Joe Rogan Experience #2427 - Bret Weinstein

1. 0:00 – 0:02

   Intro

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      (drumming)

2. 0:02 – 1:24

   Why Bret came back: proposing a missing layer in Darwinian evolution

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

   2. BWBret Weinstein0:04

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) What's happening, man?

   4. BWBret Weinstein0:13

      Hey. Good to be back?

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:14

      Good to see you. So, the reason why we had such a quick turnaround is because the last episode, one of the main reasons why you wanted to come on in the first place, is you, you wanted to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.

   6. BWBret Weinstein0:32

      Yes. Specifically, I have alluded in a number of different places, including here, to there being another level to Darwinian evolution that does a lot of the heavy lifting, um, that we, um, require in order to explain the diversity of forms that we see in biology. But I haven't been specific on what I believe that layer is. And I felt like it was time, I think, um, for one thing, the advances in AI mean that such things are going to emerge naturally. And I wanted to put it on the table before, uh, it simply gets discovered as a matter of computing horsepower.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:14

      And we were just rambling about so many different things that we never got to it last time, so I said, "All right, let's do another quick turnaround, come back."

   8. BWBret Weinstein1:20

      Right.

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:21

      All right.

   10. BWBret Weinstein1:21

       So, um-

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:22

       Spill the beans.

   12. BWBret Weinstein1:23

       Let's, let's talk biology.

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:24

       Okay.

3. 1:24 – 5:29

   Refresher on the central dogma and why protein mutations feel insufficient

   1. BWBret Weinstein1:24

      And let me just say, you know, I know it's not everybody's bag, but I do think just about everybody has, at some point, listened to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution and wondered if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love. Right? So, the classic story is that you have a genome, that it contains a great many genes. A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced. The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein. And a protein would typically be one of two things. It would either be, um, an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme, uh, well, enzyme isn't misleading, but an enzyme is a catalyst. A catalyst is misleading. It's really a machine that puts other chemicals together. So, a lot of the genes in the genome are these little molecular machines that assemble molecules. And the other thing that proteins are likely to be are structural, so something like collagen proteins can make a matrix that allows you to sort of build a sculpture, biologically. And what we say is that the, uh, the amino acid sequence is specified by the genome in three-letter sequences, right, codons. Each three letters specifies a particular amino acid that gets tacked on. You get a sequence of amino acids that then collapse into whatever they're going to be, whether it's an enzyme or a, a structure based on little electromagnetic affinities that they have, little side chains that have a positive or a negative charge that attract each other. So basically, these machines assemble themselves by folding in very complex ways that then causes them to interact with the molecules around them in very specific ways, ways that greatly reduce the energy, um, necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen. That's why we call it a catalyst, but really the way to think of it is a little molecular machine. So, we say the way evolution works is random changes happen to the DNA, because DNA is imperfectly copied or is impacted by radiation which will eliminate a letter in the DNA, and then that letter will get replaced by a different letter. There are only four choices. But some fraction of the time you get a three-letter combination that specifies a new amino acid. Almost all of the time, that will make the little molecular machine worse or break it altogether. Occasionally, it will leave the machine functional in a way that's somewhat better than the previous one, and then evolution will collect all of those advances, and that's how evolution works. That's the story we typically tell. And in fact, um, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology. Um, now the problem, most people will have thought about that and they will have heard, okay, random mutations that change this code in ways that alter proteins. That doesn't sound, that sounds like a very haphazard process and a very difficult way to get from one form of animal or plant or fungus to another. So if you've had that thought, m- that just doesn't seem powerful enough. And then biologists have said, "Well, you're not realizing how much time elapses that allows these very occasional positive changes to accumulate." And that's true. If that's a thought you've had, this is, this p- this process isn't powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of, then what I'm gonna tell you is a way in which that process is not the only process,

4. 5:29 – 8:33

   The “compiler layer” analogy: evolution needs higher-level knobs than binary

   1. BWBret Weinstein5:29

      and by adding a different process, very much a Darwinian one, we can see that the power to create all of the creatures that we see is much greater than the story that we've been told. Okay? So I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table about what enhances this. And essentially what I'm arguing is if you sat down to a computer game, right, something very realistic, and somebody says, "Well, that's all binary," that's true. It's all binary. But what they're not telling you is that there's an intervening layer that greatly increases the power to use binary to make something like a computer game. Right? So there are m- multiple different levels inside your computer. One of them is that your computer can be programmed in a language that is much closer to English...And then a compiler can take the, what you've written that a computer can't understand, and turn it into a computer-understandable code. And so the ability to make powerful programs depends on our ability not to have to program our computers in binary, but to be able to program them in C++ or whatever. That's the kind of thing I'm, I'm pointing to, is a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes. Okay, so here's what I think is the missing layer, and I will say I've done a bunch of research to figure out how much of this is understood, and I find a very confusing picture. Uh, actually depends which field I come at it from to see what the blind spots are. But I'm gonna leave that primarily, uh, for another time. Let's just say the two fields in question are my field, evolutionary biology, and a, a interdisciplinary science called evo-devo. Okay? Evo-devo is the evolution of development, and evo-devo is, um, a much newer, uh, in some ways a more vibrant field. I would argue my field is stuck. Evo-devo has been making progress from the developmental side on a number of different questions. Okay, so now let's talk about adaptive evolution and what adaptive evolution has seemed to be missing that I think does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining creatures. So let me, uh, let me just start by saying the, the thing I said at the beginning about protein coding genes being altered by random mutation resulting in changes, I'm not arguing that that is in any way a false story. It explains a great many things. My point is that what it primarily explains are things at nanoscale, right? It can explain the difference in a pigment molecule very easily, and we know that it does. It can explain things somewhat larger than that, like the very special structure, when you're a kid, do you ever play with the feathers of a bird? You know, you pull them apart-

5. 8:33 – 10:49

   Macroscopic form change example: shrew feet to bat wings via development

   1. SPSpeaker8:33

      Mm-hmm.

   2. BWBret Weinstein8:33

      ... and then they zip back together, right? Those kinds of things can be readily explained by the mechanism as we present it. What I'm going to argue is difficult to explain is the change from one macroscopic form to another. So for example, the wing of a bat. The wing of a bat evolved from the foot of a terrestrial or arboreal, meaning tree-dwelling, mammal like a shrew. So I sent, uh, Jamey a picture of a shrew's foot. Maybe we should just put it up. Um, so what we'll look at is the sh- the foot of a shrew, and it won't surprise you at all. It looks o- exactly as you would expect. It's got, you know, digits, and it looks like every other mammal's foot. So here we have an example of it. Okay, now let's take a look at the f- the wing of a bat. So here we have the wing of a bat. Now that wing is a highly modified front foot. The ribs that suspend, uh, that hold the membrane, the what we call the patagia, apart, are highly elongated fingers, right? So what you're seeing are the phalanges of that little shrew's foot elongated, very much so. Now what the evo-devo folks will tell you, and, and they are right about this, is that the difference between that bat's wing and its fingers and that shrew's foot and its toes is not a molecular difference. There may be molecular differences between the foot and the wing, but you could build that wing and that foot out of the very same molecules. What you're doing is distributing them differently. You have different amounts of molecules distributed in different ways to make these elaborate structures from the primitive structures. With me so far?

   3. SPSpeaker10:49

      Yep.

6. 10:49 – 14:24

   Telomeres as proof-of-concept: DNA can store numbers, not just protein recipes

   1. BWBret Weinstein10:49

      Okay. So what I realized more than 25 years ago, um, many people who've heard you and me talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres. So telomeres, you will remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome that are not genes. They are repetitive sequences. They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters again and again and again. And the telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there dictates how many times a cell line can duplicate. It loses repeats each time it duplicates, and when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing. Now we've talked before about why that system exists. The short version is in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening, because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this limit, the Hayflick limit, and stops reproducing. So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a lifetime, so it causes us to senesce, to age, and grow feeble as we do so. But what it said to me when I was doing that work was that there is a kind of information that can be stored in genomes, in DNA, that is not-Protein-oriented, it's not what we would call allelic. It's not written in three-letter codons. It's actually a number stored the same way you would store a variable in a computer program, right? The telomere, the length of the telomere, is a count of how many times a cell line is allowed to divide over a lifetime. It's a number. And what occurred to me all those years ago was that the ability to store a number in the genome is fantastically powerful. What it means if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome, is that you could describe creatures by allotting something, either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development, that you could specify things in the language of numbers that you can't specify in the language of amino acids. So, the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table is that the evolutionary process has built a system in which variables, uh, in which integers are stored in DNA, and those integers dictate phenomena like developmental timing, turning on and off something like the growth of one of those, uh, phalanx, the phalanges in the, in the fingers. If you could radically increase the number that d- dictated the length of one of those bones, then selection would effectively be in a position to play with adjacent forms. So, am I confusing you, or is this making sense?

   2. JRJoe Rogan14:20

      No. Okay.

   3. BWBret Weinstein14:21

      Okay. So, the question is-

   4. JRJoe Rogan14:24

      (clears throat)

7. 14:24 – 20:42

   Hypothesis: variable-number repeats (microsatellites) as adjustable developmental parameters

   1. BWBret Weinstein14:24

      All right. The telomere is a special case. The telomere exists at the end of a chromosome, and it can only exist at the end of a chromosome because of the way it functions. So, a telomere is not actually just a string. It's actually a loop, and the telomere loops back, and at the very tip, there's a little section where the DNA is not double-stranded. It's single-stranded, and that single strand inserts between two other strands of DNA. So, if you loop the DNA at the end of the chromosome back, it's called a D-loop. And then you get this one little single-stranded DNA that inserts between t- uh, double-stranded and makes a very tiny triple-stranded, like, uh, cap so that it holds the loop in place. You can't do that in the middle of a chromosome, so it's not like there are telomeres all over the place. But what there are, are a bunch of sequences that were traditionally dismissed as junk DNA that have been used as a molecular marker in biology for decades. We use something called microsatellites, right? So, a microsatellite is a repetitive sequence in DNA that does not code for a protein. It's just like a telomere in that way, and they vary in length. They vary, uh, in length a lot so that w- you may have a species in which the genome is very homogeneous, but between populations, there will have been change in the length of these microsatellites. Changes that, as far as we know, don't make any difference. But if you're a biologist in the field and you want to know if the trees in this valley are more closely related to the trees in Valley A or Valley B, you can look at a particular microsatellite, and you can say, "These trees have a microsatellite at this location that is more similar in length to Population A than to Population B, thus with some confidence, we think it's more close, i- i- it evolved from Population A," something like that. So, we use them as a tool for assessing things like relatedness. But we don't typically think of them as s- a storage modality for a kind of information that might be useful. So, the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table... Um, and by the way, these things are extremely common in the genome. There are many more v- variable number tandem repeats in the genome than there are genes, right? And my point is, I don't know whether evolution uses them as a place to store variables that then become important in describing creatures, but evolution is a very clever process. And the ability to store a variable, I feel highly confident that there will be many variables stored in many different ways, that there are ways in which you can store a variable in, um, triplet codon language, but they're clumsy, they're crude. So, you can have things like, um, a dosage compensation. You can have a gene that's repeated multiple times, and the more copies you have, the larger dose of the product that you get, right? So, if you have three copies of alcohol dehydrogenase, you'll have more alcohol tolerance than two copies, something like that. So, that demonstrates a way in triplet codon language that you can store a variable. But what I'm arguing is that there's, at least in principle, the possibility for a vast library of variables that have developmental implications for the way creatures look that allows you to go... I mean, imagine for a second, the f- the most recent common ancestor of all bats. Okay? Most recent common ancestor of all bats is an animal that has gone from-... no ability to fly, to the ability to fly. As soon as you have the ability to fly, the number of things that you could do, the number of niches that are available is very large.

   2. JRJoe Rogan18:46

      Can I pause-

   3. BWBret Weinstein18:47

      Sure.

   4. JRJoe Rogan18:47

      ... right there and ask a question?

   5. BWBret Weinstein18:48

      Sure.

   6. JRJoe Rogan18:48

      So, here's the, the real question, what, we're, uh, spec- specifically in regards to flying.

   7. BWBret Weinstein18:54

      Yep.

   8. JRJoe Rogan18:54

      How does an animal go from being a shrew or some other rodent-type creature to something that eventually can fly, and what are the steps along the way? And how would that even facilitate itself? Like, how, how would you get an animal that's completely stuck on the ground and can only hop a little bit to something that can literally traverse 3D space? All right, welcome to the busy season. There's probably a lot on your plate, and chances are that your plate isn't full of everything we need to maintain our daily health. But that's where AG1 comes in. To keep you ahead of all those seasonal struggles, AG1 is the daily health drink that could help you stay one scoop ahead of the stress, socializing, and snacking that comes with the season. I've talked about AG1 for a long time, and I know one scoop of AG1 takes care of your multivitamin, pre and probiotics, super foods, and antioxidants to support your daily health, even when you get thrown off your nutrition routine. When you have so much going on, don't leave it up to chance. Take care of yourself. Drinking AG1 every morning is a simple action that helps you stay one scoop ahead of everything coming your way. And that's why I've partnered with them for so long. If you want to stay ahead of the season with support for your energy, immune health, daily nutrition, and more, it's time to start your AG1 routine. AG1 has a special holiday offer. If you head to drinkag1.com/jorogan, you'll get the welcome kit, a morning person hat, a bottle of vitamin D3+K2, and an AG1 flavor sampler for free with your first subscription. That's over $100 in free gifts. Just head to drinkag1.com/jorogan, or visit the link in the description to get started.

8. 20:42 – 34:21

   How flight evolves: gliding as an incremental pathway and “adjacent possible” exploration

   1. BWBret Weinstein20:42

      This is why I love you, Joe. I mean, it's one of the reasons. Um, this is a question that has perplexed biologists. We have done a lot of work, we know a lot.

   2. JRJoe Rogan20:52

      It's one of the most fantastic abilities of all the animals.

   3. BWBret Weinstein20:55

      Right. How surprising is it? That's the question.

   4. JRJoe Rogan20:58

      Yes.

   5. BWBret Weinstein20:58

      Is it so surprising that it's actually impossible? And I think the answer is just simply no. It's quite possible, but-

   6. JRJoe Rogan21:03

      Well, it's obviously, it's possible.

   7. BWBret Weinstein21:05

      Well, no. I mean, you know, let's, l- let's, uh, steel man the opposing position.

   8. JRJoe Rogan21:11

      Intelligent design position?

   9. BWBret Weinstein21:12

      Yes.

   10. JRJoe Rogan21:12

       Okay.

   11. BWBret Weinstein21:12

       There, there's certainly a lot of people who would argue that actually, no, there are gaps you, you can't jump, and-

   12. JRJoe Rogan21:18

       We should explain that as well. Like, this is one of the reasons why this argument has come up, because intelligent design asserts that random mutation and natural selection does not account for the vast variety of species, and that it could not account for a rodent or a shrew, which is w- believed to be our common ancestor, eventually becoming a human being.

   13. BWBret Weinstein21:41

       Um, let's just say, uh, I have, uh, you know, initially, I thought that all of the intelligent design folks were anti-scientific, and, uh, really, um, basically just religious people, uh, wielding, uh, sophistry. I now know several of them in person, and quite like them, and I quite like them scientifically. I think they actually have done an excellent job of pointing out the folly in evolutionary biology, and in part, what I'm saying is, I appreciate their pointing out that the mechanism that we teach is not powerful enough to do what we claim it does. I, I have the same suspicion. My argument is, there is a mechanism that is powerful enough, and we haven't been looking at it because we've been telling the story that we've got it nailed already, and I just don't think we do. So, l- let's go to your, your question about-

   14. JRJoe Rogan22:40

       Right.

   15. BWBret Weinstein22:40

       ... how you get from a creature that can't fly at all to a creature that does fly, and now m- my feeling is actually this one is pretty easy. And I'm not saying that we know how it did happen in the case of a bat. We are hobbled in the case of bats by two things. One, the fact that bats are primarily tropical. The bulk of the species are tropical. And the other is that the majority of bats are small with spindly limbs. What that means is that they don't fossilize well. Tropics are not a good place for fossilization.

   16. JRJoe Rogan23:20

       Mm-hmm.

   17. BWBret Weinstein23:20

       And bats are not a good candidate for fossilization, and so unfortunately, the fossil record doesn't tell us a clear story the way it does, well, the bird story is getting ever-clearer. We've got good bird fossils in a way that we didn't when you and I were young. Um, but in the case of, of a bat, I would say the way to think of it is this. Um, have you seen flying squirrels?

   18. JRJoe Rogan23:42

       Yes.

   19. BWBret Weinstein23:42

       Okay. You've seen 'em fly?

   20. JRJoe Rogan23:44

       Mm-hmm.

   21. BWBret Weinstein23:45

       Okay. Now-

   22. JRJoe Rogan23:45

       Not in person, but videos.

   23. BWBret Weinstein23:46

       Oh, okay. I, I have actually twice seen it.

   24. JRJoe Rogan23:49

       Yeah?

   25. BWBret Weinstein23:50

       The funny thing is, they're not uncommon, but they are very uncommon to see, and the reason they are uncommon to see is that they're nocturnal, and they are so damn silent. All right? So, the two times I've seen it was when they got into an argument with each other.

   26. JRJoe Rogan24:06

       Mm.

   27. BWBret Weinstein24:06

       Okay? And they started chattering, and I was like, "Huh? What, what, what is this?" And okay, lo and behold, it's flying squirrels, and they're moving through, you know, a patch of forest, and it's the most amazing thing. All right? These things, uh, you know, technically they're not flying. They're purely gliding. I would argue that that's actually not a really good distinction, because at some level what they're doing is powering flight by climbing trees. So, they climb a tree, you know, they've got potential energy, and then they glide to the next tree. They'll go from the end of a branch...And they will glide much farther than you would think is possible, right? It's really like it challenges you. "Am, am I really seeing what I'm seeing?" It's hard to believe they can do it, and then they land on the trunk of the tree. That's why they're so silent, right? They land on the trunk so it doesn't make a big noise as they hit some branch and the leaves rustle and all of that. (inhales) But anyway, if you, if you've seen these creatures do it, then you can imagine a pretty clear story, right? Imagine a squirrel that doesn't glide, a regular garden variety squirrel. Well, that squirrel certainly faces gaps between trees that push it to its limit, and then there's gaps that are just a little beyond its limit. And you could imagine lots of scenarios in which a predator is chasing a squirrel, and it's got it out onto the end of a branch, and the squirrel has to leap, and so it's got to be pretty durable in case it can't make it to the next tree.

   28. JRJoe Rogan25:34

       (clears throat)

   29. BWBret Weinstein25:34

       They are. Um, but any squirrel that had just a little advantage in getting to that next tree would out-compete ones that got consumed or died because they, you know, hit the ground too hard or fell in front of a predator that took advantage of it or something like that. So there is an advantage that comes from even a tiny little increase in the distance you can jump. So that gets you pretty clearly from no ability to glide at all, ability to jump as is, to the ability to glide a little, to the ability to glide a lot, to the ability to glide the way modern flying squirrels do, which is like so impressive, right? But it's still not, it's not flapping flight. It's not powered. So you can imagine a story in which the shrew ancestor climbed things and had the same situation, and maybe it starts out... In fact, it probably does start out with, um, maybe a little webbing between the fingers that gives it just a little extra lift, right? And you could imagine once you get onto that little foothill, a little lift, well, a little more lift would be good. So those individuals that had just slightly more webbing out-competed those individuals that had slightly less webbing.

   30. JRJoe Rogan26:52

       Right, but what would cause them to develop the webbing in the first place?
9. 34:21 – 39:27

   Field critique: evolutionary biology ‘stuck,’ evo-devo progress, and the meme/cultural evolution gateway

   1. BWBret Weinstein34:21

      You know, I- I thought my field was stuck in a ditch since really before I entered it. You know, the last major progress in my field was 1976, and-

   2. JRJoe Rogan34:31

      Really?

   3. BWBret Weinstein34:32

      That's what I think, yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan34:33

      And what was that?

   5. BWBret Weinstein34:34

      Um, The Selfish Gene provides us a mechanism f- it's basically a synthesis of what we understand about adaptive evolution. It provides the first gateway to understand cultural evolution in rigorous Darwinian terms. I don't think that that, um, that gateway... I don't think we ever went through it. In fact, when I've talked to Dawkins about his, uh, effective discovery, the meme, he doesn't seem to understand the power of it. Um, he thinks of it as... I mean, he says in chapter 11 of, of The Selfish Gene, he says, um, that the l- landscape of memes is like a new primeval soup, which is not what it is. It's actually a solution that the genes have come up with for how to evolve things like humans more rapidly than can be done at the genetic level, right? We can evolve at a cultural level, which solves a problem for the genes that the genes can't solve directly. And that means that all of the space of human culture and the culture of other creatures, but our culture is vastly, uh, more, uh, refined and powerful and diverse. But that space is basically a... an enhanced... It's, it's another enhancement to the toolkit of Darwinian evolution, which w- we have unfortunately often dismissed as non-evolutionary, or as a parallel kind of evolution rather than as a turbocharged adaptive evolution that is targeted at the same objectives as our genes are, which is what it really turns out to be. So, i- in any case, that was 1976. The thing that has been a revolution since then was evo-devo, evolution of development. But it didn't come from the, the Darwinists. It came primarily from the developmental side. These are people who were...... focused on mechanism. And so, in some sense, the, the story of the failure of biology to update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident, right? So the f- the first Darwinists, including Darwin himself, were not focused on molecular scale mechanisms because they couldn't be. They didn't have any tools to look at those things. And so they looked at the creatures, and they saw patterns, and so they became very focused on recognizing the patterns and what they imply about what must be going on inside. But they got out of the habit of thinking about mechanism because the mechanisms weren't available to them. The developmental biologists were exactly the inverse. They didn't really have patience for evolutionary thinking. They were purely about mechanism, and all kinds of experiments, like, you know, taking a piece of one egg and grafting it into another egg and watching the weird monster that is created when the egg is getting the same signal from two different directions, right? That kind of thing. Um, and, you know, evo-devo is a very good start on bringing these things together, but I don't know if it's academic territoriality or just lack of imagination that seems to be preventing, uh, the revolution in our understanding of the most powerful process that exists, and, uh, uh, it's frustrating. So anyway, I hope, um, I hope others will take this to heart. It could easily be that the larger point is right, that variables in the genome are very important, and that the variable number tandem repeats are not the way that they are stored. That would be interesting. Maybe the variable number tandem repeats are the way it's stored, in which case there's an awful lot to be learned about how that information is read. In other words, if, once you know that that's true, if it is, then the question is, okay, well, how do we look into a particular genome and see the mapping of those variables onto the creature that we see running around in the forest? Right? That, that would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have. Um, so, anyway, uh, I didn't want to leave it as a vague allusion to a hidden layer. I wanted to point to a hidden layer that would explain how this process that we've all learned about might be much more powerful than the story we've been told about it.

10. 39:27 – 45:21

    Fast adaptation anecdotes and the ‘purpose’ of evolution: surviving chaos through explorer modes

    1. JRJoe Rogan39:27

       I was watching a documentary once on the BBC, uh, about the Congo.

    2. BWBret Weinstein39:31

       Mm-hmm.

    3. JRJoe Rogan39:31

       And it's a really amazing documentary and one of the things that it points out too is the rapid development of new abilities that these animals have that live in the Congo that used to be on the plains, and as the, uh, the rainforest expanded, they were kind of trapped in here. And one of them they pointed to was duikers, you know those-

    4. BWBret Weinstein39:52

       Mm-hmm.

    5. JRJoe Rogan39:52

       ... little small antelopes? That now have the ability to swim underwater for as much as 100 yards and they eat fish. And they were talking about it, like, this is this fantastic development because they know how long it took for the grasslands to have been overtaken by the rainforest, and it wasn't that long. And it, it didn't seem to account for the adaptation that they were seeing in these animals.

    6. BWBret Weinstein40:17

       Th- this is exactly the thing that bugs me, is imagine what would have happened if there was not an enhanced evolutionary toolkit to that creature.

    7. JRJoe Rogan40:28

       Hmm.

    8. BWBret Weinstein40:29

       It would have gone extinct.

    9. JRJoe Rogan40:30

       Right.

    10. BWBret Weinstein40:32

        That's the story again and again, right?

    11. JRJoe Rogan40:33

        Well, it's a story with humans, right? Inuits. It's a story with people that live in extremely cold climates, right? They've developed all these adaptations to, uh, be able to survive in this intense weather, where people who live in the tropics, if they, you moved them to that environment, they would die.

    12. BWBret Weinstein40:51

        It's the story with every clade of creatures. This is a chaotic planet, right? At levels that I think maybe we don't even fully yet appreciate. The difference between committing to a particular way of existing that seems really awesome for some period of time and then is suddenly impossible, and the ability to leap from one way of being to another, is the key to getting through time, which is what evolution is doing, right? I always phrase it as the purpose that evolution points towards is lodging your genes as far into the future as you can get them. And people don't, I think, fully appreciate when I say that, that it's not just a clever rephrasing of what might be more standard, might be found in a textbook. The point is, anything that satisfies that objective is valid. So for example, if you have... So we have a process, it's one of my favorites, um, to think about, which is called adaptive radiation. Adaptive radiation is where you get some creature that either solves some problem or gets to some new place and then diversifies, and we get 50 or 100 or 1,000 species that are derived from that initial discovery, right? So you get this blooming of forms, right? The first bird. What was the first bird even doing? We don't know.

    13. JRJoe Rogan42:24

        Right.

    14. BWBret Weinstein42:25

        But, but we do know is that we have 11,000 species of these things now, all doing subtly different stuff, right?

    15. JRJoe Rogan42:32

        Some of them not even flying.

    16. BWBret Weinstein42:34

        Right, some of them have lost the ability-

    17. JRJoe Rogan42:36

        Yeah.

    18. BWBret Weinstein42:37

        ... to fly. So the point is, the discovery of birdness opens up a huge number of potential discoveries. Evolution would be a dumb process if it didn't effectively search that space, if it randomly waited to find each of those opportunities. That's-... so much less powerful than searching the space. And then, once you get the search of a space, okay, so you get, you know, a hundred hits. You get some innovation, it provides a hundred niches that you could move into from there, it creates a hundred species, and it turns out most of those niches are durable on the scale of 10,000 years but not 50,000 years, so you get a bunch of them going extinct. But as long as one of them, or two of them, have gotten through that bottleneck, right, the huge blooming of branches and then the pruning of branches, the ancestor has now gotten to the future in the form of however many species made it through that destructive process. It is selection at a different scale than we typically think of it. And so, thinking of evolution as this dynamic process that is not only searching design space, but learning to enhance its capacity to search design space in order to get into the future is the way to think of it. It's much more powerful than the clumsy version that we describe, even if we don't yet understand where that power is lodged. If we were imaginative and we said, "Okay, what would I do if I was evolution to enhance the likelihood of getting to the future?" Well, then you start finding these explorer modes, and, you know, I understand that I will be ridiculed for saying that because it imposes on selection a, uh, directionality that, probably at a technical level, we are right to assume does not exist. But l- let me point this out. We often say that evolution cannot look forward, it can only see the past. At a technical level, this is true. On the other hand, we all agree that evolution built us. I can see the future, right? I can understand what is likely to happen, I can extrapolate and see things that haven't occurred yet and I will do hypothesis testing to see if my understanding is correct. But the point is, evolution can't see the future, but it can build creatures that see the future on its behalf. Isn't that kind of like it looking into the future?

    19. JRJoe Rogan45:19

        Mm-hmm.

    20. BWBret Weinstein45:19

        It feels a lot like it is to me.

11. 45:21 – 50:26

    Durable ‘unchanged’ animals and humans as a generalist platform with cultural software

    1. JRJoe Rogan45:21

       I've always been fascinated by animals that don't change, like animals that have reached some very bizarre apex predator ra- like crocodiles, for instance.

    2. BWBret Weinstein45:31

       Crocodiles, dragonflies-

    3. JRJoe Rogan45:33

       Sharks.

    4. BWBret Weinstein45:34

       ... sharks-

    5. JRJoe Rogan45:34

       Yeah.

    6. BWBret Weinstein45:34

       ... horseshoe crabs.

    7. JRJoe Rogan45:35

       Yeah.

    8. BWBret Weinstein45:36

       Yeah. So, w- this is a place where I think, um, a good evolutionary course says the right thing about it. What a good evolutionary course says about this is, we think of these creatures as backwards. They are the opposite. They are so good that in spite of competition from more modern forms, they still persist. Right? If you've watched a dragonfly, it's a super agile creature, right? It's a formidable predator. Um, and so anyway, when you see one of these creatures that has been very little modified, it's because it did find a form that's durable over a very long period of time, and, um, in some ways that's the greatest strategy, right? Having to change in order to deal with the changes in, uh, in the environment is perilous. Having found something that is so durable that it consists, that it- it persists era after era, epoch after epoch, is, um, at least a very comprehensible strategy and, um, arguably the better one because anything that has existed that long... Uh, maybe we talked in a past podcast about the, the Lindy effect?

    9. JRJoe Rogan46:57

       Yes.

    10. BWBret Weinstein46:57

        Yeah. The, the idea that we tend to think that the longer something's been around, th- that it's overdue to be destroyed, but that often the answer is, something that's been around a long time is actually built to last, and so if it's been around a long time you might expect to see it last a lot longer. Um, so it's, it's that, it's the Lindy effect in, in animal or plant form.

    11. JRJoe Rogan47:20

        So, it's just, uh, essentially evolution nailed it.

    12. BWBret Weinstein47:24

        Yeah.

    13. JRJoe Rogan47:24

        They developed a, an animal that's so adaptive and, and so designed to succeed in this particular environment that it doesn't really need to change.

    14. BWBret Weinstein47:33

        Yes, and in fact, you know, w- we are in some ways, we haven't been around that long, but our... it looks like we are a variation on that theme precisely because we have a generalist body plan, right? The physical robot that is the human being is capable of doing a tremendous number of things, and the software pl- program can be essentially entirely rewritten, right? The culture that you inherit can take a person and it can rewire them for a very different niche, including the ability to avail themselves of whatever tools are necessary to do whatever things th- the body plan doesn't do on its own, right? So, w- that's a cool strategy, right? To have a, a generalist robot and a software program that can be swapped out as, as needed that evolution can rewrite very rapidly, that evolution can rewrite on the basis of not only the conjecture of an intelligent creature but the pooled parallel processing of multiple individuals of the species, right? Th- this is what Heather and I describe in our book as campfire, right? The light has faded, it's too dark for you to be productive at whatever your niche is. You gather around the campfire and you talk. You talk about-... problems that you've run into, solutions that you're working on. You pool the information. People have different histories, they have different skill sets, and they parallel process the puzzles and they come up with ideas which, you know, the most amazing adaptation of all is the one we're using right now. Right?

    15. JRJoe Rogan49:25

        Mm.

    16. BWBret Weinstein49:25

        The ability for me to put an abstract idea into your head over open space by vibrating the air molecules between us, I mean, that is a miracle.

    17. JRJoe Rogan49:38

        Pretty crazy.

    18. BWBret Weinstein49:39

        It's amazing. And, you know, that we can prove that we're not fooling ourselves. I could say something, you know, that nobody's ever thought of, um, you know, like, uh, I don't know, a potato rocket ship, right? And you could draw on the piece of paper your interpretation, and I could say, "Yeah, that's the thing I was thinking of." Right? That ability to prove that we are in fact exchanging abstract ideas across open air and that that allows multiple minds that are not physically touching each other to process together, uh, concepts is... it's truly stunning. And in conjunction with the generalist robot that can use tools, it's a- it's an amazingly good strategy.

12. 50:26 – 1:02:47

    Microplastics, endocrine disruption, and hyper-novelty: poisoning vs adaptation

    1. JRJoe Rogan50:26

       When you talk about humans, o- one of the things that fascinates me about people is the, the changes in human beings because of the environment, because of, uh, input, meaning like certain chemicals we're exposed to, uh, sedentary lifestyle. There's changes that are taking place that we can measure from human beings that lived in the beginning of the 20th century to people that live now in the beginning of the 21st century. You're, uh... One of the things that people are talking about with, uh, a great concern, like Dr. Shanna Swan done a lot of work on this, is the impact of microplastics on our endocrine system and how it's greatly diminishing, uh, males' ability to procreate and females' ability to, uh, bring a baby to term. So, you're getting many more miscarriages and, uh, lower testosterone counts, smaller testicles and penises, reduced size of the taints. All these different things that, uh, she attributes to phthalates and various, uh, chemicals that are endocrine disruptors that are ubiquitous in our, in our world. Um, is this something that you think about? Do you, do you w- like, is this something... Are we in the middle of an adaptation or some sort of a change of the human species?

    2. BWBret Weinstein51:43

       Um, no-

    3. JRJoe Rogan51:44

       Or, or is it just being poisoned?

    4. BWBret Weinstein51:46

       We, we're being poisoned, and we're being poisoned in a particular way. I would say we have effectively threatened to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The normal pattern for human beings is you inherit your ancestor's world. Every so often, that's not true. Every so often, a generation finds itself in a brand-new circumstance. You know, you kayak, kayak across some body of water, and you end up in some foreign place in which the animals and plants aren't the same, and your old way of life isn't going to work, and you have to bootstrap something new. It's the same as... It's similar to the first flying, uh, mammal is suddenly faced with a whole set of opportunities that it has to figure out how to solve. But the point is, every so often, a generation gets a wild curveball, and it has to start not from scratch, but close to it. But in general, okay, that first generation figures out how we're going to make a living here, and it passes that information on to its descendants, who have a lot of room to refine what their ancestors figured out. And for some generations, you get this rapid refinement process, and then eventually, you kind of figure it out. "I know how we're going to live in this valley, and here's how it works." And one generation passes it on to the next, and the valley doesn't change very much.

    5. JRJoe Rogan53:19

       Mm-hmm.

    6. BWBret Weinstein53:20

       That process is sustainable. Humans are excellent at dealing with it, right? Because we're good at parallel processing puzzles, right? A population of people can figure out how to live here when the way to do it doesn't look like how we lived there. However, there is a threshold at which our amazing ability to adapt culturally and physiologically is outstripped, and that is the point at which technological change is so fast that you're not even a, an adult in the same environment you grew up in. That's what we now consistently live in, right? The world you and I now live in doesn't look anything like the world we grew up in, right? The number of radical differences in terms of the chemicals that we encounter, in terms of the behavior of other people, in terms of the information that comes into our eyes. These things have all been revolutionized. I've frankly seen several revolutions. You and I have both seen several revolutions already. You know, we had the computer, then we had the internet, then we had the smartphone, then we had social media. Now, we're facing AI, right? Each of these things would take time to metabolize, to deal with the harms of them, to learn how to address them in a wise way, but we never get the chance to figure that out, because the next one is already upon us. In fact, it's... You ever go body surfing and you get into a situation where the, the waves are just coming too quick, and as soon as you catch your breath from one, the next one is on you, right? It's just like that... You can't, you can't do that, right? You need time to-... to settle, and our rate of change is so high, this is what Heather and I call hyper-novelty. Hyper-novelty is the state at which even our amazing ability to rapidly adapt is incapable of keeping pace with technological change.

    7. JRJoe Rogan55:20

       Mm.

    8. BWBret Weinstein55:21

       That's where we are.

    9. JRJoe Rogan55:23

       Um, that really concerns me with humans, that drop-off of testosterone, the miscarriage rate increasing. Like, that's- that's really spooky, because I don't see any change in the, uh, environment. Like I- I don't see any change in the use of plastics, I don't see any change in these endocrine disrupting chemicals being in- in our systems.

    10. JRJoe Rogan55:49

        This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have a favorite holiday movie we like to go back to again and again, like Home Alone. That movie's always a fun watch. The bad guys get their comeuppance a lot, and of course there's the wholesome feelgood moment at the end that really gets to the heart of the holidays. Whatever film you like to watch, it took a team of talented people to make it what it is. Actors, editors, props people, the sound crew. When you need to build your own team to make something magical happen, use ZipRecruiter. Try it for free at ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter is the number one rated hiring site based on G2, and that's because it works impossibly fast, as fast as Kevin arming his home with every booby trap he can think of. Immediately after you post your job, ZipRecruiter's matching technology will connect you with potential job seekers in your area. Make your hiring a little merrier with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Just go to this exclusive web address right now to try ZipRecruiter for free. That's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. Again, that's ziprecruiter.com/rogan. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire.

    11. BWBret Weinstein57:06

        Well, I agree, and I think, you know, we need to think outside the box with respect to what kinds of inputs might be affecting us. I will say, in parallel with what I think is a much more toxic environment, you know, and developmentally toxic environment, um, we have a radical change in the way human beings are interacting with each other.

    12. JRJoe Rogan57:34

        Right.

    13. BWBret Weinstein57:34

        And it is unclear to me what- how far-reaching the consequences of that might be. But, um, you know, we talked last time about the impact of the sexual revolution and of reliable birth control, and, uh-

    14. JRJoe Rogan57:53

        Yeah.

    15. BWBret Weinstein57:53

        ... and abortion on the way males and females interact with each other, that basically sex being the ultimate reward, the most powerful motivator that exists, when birth control made sex common, or made it possible for sex to be common by virtue of, uh, radically reducing the risk that females face in engaging in sex with men who won't invest, it robbed us of the central organizing principle of civilization, and the consequences of that central organizing principle evaporating are incredibly far-reaching, right? In- i- in effect, we do not know that there is a way for us to live without that central organizing principle. We don't know that it lasts. And we are running that radical experiment, and then we're going to augment that radical experiment, um, now with AI and presumably AI-powered sex robots and companions, and other things that the mind is not built to properly understand. Right? So, what effect are all of these things having? You know, is there a feedback effect from, uh, your perception of the sexual landscape onto the development of your children? I don't know. It's conceivable that there is such a thing. Um, but I do know that if we were wise, we would slow the pace of experienced change way down.

    16. JRJoe Rogan59:40

        But how is that even possible at this point?

    17. BWBret Weinstein59:42

        I'm not saying it is.

    18. JRJoe Rogan59:43

        Right.

    19. BWBret Weinstein59:43

        But I'm saying if we don't, I think we know that we're doomed. So, in light of that, what would you do if you knew that down that path was destruction? You would start thinking about the question of, is there some way ... I'm- you know, maybe you can't rein in the pace of technological change. You can certainly, and we should, if we were wise, we would insulate young people from exposure, especially to new stuff. Right? There's a question about what stuff that we already have, and what effect it's having on them, but the fact that we're just going to expose them to every new revolution without figuring out what its com- uh, its consequences are, is insane. Right? We need to provide young people with a chemically and informationally stable environment where the puzzles are solvable and they are relevant to the adult world we expect them to live in, which is difficult because we don't know what world they're gonna live in. But not in- not immunizing them is a terrible error. Right? It- it can't- it can't work. Right? The- the reason human childhood is the longest developmental, uh, childhood in the animal kingdom, by far, is that it is the training for adult life.... if the training ground doesn't match the world that you're going to be an adult in, because the world you're going to be a- an adult in is something nobody can predict, it is guaranteed to make you a fish out of water as an adult. It's extremely disruptive and-

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:01:27

        And essentially every new groundbreaking technology, ev- every new breakthrough, every new paradigm-shifting thing that gets created is a completely new environment for these children.

    21. BWBret Weinstein1:01:41

        Completely new with-

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:01:42

        And no roadmap, no manual of how to navigate it, and then we're seeing all the psychological harms increase in anxiety, self-harm, especially amongst young girls.

    23. BWBret Weinstein1:01:53

        Yep.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:01:54

        Suicidal ideation, actual suicide.

    25. BWBret Weinstein1:01:57

        Well, I mean, in other contexts, I have said, I probably said to you, you know, there are no adults.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:02:05

        Right.

    27. BWBret Weinstein1:02:05

        Right? That's one of the shocking discoveries of becoming a- adult age-

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:02:11

        Yes.

    29. BWBret Weinstein1:02:11

        ... is that it's not like there's some set of adults who knows what to think about this and how to approach it. One of the reasons that you would have no adults is that it's kind of impossible to imagine where they would come from, right? An adult is somebody who has picked up the wisdom for how to deal with the world that you live in. Where would that wisdom have come from if the world just showed up five minutes ago? Right? It's, in principle, impossible to deal with this level of change. So at- at most, what you can do is become, you know, very robust.

13. 1:02:47 – 1:15:55

    Rites of passage, consequence-based learning, and the critique of infantilizing safety nets

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:02:47

       Do you think that this is where, like, rites of passage ceremony come from, that there's a- a- a thing that differentiates you between the younger version of yourself, you've gone through this thing, and so it requires a shift in the way that you view yourself and the world? Now you have passed, now you've gone through, you know, whatever the ceremony is, depending upon your culture, now you are a man-

    2. BWBret Weinstein1:03:09

       Yeah, in fact, uh-

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:03:10

       ... or a woman.

    4. BWBret Weinstein1:03:11

       ... in A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Heather and I argue that rites of passage are the place, so they're art- they're artificial in a sense, right? We dictate that this is the moment at which you go from being a boy to being a man who is eligible to marry or something like that.

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:03:29

       Yeah.

    6. BWBret Weinstein1:03:30

       And the point is, you know that that date is coming. You, there's a thing that causes you to have made that transition, right? Maybe it's a vision quest of some kind, maybe it's, uh, uh, an animal that you have to hunt and bring back or something. But the point is, you grow up with the knowledge that I am a prototype until that marker, and after that marker, it's for real, right? So you pick up an increasing level of reality until you hit that agreed-upon boundary, at which point everybody is in a position to hold you responsible for your behavior and to expect you to have certain skills on board. And the abandonment of these things, right, what we have is such a preposterous dim shadow of what once was, you know. Okay, you graduated high school.

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:04:27

       Right.

    8. BWBret Weinstein1:04:27

       Well, I assure you graduating high school means very little in terms of whether or not you know how to navigate the adult world.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:04:34

       And in fact, it leaves people with more anxiety because you don't feel like you're an adult, but yet you're supposed to be one. "I'm 18 now. I need to get a job." And you're out there in the world and very confused and trying to figure it out along the way, and also trying to pretend that you're a man because maybe that somehow will make you feel more like one, or take on male behaviors, start smoking cigarettes, whatever it is. Like, whatever you see adult people do, go to the bar, like, whatever it is and try to emulate what you think are men or women.

    10. BWBret Weinstein1:05:09

        Especially, you know, if you think about what we actually do to these kids. We put them in schools where the adults are, in some sense, themselves immunized from the realities of the adult world and they end up having these ridiculous notions about, you know, whatever it may be. It's very easy to pick on, you know, gender ideology or, uh, equity or-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:05:34

        But th- those are good examples though because they're preposterous.

    12. BWBret Weinstein1:05:38

        Ridiculous.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:05:38

        And they get adapted, or adopted rather, by enormous groups of people and then reinforced violently. Like, you let y- well, I always say that the more ridiculous the idea is, the- the more, uh, aggressively people fight against the resistance of this idea.

    14. BWBret Weinstein1:05:57

        Yeah, it's, um, they're solving some other problem.

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:06:01

        Yes.

    16. BWBret Weinstein1:06:01

        But at the level of how civilization is going to run, we are, uh, signing our own death warrant putting our children in environments in which what they pick up is a determination to be unrealistic in the face of evidence that they are wrong. And- that's-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:06:20

        And another thing, uh, we're not course correcting.

    18. BWBret Weinstein1:06:22

        Right.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:06:23

        Yeah. I mean, people complain about it when their kids are going to that school, but more kids are going to that school and it just keeps happening over and over again. And then they go into the workforce and they have these crazy ideas and they tank companies, you know, because they try to impose these ridiculous ideologies in the real world and actual people that have become actual adults and are out there working and- and struggling go, "This is fucking horseshit and I'm not going along with this, and fuck your company," and then all of a sudden that company gets de- And then there's some adaptation that way because people realize like, "Hey, we can't do this anymore. This is bad for our business. We've got to course correct." But that seems like it's one of the only ways that they do is by real world application and it being soundly rejected.

    20. BWBret Weinstein1:07:08

        Well-

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:07:09

        And financial consequences.

    22. BWBret Weinstein1:07:11

        The problem is that all those consequences are way too indirect to correct the people who are driving the change.

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:07:18

        Right.

    24. BWBret Weinstein1:07:18

        And-

    25. JRJoe Rogan1:07:18

        And the people that aren't connected to that world at all, because their entire existence is based in this la-la land, where they're being funded by la-la land, they're teaching la-la land ideology, they're reinforcing it, and then they're in a position of authority, so they are the person that these young people look up to, and they're very articulate and they string words together well, so they look impressive. And say, "Well, this guy must be right." You know? "And my parents must be really stupid and they've ruined society." And, you know, "Com- we got to give communism a shot."

    26. BWBret Weinstein1:07:49

        (laughs)

    27. JRJoe Rogan1:07:49

        "It just hasn't been done correctly."

    28. BWBret Weinstein1:07:51

        Right.

    29. JRJoe Rogan1:07:51

        (laughs)

    30. BWBret Weinstein1:07:51

        We just gotta go far enough. Um, well, the problem is the thing that does turn you into an adult is a world of consequences. Right? Now, as a child, somebody should prune that world of fatal consequences or, you know, ones that would get you maimed. But allowing you to experience the harm of your wrong understanding of the world is how you improve your understanding of the world. And so, A, we're not even doing that, right? We've got this system in which we are allowing people who know nothing to teach children the nothing that they know as if it was high minded, um, and important, and then they're immunized from consequences by, uh, what I think you and I would agree was initially a well-intentioned attempt to protect people from bad luck. You know, that, uh, people who are liberal minded, as, as you and I both are, don't want to see people suffer because of bad luck. But when you start immunizing people from the consequences of their bad decision-making, whether the people you're immunizing are corporate executives who have, uh, gambled badly with, uh, the resources of their corporation or, you know, children who make bad decisions and, uh, it causes them to be disliked at school, people have to have those consequences come back to haunt them so that they will stop making the same mistakes and get wiser. And any place that you break that with the equivalent of a welfare program, you are guaranteeing that you will end up with an infantilized adult population.
14. 1:15:55 – 1:34:29

    Sex, porn, and AI companions: how the mating market and family formation destabilize

    1. BWBret Weinstein1:15:55

       Being able to buy stuff is a decent enough motivation to the extent that there is stuff that's desirable that's out of reach unless you get enough wealth. That's a decent enough motivation. The... Nothing, I think nothing, is going to substitute for the difficulty of, um, well, for males, the difficulty of winning, uh, the ability to have a sexual relationship with a desirable female. Right? We now have all sorts of things that cause people not to want to pursue that. Um, there are things, you know... Obviously, there's porn, there's going to be sex robots. Um, so that most-

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:16:49

       Prostitution.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:16:50

       Prostitution, right. And, uh, you know, part of me is wondering why women are not up in arms over the fact that they are being competed with, with evermore sophisticated technology. Um, I- I'm- I'm confused by why that is not an affront.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:17:11

       I think some women are. There's, they're definitely, um, at arms, uh, about porn and, and then they think that not only are they competing with this, but it's changing young men's view of sex.

    5. BWBret Weinstein1:17:26

       Oh, I think it absolutely is.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:17:27

       Yeah.

    7. BWBret Weinstein1:17:27

       In fact, I think, uh, you know-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:17:29

       It's much more rejected amongst women.

    9. BWBret Weinstein1:17:32

       That is not what I'm hearing-

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:17:34

        Really?

    11. BWBret Weinstein1:17:34

        ... from- from my sons. Um-

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:17:36

        I'm hearing... Oh, okay.

    13. BWBret Weinstein1:17:38

        Yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:17:38

        What are you hearing?

    15. BWBret Weinstein1:17:39

        That women are, uh, increasingly involved with porn. That it's-

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:17:43

        Really?

    17. BWBret Weinstein1:17:43

        Yes. And which surprises me.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:17:45

        Involved in the creation or the viewing?

    19. BWBret Weinstein1:17:48

        Watching it.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:17:48

        Watching it. God, that's, that was never the case when I was young.

    21. BWBret Weinstein1:17:51

        Oh, of course not. No, I think it, I think it's not-

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:17:53

        If you went over to a girl's house and she had a collection of porn, that, uh, that was a fucking warning signal.

    23. BWBret Weinstein1:17:57

        Huge red flag.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:17:58

        Run.

    25. BWBret Weinstein1:17:59

        Right. Well, I think, you know, uh, I don't... Uh, there are plenty of voices out there that are, um, focusing on the defects of, um, modern women. I don't want to add to that chorus, but I do think there is something shocking about the degree to which young women seem to have signed up for the idea that being liberated... That the measure of whether or not they have been liberated is how much they are behaving like men at their worst.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:18:34

        Mm. Right. Like, the- the boss lady is the lady that behaves like a man at work.

    27. BWBret Weinstein1:18:40

        Behaves like a man at work, um, treating sex very casually. It's not a normal thing for females to do, and yet it's in-

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:18:47

        Right, it's in... In a lot of films, it's shown as a sign of character for the woman.

    29. BWBret Weinstein1:18:52

        Exactly.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:18:52

        That the woman's just a boss bitch and she doesn't give a fuck, and she kicks these men to the curve, and- and they're distraught, and they're, like, emotionally wrecked, and she's just back to business. "Get to work."
15. 1:34:29 – 1:41:11

    COVID aftermath: vaccines, myocarditis categorization, and early signs of institutional reversal

    1. JRJoe Rogan1:34:29

       been played, especially in regards to the way the pharmaceutical drug, uh, industry distributes propaganda and information, and then hires people to, uh, gaslight folks. You're seeing this now, right? This is a good way to pivot to this conversation now. You're seeing now this most recent study that showed that, without doubt, children were killed by the COVID-19 vaccines. So, that's not surprising. But what is surprising to me is the enormous number of gaslighters on social media that are not just denying this data, saying this data is inaccurate, and saying far more children, healthy children, were killed by COVID-19 than were killed by these vaccinations. There's a bunch of problems with that. First of all, the problem is the reality of the VAERS system. It is a very small percentage of people that have actual vaccine injuries that get recorded into the VAERS system. And then, of course, the opposite side of that, they would say, "Yeah, but anybody can say they have a vaccine injury, and anybody can get their vaccine injury put into the VAERS system, even if it's not accurate." That's kind of true, but also not, because doctors are very incentivized to not put you into the vaccine injury category, for a bunch of reasons. One, doctors are financially incentivized to vaccinate people, and this is something that I was not aware of at all until the COVID, um, lockdowns, until the, the vaccination push. Uh, Mary Tally Bowden, who's been on the podcast before, um, she said that her own practice, a very small practice in a strip mall, she would have made an additional $1.5 million had she vaccinated all of her patients. That's a huge financial motivation for one person with a private practice. Scale that out to large places, you scale that out to large hospitals, large medical institutions, large establishments, and then you have financial incentives that businesses had to vi- v- vaccinate their, their employees. And then you had, uh, uh, these p- putatory, these pu- You had punishment that would be befalling upon your business had you not met the threshold. If you have more than X amount of people, everyone must be fully vaccinated, not just had COVID and recovered from it. So, it's not logical. You have the antibodies, you, you're, you're protected. No, no, no. It's vaccinated and then boosted, and then they continued that practice even when it was shown that the vaccine, unlike what we were told initially, did not stop transmission, did not stop infection. It, it didn't do anything.

    2. BWBret Weinstein1:37:25

       Which meant that even saying, "Well, far more people got myocarditis from COVID than the vaccines," which is not true. If you look at the data, it's clear that there are shenanigans with categorizing people in order to get that result.

    3. JRJoe Rogan1:37:39

       They did that by measuring troponin levels, correct?

    4. BWBret Weinstein1:37:43

       Uh, there are multiple mechanisms, but-

    5. JRJoe Rogan1:37:46

       But the way they were trying to phrase it-

    6. BWBret Weinstein1:37:49

       Right, but-

    7. JRJoe Rogan1:37:50

       ... that more people are getting m- myocarditis that are unvaccinated than are vaccinated, what they were doing, they were measuring while they were infected, correct?

    8. BWBret Weinstein1:37:58

       They were measuring, uh, proxies, but...... the problem is the category vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

    9. JRJoe Rogan1:38:06

       Right.

    10. BWBret Weinstein1:38:06

        Right? There ... By categorizing people as unvaccinated until they reach the category fully vaccinated, which-

    11. JRJoe Rogan1:38:14

        Not just that, but two weeks or-

    12. BWBret Weinstein1:38:17

        That's it.

    13. JRJoe Rogan1:38:17

        ... plus after the injection, you're still up, up to, you're still considered unvaccinated. So if people died during that time period, they were listed as unvaccinated deaths, even if they potentially died from the vaccine itself.

    14. BWBret Weinstein1:38:33

        Right. In fact-

    15. JRJoe Rogan1:38:34

        Which is fucking fraud.

    16. BWBret Weinstein1:38:36

        I belie- it, it is fraud, and I believe the evidence will ultimately reflect that myocarditis is not being caused by COVID, and that these are miscategorized vaccine injuries, but nonetheless-

    17. JRJoe Rogan1:38:47

        Not only that, but there's also a mechanism for what would cause these vaccine injuries.

    18. BWBret Weinstein1:38:51

        Multiple mechanisms.

    19. JRJoe Rogan1:38:52

        Yes.

    20. BWBret Weinstein1:38:53

        Multiple mechanisms that actually, uh, arise because of the defects of the platform itself, not even the particulars of the COVID vaccine.

    21. JRJoe Rogan1:39:00

        Right.

    22. BWBret Weinstein1:39:00

        So I will say I am very heartened and surprised to see Vinay Prasad putting this memo out within FDA saying that at least 10 children seem to have died from the vaccines. I don't know if you've read his letter. Um, it's quite good. Uh, it is clearly the tip of a much larger iceberg. Those of us who have circulated, uh, in communities of the vaccine injured know just how many orders of magnitude more we're really talking about. But he says in the letter, "Look, the number of people, of kids who were killed by this is actually higher, but these 10 are ones in which it was so unambiguous that their analysis regards it as, uh, causal." Right? In other words, they threw out all of the cases in which somebody died, a child died days later. They, they took only cases where, you know, a person got the vaccine and then died. Um, so anyway, I'm heartened because Vinay Prasad has been a mixed bag, in my opinion. He's been pretty good on vaccines. He's been rather terrible on ivermectin. And in some ways, he, you know, he's one of the academics who managed to hold onto his position through all of the tyranny, right? Most of the people that you and I know, the Pierre Corries, the Robert Malones, Ryan Coles, these are people who were driven from jobs, had their licenses threatened, that sort of thing. Um, Vinay held on and then he got a position in the administration, and now we can see in this memo that he, um, he's on the right side of history and he's being cautious. But nonetheless, it's, it's, uh, a very positive sign, as is Marty Marquet's, uh, recent set of podcast appearances in which he talks about, um, the reality of all sorts of things, including, uh, bio-weaponized ticks and things. So-

    23. JRJoe Rogan1:41:11

        Yeah.

16. 1:41:11 – 2:10:56

    Ivermectin and the ‘war on repurposed drugs’: trial rigging vs simple natural experiments

    1. BWBret Weinstein1:41:11

       ... we have people in the administration who have managed to hold on to their position in the institutional world who are seemingly either waking up or telling us what they have understood, and it's a very positive sign. Um, can we talk a little bit about ivermectin?

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:41:32

       Yeah, please.

    3. BWBret Weinstein1:41:32

       Because I think-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:41:33

       I was just gonna ask you about that. Like what is, how has he been bad? How's Vinay Prasad bad on ivermectin?

    5. BWBret Weinstein1:41:39

       Well, he has regarded it as not useful based on the randomized control trials which claimed that it wasn't useful. And in my opinion, he fell down on the job not pursuing what actually happened in those trials because-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:41:53

       Does he not know? Have you communicated with him?

    7. BWBret Weinstein1:41:56

       Well, it's been a l- uh, it's been a little difficult. I have, um... When he, uh, was promoted at his university, um, you know, I congratulated him and I said, "I hope that having reached this final pillar, that it will embolden you to, to look deeper." And I was disappointed in him after that because I didn't think he did it, but let's just say, um, at the moment, I'm super encouraged. He does seem to be awake, and that's really good for us.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:42:27

       And you also have to take into consideration that for him to even say what he said is a, a, a giant risk.

    9. BWBret Weinstein1:42:34

       (exhales) Whew.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:42:35

        Yeah. It's, it's a huge leap. And you almost ha- I mean, I think everyone knows anecdotally somebody who was fucked up by the vaccine. Almost everyone that I've ever talked to, other than Sam Harris.

    11. BWBret Weinstein1:42:48

        (laughs)

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:42:48

        Uh, almost everyone that I've ever talked to claims they know someone who was i- irrevocably harmed by the vaccine.

    13. BWBret Weinstein1:42:55

        Oh, yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:42:56

        If not killed.

    15. BWBret Weinstein1:42:58

        Y- yes. And th- this is such a gigantic population of people, not to mention all the people who don't know, who have some sort of new pathology that they've not connected to the vaccine.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:43:08

        Right.

    17. BWBret Weinstein1:43:08

        (sighs)

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:43:08

        And whose doctors have gaslit them and said they're totally unrelated, this is just something genetic, you were gonna get this no matter what.

    19. BWBret Weinstein1:43:16

        Right.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:43:16

        Yeah.

    21. BWBret Weinstein1:43:16

        So, um, we see all of this in actuarial data. There are large populations of people who have put two and two together and, uh, are-

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:43:26

        But it's a difficult equation because you have to be confronted by so many different realities that are incredibly uncomfortable.

    23. BWBret Weinstein1:43:33

        Right.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:43:33

        And then you also have the, the, the problem of people that have asserted a very specific thing and done so very aggressively and now realize they're wrong and do not want to admit they're wrong and will fight vehemently to somehow or another twist, gaslight, obfuscate, use, uh, data that they know to be incorrect to try to prove a, a position that intellectually they must know is not accurate.

    25. BWBret Weinstein1:44:01

        Well-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:44:01

        You see a lot of that to protect themselves, protect ego, to protect their reputation. Their very careers, like the, the longer they can keep this ruse going and m- and the more they can make the data foggy in, in terms of like, uh, i- is it really effective? Did it really save millions of people? Is it worth the risk?

    27. BWBret Weinstein1:44:21

        Um, I, uh, I... Those people probably don't listen to your podcast, but to the extent that they m- might hear this, uh, there is a piece of wisdom that you need, which is however painful it may be to face the error that you've made, you are far better off to face it, right?

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:44:42

        Yes.

    29. BWBret Weinstein1:44:42

        There is... I'm not saying there's not a big cost, but the weight off your shoulders of setting the record straight with respect to your errors, it's a slam dunk.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:44:53

        Yes.
17. 2:10:56 – 2:12:29

    Motives, tabletop exercises, and bigger-system fears: CBDCs, deplatforming, and UK speech repression

    1. JRJoe Rogan2:10:56

       But the gaslighting was all about profit, because of the emergency use authorization. So-

    2. BWBret Weinstein2:11:00

       Well-

    3. JRJoe Rogan2:11:00

       ... to, to have the emergency use authorization, you couldn't have any effective drugs that existed to treat it, right?

    4. BWBret Weinstein2:11:06

       Yeah.

    5. JRJoe Rogan2:11:06

       Otherwise, you wouldn't have had an emergency use authorization for a new drug that hasn't really been tested.

    6. BWBret Weinstein2:11:12

       I don't think that's what happened. I, I did-

    7. JRJoe Rogan2:11:14

       What do you think it is?

    8. BWBret Weinstein2:11:14

       ... I did think that's what happened, but I don't anymore.

    9. JRJoe Rogan2:11:16

       Oh, interesting.

    10. BWBret Weinstein2:11:17

        Um, because these people are so good at cheating that I think they could've cheated their way past that one also. Um, m- my suspicion is that the mRNA platform needed to be debuted in an emergency with radically reduced safety testing, because the dangers of the mRNA platform are so great that they would've revealed themselves under any sort of normal testing regime. And so-

    11. JRJoe Rogan2:11:44

        So, you think this was all about rolling out the mRNA platform for many other purposes other than just COVID?

    12. BWBret Weinstein2:11:51

        I-

    13. JRJoe Rogan2:11:51

        This is just the introduction to this, and we've actually heard talk about this. It's gonna be used to treat all these different diseases and cancer and this and that.

    14. BWBret Weinstein2:11:59

        Oh, it's coming. They're already in the pipeline, and I think people need to be aware that the, the plan is to blame the COVID shots, not the platform, so that people will take the, the new shots that come out, and I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole. Um, so did you want to talk about, uh, given that we are in this quadrant, did you want to talk about Sam?

    15. JRJoe Rogan2:12:27

        Sure.

    16. BWBret Weinstein2:12:28

        All right.

    17. JRJoe Rogan2:12:29

        (laughs)

18. 2:12:29 – 3:11:27

    Sam Harris, public intellectual accountability, and why health ‘terrain’ matters

    1. BWBret Weinstein2:12:29

       Um, well, I'm not sure quite where to start, but Sam has been, uh... He's continued to be aggressive going after you and me over COVID, where my impression is that you and I turned out to be right pretty well across the board. I've acknowledged the significant place where I believe I was wrong. I don't think I was way wrong, but-

    2. JRJoe Rogan2:12:55

       And what was that in?

    3. BWBret Weinstein2:12:56

       Uh, masks.

    4. JRJoe Rogan2:12:57

       Oh, okay.

    5. BWBret Weinstein2:12:57

       I thought masks stood a decent chance of being useful. And at the point that it turned out there was no evidentiary support for that, I said so. Um, I still think, you know, given that we didn't know at the beginning whether or not, uh, COVID was transmitted by fomite, in other words, by droplets on surfaces, something that covers your face and prevents you from coughing out droplets or touching a droplet to your, your mouth is a decent bet. Um, but anyway, okay, so my error was, was masks. I don't think Sam has acknowledged any of his errors, and he said some really aggressive stuff about me. And I think recently, he said some stuff about you, and he's actually still beating this drum about y- your podcast killing people. Am I right about that?

    6. JRJoe Rogan2:13:55

       Allegedly. I, I don't listen to any things he says anymore, because it's depressing.

    7. BWBret Weinstein2:13:59

       (laughs)

    8. JRJoe Rogan2:14:00

       Um, Sam is the reason for the joke that I had in my special. We lost a lot of people during COVID, and most of them are still alive.

    9. BWBret Weinstein2:14:07

       Yeah.

    10. JRJoe Rogan2:14:08

        I feel like we lost Sam. And I think, whether Sam realizes it or not, it had a massive impact on the number of people that take his position seriously, because he's unwilling to acknowledge that the vaccines clearly damaged a lot of people, unwilling to acknowledge that they weren't necessary, especially in kids and, and younger people, and I think any healthy person under a certain age, unwilling to acknowledge that many other things could have been done to prevent serious illness and hospitalization, other than just this vaccination, and that this vaccination is seriously flawed.I had a conversation on the phone with him. I've only had a couple over the last few years.

    11. BWBret Weinstein2:14:52

        (exhales)

    12. JRJoe Rogan2:14:52

        I still love Sam. I, I always thought of him as a friend, and I think he's a very interesting guy. Um, the first one was after I recovered from COVID, where he was trying to convince me to get vaccinated. And I was like, "This is the dumbest conversation I've ever had. Why would I get vaccinated now, when I recovered from COVID?" And like I told you, it wasn't a big deal. It was only a couple... It was one day that sucked, and then I was fine three days later, when I made that video. Um, it didn't, there was no logical re- it was the same conversation that I had with Sanjay Gupta on the podcast, where he's like, "Are you gonna get vaccinated?"

    13. BWBret Weinstein2:15:28

        (laughs)

    14. JRJoe Rogan2:15:28

        And I'm like, "Why would I do that?" Like, tell me why I would do that. Well, he, and Sam's saying, "It would offer you more protection." I go, "I just got through it pretty easily." Like, I am a healthy-

    15. BWBret Weinstein2:15:38

        Right.

    16. JRJoe Rogan2:15:38

        ... person who exercises all the time. I take a fucking slew of vitamins. I sauna every day. I do all these different things that make my body more robust than the average person. I got through this disease relatively easily with all the ways that I prescribed, or that, that I described, rather, and only one of them was problematic, and one of them being ivermectin. Nobody said a damn thing about me taking IV vitamins, monoclonal antibodies, all the other things I described. I didn't say, "Ivermectin, guys. You don't need a vaccine. Just go out and get ivermectin." What I said was, "I got COVID, and we threw-"

    17. BWBret Weinstein2:16:12

        The kitchen sink.

    18. JRJoe Rogan2:16:13

        "... the kitchen sink at it."

    19. BWBret Weinstein2:16:13

        I remember.

    20. JRJoe Rogan2:16:14

        And I'm better.

    21. BWBret Weinstein2:16:15

        Yep.

    22. JRJoe Rogan2:16:15

        And CNN's response was to turn me green, and to say that I'm promoting dangerous horse dewormer, and that it's misinformation that's gonna cost people's lives. And the fact that Sam is still saying that it cost people's lives is fucking crazy. And all, I don't know if he's just convinced that he can convince people, that he's so good at debating, and he's so good at arguing points, and he's so articulate that he could spin this in a way that it makes sense. But it doesn't make sense. And in fact, if you promoted the use of vaccines, and it's been shown that v- these vaccines have caused serious injuries and death to people that didn't need them, I would say you cause death, especially if you're a person that people high, uh, that, that people hold, rather, in very high esteem, for someone that w- people respect their opinion and, and take it very seriously, and would refer to them as an expert.

    23. BWBret Weinstein2:17:10

        Um, I, I totally agree with you. And there's something just weird about the fact that here we have a, I think you and I would both agree, a highly intelligent person who prides himself on analytics. And yet, even as the story is breaking, even as the evidence of vaccine harms becomes unambiguous, and maybe more to the point in this case, even as Paul Offit has now, in several different places, said that all the top people in the public health regime who were issuing these diktats all knew that natural immunity was the best immunity you were gonna get, right? So, the evidence is right there that they lied to us in public, that you had it right. There would have been no purpose in you getting a vaccination after you had already recovered. And I would add one other thing. The evidence that vaccinations often make you more vulnerable is unambiguous. In the case of something like a COVID vaccine, or, you know, in the recent revelations about flu vaccines making people more susceptible to flu, there's a strong argument to be made that what's going on is you have acquired an immunity through an infection. Now somebody injects you with something that either, in the case of the flu shot, has a bunch of antigen in it, or in the case of the COVID shot, causes your body to produce a bunch of antigen. Well, what's that gonna do? That is going to attract the attention of all of the cells in your immune system that are supposed to be surveilling for the disease in question, and it's gonna occupy them. So, one of the mechanisms by which a vaccine can actually make you v- more vulnerable is that it can take an immunity that you've already gotten through fighting off an infection, and it can draw it to the wrong place when the disease is still circulating.

    24. JRJoe Rogan2:19:22

        Mm-hmm.

    25. BWBret Weinstein2:19:23

        So, Sam is saying something nonsensical. Sanjay Gupta was saying something nonsensical. They were actually giving you advice that has a very clear mechanism by which it would make you more vulnerable to the disease that they think you should do everything in your power to make yourself less vulnerable to. They're, they're just simply not saying something analytically robust.

    26. JRJoe Rogan2:19:41

        Yeah.

    27. BWBret Weinstein2:19:41

        And I would also point out, you know, this question about whether or not Sam is responsible for people's deaths. I, I want to do this carefully because I think it matters, and I know that you are-

    28. JRJoe Rogan2:19:54

        I wouldn't say he is. I would only say he is if he's saying that I am.

    29. BWBret Weinstein2:19:59

        Right. That's, that's-

    30. JRJoe Rogan2:20:00

        It's not something that I would go out and say. I wouldn't...

Episode duration: 3:14:15