The more we looked into it, the more extraordinary it was they couldn't find any evidence for a connection with the food chain or the market or anything.

And the more the experiments and work that was going on in that one laboratory began to look odd.

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissinger. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.

Our brilliant guest today and a returning guest of that is a writer, a former lord and the author of a new book called Viral, The Search for the Origin of COVID-19.

The co-author, I should say, with Elin Chan. Very important. Former lord, Matt Ridley. Welcome back to Trigonometry.

Thank you so much, Constantine. Great to be with you. Yeah, I co-authored this book with Alina Chan. And she's the senior author on the book, but it's it's a double effort.

Fantastic. Well, we've got you to talk about it. So here you are. Before we get into it, just tell a little bit about your background, your yours of expertise. How are you where you are?

Right. Yeah. Well, I started as a scientist. I wasn't very good at it. So became a journalist. It was quite good at that, I think. But after a while, I basically became kind of self employed writer writing books, newspaper columns, things like that.

But always with a particular interest in science. I got into the House of Lords in 2013. That was a part time, but interesting career. I've I've dropped out of that because I think actually I can make better use of my time.

Now you either do that properly or not at all. And so I see myself as a writer about science.

Well, your previous book, which I really enjoyed reading as well was about innovation. And what I remember of that interview, we did it during one of the lockdowns that we've had.

I think it was the first lockdown. You might have been the first lockdown. And we had a great conversation about innovation. And at the end, as we always do quite casually, we went.

What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? And you said something along the lines of the fact that this virus probably came from a lab or something along those lines. And we both went.

Oh, shit, because this was part of the time when that was still being censored.

So you thought, oh, my God, we've had a nutter on the program.

No, I didn't actually. I thought, oh, my God, we had a person who has quite a reasonable point of view that I think should be explored for which we'll be punished. That's what I actually thought.

Well, it is staggering looking back how how very much you weren't allowed to talk about that topic in the early part of the pandemic.

It was shut down very quickly in February, March 2020 as a conspiracy theory akin to, you know, it's caused by 5G or something like that.

And it's only really in the May of 2021 that there was a sea change because of various things that came together.

Suddenly, the media started saying, actually, we can't rule out the possibility that came out of a laboratory.

We need to investigate it properly, even the United Nations, sorry, the World Health Organization.

And the US government, particularly the Biden administration said very firmly, yeah, that explanation does have to be on the table. And we've got to explain it.

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