Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman
In a Nutshell
Bill Gurley argues that COVID-19 caused 15 million deaths and $45 trillion in damage but six years later has no root-cause investigation like the ones conducted after Surfside, 737 Max, Katrina, Fukushima, or Challenger. He identifies five virology insiders as blockers who ran a misinformation campaign that suppressed lab-leak inquiry and blocked access to documents like the DEFUSE proposal, while a handful of independent searchers continue the work largely unsupported. Gurley calls for newsrooms and institutions to fund the equivalent of a Feynman-level investigation to determine the true origin and implement prevention measures before the next pandemic.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
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.
It's good to be here again. Three years ago, I gave a talk on regulatory capture and this group was quite kind and how they reacted and how that video was promoted. And 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. It's not I'm not going to talk about AI. It's a serious topic and 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 five or six years and I'm thankful that the team here allowed me to come to talk to you about it and I'm hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well.
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 the Chamberlain Towers in Surfside, Florida. You may remember in June of 2021 when the building suddenly collapsed, 98 people died. What happened? There were design areas from the very beginning. There's poor maintenance schedule. And then the the board of the condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Three different things. That's kind of the institutional failure.
The technical failure was different. And you can see it here. This is a New York Times article. Hopefully they can push play so you can see. It's a 3D article. If if if they can't make it play, you'll have to watch it on your own. Um here we go. But 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. It corroded. The pool deck collapsed into the basement which took out the structural columns and the building came down. But what I want you to take away from this is the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened, which comes from doing primary investigative work.
There were four other parallel investigations that happened. The 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 two individuals, Matrini Risner and Bell, would spend five years on this. Allan Kilshimer 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. Judge Randall would convene a grand jury in the state of Florida to investigate this. And there were 17 victim lawsuits which got put under a single class. Tropin was the the defender or the litigant and Hodsman was the judge that 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. They had a new executive editor named Monica Richardson, but they went after this hard. The beat reporter, Alan Liuititz, was on the scene within two hours. Sarah Blaski would lead an investigative team. They would eventually find Don Leman who's a professor at the University of Washington. She would join the team. They would they would staff up to 37 people on this. They have a 3D model that's equally impressive to the New York Times one and they would deservedly win a Pulitzer Prize for the work that 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. 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. So you have change that causes prevention. That's what you want to have happen when these things happen.
737 Max crash. Unfortunately, there were two crashes, October 2018 and March 2019. For those of you who don't know know what happened, let me give you the really short version. Airbus had come out with a plane that was incredibly fuel efficient and they were 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 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 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 and they had this problem during test flights when it would occasionally tip up. So they wrote a piece of software, secret software called MCAS, MCCast, and they put it in there without telling anybody. And if if the sensor went off and told him the plane was tipping up, the autopilot would push it down. The poor pilot that was flying the Ethiopian Airways flight, his sensor malfunctioned. the the the software thought that the plane was tilting up and it pushed it into the ground. That's what happened.
There were many people that investigated this. I call them the six searchers. The US government did a Senate Commission, a House Commission, and the DOJ went after it. KNKT is the Indonesian firm that or the Indonesian agency that had the right to inspect the black boxes. They could tell very quickly the pilot was fighting the autopilot. The press played a key role. Dominique Gates had followed Boeing for the Seattle Times for 16 years. He would win a Pulitzer for his work here. Peter Robersonson wrote a book called Flying Blind. You can tell why it would have that title. 57 whistleblowers sent letters into the Senate to tell on Boeing. The victim's family showed up and were ever present and put pressure on Congress to make sure something happened. And the the head of the pilot union was very upset that that they had put this piece of software in there and not told the pilots. Boeing tried to come have a sit down with the pilots union and they secretly recorded what Boeing said and gave it to the press. And then when they wouldn't respond to Boeing's request, the pilots union issued FOIA request against Boeing. It's unheard of.
Now, in these situations where you have six searchers, you also have blockers. And 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 to the Senate panel. And one thing I would tell you about these big organizations, 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're just they 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 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 in front of the Senate literally accused him of being captured. There's our favorite word again. And he even said to him, "Sir, do you know you don't work for Boeing?"
One one of the real failures here in this case, 45 days after the first crash, almost everyone knew the MCAST software was at fault and no one grounded the plane. Boeing didn't ground the plane. The FAA didn't ground the plane. And the second crash, I mean, 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 with you, I don't want to go through this in detail, but these are the two different committees in the House and the Senate. And I just want to highlight that they were decidedly bipartisan. DeFazio was the head of the House committee, 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 Kappa. Captive and preventive action. And there there are five steps. You detect, you investigate, confirm root cause, correct, and prevent. And it's all about prevention. You want to stop this from happening again. But you can't skip root cause. That's a that's a requirement. you don't know how to fix it if you don't know actually what happened. CAP is required by law by the FDA and pharmaceuticals and medical device. The aerospace industry has regulations that require this type of process if you have a failure.
Hurricane Katrina 2005. Look at look at these stats. They're horrible. 1,800 deaths, 400,000 people displaced, damage $125 billion. What happened here? Well, the Army Corps of Engineers that built the levey want you to believe that the water went over the levies, but that's, you know, an an act of God, natural disaster. But this was only a hurricane or category 3 level hurricane. What in fact happened was the levies gave way from underneath. They washed under. And that's what's unfortunate is this was a preventable accident as well. As with these others, you have searchers and blockers. The House had a had a commission. The Senate had a commission. The press played a key role. Mark Slestein and and John Mcuade had written a series three years earlier about how this could happen. They would win two Pulitzers. I actually had a chance to talk with John about it. The NSF, the National Science Foundation cared so much about this, they did a bake off for to have another team doing investigation and these two professors from the University of California led that. And then the the state of Louisiana hired a team out of LSU and they all investigated and I you know I talked to John sometimes once again running into each other sometimes blocking sometimes sharing notes but and they all came to the exact same conclusion that this was a man-made error.
The US core of engineers is the one that built the levies 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 investigation, join the internal investigation. They paid him a million dollars. And over time they would just get kind of encapsulated inside the Army Corps and become blockers themselves. When this dust all settled, Raymond Seed, the professor from UKAL, he wrote a 42page report to the ASCE explaining all the times that they blocked. That document's on the internet. You can go see it. Like 42 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 seaw walls have held it was $15 billion. Seaw walls have held now for 20 years, which is great.
Let me move through a couple more real quickly. This is Fukushima. 2200 deaths, 154,000 displaced, 200 billion in cleanup. What happened here is is pretty simple. The seaw wall in front of the nuclear plant was 5.7 m. The water went over the wall, took out the generators, 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 m range and they buried the report. So, if you had simply raised the wall, this never happens. But it didn't happen. And in a lot of these cases, there's a combination of a technical failure and an institutional failure. The technical failure is what happens, you know, to the product or the surface of the building or the seaw wall. the institutional failures. Why did the humans let that become a weak point here?
As with the others, their searchers and blockers, the press played a role. Martin Fler would at the New York Times spent 20 years in the Tokyo bureau. He would be a puliter finalist. Mr. Yorimitsu took a third the third place paper and added 20 investigators to his staff to go after this. Had a huge impact, won two awards. the Japanese citizens were out in force both protesting and filing claims. And just like the FAA and Boeing, TCO was the company running the power plant. Nissa was the regulator and they blocked and they and they blocked and they got in the way. And in fact, the failure was partially just a result of regulatory capture once again that they they weren't playing the right role of regulator and regul. They had almost become friends.
Now, the real hero of this story is a guy named Curios Kurukawa. He was asked by the Japanese Parliament to lead the first ever private investigation they've ever had in their country's history. And they had they had a lot of power. They 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. Here are some of the stats. Kira Cowell, when he kicked this off, said he had three mandates that he wanted to adhere to. One, he cared about human safety. He didn't want it to be a battle about nuclear energy. Two, he said the investigation should definitely result in recommendations. And third, he knew the weight of this because of three Mile Island and Cherobyl from a global perspective, and he cared about that. Now, interestingly, he's a medical doctor. He's not a nuclear physicist, but he led this this commission with a level of grace and professionalism that 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. And in the 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, you know what happened here. The O-rings on the solid rocket boosters weren't designed for cold. 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 that they shouldn't launch and he got shut down. So, you have a technical failure and institutional failure once again.
Now, I could talk about a lot of searches and blockers, but I'm just going to talk about one, Richard Fineman, who was already mentioned during the all-in conference this week. Richard Fineman's a was a professor at Caltech. When when the shuttle challenger blew up, Ronald Reagan created the Rogers Commission and they added mostly insiders, Neil Armstrong, they had astronauts, they had generals, they had people from Washington, people from NA NAS NASA executives, but someone had the idea that they should put Fineman on there. And I think they wanted like a stamp of approval from a physicist. The good the good news is it made a lot of sense. He's one of the most famous scientists of all time. He won a Nobel Prize and he worked on the Manhattan project, so he had a lot of credibility. What they didn't know is he's fiercely independent. He's highly truth seeeking 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 doing investigation on his own before he ever went to Washington. He's like showing up at NASA facilities and like asking to meet with people. And when he got to Washington, none of the other members wanted to act that way. In fact, Neil Armstrong told him, you know, we just evaluate. We don't investigate. It was too late. He was already doing it.
Now, 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, "Fineman's being a real pain in the ass." The second thing is he staged a stunt on live television. He found some material that was similar to the O-ring and and in front of everybody, he dipped it in his cold ice water in front of him and picked pulled it out and cracked it to show the failure. It infuriated the rest of the commission. And then lastly, when he submitted all his notes to the commission, they wrote a final report. They didn't they really kind of smoothed over everything and he was pissed. And so he called Rogers and said, "You know what? Take my name off of it." Of course, he'd already done the thing on TV. There's no way they could take their name off of 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 Kiraawa and Fineman? Because I want to talk to you about COVID 19. In December of 2019, CO 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 three 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 for all the other catastrophes, I told you what root cause is. 6 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 my my P second co is way higher than my pdoom. And if their models are so smart, tell me what happened here. Let's get them working on this problem.
I want to I want to put this in perspective. I've added up all the deaths and cost of the five catastrophes I tal walked through with you and you get to 5,000 deaths and $349 billion. CO is 3,000 times bigger than that. Fineman in one of the documentaries said someone was telling him he needed to be nicer and he said, "But seven people died." If if you if you have to get through nicities and seek truth when seven 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, all space accidents. You still only get one-third of the way to what happened with CO. We should want to know what happened here so we can stop this from happening again.
Here's what didn't happen. And this is shocking because all these wonderful people, all these well-intended people did this in the other cases which were much smaller. And they did it in a purposeful and meaningful way. There's no committed newsroom with over 30 investigators on CO. None of the major papers did that. There was no Gates or Schle Schelestein or Flacker like a a dogged investigative reporter that had the backing of his newsroom going after this. No bipartisan Senate congressional committees like you had in Katrina and 737 Max. You didn't have a standalone investigation with someone like Fineman or or or Kiraawa. There was no sciencefunded investigation. The the NIST and the NSF launched them in these other two cases. NIH didn't fund a third-party investigation here and no massive victims lawsuit to figure out what happened.
So, what went wrong? I'm going to share some thoughts with you and I I want you to be aware of a couple piece of information that I think are kind of new or new to be understood. But I and I want to make one one qualification. This has been bothering me for a long time. I've read a ton. I'm sure there are people that are smarter than me on this, but I'm got to be top 1% in terms of how much information I've consumed. The first thing I would tell you is these five people were relied on as experts. You know, the first two, Francis Collins, Anthony Fouchy, Peter Dazzic runs something called the Ecoalth Alliance. It's a nonprofit that did viology research. Jeremy Ferrar was the head of the welcome trust that funded a lot of this stuff and went on to work at the WHO. And then Ralph Bareric is the top veriologist in the US at the University of North Carolina. What I'm here to tell you is they weren't experts. They were blockers. They acted exactly like FAA and Boeing and NASA did in these other situations. And I'm going to give you four reasons why I know they're blockers.
First, they're verology insiders. So, as I said, there's going to be a natural instinct to circle the wagon when someone shines a spotlight on you. Two, they led a misinformation campaign to take us off the lead and to tell us not to search. I'm going to tell you about that in a second. Three, they were all outspoken gain of function advocates prior to CO coming along. And if you don't know what gain of function is, is when you take a virus and you make it intentionally more dangerous to animals or humans. They felt that that was smart to do. Obama had outlawed it. they were constantly promoting to try and make it more happen more often. Fauci in 2011 wrote an article in the Washington Post an editorial 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. Because to go home at night and think that something you did contributed to the death of 15 million people would be impossible to go to bed. Your brain's much more likely to trick you into just thinking it didn't happen. You wouldn't be allowed on a jury if you had that kind of of bias. And the fourth 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 that did search. They're not at large institutions. The two on the bottom drastic is a loosely affiliated group of scientists that come together and share information. They have a website. You should follow them. It's like 20 Nick Shirley's that are all veriologists or scientists. US 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 five heroes. They're heroes of mine that have been actively trying to find out what happened from the very beginning. Alina Chan was one of the first molecular biologists that that realized that the virus looks like it was designed for humans. She wrote a book with Matt Ridley. And here's some really good news. In the past couple of years, the New York Times has published two 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 Ebon was the first person to really stick their 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. And I I think the title is important because the fight was about the discovery process. Emily Cop worked for us 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. Zade Tufeki is a professor at Princeton who also writes sometimes for the New York Times. I'm going to tell you something she did recently that I think is super
Five women have been attacked for sticking their necks out on the lab leak hypothesis. Some attacks came directly from men shown on the previous slide. These women are considered heroes for their efforts.
Allison Young wrote a book called Pandora's Gamble that examines all lab leak failures prior to COVID-19, serving as relevant data points for understanding whether lab incidents were part of the problem.
The five experts/blockers created a highly successful misinformation campaign that convinced everyone animal spillover was the determined cause of COVID-19. Anyone who considered a lab leak or asked questions was labeled a conspiracy theorist.
The campaign leveraged the scientific journal community. The Proximal Origins paper was written in approximately one week with no investigation. The Lancet published a similar paper. These papers have been repeatedly cited, and Wikipedia entries consistently reference them.
The campaign made the issue partisan, creating a situation where Democrats and Republicans have different answers about COVID origins in surveys and polls - something that should not be relevant to the discussion.
More information has emerged showing inconsistencies between what the experts thought and what they wrote in the papers.
"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."
This statement was made 45 days ago on Twitter and received 400,000 views with zero community notes.
Katherine Eban called it "manufactured consensus" and emphasized that if people feel strongly about knowing what happened with COVID, they need to understand this misinformation campaign occurred.
Three years after COVID, the DRASTIC team uncovered a document called the DEFUSE proposal that major journals never covered. A survey of scientists found that only 22% had heard of it, while 78% had never heard of it.
The DEFUSE proposal was submitted by EcoHealth Alliance (Peter Daszak's company) and connected the top virologist at Duke and North Carolina with the top virologist at Wuhan, known as the "bat lady" Shi Zhengli (Jun Lee). The proposal outlined plans to insert a furin cleavage site at the S1/S2 junction of a bat coronavirus to make it more viral in animals.
When asked how scientific principles would guide reaction to finding the DEFUSE proposal, AI responses indicated it would be considered a "direct investigational lead," "highly critical," "major investigative lead," "primary document evidence," and "highest tier evidence class."
The assertion is made that if this document had been exposed in January 2020, the conversation about COVID origins would have been very different.
The searchers are aware of the DEFUSE proposal, as is Senator Rand Paul. AI bots suggest the next step would be to pursue documents at Duke University and University of North Carolina. The searchers have been attempting this, but the University of North Carolina and the state of North Carolina are refusing to deliver the documents.
The recommendation is to support the searchers to find the root cause and prevent future occurrences. The focus should be on scientific inquiry rather than claiming to speak for science. Searching should not be prohibited, and people who search are considered good people.
The approach should move through and around blockers rather than attacking them. Senator Rand Paul's focus on prosecution is considered a mistake. The emphasis should be on root cause and prevention rather than making it partisan.
Newsrooms should dive in like Monica Richardson and put together a truly independent commission. The goal is to find a modern equivalent of Cower or Feynman.
"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."
The damage done to children during the pandemic has been personally impactful. The core motivation is prevention to stop this from happening again. There is zero confidence that if another pandemic started tomorrow, there would be any better way to navigate it - possibly worse due to misinformation campaigns causing lack of trust.
The contrast is striking between how searchers in other catastrophes were viewed as heroes versus what happened to those looking into this case.
Investigative journalism is distinct from clickbait journalism and holds particular virtue. A Brookings Institute video features four of the women who led a panel discussing why the press missed this story. Both Katherine and Emily Kopp pointed back to the misinformation campaign by virology experts that made it seem like a faux pas to ask questions.
There is still work to do as information continues to emerge. The question remains why people didn't pursue Pulitzer Prizes or put large resources into this investigation.
Asking questions resulted in being labeled a conspiracy theorist who didn't trust experts. It is considered pure evil to take people who ask legitimate questions - particularly about whether something came out of Wuhan when gain-of-function research was funded - and damage them for doing so.
Behavioral psychologists would explain that people are able to fool themselves to keep their own sanity.
No side is taken on the origin, as root cause has not been found. Anyone who is 100% convinced it's animal spillover should be celebrated to do research there. US Right to Know was funded to search for animals. China has tested 80,000 animals and not found a single crossover, despite having huge incentive to find one if possible.
The wet market theory would absolutely free China from having fingerprints. Fauci admitted in uncovered documents there were multiple cases prior to the spreader event at the wet market, which presents another problem to address.
Keep All-In Podcast in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
