Kevin McKernan Human Genome scientist explains the evolution of viruses & the value of free markets

Vance Crowe [00:00:03] As the crow flies on the Vance Crow podcast, Kevin McKernan, welcome to the podcast.

Kevin McKernan [00:00:13] Thank you for having me, Vance. Appreciate you what you're doing here. There's a lot, I think there's a lot of misinformation out there and we need alternative views on this.

Vance Crowe [00:00:21] So you and I just met, we just figured out how to get our Skype hooked up, but you were somebody that, a good friend of mine, Rob Long, who goes by Plantables on Twitter, pointed you out and said, this guy has different ideas than where, what other people are saying. And I thought, huh, that's funny. It's a cannabis genomics researcher. Maybe he's just getting high and having like high ideas that are funny to look at. And I, I flip over to your Twitter and I see that you are clearly a scientist. You are looking at data and you're coming to conclusions that are different than what I'm hearing in other places. And you have a very different voice. And so I thought, man, that is a very interesting character no matter what he believes. It's gonna be interesting to hear about. So thanks for coming on the podcast, man.

Kevin McKernan [00:01:10] Yeah, well, no problem. I guess I have to let, let me, let me give you some sense of the background so everyone doesn't think I'm just out, out here smoking weed and coming up with crazy ideas. But my, my history actually started back on the Human Genome Project in 96. So I worked with Eric Lander on that at, at MIT, at the Whitehead Institute. I was in, I was, my responsibilities there were to build a DNA purification and sequencing pipeline for the Human Genome Project. So I'm familiar with the testing. I've been really attentive to what's going on in COVID because everyone's tripping over themselves, getting testing going and, and this isn't something that should be a problem. The only reason why we have problems in testing is really regulatory. If you, if you really dig into it, we can do millions and millions of tests without a problem if the regulations get outta the way. But my background on the Human Genome Project led me into building some startups. I started a company called Adcorp Biosciences. That company built DNA and RNA isolation kits and was a large DNA sequencing facility. One of the larger ones actually in the country back in from 2000 to 2005, Beckman Coulter came and acquired that company because we had really good HIV detection tools, very pertinent to what we're talking about here in, in COVID detection. But we also had a DNA sequencer, a skunks work project that was getting built, that got spun out and later got acquired by Applied Biosystems. This is a DNA sequencer known as the solid sequencer. Got about 35% of the market share competing with Illumina for a short period of time. So that sequencer at the time, no one really believed what it could do, but it, it was basically a hundred thousand times faster than what was on the market at the time, which is why our, our 19 person company got acquired like a year after publishing a, a paper on this stuff.

Kevin McKernan [00:02:51] But that became a a, a next gen

Vance Crowe [00:02:52] People. So wait, just, just, my audience is very, very acquainted with genetics. A lot of them are farmers, agriculture, a bunch of scientists. Okay. But when you're saying it's a hundred times faster to sequence, what do you mean sequence? What?

Kevin McKernan [00:03:06] So this, this, we were mostly sequencing cancer genomes at the time, but this was thing was, it wasn't a hundred times, it was a hundred thousand times faster. It was an absolute like, you know, rocket ship. And we weren't the only one that had this at the time. There's a couple other technologies that came out at the same time that were hyper competitive. So what you saw in the sequencing market is a rapid decay in the price of sequencing. 'cause we had multiple parties competing in, in a more or less free market at the time. And that drove the cost of sequencing down faster than Moore's Law. Like they say, computer speeds double every 18 months. This thing was like going more like 10 x every 18 months. It was really remarkable at the pace at which sequencing collapsed. Now that we have this really cheap and affordable sequencing capacity, it can be deployed. There's even tools that can do it on us B sticks now. So now you can really, you can actually take a sequencer into the jungle and sequence Ebola. You can sequence bats upon coronavirus. You can sequence environmental DNA, you, you can do all of this work. That means that we're, we're now seeing all of this microbial and viral flux through the, through the ecosystem that we've never been able to see before. And it's scaring the daylights out people. However, if you take a little bit more of a evolutionary perspective here, nothing is new under the sun. Genetically, we have seen these viruses all have ancestors. And I think that's what's getting missed in the, in the news media is that everyone's talking about this coronavirus like it evolved out of Wuhan. Like it came through some Rick and Morty portal and suddenly appeared. And now that it's new, it's scary. Everyone needs to run for the run for the hills.

Kevin McKernan [00:04:38] But the reality is this, everything on earth has ancestors. The burden of proof that your virus doesn't have an ancestor falls on the people making those crazy claims. Okay? So if there is in fact an ancestor before Wuhan, which I'm very convinced there is, we just haven't found it yet, we likely have some antibodies to that. We've likely seen it before. The human inter, you know, inflammatory system. An immune system probably has some memory of one of this thing's ancestors, which is why not as many people are getting as sick as we expected. And I think it's also why we see the antibodies in the population are higher than we ever expected. And now everyone's marching the date back of introduction. We, we heard that, oh, it got into the states and Seattle. It's the first case. Well now they're going through some of the morgue records and digging up older samples. And I think you just saw this week that they're inching that date back. You're gonna find them inch that date back continually, I think because they're gonna start to find cases that predated the December discovery of this in Wuhan. It was probably out in, in, in, in the depths of China where there are no sequencers for, for a fair amount of time circulating their population. We just didn't have the tools there to find it.

Vance Crowe [00:05:47] You have just blown my mind, like no one has said anything like that at all as far as I've heard, I would have no way to push back on that. But the, like, it dawns on me that it seems like it might be correct that this, this virus had ancestors that that wiped out a bunch of people. But then there were those that had the antibodies that could protect themselves and

Kevin McKernan [00:06:11] Or it may not have been as virulent. This is the thing is we don't sequence things that don't get you sick. So its ancestor may have been a common cold that just went through the population didn't affect a whole lot of people. And only until it mutated maybe very recently did it start to take out the very weak in the population, the comorbid. I mean, 99 to 97% of the people that are getting sick or comorbid, they have either diabetes, COPD or hypertension, maybe cancer, right? So this is the tip of the iceberg of the most sick people in our population that are now getting affected. I think if you go back to this ancestors thing, it probably was attenuated and didn't, didn't really appear on our radar because it was barely making people sick. It was less virulent than maybe what's emerged outta Wuhan. But if it was an ancestor, it may still have similar proteins that our immune system has found. So, so a virus can mutate in a way that doesn't change its epitopes. The epitopes are the proteins on the surface of the virus that your immune system builds antibodies for. You can get a mutation in this virus. It's only 30,000 letters long, but only a few of those letters really code for epitope. Proteins. Proteins. Your immune system recognizes other mutations, like let's say you get a mutation in the gene that encodes the RNA polymerase that's in there. There's an RNA dependent RNA polymerase that encode that's encoded in this genome. That's the thing that copies the RNA, let's say that thing gets mutated so it's faster and it, and it copies the RNA faster and maybe it spreads a little faster, but it doesn't change the surface proteins. So your immune system could still see it, but it might spread faster, it might replicate faster, it might hurt the older population a little bit more.

Kevin McKernan [00:07:45] So when you're thinking about the variation that we're already recording on this virus, a good site to go to is called neck strain. The, this is the, the team up in Washington and Seattle's doing a great job tracking all of these viruses, encourage everyone to go take a look at neck strain. This is where all the epidemiology is being done on this. And they'll have a phylogenetic tree there that shows you all of the viruses they've sequenced. It's about 3,500 in the, in, in there today. And they've sequenced the entire genome of 3,500 of these. That's not a lot. When you consider the number of infections that are around the world, we're only getting a really tiny sliver of all the, the viruses that are out there through the sequencing programs. But they're incredibly valuable. If you look at all 3000 or 3,500 of those sequences, you'll find on average there's about a one variant per virus, maybe a little bit less than that. There's probably a thousand to 1500 variants in that database right now. So there's a lot of different versions of, of COVID circulating. Not all of those changes actually impact the virility of the, of, of the virus. So don't get scared when people say it's mutating, it mutation's natural. Usually when viruses mutate, they mutate in a way so that they're less harmful to the host so they can spread faster. A virus that kills its hosts very quickly doesn't go very far, right? So they try to find this balance of spread. How do we, how do they get the, the, you know, how do they spread as far as possible? And to do that, you really want to have asymptomatic spread. 'cause if you, if you're a virus that's asymptomatic, you go really far, really fast. Okay? Now this thing may have mutated to such a way that it goes really far and really fast, but it, it happens to be a little bit more virulent.

Kevin McKernan [00:09:19] So it takes out the top edge of the, of the population that that's already immunocompromised. Okay? Its ancestors, however, may not have done that. Its ancestors may in fact have been less virulence and spread very quickly, but our immune system may have some record of that. And so I, I think what's going on in the news media is, is clickbait and, and fear cells. And so everyone's saying it's a new virus. We've never seen it before. Everyone be afraid. Be very afraid when, when there's just no evolutionary basis for that. You know, unless this, unless you subscribe to the concept that came out of a lab, well then maybe it has a different origin. But everything else that's natural has ancestors. And the burden of proof is on those people who claim it doesn't to say that it's somehow emerged magically out of a bat. Now there, there, there are bat sequences out there. They're very distant from what's in the human population right now. I dunno, have you heard of the, the connections to bat and Pangolin and cats and

Vance Crowe [00:10:17] Yes, I had Lord Matt Ridley on and he was talking about how I love why, why bats are the particularly evolved to, to spread to humans and where the mammal connection is and why, okay. Things like cows don't spread that many diseases to humans. So,

Kevin McKernan [00:10:33] Oh, interesting. Okay. Well, so the, right now the literature on this is that this probably diverged out of bat 40 to 70 years ago. Alright, now we, we don't know exactly when the zoonotic event was. Like, was it in bats for 40 to 70 years and then lept over to humans in December? Or did it leap sometime in the last 40 to 70 years into human? And if it has been in human in a less virulent way, we probably have never sequenced it. You wouldn't, particularly in China, you wouldn't go and take an asymptomatic patient and, and let's just go look at their, their, their, their viral DNA or viral RNA that's in that patient because it's, it's a bit say to go and hunt for viruses in, in, in, in metagenomic samples. It's harder to do. We, we can sequence your microbiome, which are like the bacteria and fungi that are in your body really readily because they have conserved sequences that make it really easy to target them with, with PCR, amplify 'em and sequence them and get beautiful pictures. The viruses don't have these conserved sequences. So you really have to sequence all the RNA that's present in someone's, in someone's sampling to find the viruses. So you have to spend a lot of money sequencing to find these needle in the haystacks. And I don't think anybody does that on patients that are asymptomatic. There's just no financial motive to do it. But once it becomes virulent, people start sequencing and then they see, alright, we have a new virus we haven't really seen before. And the closest thing too is 40 to 70 years ago in bats. And that's the gap that we have. So there's a lot of information missing between what's known as rat G 13, which is the bat virus 40 to 70 years ago.

Kevin McKernan [00:12:04] And the wuhan thing that we detected back in December, and unless you believe viral evolution stopped in that timeframe and this thing just popped out of nowhere, I, I don't really subscribe to that. I think it has ancestors that are slightly different from what we have today, that date all the way back to the zoonotic event. And those ancestors are something that are really important to understand, to get the epidemiology of this right, to know what are the actual antibody repertoires that are in the human population. They're gonna probably be more related to the ancestors than this most recent thing that's only recently spread through the population since, since December.

Vance Crowe [00:12:40] So do you then think that this is a dangerous disease?

Kevin McKernan [00:12:45] I don't think it's much more dangerous than the flu. And I know there's hashtags out there, you know, shaming scientists who say not the flu, you know, not the flu or it is the flu. But if you look at a lot of the antibody data that's coming out, you gotta be a little bit cautious of the antibody data. The, these are early antibody tests that aren't out through the FDA, not that the FDA makes them any safer, but they are, they do go through some review to see that other, other people can reproduce these, these results. But the, the false positives and the false negative rates might be between two and 5% on some of these tests. So that means if you wanna look for the population presence of a disease that's below two or 5%, you have a hard time doing it because the false positives in the test end up looking, you know, the right about the same rate of the population pre prevalence. When the population prevalence gets to the point where it is like in New York, these false positive rates are, are more in the noise compared to the actual real positive rate. And so we're in a perfect timeframe to figure this out. Right now. A lot of this data is rolling in and in the places where the population prevalence of the disease is high, I believe the antibody data, and I think we're starting to see that in New York and other places, there's a really high low, like 14% of the population in New York has antibodies. That's not a false positive from the test. There might be false positives elevating that number from like maybe 10 to 14%, but it's, there's no way the false positive numbers in those tests are actually causing the entire number of those tests to go, to go to go positive. So, so the the test will get better. I think what's gonna happen is people will start deploying two different antibody tests to every patient and that will error.

Kevin McKernan [00:14:16] Correct. Some of this noise that's going on right now, some of this noise is because when you design an antibody test, you have to pick one antibody to go against the virus. You really should probably be picking two or three because there's enough variation in these viruses that you might, you want to have two different checks on it, if you will. It's kind of like measure twice cut once philosophy that a lot of people use in these testing. So I think when people start deploying two tests against, a lot of the patients will wipe out a lot of this noise for the false negatives and false positives and get a much better picture. Some studies are starting to do that, but even if you look across the globe, the antibody numbers are coming in high. And so that changes your thesis on the epidemiology. If the antibodies are that high, this thing's either spreading a lot faster than we think, which is possible, or it's been here a lot longer and spreading at the same rate. I think it's more likely the latter that it's been here longer. People have been getting asymptomatic buildup of antibodies and that we didn't know about 'cause they weren't presenting complications in hospitals. And so we have a, a, a little bit of level of herd immunity. Now, herd immunity is a term that doesn't often get used until you're above like 50 or 60%. And we may not be there yet, but we're on the way there and we will probably be there very shortly in some areas where the vast majority of the population starts to get antibodies to this. And then you have to stop and ask w what what's the ledger on this? Right? We've got, we've got this concern of millions of deaths, which haven't occurred, and I think they haven't occurred because those models frankly assumed a, an immuno naive population that this virus would be hitting. They assumed the virus was so new that our systems had never seen it before and therefore everyone who got hit with it would be, would not have antibodies.

Kevin McKernan [00:15:52] Maybe that's being challenged right now. Maybe some people do have antibodies and so it's not spreading as fast and as exponential as they thought. The other side of the ledger is government response to this, which I think throughout his history can be far more deadly than any virus. If you're not careful unleashing government action, you can end up with Stalins and miles and Pole Potts and, and Hitlers that, that maybe they have good intentions, maybe they don't, but they put in these decentralized plans that end up destroying economies and starving millions of people. Now we've got, what, 26 million people unemployed has that the, the numbers come out yet. Okay. So yeah, that ledger needs to be considered in this. I i if you're weighing a precautionary principle on this, say this could be very deadly. It's an exponent, it's a black swan. We need to be very cautious here. If you don't apply that same precautionary principle on the repercussions of government intervention, you're really cheating the world. You're, you're really not being honest with yourself because you can have the government go in and just wreck the economy with 26 million unemployed and kill far more people. I mean right now, state street cancer patients are considered non-essential or they're, they're electives. This is nuts. The hos half the hospitals are empty and laying people off. That's doubly nuts. So th that precautionary principle is very dangerous to use if you don't take a basia approach here where you look at the scene and the unseen. If you only look at the scene saying, we see all these viruses, we're gonna, we're gonna shut down the economy and you don't stop and look at, well, what is the impact of economic collapse?

Kevin McKernan [00:17:28] You're not being honest. That's, that's not a balance sheet. That's, that's, that's that's bias. And I think the media is all focused on that bias.

Vance Crowe [00:17:36] I am equally worried about the, the loss of liberty. And I, and I, when I brought it up with people about, in just the simplest of terms, should, should we suspend the ability for people to be able to go to, to church for this disease? Because that was a right before and people were like, absolutely, that right doesn't exist and, and, and, and would fight basically anybody to say that, that, that you shouldn't go to church and that should be suspended. And anybody that does should get in trouble not thinking like, well if you take away that power, what's to make certain that you, you'll get it back from, from the, from the larger government. And nobody thinks about that because they think we're all in a time of caring and pulling together. But maybe pulling together is centralizing governmental authority far more than what people are calculating.

Kevin McKernan [00:18:29] I think you've hit on it right There is, this is a decentralizing virus. It's changing itself, it's spreading across the globe into many different geographic niches. And you cannot kill that thing by centralizing human decision making. You have to decentralize human decision making. So each locale can adapt to this differently. The virus that's floating around in China is not the same as the one that's right now in, in, in Sweden. Nor is it the same one that's, that's necessarily in other geographic zones because they've mutated and the population they've entered is different. Okay? So there's papers now showing that the, the polymorphisms in the a ace two gene, this is the gene that the, that the, the, the virus enters into the cell, right? Well there are variants in those genes and some, granted this is early, it's pre-print data, but the preliminary data on this shows that there are certain mutations in the human population that are going to make the virus bind more effectively and other ones that are going to block it. So I already know there's a spectrum of human polymorphisms that are going to react differently to any given viral strain. And on top of that we have a matrix of different strains that have different variants that are circulating. So another paper came out yesterday suggesting there are variants in the HLA region of the, of the human genome. This is a region that's involved in, in immune, in an immune response that certain HLA genotypes are actually more susceptible to COVID fatality. So as this thing is moving from New York to Kentucky to, to deploy the same centralized plan in both of those places, that's the virus. That's the biggest danger we face is that we take a one size fits all approach and and roll that out into the marketplace.

Kevin McKernan [00:20:07] So I think when these people are saying we need to centralize, we need one guy in charge, they're not recognizing that the right thing to do in a pandemic isn't to choke the economy and to have one guy run it. I mean, look, last night he was talking about disinfectants in your blood, right? That's not the answer. The answer is to stimulate the economy, rip all the regulations off of it, turbocharge the economy, let everyone go to town on this thing, and we'll have drugs and solutions far faster than we will if we let everybody sit around and wait for one guy to push each option through the FDA. That's not gonna solve this. It's, it's different in every jurisdiction. Every local environmental condition in every hospital has different demographics, different viral loads, different viruses and, and different genetic populations they're dealing with. And what they find works in Alaska is likely to be very different than what they find working in Miami. And, and, and to, to, to essentially control this and govern this is actually the biggest virus we have going around.

Vance Crowe [00:21:01] Do you think that the destruction, the, the hospitals being overrun in New York was a result of them being over prepared? Or are you saying no, I act, I believe that they had many, many more people in the emergency room than normal, but that the, the containment of it was always going to be at this level.

Kevin McKernan [00:21:23] Well, you, you've gotta back up and say why, why didn't they have enough beds? Right? There's certificate of need law that the hos, in order for a hospital to build out beds in New York, they have to get their competitor hospital to approve it. That's why there aren't enough beds. That's the problem of centralized planning. You, you've got a government who put regulations in place that have certificate of need laws. Get rid of those, those don't make any sense.

Vance Crowe [00:21:45] I've never heard of that. So, so

Kevin McKernan [00:21:47] Yeah. So if the hospital, the, the, the, the, the healthcare industry, the reason there aren't masks in a first world country has nothing to do with their inability to make masks because it has to do with the fact that we've got regulations that make it economically unwise to make them in the United States due to labor laws and, and perhaps maybe environmental laws. So they all got pushed overseas, but we know how to make paper masks. The country could do it, but it's, it's, they need to go through the FDAA mask needs to go through the FDA, right? And and at one point when they realized that the FDA was in the way they told people to wear bandanas, I mean this is, this is not being spoken about, but it's, it's because of the FDA that we have them micromanaging whether a mask is safe or not, that we don't have enough masks. And, and then getting Trump involved saying, I'm gonna make all the masks and then bid against the local politicians to own all the masks and then give them back to them in some kind of political gestures is just all show the, the real root of the problem here is that why do we have the FDA regulating 25 cents of every dollar ever spent? They're unelected, right? They, they pay no price when they're wrong. And if you look at the revenue streams from the FDA, two thirds of the revenue coming from the FDA are from the PDUFA Act of 92. PDUFA Act in 92 means that the FDA is paid by the people they regulate. The pharmaceutical industry is who's paying the FDA. That's where most of the money comes from, right? So how, how are they at an adequate regulatory agency when most of their revenue's coming from the people they're supposed to be the watchdog for? Right? This isn't a regulatory system, this is a bribery system, veiled as a regulatory system that enables large entities that can afford the process to get through.

Kevin McKernan [00:23:23] And they all swap like a revolving door between the different boards from Pfizer's board into the FDA to Monsanto's board into the FDA. This isn't what America thinks it is. This is a highly sophisticated wealth redistribution system that's going on. And, and that's why we don't have masks. That's why we don't have beds. So if you get rid of those centralized plans, the economy will work. But what's happening is people are saying, ah, the sky's falling. We need more central plans and it gets worse. So I I don't that, that's my 2 cents on it, is that this is an artifact of choking an economy, not unleashing it. I

Vance Crowe [00:23:59] Mean, of the 30 semi odd guess that I've had, no one has said anything to me as dangerous as the thing that you just said there. Like I'm, I'm, I'm all the way to the point of being uncomfortable for the first time on my own show. But I, I know like regulatory capture is a real thing. People don't realize that the, that, in my example, I used to work at Monsanto and the the okay, the people that were protesting against Monsanto that stood outside and, and held up posters, they weren't paid for by Monsanto. But if Monsanto could have paid for them, they would've paid for double of them. Why? Because the protestors made them go out and make everybody afraid of, of genetic engineering and what you can be spraying out there. And so they would go to the government and they'd say, you know what? You're right. People are afraid. Go ahead and give us a few more years of regulation and we'll prove that it's safe. By the way, each additional year that us stack on is 10 more million dollars in regulatory burdens. Yes. So if a little company wants to come in and compete, they now have to get through 13 years of regulatory trials at $10 million a year. There's no chance it's a giant moat built around it and it makes it so we have a very choked out biotech system.

Kevin McKernan [00:25:21] Yeah, indeed. Let, let me just kill this phone real, oh wait, maybe someone else killed it. Okay. I never used that landline, so it's probably the census calling to see if I'm still around.

Vance Crowe [00:25:30] No worries, no worries. I'll cut it out.

Kevin McKernan [00:25:33] Yeah, I mean that, that's, so I've been involved in a lot of small startups and so I see this and feel this pressure all the time when you're a 10 person company and you're trying to compete with giants like Qiagen or these large entities, they have a lot of advantages that are ma mostly regulatory and the same thing's true with the testing going on right now. So right now have a look at what happened with the CDC, right? They were the only people allowed to do testing for COVID when this first hit the hit the shore. They, they followed up the test took us forever to get all the other labs started. Now, in order to get your lab to run a COVID test, you couldn't just be any other lab. You had to then go to the FDA and get an emergency use authorization, which known as an EUA to get the test approved by the FDAI used to be in the testing space too. I ran a CLIA laboratory. CLIA is a certain regulatory certification you get for being able to do test human samples. It's a racket as well. We'll touch on that. But that's FDA, that's, that's, that's, it's, it's a violation I think of, of the human genome project we did. We did the human genome project so you could effectively read your own genome and now you can't. The government has to get involved if you ever wanna read your genome. This is why 2023 and me has been, been regulated in weird ways as well. But back to the CDC as they declare a monopoly, no, no lab wants to go and build a test that the CDC has declared a monopoly over. So we're all unprepared. CDC fumbles a test cries uncle asks everyone else to get involved. FDA nces, wait a minute, you can't just go and do this test without an emergency use authorization in case of emergency. You have to break glass and Oh, sorry, don't break the glass.

Kevin McKernan [00:27:07] You have to fill out 10 pieces of paperwork and send it to us as to why you wanna help out in this emergency. Right? I mean that, that's insane. When there's an emergency, you need to get rid of the paperwork, not not ask people to fill it out. So everyone right now is trying to get emergency youth authorizations for their kits so they can get into the marketplace. And the FDA's choking at I'm sure the people that are working really hard late at night. I know some of them, they're not bad scientists. It's more that the structure that they have has no competitors and no accountability. When they're wrong, their budgets get bigger. You will notice the CC and the FDA got more money by screwing up. They didn't get less. Alright? That doesn't happen in the free market. You, you screw up, you lose customers and they go to your competitors, right? So, so CDC screws up, they get more money, they, they relinquish this, the rest of the world starts, starts doing the test. They run into the FDA's EUA once they get past the EUA, only CLIA labs can run it. CLIA labs have to have MDs on staff that sign off in every report. This is all to do PCR. Okay? PCR is, was invented like in 86 by Kerry Mullis. This technology is like 40 years old and it's like making chocolate milk. I mean it's really, really simple. This is stuff that gets in field. We have devices that can detect cannabis, like genetics in the field that growers can use. They're color metric tests that run off a USB driven PCR device that just change color if the amplicons there. So we can determine the sex of a cannabis plant in a cannabis grow, right? We don't need, you can do this at home, but they don't, they're getting in the way of, if you doing this at home, the ultimate way to decentralize this testing is to do it at home.

Kevin McKernan [00:28:42] You don't wanna have everyone run to a hospital to get tested. 'cause then they get infected. The hospitals are the super spreaders, right? So centralizing the testing in hospitals is, is like idiocy and it's what's happening because of regulation. This should be done at home. So you get a test at home and you figure out, okay, I'm sick, I'm not gonna go anywhere. I got my answer. Maybe I'll double check it with a doctor who has a slightly better test. But you could screen 90% of the problems if you had home testing. But the home testing is, is virtually illegal right now. Although I know a lot of people that are just doing it because they're so angry at the FDA and they, they don't believe it's right of the FDA to get in the way of them reading their own genome. And it isn't. We paid $3 billion to have the human genome project done and after it, we now have layers and layers of regulation for any person to go and read their own. That's, that's crime. That's double taxation in many ways. And there's no, there's no real logic to it other than fear that FDA's here to keep you safe. We need to make sure all those tests are accurate and they're right and they don't do shit to make sure it's accurate or right. They just process your paperwork and that's it. They don't do any reproduction of your work. They don't run the test on site. They just paper you with shit.

Vance Crowe [00:29:51] So you seem, you seem really pissed off. Right? And what do you do most of the time? 'cause I don't think you're a guy that's just sitting down in his basement, you know, rattling away his anger at the, at the keyboard. What were you doing when you're, this is so interesting to me that somebody of your caliber thinks in this way because this is, you are defying orthodoxy here.

Kevin McKernan [00:30:14] Well that, that, when I got involved in, in building these sequencers, first place we wanna deploy them are people with cancer. So you can see who is a tumor that's uniquely druggable based in this mutation profile, right? And when we got involved in that, we realized, oh, we can't really do it because the FDA, they want to get involved in all this and they wanna slow it down. These are people with terminal illness and you're saying you can't read their, their tumor genome to probably select a better drug. That kind of ticked me off. So I started looking at drugs that are outside of their purview. And that's where cannabis came into my life is I said, all right, here are compounds that are showing a lot of promise in cannabis. And right now the FDA can't touch the damn thing. And I think there's enough voter support that will kick them out of those compounds for the rest of their existence. They're gonna try and regulate a couple of the ones that are isolated and purified. And in the process they'll break them. They, theyve already done this. They, they put one cannabinoid through many years ago for the glaucoma. No one uses it. They, because they broke it and then they put another set of cannabinoids through for epilepsy. This is a really interesting study outta gw. There's some of the best genetics and, and and best cannabinoid scientists in the world. And they broke their drug too. Their drug is, was

Vance Crowe [00:31:20] How does the government break a drug?

Kevin McKernan [00:31:23] Well they, they make you isolate it. So that's a single compound. Right? And, and that's not how, that's not how plant medicine works. Plants make a, make a portfolio of compounds. FDA doesn't like that. They want one, but you know, cannabis makes C-B-D-T-H-C-C-B-G, it makes a whole portfolio of cannabinoids. And it's when you deliver a full entourage of these things that you actually see the most potent effects on patients. So they made them isolate CBD out of all of that repertoire and then they told them to add a strawberry flavoring, which was a pesticide. And then they made them put in sucralose, which was a sweetener, which sucralose you don't play with artificial sweeteners with epilepsy. A lot of the epilepsies out there are glucose transporter based epilepsies. Right. They're not getting enough sugar into the central nervous system. And so they end up getting seizures. And so when you start putting in artificial sweeteners into these things, you mess with that whole metabolism. So, yeah. But their drug works. It got through FDA trial. But a lot of patients report that if they take a plan extract, they get much better results. We don't know why. 'cause the plan extracts aren't characterized as well, but they're cheaper. They're 30 times cheaper than getting something that's come through the FDA. So they, they, they have a tendency to be reductionists and try to narrow things down to a single compound in a single target. And real biochemistry doesn't work that way, way. It's usually a, a portfolio of compounds against dozens of receptors. And that's where you tend to get really, really dramatic effects with cheap plant-based medicine. So I, I got interested in cannabis 'cause I saw it as a way a runaround on the FDA 'cause there's enough voter support to keep a portion of that pipeline nutraceutical and access to the people and perhaps more, you know, it'll be generally recognized as safe I think in the next 10 years.

Kevin McKernan [00:33:03] And I think nothing speaks louder to this than this actual shutdown. Four years ago, cannabis was federally illegal. Now it is an essential business. They cannot turn this off. 'cause if they do, the hospitals will be overwhelmed. And the, and they know this, this is why they did not kill dispensaries In most of the states. The dispensaries are all open.

Vance Crowe [00:33:22] We, the hospitals will be overrun because, because cannabis works as an actual medicine.

Kevin McKernan [00:33:29] Oh yeah. There's papers in JAMA and other are in other peer-reviewed journals showing that the states that adopt cannabis regulations and have medical cannabis access have reduced Medicare spend by like 24%. There's, there's a lot of patients using this. And that's a huge relief valve for, for the hospital system. If you were to shut that down, you would see a, a line share of like cancer patients. Probably there's some success in Alzheimer. There's epilepsy patients. There is a lot of success in chronic pain in the opiate crisis. All of those patients would be shut off and have to go into the hospitals to get different meds.

Vance Crowe [00:34:05] My fourth interview, the fourth interview I did, or maybe fifth of this podcast when I switched it to Coronavirus, was with a guy that was a manager at a dispensary. And I know him, he's at my Juujitsu gym. So I just thought it was kind of funny.

Kevin McKernan [00:34:18] Yeah, yeah. It never,

Vance Crowe [00:34:19] When he would talk to me about like, patients or getting them their medicine, like I thought that was tongue in cheek. 'cause I used to live in Mendocino, California where the medicine was like, I just wanna be stoned outta my mind all day. Yeah. And so when people, I have not actually taken it as a legitimate medicine until you're talking about it just right now.

Kevin McKernan [00:34:39] Oh yeah. It, it is hands down, probably one of the most legitimate medicines out there. And you won't hear that from the media who likes to echo chamber, the, the pharmaceutical narrative. Right. A lot, a lot of the advertisement revenue into our conventional media right now is like boner medicine and, and you know, Cialis and all this stuff you see on the NFL, right? They have a large revenue stream coming from pharma. They, they heavily have a heavy hand in crafting all of the news cycles that come out about drugs and how they should be reviewed and how we need all these double blind placebo controlled trials. And, and they beat that drum of regulation, regulation regulation. Cannabis. This isn't the first time it was in medicine. I mean this used to be the second most prescribed drug back in 1937 before they made it illegal. Right? It's been in the pharmacopeia for, for many years. Many more years than it has been illegal. Only recently for the last 80 years have we been playing this experiment of ripping out phytocannabinoids that target the most prevalent GPCRs in our body. They were banned for 80 years. Alright. There's a good argument out there that a lot of the chronic diseases we're seeing now are diseases that are an imbalance in the endocannabinoid system because we've removed it from our diet for 80 years. But it used to be ubiquitous and it's the most common receptor in the human body is the cannabinoid one receptor. So you can't just shut that thing off and not expect there to be dire consequences. So yeah, if you go through the

Vance Crowe [00:36:01] Wait, you're proposing that we, the human beings used to all use a lot more weed. I don't understand.

Kevin McKernan [00:36:06] Oh, hemp. So hemp was in our diet and hemp has, has residual amounts of CB, D and other and other cannabinoids.

Vance Crowe [00:36:12] You are freaking kidding me. I have thought people that were supporting hemp were the biggest like wahoos ever. No one has legitimately ever told me

Kevin McKernan [00:36:21] This. No, no, no, no. He, hemp is hemp is one of the best food sources.

Vance Crowe [00:36:26] Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [00:36:27] It's amino acid profile. If you look at his omega threes, omega sixes, this is a fantastic food source. Like as a, as i, I try to be vegetarian once in a while. I try and get as much hemp as I can 'cause the only way I can get a complete amino acid profile. So it's a great food source. And it was ubiquitous in our, in our, in our food source in the past. And it was also the most, the most commonly second, most commonly prescribed drug back then. There, there, there's, I can point you to a bunch of this literature in the past, but O'Shaughnessy is a person to look up. He was one of the first physicians that pulled this out of India into, into the UK and into Ireland. And that's where a lot of the westernized version of this cannabinoid medicine started. And it was a long time ago, like 18 hundreds. But yeah, so this was a case of regulatory capture in 1937. Who was it? Hearst I think was involved in this. And Hearst had an interest in nylon and hemp fiber was gonna knock out nylon. So we found a way to ban it under banning marijuana as a xeno xenophobic slur against certain parts of the population. I think African-Americans and Mexicans were using a lot of marijuana back then. Physicians showed up at that actual congressional hearing to point out that it was the second most prescribed drug in the pharmacopia and he was ignored. So they banned it by banning marijuana when all the physicians knew it as cannabis, but they didn't recognize their drug was getting banned in the process because they used the slang word in the legislation. That's how it all went down. 80 years later, we're still trying to fight to get this reversed. And when people say, let's get more regulation involved and like get the FDA involved, all we see is that repeating itself on, on steroids.

Vance Crowe [00:38:00] I'm not sure, I'm not high right now. I I'm, my mind is being smashed against the rocks.

Kevin McKernan [00:38:09] Look, my my my intent here is, is really to encourage people to look into these medicines because they, you don't find compounds that have safety profiles like this in the pharmaceutical engines. Okay? These things are what, what attracted me to them in cancer is that I love the fact that we could sequence tumors and stratify people's tumors for more probable drugs. But the drugs that we had to select from were like cisplatin. The, these are toxins, right? They, most of the cancer drugs are threading this needle between killing the patient and killing the tumor. They don't have very good therapeutic indexes. The ratio of the effective dose, the lethal dose is really narrow in these things. In cannabis, that number is like a thousand. You need a thousand times the amount of the drug to kill you versus the effective dose. So you, you can miss and not harm anybody that, that's the hippocratic oath. First do no harm. And if that's your mission, aim for drugs that have low toxicity, phytocannabinoids, very low toxicity, huge library from the plant. And they all do different things. And, and that can have an enormous impact on personalized medicine. And you can grow them out of the ground without all of this insanity of pharmaceutical regulatory capture that's driving really bizarre medical pricing in our, in our healthcare system.

Vance Crowe [00:39:23] This is unbelievable. Do you, do you see downsides to cannabis use? I mean, do you, it seems like if people were smoking weed all day, they'd be a little bit lazy and kind of forgetful.

Kevin McKernan [00:39:35] So that depends on the person and it depends on the cannabinoids. You know, if you're into personalized medicine, there's no such thing as a one size fits all right? So there are cases of cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome. Okay? So this is a very rare condition that some people get sensitized. They believe it might be related to, to trip receptor genetics. But that's something that's not been proven yet. That's just a hunch. These people get into a vomiting cycle and it's almost like an allergy and, and they can't have any cannabis anymore after that point. They need hot showers and everything to fix it. It's very rare. There are, there's some tenuous connections to schizophrenia. I'm not really convinced by any of that data. There's a lot of schizophrenia because that use it and it's kind of a, a chicken and egg thing. Like are they using it to, to, to deal with the symptoms or are they causing the symptoms? No one's really sorted that out. All we know is that cannabis use of skyrocketed and schizophrenia has not. So it's unlikely to be a cause and effect there from a, a usage standpoint in terms of couch loss,

Vance Crowe [00:40:30] I can tell you, you, I can tell you that. So I, when I lived in Northern California, I took up smoking weed. I had never really smoked it before and it was like all of a sudden ubiquitous. And I had to quit because I heard, I heard voices and Oh yeah. And, and it, it was, it was really weird for me and I was like, Hey, this is not good. I'm having conversations with myself. I have since tried it as an adult, you know, 10 years later and I don't have any of that. But it was like one of those things that I was like, whoa, this is actually interacting with my brain in a, in a real way.

Kevin McKernan [00:41:06] It is. Yeah. So THC has a tendency to be more to, to, to, to have those symptoms. Okay. So probably one in nine people will get anxiety or, or have some type of psychotic event like that. With, with high doses of THC. High dosage of THC is actually a genetic bottleneck that occurred because of, of regulation. We, we put in a prohibition on this and much like prohibition with alcohol, alcohol people stop brewing beer and start making whiskey because it's all regulated based on the weight. So if you get caught with a pound of weed, you get x amount of jail time. So people wanna make sure that weed is 20% THC, not five. So they've bred all of the cannabis out there to be type one cannabis, which is a cannabis plant that makes only THC doesn't make any CBD If you look out through, you know, throughout the globe, cannabis naturally is gonna be a heterozygous state. It's gonna make both CB, D and THC. We just went through this regulatory bottleneck where we bred everything in the THC direction and that came at the cost of it not making any CBD. But natural cannabis has both. CBD is known to have kind of a yin and yang effect with THC. It's an anxiolytic, it alleviates the anxiety that you might get from THC. The combination of the, of the two is, is proven to be far more effective in a lot of the, in a lot of therapies the CBD helps mitigate the negative effect like you experienced. But the CBD also has different pharma pharmacological kinetics on different receptors. So you really want plants that are diverse like this. And one problem we've had in the cannabis industry, this is what we we do at Medicinal Genomics, is we sequence people's cannabis plants, figure out all the cannabinoid genes they have and help them breed for particular pharmaceutical repertoires.

Kevin McKernan [00:42:44] Okay? And to do that correctly, you've gotta really, you've gotta understand which genes are driving all this and how those things work pharmacologically. But what you ideally want are plants that make a whole portfolio of these cannabinoids so that you don't end up with these adverse events.

Vance Crowe [00:42:58] Well I mean it's, I'm glad you told me that. I'm glad I brought it up because the guy that gave me that weed was an old sailor named Fred that had been growing weed to be the strongest thing it could possibly be. It never crossed my mind that that perhaps the weed I was using was pretty supercharged

Kevin McKernan [00:43:17] At the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:43:19] And

Kevin McKernan [00:43:19] That's, that's not uncommon and that's actually, that's an artifact of prohibition. You know, I think what as prohibition is, is relaxing right now you're seeing an increased demand for the more balanced cannabis, what we call type two plants, plants that make both CBD and THC that those plants actually sell for a little bit more than what you get from just a, a real heater THC strain. The, the CBD strains are starting to get some popularity as well that they make only C, BD and very little THC those can legally be grown outdoors. And so their price is decaying faster than all of them. Because once you can grow this stuff outdoors, the the price plummets, the indoor growing is what really is what really drives the price up. 'cause you gotta have lights, electricity, and security cameras and you basically have to build a prison to grow the stuff, which is I

Vance Crowe [00:44:07] Wrong. Yeah, that's right. I visited one and it is like a prison.

Kevin McKernan [00:44:10] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:44:12] So I wanted to change subjects. I saw an interesting tweet that you had, which was something to the effect of the precautionary principle should be known as the starvation doctrine. I thought that this was particularly interesting because I have for a long time studied and felt like the precautionary principle as described by people like Nasem Taleb have been holding us back in an extraordinary way that is in and of itself dangerous. And so I was wondering what you meant by that. And maybe, you know, what, what, why are you writing about that right now?

Kevin McKernan [00:44:50] So I, I had some exchanges with him on Twitter 'cause he was really adamant about following this precautionary principle once the China thing came out and China quickly quarantined like entire city of Wuhan, which is larger than New York, right? And next thing you know, there's like 400 million people in China that are quarantined. And I, I kind of challenged them on this being like, you, you are worried about black swan events. I get that. I understand this is exponential. I deal with exponentials all day with with doing QPCR. I get that the, the, the outcomes can be really dramatic if you don't act early. However, I don't believe this is a black swan event because this to me looks like a, a, a flu or maybe two or three XA flu that we get every single year. So that doesn't necessarily call for making extreme changes. And secondly, if, if, if you do this, if you don't take Bos out into mind here, which is the scene in the unseen often spoken about, like he can see that this may spread all over the globe. What's unknown about is about any action you ask the federal government to take is what is going to be on the other side of the balance sheet. Right? Are you doing a precautionary principle on Donald Trump? Right? Like if he suddenly decides to shut down the world economy. I saw an article yesterday from CNNI don't know how to validate CNN stuff anymore 'cause I don't believe CN very often, but there, there had a headline that was like 180 million will starve from the virus. They didn't say from the shutdown, they said from the virus, but we all know it's because of the shutdown, right? They're already trying to pin the economic destruction on the virus, not on our reaction to the virus.

Kevin McKernan [00:46:28] And so I think human reaction to panic is far more deadly and dangerous and abusive than the actual biology of this virus that Nasim was trying to point out. So we had lots of precautionary principle act now act fast. But he should apply that same principle to when you centralize power like this in history, you see 20 million dead, you see 8 million dead. You there's, there's, this is littered throughout history of demic side of centralizing power. When people give up their liberties because they're afraid, suddenly you get really dumb decisions happening. And that's a black swan event right there. I think he created a black swan event pointing out something that was as average as the flu

Vance Crowe [00:47:08] With China's reaction. You have to say they are reacting based on a different set of criteria than American politicians. I mean they are still in the same criteria of we wanna remain in power just like the politicians do here. But there the options that sit at their, at their hands, you know, they really can turn on or off aggression the o on or off of authoritarianism. And there is a very good chance that they would not have necessarily predicted that this would have the reaction in the United States that it's having. And the significant thing that I am watching is meat production in the US Okay? And the amount of pig plants in particular that are being taken offline and you know, we're talking about, you know, 65,000 pigs in one factory and there's 7, 8, 9 factories shutting down. Yeah. Cattle factories shutting down. If a third of those, if that production was going to China and that's now shut down, there's no way they were predicting that this was gonna happen. It could be that their reaction, whatever it was sent shockwaves into the system that are gonna imperil their country too.

Kevin McKernan [00:48:22] These things are very, very hard to predict. And, and that's, that's precisely why I, I think that these precautionary principles, you, you, you need to be careful when you apply them, that you're looking at the scene in the unseen, the repercussions of action can sometimes be more deadly than, than what you just, sometimes you have to just let it happen. Sometimes no action is, is the better move then you must act now because everyone's looking for you to act. And, and I, I think we're seeing that in some other countries. I know Sweden is a lot of people critiquing what's going on in Sweden. I'm, I'm kind of, I don't think that stories played fully out yet, but I think we need to watch it. But, you know, Sweden had no lockdown. And yeah, there's some more deaths there, but in the end, they will probably still have an economy. They won't have suicides, they won't have spousal abuse, they won't have all of these others repercussions. It's, it's a little bit frightening because we took a model from Neil Ferguson, a model that never went through peer review, and the code still isn't public and implemented this saying 2 million people might die. That's not peer review. You know, this came out of Imperial College of London, which has funding directly from the Gates Foundation. And now people are criticizing all the papers that are coming out in bio archive as being, that's not peer reviewed. You know, like whether you talk about DDA ALS work out in France. I mean, he, he's, he's, this guy's trying to treat thousands of patients is putting papers out as quickly as he can. And people are critiquing his p values and stuff in the paper while he's got patients dying on him and he's rapidly publishing, yet they're not applying that same scrutiny to the model makers who

Vance Crowe [00:49:54] Put, I mean, I will say this, I had a guy named Yosha Bach on very early in the podcast who actually, hi. He had models that before the Imperial College models came out, and there seemed to be quite in line with their predictions on what would happen. So it wasn't, I, and I only bring that up because I didn't have any scope of whether or not this was serious or not. And I don't know, like that was two places that said the same thing.

Kevin McKernan [00:50:22] Yeah, yeah. That, that's, it's good to see there's at least some, some concordance like that. That's always good to see. 'cause then, you know, you know, the conspiratorial tone gets, gets kind of neutralized. There's two different groups that are coming up with the same answer. But I think it's been pretty clear as we look at the data today, that those models were way off and they were never adequately peer reviewed and the code was never put public. And that instilled a massive lockdown on, on multiple different jurisdictions, and none of those fears came to play and they're off by a large sum. And it's not because of social distancing. Some of their models assumed social distancing and they were still in order of magnitude off, and they keep revising them down. And I think most of the, the modeling is, there's a couple reasons for it being off, but one of 'em is that they assume the population that we are gonna hit had never seen this before. There's just no genetic evidence that that would be true. We have a virus where we've collected thousands of mutations as it spread throughout the population. You have to assume there's other ones of those that exist beyond Wuhan in back into time that were also slightly mutated before the, before we detected the one in Wuhan. And those ones have probably been circulating. We don't know exactly when the zoonotic event happened, but these are cold viruses. We've been, we've been exchanging these things for, for forever in human history. So to believe that this thing came out in the index case and the phylogenetic tree needs to be rooted in December is, is just insane from my perspective. There, there is, there's, there's likely convergent evolution going on. There's likely other things that are gonna throw off that as being the first case we ever detected.

Kevin McKernan [00:51:56] And if that's true, then the population has seen this before and the models are all wrong. And, and, and we should not be taking people's liberties on someone's theory. That's insane. Right. If you're gonna rip out everyone's constitutional rights, shut down the economy, which by the way, I think hyper, hyper stimulating the economy is the right answer, not choking it. And if you're gonna do the opposite of what you should do, which is stimulate the economy in this case and take everyone's constitutional rights, you, you need to have more than a theory. And so if we come out of this, that's the first thing I think we need to focus on as a civilization, is never let this happen again. Because one person came up with models that no one could review, and that politicians took it and ran with it.

Vance Crowe [00:52:40] But isn't, the danger isn't, isn't the opposite danger that it's like a hurricane that didn't come. And then people are like, next time I'm not evacuating. And then a hurricane comes and you Well, that's, and yeah, they just start

Kevin McKernan [00:52:54] Beating the drama on second wave and no one's gonna listen. I I'm not gonna listen. They start saying second wave, I'll look at the data, but I'd be really surprised if the second wave takes off at the rate the antibodies are building up. So there, there is a danger that if you cry wolf too many times, the populace is just gonna say, screw you. I'm not taking another three months off.

Vance Crowe [00:53:11] Are you stay at home right now?

Kevin McKernan [00:53:14] Oh no. I, I, we have a lab, so I still go to the lab every day except for, you know, Friday. Sometimes I do stuff like this. But we we're working quantitative PCR tests. We're actually right now looking at detecting COVID on, on different samples. We actually have some concerns that it could actually get into the cannabis supply chain as an inhaled product. That's a risk for us. So we're trying to figure out if we can detect this on the cannabis supply chain. Couple reasons for that. If you look at the discovery of coronaviruses, almost all of it comes outta bano. And ba guano is used as an agricultural fertilizer in a lot of places. So that's a risk. Yeah. You, you don't, you don't want to be feeding your plants that you're about to inhale ba guano. That should end. But the other thing that's coming up is that there are patients or people that are working in a lot of these grows that are coming down with COVID and they're handling and trimming the plants. Are they, this is ending up on flour. We don't know. Probably not, but we should certainly have a screen in place for it. The third issue is that the comorbidities in COVID are all have some overlap with, with with cannabinoid users. COPD, a lot of people are using cannabis oils for COPD. They're not smoking flour, so maybe not a big risk there. A lot of diabetes patients, there's a lot, there's a double blind placebo controlled trial and THCV, which is a different cannabinoid that seems to be working for diabetes, cancer, a lot of patients are using this in cancer. So if we have a lot of patients that are using cannabinoids and they're the same class as the COMORBIDS in COVID, we have to make sure the cannabis supply chain has no COVID in it.

Kevin McKernan [00:54:45] So we're building QPCR tests that can monitor that in, in the cannabis supply chain. I don't know if they're gonna get used, it's just our understanding that if this were to ever break out in the cannabis supply chain, our status of being essential business will evaporate overnight and we'll have a hell of a time getting it back up. And so our, our thinking is we gotta be preemptive here, build the assays. Maybe they never get used, but it's the right thing to do. So we're spending some time in our lab doing that. It

Vance Crowe [00:55:10] Seems to me like that's the way that all companies should have to be, which is to think about what the contingencies are that could knock you down. Because if you don't plan for them, you get burned outta the market and nobody lets you come back in, you know, by bailing you out. That's cool. It's why the airline industry, like I, I rely on the airline industry. It is what my work is basically done by. But if we just bring them back because they were always there, we missed the chance that we've already had a brush fire. Let the forest fire burn all those things out of there and see what grows next. And it's not gonna be as good at first and it's not gonna be as coordinated, but let new things grow instead of propping up the old system and letting the dinosaurs continue moving on.

Kevin McKernan [00:55:59] Yeah. Yeah. I hope that's what happens. But as what we're seeing is they're probably gonna inject, you know, government stimulus or, or you know, checks into these, you know, Boeing or some of these rotting companies that haven't necessarily planned accordingly. So we'll see, you know, that that's, that's one challenge we're having with all these trillions of dollars that are getting printed is they're not gonna get rain from helicopters. They're gonna get it injected in a cotillion effect into the economy where people close to government get access to the cash. And that does, has a further widening of the, of the rich and the poor. You know, we're seeing this with Harvard having to give back money with Shake Shack getting money, all these PPP loans, they're finding their way into, into the hands of people that have, that have good relationships with their banks. Bigger companies are in the front of the line over the smaller companies.

Vance Crowe [00:56:45] It's, and and when it happens, when something gets rolled out, this fast mistakes get made and then sacrificial lambs are brought up to, to take 'em out. But you'll never, you'll never make it Justin. Right. You know? Yeah. When you move something this fast.

Kevin McKernan [00:57:02] Yeah. Yeah. It, it, it's, I don't know. I I just, I just, I just sense that this is the time to decentralize, not decentralize, you know, we've got, we, we've gotta treat every jurisdiction differently and, and enable those jurisdictions to open and close as they see fit, as opposed to having, you know, everyone close down at once. I mean, part of the problem when everyone closes down at once, like New York had an issue, I get that they probably need to do what they need to do, but then the hospitals in Kentucky are sitting there starving, waiting for COVID patients to show up and not doing any electives. And they're Furloughing employees because they all did one size fits all planning here. They should have actually probably stayed open and dealt with their cancer patients and their heart patients to get them healthy before COVID showed up. And they could have figured out when COVID showed up by, by testing and, and, and reacting to their microenvironment appropriately as opposed to just following the Cuomo lead. Right. I I think that's the answer to, to this viral propagation is, is you need to decentralize the way it is as opposed to centralizing and having one guy with a bullhorn try and run the whole economy that's gonna, that's gonna kill it. That's what, that's what's, that's what you get breadlines for.

Vance Crowe [00:58:09] Yeah. And you know, you, you'll know somebody is, you know, somebody is, is actually decentralizing the problem when, or the answer to the problem is when they start standing up on the podium and saying, it's your comorbidities that are gonna kill you. So if you're fat, you need to start exercising and eating right. Like you don't, yes. You don't get to like sit this one out or get a super special pill when the politician starts saying, you everyone is gonna get baptized. And this one happens to be a very bad disease. And so some of the people that have comorbidities are gonna get taken down by this, take that seriously start now. Should have started two weeks ago.

Kevin McKernan [00:58:46] Absolutely. Yeah. And, and I think there's a, a much more surgical approach we could have here is, I'm not suggesting everyone go out to a Phish concert tomorrow and, and swap, you know, swap microbes. I'm suggesting people who know they're sick, they're the people most vested in their outcome. They're gonna probably make the best decision for themselves and stay home. And those of us who are healthy will probably go to work and try and move the economy along so that those people have a better shot and there'll be better drugs for them when, when they do get sick. But this concept of everybody stay home doesn't make any sense at all. And this concept of the government deciding who's essential, not essential, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, if, are you familiar with, is it Leonard Reed's work on eye pencil?

Vance Crowe [00:59:27] Oh, oh yeah, of course, of course. Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [00:59:29] So economies are very complex. If you try to take eye pencil and decide who's essential in making the p part parts of the pencil and who isn't, it's kind of hard to, to, to, to rip out the guy who makes the chainsaw from the guy who makes the graphite from the eraser, from the people who are feeding them, right? We know this 'cause 'cause we got essential status here in Massachusetts because we, we are involved in testing the safety of all the cannabis. And cannabis is an essential business, but all of our vendors aren't essential. And we have a hundred vendors. They have a hundred vendors, right? This is like in two hops. You're, you're six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, right? Just in, and when you look at supply chain inventory, you go out to all of your suppliers, they're not all essential. They have a hundred suppliers each. They're not all essential. So suddenly the whole chain is broken because there's holes everywhere. And while we might be essential, everyone feeding us isn't, and we have to go and lobby for those people to now become essential so we can continue our business. This is all wasted energy. If you let the people decide, alright, I'm at risk, I'm gonna stay home, you're not at risk, maybe you should go, go to work. The people who are actually most vested in whether or not they're taking the appropriate amount of risk are the individuals who know most about their surrounding circumstances. I've got grandma at home, I probably shouldn't be doing this. I've got three kids that need to go to school. I need to do something different. You know, my, my significant other's a nurse. And this changes our dynamics based on our tight household. We shouldn't be mixing young kids with grandparents and, and stay at home orders. You know, shelter in place isn't good for your immune system. You gotta get outside. So that's really bad to conflate with this concept of social distancing, which is keep your distance from people, but maybe get outside.

Kevin McKernan [01:01:06] You know, there's a lot of these things that are very nuanced that you're never gonna get out of a regulator who pays no price for being wrong when they write these regulations to sweep across the entire country. That's a disaster. That's, that's where the virus is gonna shine.

Vance Crowe [01:01:22] Are you, what would, are you confident that your ideas will, will see the light of day or have you been listening to what's going on with Facebook and YouTube describing that advice that goes against the WHO or the government's perspective won't, won't be allowed. I

Kevin McKernan [01:01:39] Wait, I'm waiting for, I've got two YouTube videos on this on my site and I suspect they'll get pulled in a week or two. So go, if your audience want go see 'em. They, we talk about the genetics of the disease and, and why we believe there are ancestors that are yet to be detected and the impact that has on, on survivor bias and sequencing. We've also done some homework on a few of these movies that have come out suggesting it's a bio and we've not seen enough evidence to, to call that card. And we do think extreme hypotheses like that need extreme evidence and we just don't have extreme evidence on that front. So look at those before they disappear. But yeah, that's really 1984 ish. I mean, how are we different from communist China if we're gonna have YouTube decide that everything needs to be the who and the who, by the way, is the one who told you not to wear a mask. I mean, that's insane. That,

Vance Crowe [01:02:24] That's why I'm like, no bueno. So I used to work at the World Bank and my experience working at the World Bank was everything that's horrible about a bureaucracy being amplified with billions of dollars and, and all the royalty that comes with being in an international organization. I really did not enjoy working at the World Bank. Yeah. I can only imagine that the World Health Organization is somewhat like that. Now, I said that last time and I had a lot of scientists and people come at me saying, oh, the WHO is super important, you know, da da da. But those are the same people that told me not to wear a mask and I didn't. Yeah. I I went to the airport. I flew from one country to another and back and I didn't wear a mask because they told me I didn't have to. So what the hell?

Kevin McKernan [01:03:13] Yeah, there is a, there is a bias in academia, okay? And it's, you and I was involved in, on the Human Genome Project. I had government funding and I was in that camp for a very long time thinking that we needed government to fund market failure. And the case of the Human Genome Project was a very interesting, I'd say test case for this because everyone was saying the government needed to put $3 billion into the Human Genome project because no one else would. Then Solaris shows up saying, we've got new sequencers and we can do this for a hundred million dollars and we'll be done next year. Government doubles down, decides to put more money into the human genome project even though there's an example of a market participant who's going to solve the problem. And they did this on the basis that all the, the the private guys are greedy. They're probably gonna patent, patent the shit outta the genome. So we have to do it to keep it public, right? Well, the NIH ended up with more patents than RA on the human genome and the, and the end of the day. So it was a pretty, you know, blunt lesson where I lost kind of my love that this NIH system is all for the good of the common man and we're above and beyond and don't have any greed like Sora has when they ended up with more patents than so that, that's kind of a farce. So there's a bias in academia for centralized hierarchy in medicine out of Dao and, and the who is like their emblem. Right? However, you gotta be very cautious with people that are on that boat because they're, they aren't market forces involved in their research, right? They're, you get when you, when you write a government grant, right? A lot of people say you need the government to write these grants.

Kevin McKernan [01:04:43] 'cause no industry's gonna fund this ant this ant farm research and it's really early stuff and it has to be done by the government. 'cause the, the private sector won't fund it. I've written government grants. We've pulled in over 32 million in government grants over my career. And I'll tell you, there isn't a single grant Wew wrote that didn't cost us at least a million dollars to file. So the private sector is funding this stuff. They're just enjoying the fact that they're getting freebies from the government in the process of getting non-dilutive capital into their company by betting a million bucks for some of the preliminary data that goes into the filing. So that you better believe the private sector does have an interest in these things. And this concept of market failure is a complete fraud, right? This is just a way for people who know how to grease the system to basically write grants to get money into their private company that's non-dilutive. But the private sector is there and they're the ones who actually put the first money up 'cause they did the preliminary experiments. So the people that are in that system, they're always getting government paychecks and there is no cost to them for, they don't have a competitor that necessarily is necessarily competing with them per se for that money. They don't have a market review. You, you might get 12, six to 12 people in your study section and almost all of those people in your study section for a grant are on the boards of various private companies throughout the biotech industry. But when you're in the marketplace, you don't have six people bottleneck and make a decision on whether the research should be done. You have the entire marketplace telling you you're wrong or you're right, right? So trying to get something done in the free market, you actually have more scrutiny in the free market than you will get from the peer review at the study section and the people in the study section, the same damn people that are on the boards of these other of the others companies.

Kevin McKernan [01:06:14] So they're just a sub selection of the marketplace. You're basically taking a statistical sub sampling of brains, applying it to the review process and then handing out to government money in the free market. You have all of them critiquing your work. So there isn't really this, this perceived notion that the market's not gonna do this, we need to have the government do it instead. That's all a fantasy. That's not, that's not really how things work in, in the biotech space. So I think you'll find with a lot of the folks that have academic funding, they believe the government needs to be in charge. In cases like this, they don't see that the free market actually delivers results a lot faster. And they're very, they tend to have a, oh they're greed based and we're public servant based, except for the public servant side of it takes their money through taxation, which no one can actually refute, right? The greed's really coming from the government side. You can't, if you don't like stem cell research for ethical reasons, doesn't matter. We're taking your money any way anyway and doing it. Same thing's true with gain of function mutations on viruses. They were funding that for a while with our tax dollars, which, who knows, maybe it played a role in one of these viruses emerging, right? It's very dangerous research, but you can't vote or opt out of it. And the private sector, you can, you can say I'm not funding that because I, I I think that's just shady stuff. I'm gonna put my money in a startup somewhere else. Alright? So there aren't the same economic incentives on government funded research. There aren't those, those, those review mechanisms and there aren't those market forces that help balance it. And so I I'm not surprised you ran into people throwing stones at you if you critique the who 'cause the who is just another one of these hierarchical systems that's trying to tell the rest of the world what to do.

Vance Crowe [01:07:51] How have your academic friends embraced you since you've taken this position?

Kevin McKernan [01:07:57] They tend to point to the weed stuff I'm doing to discredit me. So yeah, it's not popular. I, it's not a popular opinion, but you know, it's just been informed through experience. I've been on the government side of things and then I've gone into the entrepreneur side of things and you get, you get a very wholesome picture that way. You, you see how things operate on one side of the fence and then you see how they, they operate in the free market side of things and we by no means have a perfectly free market. You know, it's regulated to hell, but it's, it's certainly, I believe it is what's responsible for maybe some of the numbers you've seen at the World Bank. When you look at the World Bank, they've done a good job measuring how many people are coming out of poverty, right? There's been more people coming outta poverty like in the last 50 years and all of human existence. That doesn't happen with, with orange man in charge. That happens because the economy is growing. There's more interactions between people 'cause we're more connected. So there's more win-win relationships that are being discovered throughout the world, being hyper networked as a result. We have GDP that's growing even though population's growing that that, yeah, that can't happen in their model of it being a fixed pie, right? Like, I'm rich, my, my, my wealth came at the cost of someone being poor. That can't be true if more people are coming outta poverty than ever before, concurrent with population growth, that means the pie's getting bigger. Why is the pie getting bigger? It's getting bigger because we're more networked and we're finding more win-win relationships by being more networked, right? It's, it's, it's free market economics that are driving this, not structured hierarchical economics.

Vance Crowe [01:09:24] So the Overton window is wide open right now because, and, and for for left ideas like, hey, we need more government support. We need more money to come in here for right ideas of, hey, we've gotta let things burn and see what comes out new. What do you think people should be doing right now to ensure that they are seeing the right kind of ideas enter society or, or promote the right kind of ideas in some effective way?

Kevin McKernan [01:09:57] I think they should be looking at what they themselves can do to change their microenvironment. And they should not be holding their breath waiting for decent centralized decision makers to come save them because they're not coming. What we've seen from government action on this is, is nothing but destruction. We've, we've got the CEC screwing things up, then the FDA screws it up further, then they have clear regulations, certificate of need laws, all of these things are just impeding people's freedom, making it really difficult for people to do their jobs. Likewise, the response to this is print shitloads of money and give it out to their friends. I don't know if people have figured this out, but they're, when they print the money, they're diluting yours. So they're, they're paying you to stay in your house with your own money and you're not even getting a large portion of it. Alright? Right. The $6 trillion, if you average that across like, you know, 328 million people, it's something and you only get $1,200 of it. Well that's, you should, you should be getting 18,000 of it and you're not, you know, th this, this is a game where they are basically robbing the coffers of, of the treasury right now because they can get away with it. Everyone's panicking. So they're not your solution. The solution rests within you and you need to go and find where you're, where you can deploy yourself in this new market. And I would stop following the rules because they're not following them. I would, I would, I would go, I would resort to Aris here. I would resort to basically free market economics. And if you think it's a black market, don't worry about it because frankly, everything's illegal right now and none of it justifiably is. And so only you can really get yourself out of this.

Kevin McKernan [01:11:30] And I wouldn't hold your breath for, you know, sacred regulation to come down and turn the economy on in three months and give you a check. It ain't coming.

Vance Crowe [01:11:38] How bad do you think breadlines and things will get?

Kevin McKernan [01:11:44] You know, I, I have a hard time predicting politicians. I mean, I can, I've been watching the spread of the virus very closely and I don't think it's as dire as what they're doing. So why are they doing it right there? There's lots of smart people that can see this, that this isn't going to be much more dramatic than the flu. We've never acted this way for any other flu before. So what's the motive? And then if you look before the virus came, the economy wasn't necessarily in great shape then either. This is really just the pin that pricked the bubble, right? We had inverted yield curves, we'd been printing money for a very long time. Everyone was expecting there to be an economic disruption of some sort. No one just knew what the trigger was gonna be. So are they, are they trying to extend this as long as possible so that we are willing to accept any new order that comes next? Right? I mean, I don't know, it doesn't make sense to me that that that they would, you know, bite off their, the, you know, cut off their nose despite their face here. You know, that the economy's certainly been, been shaken up quite a bit. But,

Vance Crowe [01:12:48] And that doesn't express to you, man, they must have thought this was bad because when the people that have money give up money, for example, if, if all of the money that's gonna go away from March Madness is gonna go away. Like those guys, they didn't, they they did that because something scared. 'cause something scared him.

Kevin McKernan [01:13:06] Well, what's kind of interesting about that is a lot of those companies did that before the government stepped in. Right? Like they voluntarily decided that they looked at the data saying this could be really messy. We don't know what's coming. The models look scary, but I don't think it was a government order that shut down a lot of the, a lot of the, a lot of the companies voluntarily chose to like, let's push this off. Let's cancel this conference south by Southwest. Right? And that's, that should be a reminder to people that people are doing that because they have self-interest in mind. They don't want to be the super spreader event. And that could, that could get them liability and that could be a disaster for the reputation. So the market in many ways is reacting before the government is, and the government's just stepping in front of the parade, taking credit. So that's an important thing I think to remember that markets are under un underlying this. They are doing some things correctly in spite of this and they're all doing it on their own timelines. And that might be the more optimal approach than having one person step in and do it all. But in terms of the, you know, the, the government has an echo chamber of advice, right? The people advising the government on this, let's take, I I I know, I know, I know Fauci, I know Francis Collins, I've worked with both of 'em. Alright? They're good people. People wanna villainize them, but they're in an environment where they're not, their paychecks aren't gonna stop. They haven't, I mean, Fauci Hass had a paycheck for 40 years from the government, right? So he's never personally at risk for making these calls. He's very likely to gain a tremendous amount of funding after this. And his funding is likely to be larger.

Kevin McKernan [01:14:38] The longer this hell, the more pain we feel, the more we're going to enhance the NIH budget, right? His patent estate, primarily vaccine based intellectual property. Alright? Is that the only voice that should be advising the president right now? He's no skin in the game. He's gonna get a bigger budget when this is all over and the budget's gonna be larger the more pain we experience. His vaccine patent in the state is not on coronaviruses, but it's, he's, he is mostly got intellectual property surrounding vaccines. We're hearing a narrative. Everyone holds your breath until the vaccines are here. That's crazy. The corona vaccines that the coronavirus vaccines we've had in the past have backfired. They, they make, they make, they make things worse, right? They, they, they've tried these in other organisms and there was an effect where when you got the vaccine, when you eventually were given the actual virus, your immune system went on fire and you got a cytokine storm and the vaccines actually had a worse outcome for the animals than just getting the disease itself. That that's the, that's the history of coronavirus vaccines. It's really ugly. And so to suggest that we're gonna race one of those things out, and by the way, I'm sure you're familiar, the vaccine industry is one of the dirtiest industries in the bi. They, they have no liability, right? So you're gonna mandate this, you're gonna have to have a chip to go across borders and there's no liability for the people making these things. That's a recipe for absolute disaster.

Vance Crowe [01:16:03] You've just jumped the shark man. Now, now you're talking like you don't like vaccines.

Kevin McKernan [01:16:09] No, I like vaccines. I just don't like people who don't have vi liability when they make them. There's a big difference. Okay? Immunology works, but, but you can't have a market where the people making a product can, can cut the corner in manufacturing because they're no longer held liable. They, they've socialized the cost of the damages of vaccines onto the vaccine courts and the VA system. That's nuts. I make products and every day I gotta keep track that my products don't have a contaminant in them. They don't have to do that,

Vance Crowe [01:16:39] Man. I don't know, like you are really in this area where if you talk about vaccines or anything about them, you

Kevin McKernan [01:16:46] Are, oh, you're an anti-vaxxer. Yeah, you're an anti-vaxxer. Exactly. That's, that's that's third rail material. But but think of the framing of that, of that stereotype, right? Are what's your position on antibiotics? Are you pro or anti antibiotics? Have you ever been asked that?

Vance Crowe [01:17:02] No.

Kevin McKernan [01:17:03] Right? I mean, you don't categorize, like Doxycycline's pretty cool, but I don't know about the Z-pack, right? Z-Pack

Vance Crowe [01:17:08] Is pretty cool right

Kevin McKernan [01:17:08] Now for coronavirus. You don't talk about classes of drugs like this. Why are we talking about vaccines like this pro or anti, that's a false dichotomy. Some vaccines are good for certain people. I'll tell you, if I'm a, if I'm a family that's got epilepsy, I'm gonna read every damn packet insert to figure out which one of those I should take. Because they all have different risk profiles. And epilepsy is one of those conditions that are genetically pre predisposed to having battery reactions to some vaccines.

Vance Crowe [01:17:34] So I, so a, a couple of weeks ago, just some night I was sitting around and I I threw out a tweet that said, how long would a vaccine need to be tested before it was safe to be mandatory on society? This was like two or three weeks ago. People went nuts on me. They were like, why would you even ask this question when it's ready? We'll we'll give it to people like wait a second. No, no, no. You decide beforehand what the testing parameters yes will be. And then you let people know. So that way everybody gets a chance to see, hey, that's what they said it would do. That's what it did. That's what we were worried about. These are the unintended consequences that we were able to monitor for. But people treated me as though I was an anti-vaxxer. I'm a Peace Corps volunteer, right? Like I am. Yeah. I am a normie. You've seen

Kevin McKernan [01:18:21] Them work?

Vance Crowe [01:18:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah. A hundred percent man. Yeah, a hundred percent. But if you come anywhere near talking about this, I saw the Cornell Alliance for Science equating anyone that was going to the protests against lockdowns as anti-vaxxers and like right wing sedition. And you're like, you are a public, you know, university and you're sitting there saying there is no, anyone that disagrees with this point of view at all should be completely labeled and and written off and thrown out of the conversation.

Kevin McKernan [01:18:54] Yeah, it is. It's a new priesthood and we're not wearing black rose, we're wearing white ones now. The scientists are the ones who can read the code of life and it will be told to you what it is from on high. There is a problem with us having this irrational irreverence on science. I'm a scientist, I have a certain domain expertise. I'm not an epidemiologist, I'm not a doctor. I can do the genetics on these things. But you know, I think you should have economists at the table, right? This con this concept that, you know, follow the science and only the scientists lead everything is dangerous. You, you need a lot of different expertise to, to, to think through what's going on here. And if you bring up any challenge to this, like, I don't like the fact that the incentive structures on the pharmaceutical industry lead to really negative consequences. I really believe in immunology and vaccination. I just don't believe in the legislation you've put forward with these people. You're instantly labeled anti-science. You're an idiot. You're, you got a tinfoil hat and we're gonna discredit you. Some of that is coming, I think because of the manner in which we fund science. There's, there's, there's far too many, many scientists that I think are getting funded through government sources. And they should be in the private sector and, and working in careers that don't have those, those types of conflicts involved. Right? When you're, when you're working under that environment, you don't have market forces guiding the research that you should be doing. You're just getting money from, stolen money from the government that effectively is, is oftentimes reinforcing their agenda, right? They, they will fund things based on what they, I mean look at NIAI, is it ni know it's NI A-N-I-D-I-A National Institute for Drug Abuse.

Kevin McKernan [01:20:33] Okay? We have an institution whose goal is kind of evident in their title of their institution, national Institute for Drug Abuse, not drug benefits Drug abuse. So all they do is they look for a science that shows drugs harm you. That's not science. That's, that's propaganda. The whole institution is propaganda. Right? They're looking for the negative consequences of, of they they shouldn't do that. It should, there should be National Institute of Drug Research, right? Look for the pros and the cons. And, and this is the, in this is the organization that has funded most of the research showing cannabis harms people. Yet we've got alcohol in the streets and an opiate epidemic and cannabis is like benign compared to these things. There's an institute dedicated to tearing it down.

Vance Crowe [01:21:13] You may be the devil, you're, you're the most persuasive sin. Like, like I I I am completely wrapped by your argument, but I can say that this is well outside of the, I don't know if you've listened to Eric Weinstein at all. He has this podcast called The Portal.

Kevin McKernan [01:21:34] I have not, I I saw his name flash through Twitter once or twice.

Vance Crowe [01:21:37] I think he was, it is definitely worth Lee. He is worth checking out if only because he knows where the edges of the Overton window are and he's pushing well outside of them. And

Kevin McKernan [01:21:48] So I think I picked up, was he, he may have been on Rogan lately and I think I picked up some of his inklings on, on bio weapon stuff. And, and yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll look into it. I'm a little nervous about all the bio weapon accusations right now because it reminds me of weapons of mass destruction. You know, let's, let's get some scan evidence to, to beat the war drum and go get into war China. That, that to me, they're, they're apply the pro precautionary principle to that idea. You better have damn good evidence. It's a bio weapon before you start beating that drum. 'cause the history of us going to war is over really thin data.

Vance Crowe [01:22:21] Yeah. And I mean war with China, like it's, it's a much bigger world. If we say, let's let them succeed the way they wanna succeed and let's let us succeed the way that we wanna succeed and try as best you can to not have to get into any kind of a fight because that's a fight where there's no good outcomes there.

Kevin McKernan [01:22:41] If there's enough trade between, you know, what do they say when borders close bullets fly, right? If there's enough trade between those two countries, that will become a mutually assured destruction if you get aggressive between any of those two parties. And so I think that's the solution is we need to be, I I what I'm afraid will come out of this is xenophobia and nationalism where we're going to pull all of our manufacturing outta China and try and base it here. And all the cost of goods will go through the roof as a result of this. And we'll start reinforcing national boundaries. I think that's a disaster. I think we should be going the opposite direction, which is encourage more globalization, get our economic ties to the point that if you ever decide to cut off ties with the country, you're basically cutting off your leg. You need to be so, you know, economically integrated throughout the world that war is obsolete. 'cause there's nothing good that comes out of that that just wrecks economies all for just nationalistic pride, which doesn't really, in the end give you anything. So I, I hope that's not what happens. I hope, I hope we get come to our senses, but I, I do worry that a lot of this sentiment of, oh, it came from Wuhan and, and we need to, you know, we need to snap them in order kind of thing is, is, is jingoism that's not going to gonna help during an epidemic.

Vance Crowe [01:23:54] Well, it's like Rene Girard talks about like in a society, if you have wrecked everything, you will find a scapegoat to place that damage on. Yes. So that everybody can load up their sins and send that scapegoat out to die. And it, and that's the way you purify your society. And, and that is coming whenever we get to a resolution here. Because no one, you can't have a functioning society where they think the cause of the disease happened within the society. So you have to find it, root it out and send it out and there it's gonna be something. And so we just need to be on guard for that.

Kevin McKernan [01:24:31] Yeah. I mean, in many ways, I think some of that is what's going on right now is that we had a lot of sins in the economy coming up into January and they're, they're racing all of that history with the viruses here. And, and we couldn't control this and it blew up the economy and the, the sins of the past are gonna get ignored that led up to this. So there's, there's, I think some of that's already in place, unfortunately.

Vance Crowe [01:24:58] Well, one question that I ask everyone before they hop off here is, where do you think the world will be in two weeks?

Kevin McKernan [01:25:07] Two weeks? I hope to see a few more brave jurisdictions opening up like Texas, Georgia and, and, and maybe five more con states like that. And I hope this sends a glaring signal to a lot of businesses that relocate your business to the jurisdictions that that open up. Because the, the biggest fear we're, we're a small 20 person company, middle of a raise. We didn't expect that this would, this would come about. Fortunately, the cannabis industry being selected as an essential business has meant the raise is going fairly well. We, we initially thought it was all gonna evaporate, but right now there's very few places to park money. And so people are parking them in, in essential businesses. But we're also gonna, central jurisdictions investors are gonna wanna know, I want, they're, they're gonna wanna invest in jurisdictions that aren't gonna do this to them again. And so the money's gonna move and a lot of the businesses now can be more virtual. We're going through that lesson right now with this and with Zoom and everything else. And so Sweden and Texas and Georgia, those things are gonna come on the radar of, of, for businesses to, to, we need to put our, we need to get outta California. Come

Vance Crowe [01:26:17] To Missouri, brother, we've got the most plant geneticists here per capita anywhere. St. Louis is the right on the river. We're protected as far as, you know, having problems on the coast there many times.

Kevin McKernan [01:26:30] A lot of colleagues up there at Wash u, the genome center we used to collaborate with up there and Rob, Rob probably interacted with them as well. It's, it's a hotbed for excellent genomics is going on in St. Louis some of the best,

Vance Crowe [01:26:41] It is my belief that that, you know, the emerging mega regions, the major cities that will happen, are going to be built in this new post Corona era. Because what you're gonna find is what we valued cities for in 2019 is very, very different from what will value 'em. And to your point, it's the regulations that will be everything. Yeah. And it will be who is the first city to open up. And my belief is while all these rules are in place, start doing really inventive things. Let drones fly. Let your yes, let do as much automated driving as you possibly can now make that available and make it as amen. Easy as possible to start those companies

Kevin McKernan [01:27:22] Nail on the head. I mean, I think that's the question everyone needs to be asking all of these regulations that the government is lifting right now to deal with the, the pandemic. We have to ask the government, why can't it be that way all the time? If this stimulates the economy when we have a pandemic, shouldn't that be the permanent state of the economy? That way we never get one again. Right. The, there's gonna be a tendency for them to wanna bolt some of these things back on after this is gone. And I think we resist that with every ounce of our soul because the, the, it's coming really clear that the FDA managing a, like regulating a mask, like what the hell is that all about?

Vance Crowe [01:27:54] So my wife is a physical therapist and she was probably one of the very first people to move her practice online and the number of laws that she still has to face in order to be able to help somebody that like was supposed to get surgery on their back or on their elbow or on their wrist.

Kevin McKernan [01:28:12] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:28:13] Like she has to jump through all these hoops in order to be able to treat these people. But some of the laws have come off and it's like all of a sudden there's the state of New York can now get help from a practitioner in Missouri, so bang, bang, bang. She's not

Kevin McKernan [01:28:26] Out.

Vance Crowe [01:28:26] Yeah.

Kevin McKernan [01:28:26] And they're gonna look for it. New York is probably the worst state of them all. We, we had took us probably two years to try and get a CLIA license in New York. They're, they're, and they've done that to the Bitcoin space as well. They like pushed out with that bit license crap that they do. They're, they're a regulatory nightmare. That state is, is some of the mess that they're in right now is because it's just nothing but red tape in that state to get anything done. Well

Vance Crowe [01:28:47] And they had an opportunity to be one of the great agriculture states they are as far as your land in upstate. Yeah. But the amount of red tape that you had to go through to do the farmers' markets and all of those things, like it's difficult to do business in New York City. And so unlike here where it, it, when when the grocery stores got shut off, I was able to do grocery delivery from farmers overnight like that.

Kevin McKernan [01:29:13] Nice. Yeah. Yeah. I I'm hopeful that, that that will change people's, you know, they say in the pandemic everyone becomes a libertarian, right? You've got like, you know, weed delivery now alcohol can be delivered like every, everyone's cheering on these things that they were sort of shunning when there was not an emergency in place. And I'm hoping that's gonna shine and open up people's opinions on this, that these regulations are actually dangerous and regulations can kill

Vance Crowe [01:29:40] Kevin, this has been absolutely fantastic. People are gonna wanna follow and interact with you, hopefully to yell at you. And not just me, but what, how can people find you? You're out there on Twitter. So

Kevin McKernan [01:29:53] I, I work, I'm on Twitter. The company we work at is Medicinal Genomics. This is a company that does cannabis genetics and, and cannabis safety testing. We're proficient at, at tracking microbes on cannabis. So this is, tracking COVID is right in our wheelhouse. We build a lot of portable genetic tools to decentralize testing. They, you know, people could probably hijack the tools we make right now to do home testing for COVID because all of the

Vance Crowe [01:30:16] Tools we're using

Kevin McKernan [01:30:17] For this, we can't support you in that. But I highly encourage you to do it.

Vance Crowe [01:30:21] And there's probably a Reddit thread just waiting to, waiting to everybody to share all their information or a GitHub account.

Kevin McKernan [01:30:27] All tools are publicly available to do COVID testing in your house. I will point you in all the directions you need to do to do it, but we, we, we don't want the FDA on our on case so we can't sell it or support it. So that's kind of our specialty is, is cannabis genetics. We do a lot of blockchain work with this as well. There's a different whole nother rabbit hole on why we use blockchains to track all this data. But it's necessary in, in the industry like ours. But we also manage a cannabis science conference every year called caned, which is gonna be held probably in September this year is what we're aiming for. Assuming the lockdowns don't disrupt that. But right now we're everything we're looking at think, we think this is gonna be over by then. But that's a, that's a conference about a thousand people that has that physicians, it has genomic scientists like myself, it has growers, it has analytical chemists that are trying to track all these cannabinoids. So if you wanna learn how to do personalized medicine off of plants, you can grow out of the ground and do it with the utmost scientific rigor that could even sustain an FDA trial. Those are the people to come and see that happens every year in Pasadena and encourage people to take that out. So. So check us out at Medicinal Genomics. I'm on Twitter, Facebook and probably LinkedIn as well.

Vance Crowe [01:31:35] What is your Twitter handle?

Kevin McKernan [01:31:37] Yeah, it's Kevin Kernan. But yeah, check out those videos before they melt them because I'll put 'em up in library or some other blockchain system they can't metal with. Alright,

Vance Crowe [01:31:45] Thanks man. Alright, thank you.