EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,177 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.…
- JRJoe Rogan
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- BWBret Weinstein
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) What's happening, man?
- BWBret Weinstein
Hey. Good to be back?
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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."
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
All right.
- BWBret Weinstein
So, um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Spill the beans.
- BWBret Weinstein
Let's, let's talk biology.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
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, 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-
- SPSpeaker
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
... 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?
- SPSpeaker
Yep.
- BWBret Weinstein
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
No. Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay. So, the question is-
- JRJoe Rogan
(clears throat)
- BWBret Weinstein
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
- 15:00 – 30:00
Can I pause-…
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Can I pause-
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
... right there and ask a question?
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, here's the, the real question, what, we're, uh, spec- specifically in regards to flying.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's one of the most fantastic abilities of all the animals.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. How surprising is it? That's the question.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
Is it so surprising that it's actually impossible? And I think the answer is just simply no. It's quite possible, but-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's obviously, it's possible.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, no. I mean, you know, let's, l- let's, uh, steel man the opposing position.
- JRJoe Rogan
Intelligent design position?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
There, there's certainly a lot of people who would argue that actually, no, there are gaps you, you can't jump, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay. You've seen 'em fly?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay. Now-
- JRJoe Rogan
Not in person, but videos.
- 30:00 – 45:00
No.…
- BWBret Weinstein
readily modified. In other words, um, if you, you know, looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there is already a ton of variation in, you know, the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles. And that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available, um, and therefore evolution can explore what, uh, Stuart Kauffman would call the adjacent possible.Right? Have you heard that term?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- BWBret Weinstein
Have, have you had Stuart on?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- BWBret Weinstein
So Stuart Kauffman is a, uh, complex systems theorist and his, uh, point, one of many, is that effectively e- the creatures we see exist in a design space, and that selection finds the things that are similar to what you've got near enough to be accessed and advantageous, right? So if you have a rodent of one size and there is... You know, let's say you have a rodent that specializes on a particular seed, and it exists in a habitat where there's another seed that's similar, but much bigger. Well then, you need to access the adjacent possible in order for a second species or subspecies of this rodent to evolve to take advantage of this untapped resource. So, if you think of, you know, all of the things that you've got, and then all of the things that you might want that are similar, that's the adjacent possible. And my point is variables as one of the primary modes of information storage in the genome provides a mechanism for evolution to explore the adjacent possible in a radically more effective way than the story we typically tell about random mutations to protein coding genes, right? It- there's nothing un-Darwinian about this. Darwin didn't know anything about genes, probably to his advantage in the long term, because if he had understood genes, he might have made many of the same mistakes that we made in the middle of the 20th century in evolution, where we became overly focused on the genes we understood. But basically, everything that the- Darwin said was about a vague hereditary information, and numbers is no less a candidate for that than triplet codons stored, uh, that code for amino acids. So my point is, Darwin is untouched by this. Darwin is still th- the guy. He nailed it, and this is just as Darwinian as protein coding genes, it's just vastly more powerful with respect to taking a form that you've already got, and finding a similar form that you don't yet have. Um, now there's lots of nuances about how this could work. There's lots of questions I certainly can't answer. I will say, as, as I was mentioning at the top, this story seems to be largely unaddressed in adaptive evolution space. If I come at it from the evo-devo side, I see much more th- uh, description of mechanisms that work like this, but I don't see the revolution that should happen when you've come to understand that you have this very powerful additional evolutionary mechanism. That should be causing a massive uptick in the power of what we can address adaptively, and it does not seem to be there. So now, it... You know, I'm not in a university anymore. I'm not primarily working as a biologist, so it's possible I've missed something. But there's... Well, I mean, as you know, we have massively dysfunctional institutions, and they... I... 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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BWBret Weinstein
That's what I think, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what was that?
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
I was watching a documentary once on the BBC, uh, about the Congo.
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
It would have gone extinct.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's the story again and again, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
But, but we do know is that we have 11,000 species of these things now, all doing subtly different stuff, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Some of them not even flying.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right, some of them have lost the ability-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... 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
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Mm-hmm.…
- BWBret Weinstein
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
It feels a lot like it is to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
Crocodiles, dragonflies-
- JRJoe Rogan
Sharks.
- BWBret Weinstein
... sharks-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... horseshoe crabs.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
So, it's just, uh, essentially evolution nailed it.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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?
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Pretty crazy.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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?
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, no-
- JRJoe Rogan
Or, or is it just being poisoned?
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's where we are.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
And essentially every new groundbreaking technology, ev-…
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
Completely new with-
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
Suicidal ideation, actual suicide.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I mean, in other contexts, I have said, I probably said to you, you know, there are no adults.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? That's one of the shocking discoveries of becoming a- adult age-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, in fact, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
... or a woman.
- BWBret Weinstein
... 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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I assure you graduating high school means very little in terms of whether or not you know how to navigate the adult world.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
But th- those are good examples though because they're preposterous.
- BWBret Weinstein
Ridiculous.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, it's, um, they're solving some other problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
And another thing, uh, we're not course correcting.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- 1:15:00 – 1:30:00
Sure. Except-…
- JRJoe Rogan
just be... What's... It would just be a thing that you're using to acquire the means to survive, and now you pursue this other thing, maybe not necessarily for a monetary reason, ma- not- not necessarily to acquire wealth, but instead to educate yourself, in- instead, you know, to... As a- a process of human development, a skill that you're learning, um, a thing that you're competing in. Something.
- BWBret Weinstein
Sure. Except-
- JRJoe Rogan
It gives you meaning.
- BWBret Weinstein
Except for one thing. What has to be true at the end of that substitute purpose is some undeniably valuable reward. Right?
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause that's the motivating factor.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's the thing that will cause you to do it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? So, not starving is a great motivation, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
Prostitution.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, I think it absolutely is.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
In fact, I think, uh, you know-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's much more rejected amongst women.
- BWBret Weinstein
That is not what I'm hearing-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BWBret Weinstein
... from- from my sons. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
I'm hearing... Oh, okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
What are you hearing?
- BWBret Weinstein
That women are, uh, increasingly involved with porn. That it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Really?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes. And which surprises me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Involved in the creation or the viewing?
- BWBret Weinstein
Watching it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Watching it. God, that's, that was never the case when I was young.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, of course not. No, I think it, I think it's not-
- 1:30:00 – 1:45:00
The robot loves you and your potential…
- JRJoe Rogan
be someone that's good at conversation so that y- y- someone who's reasonable so you, you, you form a great bond with your partner, all that goes away because the robot just loves you.
- BWBret Weinstein
The robot loves you and your potential partners are getting less desirable.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? The robots are getting more desirable. Your potential-
- JRJoe Rogan
The robot doesn't argue.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. No.
- JRJoe Rogan
The robot wants me to play golf, right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Exactly. The, so I think that, look, I keep waiting for a movement to start in which young people (clears throat) who have yet to form these relationships put out a set of rules and they say, "Here are the rules I'm going to abide by, and I'm only going to date people who abide by them too." Right? No porn. No robots. Um, (clears throat) I would say this is, you know, if I was writing the rules, one of them would be no sex with somebody that you know is not a long term partner. You're not committing to a long term relationship when you have sex with somebody necessarily, but if you know somebody's not a candidate, you shouldn't be engaging in baby-making behavior with them. Right? That, that's bad-
- JRJoe Rogan
The problem is that it's like such a primary force in our society for almost everything, for selling things, for exemplifying social status.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, but nobody's happy.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
So given that they're not happy, the answer is, okay, well, I'm doing something-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I wouldn't say nobody's happy. I would say happiness is difficult to acquire.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I would say it is rare to find young people who express that they are happy with this part of their life.
- JRJoe Rogan
Have you ever met young people in any time in history, uh, while you've been alive that were happy with that process? The process is kind of brutal.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh, the process kind of sucks-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... but, uh, I've met plenty of people and I've been-... uh, a happy young person. Not, you know, it's not all, you know, flowers and rainbows.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
But- but the point is, there is something achievable. And I think it is being treated increasingly as if it's just kind of a story.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right? Like, it's not a real place.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
And I think that's, um, that's a dangerous thing, and I would love to see... I mean, and maybe it's happening in religious communities, that people are opting into a different set of rules and looking for mates within their community because those mates will abide by it.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That- that is the place where people are going, and y- I think it's probably one of the reasons, one of many reasons, why you're seeing an uptick in religious participation amongst young people.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, makes sense to me.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, and if I-
- 1:45:00 – 2:00:00
Right.…
- BWBret Weinstein
talk a little bit about, you know, people and this, uh, recent memo inside of FDA about children who had no reason to get the COVID vaccine in the first place-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... because they stood to gain nothing from it. Dying of it is a, um, is a... it's beyond criminal negligence. It's, it's, it's unforgivable. Um, it's a very positive sign, but you and I know that the vaccine story has been breaking because, I think in large measure, so many people, virtually everybody knows somebody who was injured. And so it's very hard to keep people in the dark about that, and people's acceptance of the boosters has plummeted. People do need to understand that there's a huge number of mRNA shots that are being cooked up at this very minute, that the damage is not from the COVID part of the shot, it's from the platform itself. And so we need to stop that vast array of mRNA shots from ever making it to the market, and we need to get the COVID shots pulled, which again, a- another thing I want to get back to is, uh, Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk and I were working together, um, trying to get the shots pulled. He had the president's ear. I was helping to inform him about what's really going on with the mRNA platform. And anyway, we were making great progress. Um, he sent me a text at one point. I had congratulated him on, I think, the shots having been pulled for, uh, no longer being recommended for kids and pregnant women. And he said something, I think it was, uh, "We're doing holy work together." And it, it meant a lot. I'm obviously not a religious person, but it meant a lot for me to hear that from him, and I do think among the many tragedies that are the result of his terrible death is the fact that it slowed progress on getting these shots removed from the market. But anyway, back, back to, um, ivermectin. W- we'll return to Charlie a little later. Um, the vaccine story is breaking. Vinay Prasad is helping it break inside of FDA. That's a marvelous thing. Um, the vaccine committee that, uh, Robert Malone is on with, uh, Martin Kulldorff and, uh, Retsef Levi is also, uh, doing excellent work. So there's lots of positive signs on the vaccine front, although it's painfully slow from the point of view of shots that shouldn't be on the market are still being injected into people. The story that has not properly broken is the ivermectin story, right? More generally the repurposed drug story. But this is one you and I lived, um, very personally. You know, you were... I don't know what they did to you. They, uh, colored you green and they-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah (laughs) .
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
They made me green on CNN.
- BWBret Weinstein
They made you green on CNN. Um, and basically even people who are awake about the vaccines largely have arrived at the conclusion that ivermectin showed promise and then it turned out it didn't work, and that the evidence is overwhelming that it didn't work, and that those of us who said otherwise, it's time that we admitted that. And this is a maddening nonsense story, right? Even the trials that say that ivermectin didn't work, if you dig into what they actually found, you find A, a huge amount of fraud designed to produce the impression that ivermectin didn't work, and amazingly enough, even in trials that are designed to give that result, it still shows that it's effective. And there is a, uh, something I want to show you, um, one of these that I think you probably haven't seen yet, that makes this point really clearly. Um, so can you bring up that tweet, uh, Alexandros Marinos' tweet on, uh, the... I think it's called the PRINCIPLE trial. Um, anyway, this is shocking. This is another one of these multi-arm platform trials. So these are these highly complex, uh, structures in which many drugs are tested simultaneously so that they can share a placebo group. Okay. L- let's look at the whole tweet. Uh, it says, um... I think that's supposed to be no. "Did you know that the PRINCIPLE trial out of the UK found that ivermectin was superior to the usual care in practically every subgroup it tested, but it sat on the results for 600 days when it finally published, buried these results on page 364 of the appendix." Now, look at this chart. The, the way to read this chart-
- JRJoe Rogan
346. Page 346.
- BWBret Weinstein
What did I say?
- JRJoe Rogan
364.
- BWBret Weinstein
Oh. Okay, dyslexia strikes again.
- JRJoe Rogan
Just so people... If they go back and-
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah. 346. Okay. So what this is, is a forest plot in which the... there's a line, a vertical line at 1.00. That's the line that delineates effective-... uh, with ivermectin on the right and, uh, with the usual care on the left. In every single tested category, ivermectin is better than no ivermectin, right? The lines, so even the one case, the people greater than 65 years where it's touching that line, it's still to the right of that line. So in every single case, ivermectin is superior to not giving ivermectin, even though these people were given ivermectin late, they were given ivermectin in a sneaky way, where the regular dose is supposed to be something like, uh, three milligrams per kilogram of body weight. But there's a sneaky thing that they slide into the methods, where if your weight is above a certain number, they cap the dose, so you're underdosed, which-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
So you don't spot it unless you go looking for it. But in any case...
- JRJoe Rogan
And overweight people are the most vulnerable.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right, exactly.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
So it's a great way of making a drug n- look not very effective.
- JRJoe Rogan
And a lot of people are overweight.
- BWBret Weinstein
A- absolutely. So on this plot, every... So you see those horizontal lines, you got a box in the middle of a bunch of horizontal lines.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
The horizontal lines are confidence intervals. If they don't touch the 1.0 line, then the result is statistically significant. So in all of these categories, ivermectin is statistically significant in its efficacy. In the one category where it's not, it's still effective, it's just not statistically significant in its- in its effectiveness. Okay? And they buried this in this appendix, page 346, right? And, um, actually if y- can you scroll down to the next tweet in this thread? Can you, uh, let's see, uh, click on the link to the paper. Now scroll down. Let's get a background, me- stop. Uh, go back up a little bit. Uh, interpretation. So this is their take home message from the paper. It says, "Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide a clining- clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted." So, here you have a trial that overwhelmingly shows ivermectin is effective. It reduced the recovery time by a couple of days, even though they gave it super late, which with all antivirals, makes them very much weaker than they would otherwise be. And here they are reporting that the answer is, it's unlikely to create meaningful outcomes, and there's no further work needed. Okay? This is absurd. This is the quality of trial that we're going to. And what it does, this is them gaslighting us, right? You and I said, "Look, the evidence suggests that this stuff works. It's v- quite safe compared to almost any other drug you could take. In fact, I can't think of one that's safer. And that therefore, in light of the evidence that it seems to meaningfully improve outcomes, it's a good bet." Right? They mocked us over that conclusion. This study makes it very clear that even when people are trying to hide that conclusion, that it's there in the data if you go looking.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BWBret Weinstein
Now, there's an even better one though. Um, there is a ... Have you read, uh, Pierre Kory's book, The War on Ivermectin?
- JRJoe Rogan
No.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay. There's something reported in this book that, um, it really stops you in your tracks. It is an accidental, uh, natural experiment. Okay? So a natural experiment is something in science where maybe you happen on an archipelago in which you have a bunch of different islands that have different conditions, and you can go to each island and m- measure the, you know, whatever parameter it is, because nature has given you an experiment that you can analyze. You don't have to build islands, right? In this case, what Pierre reports is that there were 80 court cases in which a family sued a hospital that was refusing to give ivermectin to a desperately sick family member, um, and they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer ivermectin. 80 cases. In 40 of those cases, the courts granted the families' request and ivermectin was administered. In 40 cases, they refused to intervene and no ivermectin was given. In 38 of the cases where ivermectin was given, the patient survived. In two, the patient died anyway. In 38 of the cases where no ivermectin was given, the patient died, and in two, the patient survived.
- JRJoe Rogan
Wow.
- BWBret Weinstein
Okay? Now, I find this, like this is incredibly ... Uh, uh, I cannot vouch for the data itself. I, because it's not published in a scientific paper, I can't go look at the methods. I can't go find the court cases. But assuming that the data is accurately reported, and I know Pierre well, he- he didn't make it up. So, um, assuming that the data is accurate, the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical, right? I, uh, had Heather run a, uh, chi-squared calculation and the P value, I checked it also with, uh, two different AIs. The P value comes out to be 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15.... right? So what that means is that the chances of a result that strong if ivermectin does not work-
- JRJoe Rogan
(clears throat)
- 2:00:00 – 2:15:00
(laughs)…
- BWBret Weinstein
regime. And what we in the public should want are tests that are very difficult to rig. So randomized controlled trial, in this case, where you have multiple drugs being tested, where they share a placebo group, where endpoints are adjusted midstream, uh, where the, uh, particular endpoints that are targeted, uh, are adjusted to make some drugs look good and other drugs look bad, all of those are places where fraud can hide. It is way more important to have good experiments than to have highly sensitive experiments that are very prone to fraud, because there's so much incentive for fraud in our current system. The accidental experiment that, uh, I described that the courts ran is incredibly powerful evidence. The statistics are literally something that you can do on one sheet of paper, right? This is the simplest conceivable test, the chi-square goodness of fit test. There's no place for anything to hide. Either the data is what it says it is or it's not, but if the data is what it says it is, then the result leaves no question whatsoever that ivermectin works in very sick people, uh, relative to an endpoint of death. That's a very powerful kind of, uh, of evidence. And, you know, I was recently on a podcast called, um, Why Should I Trust You-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
... with Pierre Kory, actually. We were at, we were at the CHD Conference and this podcast-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's a great name for a podcast.
- BWBret Weinstein
It is a great name for a podcast, and actually I loved the podcast. The podcast was w- we didn't really know what we were sitting down to, um, but it was Pierre and me talking to three allopathic doctors and a host, and the allopathic doctors were curious about the medical freedom movement, but they certainly weren't on board with this. And, um, Pierre and I told them about the accidental, uh, experiment run by the courts, the natural experiment, and it was clear that these doctors couldn't grasp the significance of the evidence, right? It's too mind-blowing that this very simple circumstance reveals the overwhelming power of this drug, and it was like, "Well, that can't be right," but it can be right. And so in any case, I would just say...Um, fraud is a serious problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
Why did they have a problem with the data?
- BWBret Weinstein
I think ... You know, let's give them their due. They're sitting down talking to two people who I think they don't know, can't assess whether or not we're being honest, whether the data is as reported. But, um, so, it... I think there's a natural reaction to reject that which seems, uh ... I think when you've been lied to as much as these doctors had been lied to about repurposed drugs for COVID, and vaccines and things, that being confronted with very powerful, in fact, if the data is what it's supposed to be, incontrovertible proof. And I, I don't use the word proof lightly but, you know, P equals 5.03 times 10-15. That is an amazing level of statistical significance.
- JRJoe Rogan
How did the conversation play out? Like, when you gave them this data, when you discussed this.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, what they said was, "Well, there could be lots of explanations for that." Which is not true, right? Really-
- JRJoe Rogan
What, uh, um, what explanations did they provide as possible?
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, I think they were reserving the right to go find some explanation because-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BWBret Weinstein
... think about it this way, let's, let's, let's-
- JRJoe Rogan
This in front of a crowd?
- BWBret Weinstein
No.
- JRJoe Rogan
No? Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
Um, let's imagine how this experiment could not, could be something other than it seems to be, all right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
Let's say that the courts were biased in who they granted the right to have ivermectin, uh-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
... administered to. If the courts were biased, then the test isn't what it appears to be. However, you would expect the courts to be biased in exactly the inverse way as the result. In other words, you would expect the court to grant access to ivermectin in more dire cases. So you would expect people who got ivermectin, if there was a bias in the way the courts granted that access, you would expect the people who got ivermectin to be more likely to die because they're-
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. That would be logical.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, and so the fact that we see exactly the inverse means that actually the result, if there's any bias at all, is probably conservative, right? It's probably more effective than we think, right? Um, so in any case, I just think we've forgotten how science works, right? It doesn't take any... Uh, all of the money and, uh, the complexity of running one of these multi-arm trials is huge. And yet, an accidental experiment run by the courts gives you a powerful result like this that tells you without a doubt that this is effective, which is actually what you find when you go and look at all these trials that attempted to sabotage ivermectin and you discover that actually, you know, they, they're playing games. They're telling you... Uh, like let me give you an example. Um, you can create the impression that a drug doesn't work by setting an unrealistic end point, right? Like if I... Let's say that I had a, a drug that was perfectly successful at, uh, stopping the common cold, right? You take it and one day later your common cold is gone, okay? And I decide to run an experiment, but the end point of the experiment is, uh, hospitalization, right? And I say, "Okay, was there any difference in how hospitalized patients who got my drug are versus those who didn't?" Well, no, nobody goes to the hospital over a cold. So the point is it makes the drug look totally ineffective. Uh, that's one trick you can play. You can also underdose it. Um, you know, one of the games played in the principal trial is, uh, they detected no difference at all in the patients who got ivermectin and didn't get ivermectin six months later. Well, I'm not sure you would expect a difference between the population that did and didn't get it six months later, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, you've completely recovered.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. So anyway, there's all kinds of games, and the point is actually we do not... Uh, you know how when you go to buy a car, nobody prioritizes the simple vehicle, right? The point is what, what they sell you is the features, right? "Oh, this car has all of these different new features-
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
"... that your last one didn't." But there's no value placed on, actually, I want fewer features. I want the, a tiny number of features that I actually use, and I want the car to be, you know, capable of dealing with everything, never need any service, all of those things. But that's just not the way it works. So scientifically, we're in the same boat where it's like the fancier trial has the priority in our mind, just as the new drug has the priority in our mind. "Oh, I want the new one." No, you don't. You want the one that all of the interactions with other drugs have already been spotted, that y- your doctor has a lot of experience knowing how people react to it. The older drug is better for you, right? All else being equal, the older drug is at least, uh, stands a much greater chance of anything really seriously wrong with it having been spotted. So I'm just advocating for simpler experiments where nothing can hide and simple statistics can be used and us normal folks can understand what was done.
- JRJoe Rogan
So in the case of this podcast, how did you guys resolve it? How did it end?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, it actually ended really well. I hope people will go listen to it. Um, the positive thing about it was we clashed, we definitely disagreed, but it was all quite respectful and I feel like Pierre and I both felt that we were heard.... uh, in a way that is not the usual these days. Um, so anyway, I, I thought it was a very encouraging-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I think e- even people that were initially highly skeptical and very pro-vaccine have had their eyes opened a bit, whether they like it or not. The, the window has shifted.
- 2:15:00 – 2:30:00
(laughs)…
- JRJoe Rogan
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?"
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
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-
- BWBret Weinstein
Right.
- JRJoe Rogan
... 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-"
- BWBret Weinstein
The kitchen sink.
- JRJoe Rogan
"... the kitchen sink at it."
- BWBret Weinstein
I remember.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I'm better.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- JRJoe Rogan
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.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
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.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
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-
- JRJoe Rogan
I wouldn't say he is. I would only say he is if he's saying that I am.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. That's, that's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's not something that I would go out and say. I wouldn't...
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. Here, here's how I would do it rigorously. Okay? I think the discussion, a robust, open discussion about a complex set of facts, that discussion is how we find the truth. Right? The truth gives us an opportunity to become safer. So my feeling is everybody gets credit for participating, anybody who participates in good faith in the conversation about what the right thing to do is, is part of the solution. Even the people who get it wrong.
- JRJoe Rogan
I would agree with that.
- BWBret Weinstein
However, as soon as you start making the argument that you're wrong and that means you're putting people's lives in jeopardy, my feeling is, well then, you're changing the rules. You're setting a standard that we have to be right or we're responsible for whatever deaths might befall us. We have to do more than just participate in good faith in the conversation. We have to be right. So that means, Sam, when you're wrong-... you become responsible for the deaths that resulted from your bad advice. You wouldn't have been responsible in the first place, except that you decided these were the rules of engagement. You decided that the people who were wrong in the argument are responsible for the deaths. And guess what, Sam? You were wrong. People died. People got a vaccine that they shouldn't have gotten, and they died. Children died, right? That's on you because you decided those were the rules, and-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... I don't know. I, I hope Sam can find his way back.
- JRJoe Rogan
I think Sam has a real problem with admitting wrong. Admitting you're wrong requires you to admit that you're fallible, that, that your intellectual rigor in pursuing this very complex scenario that we all find ourselves in that's very novel, you made errors. You trusted establishments that were compromised, you trusted experts who were incentivized to d- deliver this propaganda that was, this was the only way out of this, you, you had to get vaccinated. And I think a lot of it was he had an initial, uh, experience with someone that he knew that had got COVID that got very sick, and was a young, healthy person, was a skier. Relatively young, in Italy. And, uh, I don't know what treatment they got, I don't know what the su- situation was. I do know that supposedly they had been heavily drinking while they were there, like on a ski trip, getting drunk, get COVID, got really sick, um, and wind up getting very fucked up by it. Um, I think that scared him, and I think he was, uh, initially he was one of the bigger ... like, the people that I was in contact with that was warning me that this is not the flu, this is really dangerous. And, um, I, uh, took it to heart and, uh, like I've publicly said many times, I was n- not just willing to get the vaccine, I tried to get it. Uh, the UFC allocated. This was early on in COVID, UFC allocated a, a bunch of COVID vaccines for their employees. I got there the day of the fights, I asked to be vaccinated the day of the fights. I didn't even think about it. I thought of it as like a flu vaccine. I take a flu shot and go commentate. It wouldn't even bother me. I don- I don't think ... Maybe I'd feel a little bad, but it would, it would be fine. I drink coffee, whatever. I'll be, I'll be okay. That, that was my position. And, um, I couldn't. I would have to go to the clinic. They told me, "Could you come back on Monday?" I said, "I cannot, but I'll be back in two weeks for the next fight, so we'll do it then." In that time period, the vaccine was pulled. It was the Johnson & Johnson.
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
So it was pulled, and I knew two people that had strokes. Two. Two people that were relatively healthy people that all of a sudden had strokes. And then I started getting nervous. Then a bunch of people that I knew, Jamie being one of them, a bunch of other people got it and recovered. And I'm like, "All right. Well, this isn't a fucking death sentence." Also, I was around Jamie, I didn't get it. I was around Tony, I didn't get it. Then my whole family got it. My whole family got it, and I didn't get it. And I didn't do anything. I did the opposite of trying to not get it. I tried to get it.
- BWBret Weinstein
Mm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And I didn't get it. And I'm like, "Okay, well this isn't what everybody's saying it is." It's clearly not what everybody's saying it is, especially not to ... I would, I would say on the healthy scale I'm at ... I'm an outlier. I'm very healthy, because I spent a lot of time working on it.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yep.
- 2:30:00 – 2:45:00
Mm-hmm.…
- BWBret Weinstein
is part of a pharma religion, right? Where the idea is that things happen, that they're not your fault, and that they are corrected with interventions. And there has been a false dichotomy painted between what's called terrain theory (clears throat) and germ theory, right? Where it's like, well, which of these things do you think it is? And the answer is, these things are not mutually exclusive.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
The health of the terrain dictates how vulnerable you are to the germs. And a very healthy person i- has very low vulnerability, you know? Um, and a lifetime of abuse makes you highly vulnerable. And people l- people like Hotez don't get it. I, I remember that interaction that you had with him. Uh, he goes to Shake Shack with his daughter.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, it's crazy.
- BWBret Weinstein
His daughter who has autism, and, uh, he swears it's not the vaccines. Um, but in any-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, that's the other thing. I said, "Well, what does cause autism?" And he said, "It's, uh, we've narrowed it down to five environmental factors." I said, "What are they?" And he couldn't tell me. I'm like, "Listen, man, if my daughter had autism, and I knew for a fact that it came from five things, I would tell you what those things were, because I would know what those things were, 'cause I'd want to warn other people."
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. You... It would, it would be on billboards. Here are five-
- JRJoe Rogan
He's an expert who wrote a book-
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... about his daughter. Right?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And he couldn't tell me what those environmental factors are that contribute to autism rates being higher.
- BWBret Weinstein
He's, uh, an "expert", uh, in quotes. Um-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it's just the, the limited thinking. And I like Peter as a person. Outside of all this stuff, my interactions with him been nothing but pleasant. I... You know?
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I try to be as nice as possible.
- BWBret Weinstein
I know, yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I try to be as charitable as possible. But that ability to live a life that is measurably, demonstrably un- unhealthy, like, clearly unhealthy-
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and yet be talking about health, that kind of thinking is wild.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah, it's-
- JRJoe Rogan
It's wild thinking. And for you-
- BWBret Weinstein
It's hyp- it's hypocritical.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's also, to be a public expert and to have that kind of flaw in your thinking that exposed by a fucking comedian. Like, "I'm not even an expert. I're just a guy who's, like, asking you questions." And it's so blunt, so obvious by your response that you, you don't even take this into consideration. The primary factor of health, physical robustness, metabolic resistance, health, you don't take that into consideration at all? The idea that there's no difference between an unhealthy, unfit, obese person who eats garbage and is vitamin deficient in virtually all measurable areas, versus a healthy person with, with a, uh, uh, with a, a strong body and a robust immune system, and constantly consuming vitamins, and exercising, and staying healthy, and getting a lot of sleep, and water, and electrolytes, like, there's no difference? And the only difference is vaccines?
- JRJoe Rogan
That's cr- that's crazy that a public health person can have those points and not just have them behind closed doors where you're not challenged, but espouse them publicly.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, there's something very wrong with our entire approach to public health. And, uh, hopefully, we are going to confront it because they've effectively, uh, staged a coup against doctors, and they're dispensing very low quality advice. I mean, it's really the inverse of good advice. But this, this brings me back, actually, to Sam, because there's a dire lesson here. For one thing, I quite like Sam also, and I will tell you one of the early experiences I had as I was getting to know him, was that I heard him say something that I had said many, many times, uh, as a professor, which is that, and I said it, I think, at the beginning of this podcast, that when you are wrong, that as painful as it is to acknowledge it, you are far better off to get it done as quick as possible, so that you can get back to being right. And I heard Sam say something almost exactly like that, right? And I thought, "Ah, here's somebody who has the same intellectual approach, somebody who appreciates that same, maybe slightly subtle piece of wisdom." And yet here, in the case of the pandemic, I think he got everything wrong, and worse than that, I mean, you know, you and I both think that, you know, you can get stuff wrong, and it was a very confusing time, and the information was very low quality, and lots of people got stuff wrong. However, you are now making unforced errors refusing to see that you got it wrong. In fact, you're not even acknowledging what you know, Sam. You have stopped getting boosters for COVID, despite all of the things that you said about it. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
How do you know he stopped getting boosters?
- BWBret Weinstein
'Cause he said so. I believe he said so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did he say why? How many did he get?
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs) That I don't know. Um-
- 2:45:00 – 3:00:00
Yeah.…
- JRJoe Rogan
was talking about Fauci be- ... Before the pandemic, a lot of people attributed to him saying it about Fauci and the PCR test after the pandemic. No, it was before.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it was in regards to the AIDS crisis. He'd done ... I believe he'd done that interview in the 1990s. And the b- ... He was saying that there's not a way to detect whether or not someone is infected with a fucking disease. That's not what it's d- intended for.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, right. And, I mean, the short answer in that case is-It's an inappropriate test because what it is, is an amplifier and if you turn the cycle threshold up, it can amplify absolutely anything to a positive result.
- JRJoe Rogan
And the admission in false positives with COVID is through the roof. I mean, false positives were a- an immense part of the situation.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, you know, this is why when you say it was about the money that I'm just not convinced, is I can certainly tell a story about lots of places where a huge profit was made. But the commitment across the board to making sure that certain things happened, that we were maximally spooked. And what's more, not only maximally spooked, but primed before the thing supposedly hit our shores, we were primed to be expecting a certain disease, and so we hallucinated that disease. Doctors were primed to imagine that they were about to be dropping like flies because they were going to be forced to deal with these sick people who had this very destructive disease. And I don't know why this happened. For one thing, I don't think we have properly figured out what the meaning of tabletop exercises is. You remember Event 201?
- JRJoe Rogan
Yes.
- BWBret Weinstein
Like shortly before-
- JRJoe Rogan
Explain that to people.
- BWBret Weinstein
So Event 201 was a tabletop exercise shortly before the COVID pandemic, in which a scenario suspiciously like the COVID pandemic was portrayed with sort of medium production values, you know, false news reports and things were, uh, broadcast to the participants, you know. And so basically, you took a bunch of people who would ultimately play some role in the pandemic and you put them through a trial run where they got to make the decisions that caused them to censor the misinformation spreaders and to mandate the this and that and to advocate for the so-and-so. I don't think we have yet understood why a tabletop exercise happened. It's possible it was just a coincidence. I think it's highly unlikely it was just a coincidence, but I don't think we know why they run them. I, I think there's a, there's a meaning to it, right? I, I don't know if it is a pump priming thing where the idea is we know this is coming for some reason, and in order to make it go down the way we want it to go down, everybody has to have practiced their role, they have to go through a rehearsal, right? Is that what it was? Is it a mechanism of spreading a kind of word, you know, in a, in a way that has plausible deniability so that people will understand that some powerful force is engaged in something? I don't know. But what I do know is that we haven't figured it out, that it's just this weird historical anomaly that, oh, yeah, there was a tabletop exercise, wasn't there? And it looked an awful lot like COVID.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, and people could, would just say that was a coincidence, that they did that-
- BWBret Weinstein
And it could have been.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
Could have been. But the question is, what I want to know is, you know, if you're constantly running tabletop exercises with infectious diseases, so that Event 201 stands out because it just happened to be the one that was shortly before the pandemic and it got lucky with respect to some of the parameters being right. Okay. But it's like, it's like when I first discovered that I had, uh... I think I probably mentioned this to you. When Heather and I finished the first draft of our book, we were in the Amazon for two weeks, intentionally insulated from all contact with the world. And we emerged to this military checkpoint at which you transition from out of contact to back in contact.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so we're sort of looking at our phones and, uh, we start seeing this thing about a coronavirus, and this is our first awareness of it. And, oh, the coronavirus, the first case in the new world is in Ecuador. And we're reading this in Spanish trying to understand what it is. And it's, you know, oh, a bat coronavirus has escaped, a zoonotic this, that, and the other. And because I was a bat biologist, I, uh, briefly looked into it, figured out who the bats in question were, where the disease came from, all of that. And I tweeted to my followers, you know, "This is a developing story, but it adds up based on what I know about the bats." And one of my longtime followers tweeted back, he says, "Oh, so you think it's just a coincidence that it happened on the doorstep of a biosafety level 4 laboratory studying these very viruses?" And I thought, first of all, what's a biosafety level 4 laboratory? And then I thought, well, maybe that's not a piece of information worth processing if there are 1,000 laboratories studying these viruses. But if there's only one, then I just got it wrong. Then this is significant, and so it literally is exactly one hour between my tweeting, "Hey, this story makes sense to me," my getting this pushback, and my tweeting, "Uh, I take back what I said. This story may not be what it appears to be." It was-
- JRJoe Rogan
This is very, very early on.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's right... It's my first awareness-
- JRJoe Rogan
Okay.
- BWBret Weinstein
... it took exactly one hour for me to wake up-
- JRJoe Rogan
How does this other guy know about the biosafety lab already?
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, I don't know. I'm-
- JRJoe Rogan
What, what's his, uh, background or her background?
- BWBret Weinstein
(laughs) It's an anonymous account. I s- he still follows me, but, uh, I don't, I don't know what his background was.
- JRJoe Rogan
Probably a fed.
- BWBret Weinstein
I don't think so.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whistleblower? Someone from China? (laughs)
- BWBret Weinstein
I think this was, I think this was already being discussed in public. And because I was coming out of the Amazon, I was a couple weeks behind, right?
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, I see, I see.
- BWBret Weinstein
And so anyway, uh...But anyway, it A, I'm really glad that it got caught on Twitter, that both my error and my correction one hour later, like, almost exactly one hour later with ... just by pure accident.
- 3:00:00 – 3:11:27
Very unlikely.…
- BWBret Weinstein
so if you have stocks, you don't have a stock certificate. Your stocks are held in sort of the same way that, um, your cryptocurrency is held if it's in an exchange, where you don't really have cryptocurrency. What you have is an IOU from a company that has cryptocurrency, and as long as the company remains, uh, solvent, then it's the same. You can use it, you can take it out, you can put it in. Um, but the problem is that these stock certificates that we no longer have, have been replaced by an agreement that has contingency clauses. Those contingency clauses mean that your stock can be used as collateral by the holder and if they need to satisfy a debt because of insolvency, that your stock becomes the way to satisfy the debt. So in other words, there's a hidden mechanism whereby you could suddenly discover that somebody else has used your stock and not paid you in order to settle a debt of theirs. Right? It's not a big deal as long as the market remains stable, because the creditors in question aren't going to go, uh, or the debtors in question aren't, aren't going to go insolvent. But okay, the, the punchline though is this, that's not the only place where we in the public are vulnerable. Another place, and this is speculative on my part, I would love to be told that I'm imagining things and the danger that I see is not real. Um, I look forward to somebody telling me that. But so far, that's not what I've heard as I've talked to people about this concept. If the stock market is wildly overvalued as a result of bubbles and fraud, and it comes unglued and it causes a run on currency, people trying to get money out of banks and the banks turn out not to be stable, here's what I'm concerned might happen, and I'll connect it back to the question of free speech in a second. My concern is, if your bank goes insolvent, A, you're now in jeopardy with your house because almost everybody... It's in fact considered financially wise not to have your house paid off. If you borrowed money to buy your house under favorable conditions, then you can make more money by not paying off your house and taking the money that you would use to pay off your house and putting it into investments that pay better. Right? You're actually financially ahead if you do that. But if you suddenly can't pay your mortgage, then your house can be taken. Right? So if there's a collapse that causes us to be unable to service our mortgages, not because of anything we did wrong, but because the whole system is now not, uh, in a position to allow us to just simply service our debts, your house could be vulnerable. And then, here's the punchline of the story. Your bank account is insured by the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. So I've forgotten what the exact number is. It might be a quarter million per account, something like that. If the banks can't deliver your money, if they were to collapse and...... the federal government were to say, "Don't worry, your account is insured, but we're going to pay you in central bank digital currency. You're going to have to take your money in central bank digital currency. You can spend it just like real money, but you're going to get it in this form." It seems to me that that, in one fell swoop, puts us into a potentially tyrannical scenario, because at the point that you have accepted central bank digital currency, now there's... It's basically programmable money that can be cut off. You can be de-banked, you can be told what you're allowed to spend it on and what you're not allowed to spend it on. So the question is, if we rerun the pandemic, let's say, but all of our money is in CBDC, how likely is it that people like you and me get to put information into the public square that allows people to make higher quality decisions to avoid the shots, to avail themselves of alternative...
- JRJoe Rogan
Very unlikely.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's what I think too. So anyway, hopefully-
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, we know this but just based on Elon buying Twitter and the examination of the Twitter files.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. Exactly. So, Elon buying Twitter carves out an exception where we can still talk there. It's not perfect, but it's so far ahead of anything else that it does create a place you can go for information that is not being filtered by the regime. But at the point, if it is true, that we can be forced into a CBDC, and I believe the plan to force us into a CBDC exists, whether the scenario I'm painting is plausible or not. But, um, if they can get us into a regime where we have to accept CBDCs as the means of exchange, then it seems to me we are in a much worse position to fend off tyranny of all sorts, including medical tyranny, because the ability to punish us for wrong-think becomes extremely powerful.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm. Yeah. And we're seeing the consequence of that in the UK. We're seeing places where people don't have the same laws and don't have the same rights, they're being punished in unimaginable ways in America. Are you aware of the, uh, the Irishman, um... (sighs) God, I can't remember his name. Uh, I believe he's a religious guy who's a, a school teacher who refused to address someone by their transgender pronouns, and now he's being jailed.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And not, not just being jailed, but a very long sentence. The other thing they're doing in the UK is they're eliminating trials by jury.
- BWBret Weinstein
I'm aware of that.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, which is crazy. And you're ha- you're having trials just by judges, and the judge will just appoint a sentence.
- BWBret Weinstein
Right. Uh, i- it's apocalyptically bad if you understand what our... What the West is based on.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
You're watching a shining example of Western freedoms getting pushed over the cliff, right? And, you know, it's not... I- It's bad enough that somebody refusing to use somebody else's pronouns is being jailed, but this is happening at the same time that you have, uh, grooming gangs raping young women, and talking about it is understood it's wrong-think, right? That...
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
... acknowledging that you have an immigration problem and that there's a, uh, a dynamic in play that involves certain populations that are prone to seeing, uh, the British people not as their countrymen, but as something else, as prey.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BWBret Weinstein
That's something that obviously a society needs to be able to talk about, and this is happening at exactly the moment when the society in question is losing the ability to talk freely because it doesn't have an industrial strength constitution the way we do.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that same society is having digital ID pushed on them.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yes, they are. And their ability to discuss the wisdom of this is, of course, downstream of their right to speak freely. So, um, I mean, I will say I have multiple friends in the UK who are all looking at the system and thinking about getting out.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, I do too. I know quite a few.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's spooky.
- BWBret Weinstein
It's beyond spooky because, um, again, it's the differences in the quality of our constitution that has protected us so far, but it's not like it hasn't been targeted.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right. Clearly. The, just the Twitter files alone just shows you what happens when, uh, intelligence agencies get involved in distribution of actual factual information, and they suppress it.
- BWBret Weinstein
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Sam Harris also had a wild take on. (sighs) Like that was... He didn't care if Hunter Biden had children's corpses buried in his basement, or whatever the fuck he said. Like, what? You don't, you wouldn't care about that? Like that wouldn't be nuts to you? How... I, I don't... I, I get, y- you're trying to be hyperbolic and you're trying to be, you know, entertaining, but that's fucking crazy to say.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, and, you know-The ... What he was trying to say is absurd.
- JRJoe Rogan
Is that Trump is really bad.
- BWBret Weinstein
Well, a- as always, that's what he's trying to say.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
Episode duration: 3:14:15
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