US taxpayer money by people like uh Peter Dac and Xiang Lee. Uh furthermore, Peter Dasac was also involved with\n\n[22:35] the Pentagon in the DARPA diffuse proposal which was leaked then in 2021 which included the genetic engineering of these viruses in Wuhan with the US military money and it was very very detailed proposal of inserting the furing cleavage sites into the backbones of these viruses. And then then behold uh 2 years after such a proposal was written then a virus with a unique furing cleavage site emerges right next to the laboratories in which they plan to do exactly that. Uh I read a book about DARPA when the uh the electric cars and uh self-driving cars were being developed and I got a good wipes of the DARPA organization but when you combine DARPA with diffuse I mean maybe that's something less less nice uh is that like one of the key key players yeah I think uh the what what DARPA said then when the diffuse leaked it was leaked by a whistle blower inside Mm. DARPA in the autumn of 2021, Major Murphy leaked it. Uh so so that in itself is a cover up because that of course DARPA had been holding on to that proposal with very incriminating details about the kind of research that was planned in Wuhan and they had been holding on it for for the first year and a half into the pandemic into the original investigation. So that means that DARPA and other US federal agencies and other branches of military in some capacity and intelligence agencies were to some extent involved in this cover up of this crucial evidence. Now whether uh because DARPA did not then fund the proposal they said that it is too risky but they knew about the plans. Uh so so what exactly is is DARPA's uh complicity in it uh is still uh unknown but those uh the diffuse\n\n[24:44] proposal outlines in disturbing detail the kind of direction that the virus research was going in Wuhan. And it is possible uh some would say even probable that perhaps elements of the Chinese military for example the academ of military medical sciences took some of those elements some of those ideas and then went ahead Mhm. and and tried it. Yeah. Then about the the virus so so it has some pedigree on this lab developments and the earlier viruses and like you said it's uh remarkably well adjusted for human population. But the good thing was it wasn't very lethal. So I had one guest uh Thomas Malin who compared it to the Spanish flu 100 years earlier and that was more deadlier but it it the waves get milder quite quickly. Yes that that is true. So if if it has this super prop property, it is the infectivity and and combined with the fact that the symptoms uh the patients can be asytomatic for a longer period which which gives it the pandemic potential. Like if you compare it to the first charge virus which was way more deadlier uh but then it had the luckily it had the property that the uh let's say the viral um shedding took place at a much later stage of the when the symptoms had already appeared. So you could you could actually quarantines actually worked and they they were able to uh it was around what did they have 8,000 something like that m uh SARS cases uh the first one and then compared with the billions we we now had with this one but it's true that the lethality is luckily much lower. Yeah. Now that we know or at least strongly suspect it's it's all lab engineered even without\n\n[26:48] proper AI artificial intelligence one thinks that it would be just a matter of relatively simple tinkering to increase the lethality and uh just keep the other nice properties of spreading uh intact and that would be a much harder case because we have excuse my friends [ __ ] up the system because uh now nobody believes believes the system anymore. M yes it it yes it is a very very disturbing scenario that what we now saw with the sarskov 2 that it might have just been like a uh kind of like a exercise run for something something much worse in the future and that's also why we I think as a society we have to take this for example this gain of function uh research risks now very seriously and and also all the advances in the synthetic biology ology and now combine that with the AI. So that that can be a really existential question for all mankind. Is there there were all kinds of varants and uh it it kind of uh the timeline I guess is like roughly in the by the end of 2019 to was it 2022 in my mind kind of a is hazy on these things but uh by the uh end of 2021 there was already a milder variance but there was like a was it Omicron or Delta. Delta was the bit more nasty variant and then the last kind of a smooth variant was Omicron which kind of smooth it it nicely nicely out of the population. Yes. But uh was there something to be learned on those like variants which came after the first um 19 and was some of those like engineered by man-made uh efforts? there there has been some there has been some interesting theories. Uh so that that's the thing with um with some of these laboratory techniques and the synthetic uh viology is that you can really get into these rabbit holes and that's part of\n\n[28:50] the uh kind of paranoia also that we can see also from the literature both on the US side and the Chinese side on the biod defense that already uh like in the early 2000s they were very aware of the fact that it It may become very difficult to detect whether or not a virus has been somehow tampered with in a laboratory or not and some perpetrator uh by intention or just by accident. It could be let's say uh research related or vaccine development related uh leak. So some some variant could come out and we wouldn't even necessarily know uh whether whether or not it's of of natural or origin or not. But I I suppose I'm not an epidemiologist but I suppose that those uh later variants uh behaved somewhat somewhat as might be expected in in terms of of becoming uh milder. And then I guess the vaccination itself I remember there was like a Russian vac vaccination and the Chinese vaccination and then there was the Astroenica one and then there was the modern RNA um which was the like the real breakthrough and I remember thinking like lucky me my mother got this Astrazenica crap but I got this cool RNA uh modern uh modern like a crisper technology and I I felt good about that. But uh any any reflections on on those vaccines or were the sideshow or their development? Uh you mentioned that some Chinese guy patented the early version. Maybe that was blueprint for the Chinese vaccination. Yeah. So so that's the that's the kind of double-edged sword with this whole whole uh vaccine research. So there are some this quite disturbing timelines of the vaccine R&D um in terms of that. So, Yusen's case was one. Uh, just uh days ago,\n\n[30:53] we had those Fouchy emails uh released and in what or his diaries released rather. And in one of them, he was uh very disturbed to have learned in around June 2020 of a Chinese research paper that was describing the use of humanized A2 mice. And the problem with the paper was was that the mice were in the paper 30 week old. And you know, Fouchi kind of he can do basic arithmetic. And then he started like checking that wait a minute why did the uh Chinese start breeding these mice in like late summer, early autumn of 2019. It's quite a disturbing question. Yeah. Uh so so uh yeah there there could be those kinds of uh those kinds of uh connections uh as well as some very um troubling uh questions of incentives in the in the risks of these kinds of research. So if you have say vaccine R&D development that is risky and may cause a pandemic and then then that same industry profits if a pandemic takes place then that's you know that's not a very good incentive structure even if you know nobody intended it to be that way. Yeah. Now because of this we get all kinds of u dry runs or test cases and of course millions tens of millions of people died and uh it's it's all tragic and um it's very hard to kind of find the bad guys and even Fouchy he strikes me as a kind of egoistic guy who enjoys being in the limelight and uh just being the being the mastermind and uh and the source of truth in this middle of the global thing and everybody looks up to him but uh It's still kind of my mind is still a little bit\n\n[32:53] uh not made on that. Was he just a bit of a fool or evil? Yeah, I start my start my book with the epic. I might read it out loud. I I actually I selected this already uh when I started writing it. And it goes like this. There are no secrets about the world of nature. There are secrets about the thoughts and intentions of men. And the source of the quote is uh the father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oenheimer. Mhm. And I think when writing this book that was a recurring thought in my mind like trying to understand that what were these people thinking who is the who is the good guy here who is the bad guy and or is it like a areas of areas of gray. So I I think there's some quite uh there's some quite Shakespearean drama. I think high stakes you you can see the pressure that is put on people uh whether it's science administrators or or or these scientists and they have to make these judgment calls. Um in terms of Fouchy though I I I am starting to lean in the you know more in the in the villain category. um some of his actions. He was uh not only was he aware that the wet market is not the origin, but that the emails from him showed that he was actively uh involved in the in the cover up because he had uh funded the gain of function research in Wuhan starting in 2014 to with a grant to the ecoalth alliance and the emails show that he was already uh covering it up in in January um 2020. 20 and his diaries show him quite enjoying the public limelight and how important he is now and how everybody likes him. At the same time,\n\n[34:58] he's doing this quite quite selfserving uh acts. Mhm. So, so one gets this very two-faced um portrait of of what his diary show and what the records show and then how he liked to be perceived in the in the public eye. Yeah. And it's remarkable how there was this global coordination with the World Health Organization and uh all the uh national entities but how kind of uh scaringly totalitarian each country reacted. Uh, for example, uh, like I mentioned in Sweden, I have a like a Finnish uh, friends who live in Sweden and I was like wondering because the Finnish narrative was that they completely crazy and irresponsible and technist evil guy who lets Swedish die and they just sacrificing for human lives for the economic alter of people being able to have a dinners in the in the social settings. cuz I said like can't can't you guys see and then we had like a the Finnish reality was was leftwing government with the Christa Koru and DHL the our health organization kind of having half-hearted debate where sort of once you should wear masks and uh then it wasn't quite clear and we should definitely guarantee and nobody should go to restaurants and uh let's just go to the full total tourism and uh just know oh I'm I'm a little bit exeaggerating but let's go the full vaccination cards and uh restrictions on the on the travel and uh international movements. And then we had the US situation where you have like a Trump in power and Fouch is still keeping through every government and then the Democrats coming over and they flipping the positions on these masks and the guarantines from one state to another. But for in each country there was the was the local truth and people were very scarily obedient to that truth.\n\n[37:01] and and the truth in each different country were just isolated installations. So it was fascination and nobody has done like a postmortem on like a on these crazy times what we could learn from this kind of mass psychosis. Yes. Yes. I think it is one of these things we would all like to think that we are these uh in individuals and we think for ourselves and we are not swayed by by these kind of primal emotions or or mass psychology but you know that clearly is not not true. So yeah and and it was not like a I mean like I said China took it much longer than all the rest. So I was wondering when it was like a clear that it's over and you shouldn't guarantee and they were still continuing on and it looked like they wanted to go to the full end of the social experiment of can we control the people in in like in good totalitarian fashion and I think there there was there was some disturbing convergence between the Chinese model and and even some western countries that we pride ourselves in in in the civil liberties and these kinds of things. But in in in some respects there was some bit too much resemblance, let's say. Yeah. And I remember Spotify banging COVID 19. So he mentioned that the then the uh the episode didn't spread and uh there was YouTube also cancelling and then all the social medias were like at like like we mentioned at some point it was illegal to um talk about lap league. Yes. Yes. They or illegal but it was de facto social media death. Yeah. the like Facebook who even went to the lengths of banning uh mentioning the idea that the virus may be engineered so they would just remove that content and they they said so uh but this is this is just this like re reinvention uh reinventing or trying\n\n[39:02] to reinvent the wheel of the the basic concept of the freedom of speech and the dangers of uh this kind of uh presensorship whether it's done directly by government or somebody who is kind of doing the bidding of the government. But it seems that we ne never learned the basic lesson why it is so dangerous that uh uh who who tells the fact checkers the facts. So uh that's why we we have to make sure that we we don't repeat that mistake. Yeah. And then there was a social media remember Brett Weinstein and uh Joe Rogan doing this. was it Ivormecting or some other like a horse uh animal health drug and that was probably just a complete [ __ ] uh sort of dead end as well and uh at the same time the RNA vaccinations probably worked and they were the best science at the time and the science was kind of settled on that and it was logical to follow the that part of the official track and taking the vaccinations and then trying to sort of minimize So your chances of uh uh catching the infection, but then again looks like the it may mainly hit older people over 70 years old and uh then you get the long co and all kinds of other effects from the vaccination that guarantees mental health uh problems. So I mean um truth is the best disinfectant but I don't know when you nobody knows what the truth is then will the completely free speech and crazy theories be the right way but I guess at least you get the ideas in some probability out and then it's up to you to make the judgment what what is the truth. Yeah, I mean we we we've tried to model that the government tells what the truth is and we know that that's not a good that is not a good model\n\n[41:02] and I also that there is this very detrimental effect uh to the trust in science trust in public health authorities now but and and that is I think we would need to go to the root causes of what what is what is causing that that for example if we have like public health authorities like uh like Anthony Fouchy who are this uh you know two-faced people then no wonder that people lose the trust even when the advice is the correct one but how how would how would normal people know when are the authorities lying when are they telling the truth so that that that will be one of these um ripple effects also of this whole origins cover up debacle that we we will now have a a generation of people who who will not trust the public health authorities. Yeah. Now for uh good or mostly worse, we have done the crying the wolf test and the the we have tried the sort of trust the government and it didn't look good. So let's say if somebody now does the more lethal and true dangerous variant of COVID 21 or whatever [ __ ] it is called then it's u then uh we have screwed the system like uh then even if the government or the science is settled in the next time around then people have a very different trust reaction to the government uh guidance. Yes. Yes. And I think that that has been one of these uh maybe one of the motivations for these kind of cover-ups going as long as they have that that people have kind of justified uh this kind of noble lie. Mhm. that you know let's try to keep the mistakes uh out of sight so that people would not lose the trust and also people's favorite politicians have picked one side and uh\n\n[43:08] like I said I mean people change the sides so like republicans were thinking one way and uh then when they were opposition they were thinking other way so they were not not like a consistent line that um only democrats wore masks and they were idiots and and so on and the same thing in Finland, nobody wants to do postmortem because we had this lovely left-wing government who was just doing the their best and nobody wants to remember all the mistakes which were made because it's embarrassing and their favorite politicians would look bad and so there's a also media is having a lot of trouble with on this because there was a lot of articles written on very much certainty that this is the truth and this is what you must do and this is these are the right people and if you don't agree 100% present you an idiot and dangerous and probably some right-wing lunatic. Yes. Yes. I mean undoubtedly this was uh among the worst media failures of you know at least at least my lifetime but you know we we will have this ahead of us. We have to come face to face with with what happened. For example, in Finland, we still have no uh official investigation or even interest in the in the origin question, for example, and many other uh pandemic era policies. Mhm. But you know that is unsustainable like sooner or later we have to come you know face to face with the facts. Yeah. Um and people had a such a strong economics and they were like really I had a lot lot of friends who were absolutely 100% economists that this is the way to do and I remember myself doing episodes throughout the bad uh pandemic and I had str uh struggled I actually had very few masked episodes but I just had a bigger distance between me and the guests on that but I mean a lot of people were really really paranoid on on on what to and what to say and uh and also I I as a sort of podcaster\n\n[45:13] and a YouTuber but emerging publisher I was really worried all the time that I might get cancelled and lose the whole platform. So that was a really silencing effect. Yeah. Chilling effect. Chilling effect. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I'm even even myself like I I didn't start out on this journey with like very like uh hard set uh like a set of convictions that I already knew from early on that oh this is how it is or or something. I was definitely wrong about things along the way and and had had to really like revise my world view. M uh I took the scientists at their word uh say early 2020 when they said that oh this is uh this cannot be uh uh research related that we have we have ruled it out. I looked at okay here's prestigious scientists saying this they seem to be you know wearing white lab coats and like they have decrees and like who am I to who am I to disagree? M so so yeah I I think one one has to kind of be be able to revise their convictions if the evidence somewhere else. What was your vaccination history? Like I said I get two two more than a shots but yeah I I I I got I got my vaccines as well. I don't know was it a good idea. I haven't really like Yeah, but I remember like I I tried to get into like the favorable place in the queue because it's a was kind of a honorable thing to do it early and so on. And then I think I got twice uh the COVID. So I at least got the same Yeah, I got two recorded uh uh uh sort of uh tests that said that I had still had the COVID. So and uh but both were mild varants. So I skipped the delta. So I get the omic chrome which was nothing. So it was just a bit of a flu. M but yeah I don't know like uh there is this like uh one shouldn't also get all this like contrarian um worldviews\n\n[47:17] as like a set. The same it's the same as with this like very conformist worldview that you just believe everything you read in the paper. Sure. But but then there's the kind of the the opposite or the corerary of that is is not necessarily the way way to go either that you know not not every conspiracy theory is true even if some are. Yeah. But it was hard time. I remember I took uh our kid from the school illegally uh one week early just because it was clear it's spreading and uh the system wasn't guaranteeing. So I took the liberty of uh going against the rules in that way. in that judgment that end but then in the other end then I was just thinking starting to think that this is this is like looks like the maybe the technal was more right than I thought and uh then then I was on that end of the things and uh started thinking that this this is like stupid that we we are so strongly always believing the authorities like in the beginning of it was like no no no everybody goes to school and no uh you shouldn't do anything individual ually unless you are absolutely told what to do and uh you should be wearing masks or not wearing mask and whatever and uh and taking the shots and uh and not traveling and uh taking your record in the in the pan uh European uh vaccination uh database so you can travel to Norway and uh it's it was crazy times but now most of my friends who were really fanatic one way or other I had some friends who were also in the in the kind of this is this is crazy and we should you shouldn't vaccinate at all and uh everybody should just um get the natural immunity and and like almost like willingly get the virus and that's the way to get it through. So, but nobody now nobody wants to talk about that and and just everybody feels just a little bit ashamed about it. Yeah. And I I suppose also like uh just like exhausted and tired about it. So there's there is this thing that it it was\n\n[49:21] very like extraordinary at time then I suppose like many people just don't want want to think about it too much or you know it's there there is this kind of weariness that that comes in and and I think that's also eventually we have to though we have to get like a historical record straight of you know what what really happened. Yeah. And uh surely you have some wisdom what we can learn from this. Now it's scary to think that uh if if and uh when this was man-made and lab generated maybe for noble purposes of just trying to find a preventive cure for this awful viruses which had been deadly in the earlier uh manifestations. Now we have AI. We have a completely different global coordination. I mean US and USA and China are no longer friends. Europeans don't trust Americans. All the trust is lost in the a lot of the trust is lost in the official uh institutions. But we have a super powerful artificial intelligence. So what now? It's scary times. Uh definitely we should try to implement if we can some kind of uh proliferation ban in in the in the similar sense as with nuclear weapons earlier. I mean we have the bioweapons treaty but it it's seems it's very outdated. It's from the 70s uh banning the development of of biological weapons but it's so full of loopholes that in in practice uh it it's not very well enforced and I think that we we would need to get all all sides to understand that what are the risks for everybody here and uh try to work out some kind of a solution that we would uh stop uh dangerous gain of function\n\n[51:25] research. Uh there was just announcement from US that they're they're putting um more of a federal ban there on the certain kinds of uh dangerous gain of function research because the risks of it clearly outweigh the benefits. So I think that that whole doctrine that that for example Fouchen and NI were were proposing in the early 2010s that just is wrong. So that the that that would be in in every one's benefit. Now whether whether those uh superpowers can see face to face and and figure that out, I don't know. And and then throw the AI in the mix. So it it is very precarious times we're living in, I'm afraid. Yeah. And uh with war and uh international conflict still in the agenda. I mean if you look on the Ukrainian uh Russian fight we are past the terminator aids I I think so we we seeing self-guided weapons and uh drones in in particular and uh Ukraine has been sort of developed remarkable uh drone capability where they're now burning the uh the uh Russian uh uh department store stoages and uh and the uh oil infrastructure and uh and then I think they are now moving in the this year in the ground troops where the uh the artificial intelligence will do the killing. So now you would think uh if you're Russia or something like that uh well if you have a low morals anyway why not go this way. So it I I think unfortunately this is um this is still a kind of the game theory problem where where the global aband is doesn't look like a very likely solution. Yes. And also I think the biological weapons have very particular problems like the\n\n[53:28] attribution that for example you may not know who the attacker is and that that makes all these game theories quite quite difficult. Yeah. And uh then on the other hand the artificial intelligence I use it super heavily myself. So I think it it's this kind of the game theory problem that uh if USA and Europe um slows down then uh China will just keep going. So there's no point kind of stopping because um you just um take yourself out of the game. M and uh uh we now seeing with the closed models like uh anthropic and um open AI that the US government was kind of toying with the idea let's only give the Americans this best models and it failed and now there seems to be a consortium that u we should have the open-source models more available so we you can just sort of regulate the paid models and uh and if you are going open source then it's by definition auditable so but it's powerful so I think we have the same [ __ ] here I mean you can you can do the biological research and on the closed circles but I don't know if that's good idea so yeah I don't remember who said it was it Peter Teal or it might have been him that he he said that you know sometimes when he you know when he doesn't know how to you solve a problem at least he will try to talk about the problem that you know that's a maybe it's a bit like this crutch but like that that's maybe something that where we can you know even if we don't have the answers that we we kind of start thinking about that you know what what could the solutions be and what are the right questions to ask and the right right problems to f focus on maybe about the book so this is uh\n\n[55:30] English language uh book uh available in Amazon in in the hard um yeah paperback paperback and Kindle versions uh on Amazon's worldwide. So it's origins of corona virus wuhan the secret research that sparked the pandemic and the cover up of the century and I have all the it's based on like um bit over 400 sources there also on the book website all all linked so our interview with Anthony Fouch you know that I think he he will be pleading the fifth from from now on. Yeah. Uh but yeah so uh so so everything in the book is you know it's not some you know opinion book everything is uh you know fact can be checked and uh I'm I'm quite optimistic that you know whatever uh open questions remain after after having researched this couple of years and you know it's it's like a remarkable group of people all around the world who have been on this for for years and I chronicle some of their achievements here as well. But uh you know I'm I'm quite uh confident that we will solve this that whatever the open questions are they will be we will get the answers. Yeah, I think this is now Anthony Fouchy leading the fifth. I mean, we won't get too much information from him, I guess, because he's just stonewalling, but this is um feels like a kind of a political fight in the USA because um it kind of gives bit of a breathing room from the Republicans from the Iran fiasco and uh and then uh uh although there there is like there is bipartisan support on the on the origin question. So that it's not so much it's maybe leaning more on the Republican side, but it's it's not as bipartisan of an issue as as many others are. But yes,\n\n[57:31] def definitely this is like a earthquake moment when when Fouchi led the fifth and there would be so many avenues uh where this uh investigation would be going if the DOJ started it. There has already been for example uh Fouch's uh advisor Dr. David Morren he was indicted and arrested on May on uh conspiracy charges as well as destruction concealment of federal records. It's also in the I I already covered uh his misdeeds in the book before that before that happened. So that was kind of gratifying to see the or hear about the SWAT in at his door. Uh so uh Ralph Barrick's research also he he announced sudden retirement in in May and he is in federal department process as well uh related to these things. So even though Fouchy is not speaking that doesn't mean that you know an investigation is not going forward. there's a very very many directions that it would now take. Yeah, it's good point that it's kind of a shared by both aisles and uh it's not so it's a in a disturbing way it's a little bit like a Epstein like everybody both parties had like a people benefiting from from that network and uh now we have the kind of the Fouchy standing decades in the in the system and being in the Trump administration and uh Biden administration and it's just a sort of a constant everywhere. So I we'll see but it's looks like a it's American theater and uh I think it will um develop and hope hopefully uncover lots of uncomfortable truths. Yes. Yes. And I mean of course one must say that uh like Americans even though they have been now in kind of a a bad light in due to these voucher revelations they have still been one could say\n\n[59:34] the most transparent in terms of trying to get to the bottom of this. So, so we get this kind of spotlight effect that you know China has done worse things but they don't have such transparency going on there. So that's the that's the good side of the American system that they still have some semblance of of uh like a democratic o oversight over this and and I would say that it's almost like more of this permanent bureaucracy of or what you know President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military-industrial complex. So that once you build these budgets and these institutions and this kind of permanent bureaucracy and the kind of scientific technological elite as he called them, it kind of takes a life on its own and I think that's that's what has happened with with some of this biod defense stuff and now it now it's a question that whether the whether the uh political system the democratic system can can somehow uh tame it get it get it under over uh some some you know oversight again. Yeah. And um we'll see we are recording this in English. I I do every now and then um English episodes. But uh if I get the international non-Finnish audience in particular of Fins, I mean would be good if you could comment on the your recollections from those strange times when uh were you part of the you were always cheering for the official line and uh and what was your thinking and have you changed the thinking or is this just you want to what what's what's your feel on this? I would appreciate if the there would be a lively debate on this and on the international uh basis as well. Yes. And yeah, go go buy the book on it's on Amazon. It's a it's a thrilling read and uh you know it really reads like a detective story. So, and uh one uh of our uh sort of um popular guests here, Mati Van, is apparently working with you on\n\n[61:35] the Finnish translation as Yes, Mati helped edit this one and and we have the Finnish translation in the works as well. Yeah. So, we'll might do this again. And maybe we'll invite Mati as well to to discuss the this because he he's been publishing also other other interesting books on like the path where the he discussed the sort of political polarization how how how that happened in Finland and then he was also discussing the climate change and uh it's it's I think it's good to have this overton window like um there might be one objective truth but uh for sure if you a very narrow overton wing window in the in the society where you're only allowed to speak about the perceived official truth. That's that's always a bad idea and we see time and topic and generally after another that it's a bad idea to lock in to with too much certainty in one official launch. Yes. And uh but I I think judging from your book u there's some untold stories here but uh uh we can say categorically no to the uh wet uh market biological story and yes to the laplik and the and the sort of grandio uh coverups and uh nefro u actions and uh incompetence. I guess those are the themes. you know, go go read the book and check the evidence. Like I'm I'm not even I'm I'm really like happy for for people to having their own own theories and own own view owns on it like just because it's like based based on the evidence. So I'm not really even that interested in sort of convincing anybody of anything that it's very evidence first and uh so thank you Yari Maki. I guess you you hang on to in the X on Twitter mostly and you have your own podcast as well. Yes. Uh so you can find me on social media x.com/yaragamaki. I have a website for the book\n\n[63:40] also yarwagamaki.com/ origins and then we have the vidasalta podcast with the u on YouTube. Yeah is great. he has been here with me uh talking about various topics and uh it's it's translate 50 state that's like the that's the political theories and that so actually because you you you studied in London in um was it London school of economics and um yes yes I did my masters there as well and then um undergraduate in in Helsinki yeah so uh I think I have this thing um inside episode so I learned you had also studied uh uh uh Ronald Kors and uh this is very topical about the AI economy because um he he's one of the great minds of the theory of the firm and uh it's fascinating that we have the hierarchical entities called firms or limited liability companies where you use the uh you you have the you have bosses and subordinates and tasks and the reason for that accord According one theory is that because the transactional costs are uh very low inside the organization because you have the the bosses have right to boss around the employees and uh they have the obligary duty to work because they get the salary. Now the artificial intelligence is breaking that and uh I think we we could go to the the inside episode to discuss how will AI reshape the uh modern corporation and uh androidization of humans and uh corporations and uh artificial intelligence. Uh I think uh let's do that. Thank you uh Yikamaki and like you said uh by the book. Oh, thank you. Great being here. See you in the inside episode. uh area. Thanks,"}