Nicholas Wade worked as an editor and science journalist at the New York Times from 1982 to 2012. He is the author of several books including A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. His megaviral 2021 article, “The Origin of COVID: Did People or Nature Open Pandora’s Box at Wuhan?,” played a major role in making the lab-leak theory mainstream. Wade initially self-published “The Origin of COVID” on Medium after it was rejected from “every outlet [he] could think of, left, right, and center.”

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Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

0:51 Social behavior vs. IQ

8:51 Rice vs. wheat farmers

16:14 Persistent race differences

19:30 Environmental explanations

28:55 Response to A Troublesome Inheritance

36:43 Academic censorship

39:53 Reforming academia

49:59 Origins of race denial

58:11 Making race realism mainstream

1:01:15 A racial hierarchy?

1:11:04 Academia after race realism

1:13:50 Groupthink and resistance to the lab-leak theory

1:20:43 Conclusion