#2427 - Bret Weinstein

Bret Weinstein, PhD, is an evolutionary biologist, author, and co-host of “The DarkHorse Podcast” with his wife, biologist Heather Heying. They are the co-authors of “A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life.”www.bretweinstein.netwww.youtube.com/@DarkHorsePodwww.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/618153/a-hunter-gatherers-guide-to-the-21st-century-by-heather-heying-and-bret-weinstein/ Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan Get a free welcome kit with your first subscription of AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/joerogan Try ZipRecruiter FOR FREE at https://ziprecruiter.com/rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Joe Rogan?

  What's happening, man?

• 0:13Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 0:14Joe Rogan?

  Good to be back.

• 0:15Speaker 02

  Good to see you.

• 0:16Joe Rogan?

  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 wanted to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.

• 0:31Speaker 02

  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 that we 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, 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 it simply gets discovered as a matter of computing horsepower.

• 1:13Joe 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."

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:21Joe Rogan?

  All right.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  So...

• 1:23Joe Rogan?

  Spill the beans.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Let's talk biology, 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. All 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.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme, well enzyme isn't misleading, but an enzyme is a catalyst. 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 amino acid sequence is specified by the genome in three-letter

• 2:51Speaker 02

  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 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 necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  Almost all of the time, that will make the little molecular machine worse or break it all together. 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, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology. 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

• 4:50Speaker 02

  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, 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 process isn't powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of," then what I'm going to 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

• 5:33Speaker 02

  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."

• 5:58Speaker 02

  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 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 pointing to,

• 6:39Speaker 02

  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. It actually depends which field I come at it from to see what the blind spots are. But I'm going to leave that primarily for another time. Let's just say the two fields in question are my field, evolutionary biology, and an interdisciplinary science called EVO-DEVO. Okay, EVO-DEVO is the evolution of development.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  And EVO-DEVO is a much newer, 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 evolutionists seem to be missing that I think does a bunch of the heavy lifting in terms of explaining creatures.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  So let me, I, 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 nano scale. 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, you ever play with the feathers of a bird? You know, you pull them apart and then they zip back together. Right?

• 8:35Speaker 02

  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 Jamie a picture of a shrew's foot. Maybe we should just put it up. So what we'll look at is the, the foot of a shrew, and it won't surprise you at all.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  It looks exactly as you would expect. It's got, you know, digits and it looks like every other ma-

• 9:27Joe Rogan?

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• 12:04Speaker 02

  Almost foot. So here we have an example of it. Okay, now let's take a look at the wing of a bat.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  So here we have the wing of a bat. Now that wing is a highly modified front foot. The ribs that suspend, that hold the membrane, what we call the pitagia, 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 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,

• 13:00Speaker 02

  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? Yep. Okay. So what I realized more than 25 years ago, many people who've heard you and me talk before will have heard us talk about my work on telomeres.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  So telomeres, you'll 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.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  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

• 15:45Speaker 02

  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...

• 16:10Speaker 02

  That the evolutionary process has built a system in which variables, 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 phalanges, the phalanges in the fingers. If you could radically increase the number that 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?

• 16:55Speaker 02

  No. Or is this making sense? It's making sense. Okay. So, the question is, all right, the telomere is a special case. The telomere exists at the end of a chromosome, and it can only exist at the end of a chromosome because of the way it functions. So, a telomere is not actually just a string, it's actually a loop. And the telomere loops back, and at the very tip, there's a little section where the DNA is not double-stranded, it's single-stranded. And that single strand inserts between two other strands of DNA. So, if you loop the DNA at the end of the chromosome back, it's called a D-loop. And then you get this one little, single-stranded DNA that inserts between a double-stranded

• 17:39Speaker 02

  and makes a very tiny, triple-stranded, like, 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...

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Molecular marker in biology for decades. We use something called microsatellites. 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 in length a lot. So that 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

• 18:47Speaker 02

  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, 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 a storage modality for a kind of information that might be useful. So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table, and by the way, these things are extremely common in the genome.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  There are many more 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 triplet codon language, but they're clumsy, they're crude. So you can have things like

• 20:16Speaker 02

  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. 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 code on 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,

• 20:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 21:23Joe Rogan?

  Can I pause right there and ask a question?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 21:25Joe Rogan?

  So here's the real question, specifically in regards to flying.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:31Joe 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 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 can help you stay one scoop ahead

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• 23:19Speaker 02

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

• 23:30Joe Rogan?

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

• 23:32Speaker 02

  Right. How surprising is it? That's the question. Is it so surprising that it's actually impossible? And I think the answer is just simply no. It's quite possible.

• 23:41Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's obviously it's possible.

• 23:42Speaker 02

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

• 23:48Joe Rogan?

  Intelligent design position?

• 23:49Speaker 02

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

• 23:55Joe 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 it could not account for a rodent or a shrew, which is believed to be our common ancestor, eventually becoming a human being.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Let's just say, I have, you know, initially, I thought that all of the intelligent design folks were anti-scientific and really, basically just religious people wielding 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 have the same suspicion.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  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, let's go to your question about- Right. -how you get from a creature that can't fly at all to a creature that does fly. And now, 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.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  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, 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. But in the case of a bat, I would say, the way to think of it is this-

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Have you seen flying squirrels?

• 26:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Okay. You've seen them fly?

• 26:21Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:22Joe Rogan?

  Not in person, but videos.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. I have actually twice seen it.

• 26:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah?

• 26:27Speaker 02

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

• 26:43Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Okay, and they started chattering, and I was like, huh, what is this? And, okay, lo and behold, it's flying squirrels, and they're moving through, you know, a patch of forest. And it's the most amazing thing, right? These things, you know, technically, they're not flying. They're purely gliding. I would argue that that's actually not a really good distinction, because at some level, what they're doing is powering flight by climbing trees. So they climb a tree, you know, they've got potential energy, and then they glide to the next tree. They'll go from the end of a branch, and they will glide much farther than you would think is possible. Right? It's really like, it challenges you. Am I really seeing what I'm seeing? It's hard to believe they can do it. And then they land on the trunk of the tree. That's why they're so silent, right?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  They land on the trunk, so it doesn't make a big noise as they hit some branch, and the leaves rustle and all of that. But anyway, if you've seen these creatures do it, then you can imagine a pretty clear story. Right? Imagine a squirrel that doesn't glide, a regular garden variety squirrel. Well, that squirrel certainly faces gaps between trees that push it to its limit, and then there's gaps that are just a little beyond its limit. And you could imagine lots of scenarios in which a predator is chasing a squirrel, and it's got it out onto the end of a branch, and the squirrel has to leap. And so it's got to be pretty durable in case it can't make it to the next tree. They are.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  But any squirrel that had just a little advantage in getting to that next tree would outcompete ones that got consumed or died because they, you know, hit the ground too hard or fell in front of a predator that took advantage of it or something like that. So there is an advantage that comes from even a tiny little increase in the distance you can jump. So that gets you pretty clearly from no ability to glide at all, ability to jump as is, to the ability to glide a little, to the ability to glide a lot, to the ability to glide the way modern flying squirrels do, which is like so impressive, right? But it's still not, it's not flapping flight, it's not powered.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  So you can imagine a story in which the shrew ancestor climbed things and had the same situation. And maybe it starts out, in fact, it probably does start out with maybe a little webbing between the fingers that gives it just a little extra lift, right? And you could imagine, once you get onto that little foothill, a little lift, a little more lift would be good. So those individuals that had just slightly more webbing outcompeted those individuals that had slightly less webbing.

• 29:29Joe Rogan?

  But what would cause them to develop the webbing in the first place?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Well, that's just it, is, you know.

• 29:35Joe Rogan?

  You have. Is that random mutation? Is that?

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I would say at some level, these things all have to start there. But my overarching point is, selection not only discovers forms, it discovers ways to discover forms. So I call these ways explorer modes. This is a concept I've taken a certain amount of crap over, but I'm quite convinced of it. I would argue that our consciousness is in explorer mode, right? Our consciousness allows us to.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Come up with ideas that might be useful and to kind of test them in our heads and to figure out how we would try them out in life and then to build a prototype and see how it works and then discover how it might be improved. And you know, sooner or later, you get you get from, you know, the Wright Flyer of 1903, which can stay off the ground for barely half a minute, to not so many years later, a modification of the same aircraft that can circle the Eiffel Tower. Right? It's that process. That is the ability to explore design space in some way that is not random. And to the extent that the genome is capable of storing a large number of variables and

• 31:00Speaker 02

  then applying them, what that means is at the point that you have the first true bat, right, the first flyer, that animal has discovered an adaptive landscape, a series of opportunities that we represent as peaks, that is unknown. Right? What can you do if you can fly that you couldn't do when you could only climb? Well, you can move between distant trees and collect fruit. You can catch insects that are flying on the wing. You can seek out mammals and birds and slit them open and drink their blood. You can catch fish that come to the surface and cause ripples.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  These are all things that bats do. And the point is, the initial bat presumably didn't do much of any of that. It did some, probably a generalist something. But having achieved flight, there's a question about how evolution can find all of the opportunities that are now suddenly available. And the idea that this happens through occasional, random mutation of a protein coding gene that alters something important is, in my opinion, ridiculous.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  That more likely, vastly more likely, is a system in which parameters like finger length and the length of each phalanx in the finger is stored as a variable. And those variables get readily modified. In other words, if you looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there's already a ton of variation in 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

• 33:02Speaker 02

  an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available. And therefore, evolution can explore what Stuart Kaufman would call the adjacent possible. Right? Have you heard that term?

• 33:22Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Have you had Stuart on?

• 33:24Joe Rogan?

  No.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  So Stuart Kaufman is a complex systems theorist, and his point, one of many, is that effectively, 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

• 34:07Speaker 02

  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 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

• 34:52Speaker 02

  we typically tell about random mutations to protein coding genes. Right? 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 Darwin said was about a vague hereditary information. And numbers is no less a candidate for that than triplet codons stored that code for amino acids. So my point is Darwin is untouched by this.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Darwin is still 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. 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 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 description of mechanisms that work like this.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  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. Now, 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 is, well, I mean, as you know, we have massively dysfunctional institutions. And they

• 36:57Speaker 02

  I, you know, I've 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

• 37:08Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 37:09Speaker 02

  That's what I think. Yeah.

• 37:10Joe Rogan?

  And what was that?

• 37:12Speaker 02

  The selfish gene provides us a mechanism. 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, that gateway, I don't think we ever went through it. In fact, when I've talked to Dawkins about his effective discovery, the meme, he doesn't seem to understand the power of it. He thinks of it as, I mean, he says in chapter 11 of The Selfish Gene, he says that the landscape of memes is like

• 37:57Speaker 02

  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 more refined and powerful and diverse. But that space is basically a, an enhanced, it's

• 38:37Speaker 02

  another enhancement to the toolkit of Darwinian evolution, which 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, 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 Darwinists. It came primarily from the developmental side.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  These are people who were focused on mechanism. And so, in some sense, the story of the failure of biology to update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident. Right? So, 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

• 40:07Speaker 02

  available to them. 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. 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, seems to be

• 40:45Speaker 02

  preventing the revolution in our understanding of the most powerful process that exists. And it's frustrating. So, anyway, I hope. 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,

• 41:29Speaker 02

  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 would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have. So, anyway. 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.

• 42:00Joe Rogan?

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• 43:40Speaker 02

  Much more powerful than the story we've been told about it.

• 43:44Joe Rogan?

  I was watching a documentary once on the BBC about the Congo. And it's a really amazing documentary. And one of the things that it points out to 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 rainforest expanded, they were kind of trapped in here. And one of them they pointed to was dikers, you know, those 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.

• 44:28Joe Rogan?

  And it didn't seem to account for the adaptation that they were seeing in these animals.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  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. It would have gone extinct.

• 44:47Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  That's the story again and again, right?

• 44:50Joe 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 be able to survive in this intense weather where people who live in the tropics, if you've moved them to that environment, they would die.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  It's a story with every clade of creatures.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 46:41Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 02

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

• 46:49Joe Rogan?

  Some of them not even flying.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Right. Some of them have lost the ability 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, 100 hits. You get some innovation, it provides 100 niches that you could move into from there. It creates 100 species.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  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 directionality that probably at a technical level, we are right to assume does not exist. But 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.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I can see the future, right? I can understand what is likely to happen. I can extrapolate and see things that haven't occurred yet, and I will do hypothesis testing to see if my understanding is correct. But the point is, evolution can't see the future, but it can build creatures that see the future on its behalf. Isn't that kind of like it looking into the future?

• 49:36Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  It feels a lot like it is to me.

• 49:38Joe Rogan?

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

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Crocodiles, dragonflies, sharks, horseshoe crabs.

• 49:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. So... This is a place where I think 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. 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.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  And in some ways, that's the greatest strategy, right? Having to change in order to deal with the changes in the environment is perilous. Having found something that is so durable that it consists, that it persists era after era, epoch after epoch, is at least a very comprehensible strategy. And arguably, the better one, because anything that has existed that long, maybe we talked in a past podcast about the Lindy effect.

• 51:13Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. The idea that we tend to think that the longer something's been around, 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. So it's that. It's the Lindy effect in animal or plant form.

• 51:36Joe Rogan?

  So it's just essentially, evolution nailed it. They developed an animal that's so adaptive and so designed to succeed in its particular environment that it doesn't really need to change.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  Yes, and in fact, you know, we are in some ways, we haven't been around that long, but our...

• 51:59Speaker 02

  It looks like we are a variation on that theme, precisely because we have a generalist body plan. The physical robot that is the human being is capable of doing a tremendous number of things. And the software program can be essentially entirely rewritten. 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 that the body plan doesn't do on its own.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  So that's a cool strategy, to have a generalist robot and a software program that can be swapped out 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. This is what Heather and I describe in our book as campfire. 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.

• 53:18Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 53:55Joe Rogan?

  Pretty crazy.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  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. You know, like, I don't know, potato rocket ship, right? And you could draw on a 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 concepts is it's truly stunning. And in conjunction with the generalist robot that can use tools, it's an amazingly

• 54:41Speaker 02

  good strategy.

• 54:43Joe Rogan?

  When you talk about humans, one of the things that fascinates me about people is the changes in human beings because of the environment, because of input, meaning like certain chemicals we're exposed to, 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. One of the things that people are talking about with a great concern, like Dr. Shannon Swan, done a lot of work on this, is the impact of microplastics on our endocrine system and how it's greatly diminishing males' ability to procreate and females' ability

• 55:28Joe Rogan?

  to bring a baby to term. So you're getting many more miscarriages and lower testosterone counts, smaller testicles and penises, reduced size of the taints, all these different things that she attributes to phthalates and various chemicals that are endocrine disruptors that are ubiquitous in our world. Is this something that you think about? Do you, like, is this something, are we in the middle of an adaptation or some sort of a change of the human species?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:01Joe Rogan?

  Or is it just being poisoned?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  The normal pattern for human beings is you inherit your ancestors' 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 mammal is suddenly faced with a whole

• 56:58Speaker 02

  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. That process is sustainable. Humans are excellent at dealing with it, right?

• 57:42Speaker 02

  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

• 58:04Speaker 02

  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,

• 58:47Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Hyper novelty is the state at which even our amazing ability to rapidly adapt is incapable of keeping pace with technological change. That's where we are.

• 59:39Joe Rogan?

  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 environment. Like 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. This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. We all have a favorite holiday movie we like to go back to again and again, like Home Alone. That movie's always a fun watch. The bad guys get their comeuppance a lot. And of course, there's the wholesome feel-good moment at the end that really gets to the heart of the holidays.

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• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Well, I agree, and I think, you know, we need to think outside the box with respect to what kinds of inputs might be affecting us. I will say, in parallel with what I think is a much more toxic environment, you know, and developmentally toxic environment,

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  we have a radical change in the way human beings are interacting with each other.

• 1:01:51Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  And it is unclear to me what, how far-reaching the consequences of that might be. But, you know, we talked last time about the impact of the sexual revolution and of reliable birth control and abortion on the way males and females interact with each other. That basically, sex being the ultimate reward, the most powerful motivator that exists.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  When birth control made sex common, or made it possible for sex to be common by virtue of radically reducing the risk that females face in engaging in sex with men who won't invest, it robbed us of the central organizing principle of civilization. And the consequences of that central organizing principle evaporating are incredibly far-reaching, right? In effect, we do not know that there is a way for us to live without that central organizing principle. We don't know that it lasts. And we are running that radical experiment, and

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  then we're going to augment that radical experiment now with AI and presumably AI-powered sex robots and companions and other things that the mind is not built to properly understand, right? So what effect are all of these things having? You know, is there a feedback effect from your perception of the sexual landscape on to the development of your children? I don't know. It's conceivable that there is such a thing. But I do know that if we were wise,

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  we would slow the pace of experienced change way down.

• 1:03:56Joe Rogan?

  But how is that even possible at this point?

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  I'm not saying it is.

• 1:04:00Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  But I'm saying if we don't, I think we know that we're doomed. So in light of that, what would you do if you knew that down that path was destruction? You would start thinking about the question of, is there some way, you know, maybe you can't rein in the pace of technological change. You can certainly, and we should, if we were wise, we would insulate young people from exposure, especially to new stuff, right? There's a question about what stuff that we already have, what effect it's having on them, but the fact that we're just going to expose them to every new revolution without

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  figuring out what its consequences are is insane, right? We need to provide young people with a chemically and informationally

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  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 going to live in. But not immunizing them is a terrible error. It can't work. The reason human childhood is the longest developmental 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 an adult in is something nobody can predict, it is

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  guaranteed to make you a fish out of water as an adult. It's extremely disruptive.

• 1:05:44Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  Completely new.

• 1:05:58Joe 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.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:06:11Joe Rogan?

  Suicidal ideation, actual suicide.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:06:22Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  That's one of the shocking discoveries of becoming adult age.

• 1:06:27Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  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 most, what you can do is become, you know, very robust.

• 1:07:03Joe Rogan?

  Do you think that this is where rites of passage ceremony come from? That there's 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.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, in fact.

• 1:07:27Joe Rogan?

  Or a woman.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  In A Hunter Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Heather and I argue that rites of passage are the place. So 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.

• 1:07:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  And the point is, you know that that date is coming. There is a thing that causes you to have made that transition, right? Maybe it's a vision quest of some kind. Maybe it's 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.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  And the abandonment of these things, right? What we have is such a preposterous.

• 1:08:39Speaker 02

  Dim shadow of what once was, you know, okay, you've graduated high school.

• 1:08:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:08:51Joe 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.

• 1:09:26Speaker 02

  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 equity, or...

• 1:09:51Joe Rogan?

  But these are good examples, though, because they're preposterous.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Ridiculous.

• 1:09:55Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:10:18Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:18Speaker 02

  But at the level of how civilization is going to run, we are 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're wrong. That's...

• 1:10:37Joe Rogan?

  And then another thing that we're not course correcting.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:40Joe 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 struggling go this is fucking horse shit and I'm not going along with this and fuck your company and then all of a sudden that company gets down 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 a course correct but that seems like it's one of the only ways that they do is by real world application and that being soundly rejected.

• 1:11:25Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:11:26Joe Rogan?

  And financial consequences.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

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

• 1:11:35Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  And.

• 1:11:36Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  Right we just gotta go far enough well the problem is the thing that does turn you into an adult is a world of consequences right now as a child somebody should prune that world of fatal consequences or you know ones that would get you maimed but allowing you to experience the harm of your wrong understanding of the world is how you improve your understanding of the world and so A we're not even doing that right we've got this system in which we are allowing people who know nothing to teach children the nothing

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  that they know as if it was high minded and important and then they're immunized from consequences by what I think you and I would agree was initially a well intentioned attempt to protect people from bad luck you know that. People who are liberal minded, as you and I both are, don't want to see people suffer because of bad luck. But when you start immunizing people from the consequences of their bad decision making, whether the people you're immunizing are corporate executives who have gambled badly with the resources of their corporation, or, you know, children who make bad decisions

• 1:13:31Speaker 02

  and it causes them to be disliked at school, people have to have those consequences come back to haunt them so that they will stop making the same mistakes and get wiser. And any place that you break that with the equivalent of a welfare program, you are guaranteeing that you will end up with an infantilized adult population.

• 1:13:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:13:55Joe Rogan?

  It's horrible reality, you know, because the compassionate, kind people want a safety net, you want a social safety net, but making people reliant on that social safety net and then having generation after generation relying on the social safety net, you stifle all growth and development and make people dependent.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Well, my argument-

• 1:14:17Joe Rogan?

  You turn them into infants.

• 1:14:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you do. My argument would be a system functions really well when people are immunized from real bad luck, right? Things that they, it's not the consequence of their bad decision making, it's actually, you know, you happen to get a tumor because of a genetic vulnerability or an encounter with some chemical that you had no ability to know was there. But that as soon as you start immunizing people from the downstream effects of their own bad decisions, where they had better decisions that were available to them, you just get the evolution of civilization into a quagmire.

• 1:15:00Joe Rogan?

  This is my fear, my great fear about the concept of universal basic income.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:15:05Joe Rogan?

  That we're going to essentially make an entire civilization dependent upon its overlords.

• 1:15:12Speaker 02

  I can't see how it could go well. I understand.

• 1:15:16Joe Rogan?

  I can't see how it could go well either. I think if you're a nice person, you're like, "Well, all these jobs are going to be replaced by AI and automation. We need to find some way to help people and give them the quality of life that they need to succeed." But you're making them dependent on the state forever.

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  Right. And what we really need to do, and I do not see any mechanism that is capable of it, but what we really need to do is figure out how we want people to allocate their time, what problems we would like them to address themselves to, right? And then we need to reward them for success relative to those problems and allow them to suffer from the failure to make progress relative to those problems. Now, I don't exactly know what those problems are because civilization is changing so fast that it's very hard to even define what it is that will need to be done. But I think we talked about this

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  last time. People are not going to be coherent absent purpose. They need to have purpose. And it used to be that biology itself forced purpose onto you, right? On the frontier, the ability to win a mate, to provide enough shelter, consistent enough food, all of the things necessary for life, that that was a full-time occupation. It was difficult. Not everybody could pull it off. And so it created a very concentrated purpose. You succeeded if you managed, in this environment, to do all those things and leave some offspring

• 1:16:58Speaker 02

  who were well-adjusted to the situation. In our environment, there is nothing like this. And the...

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  Winning a mate has been turned into chaos. What does it even mean? Are there mates out there that you would want to win? Are they interested in reproducing? Are they interested in raising children? Are they going to farm that job out to some crazy person who believes you can switch gender by just saying you've done it? Right? So the purpose has become incoherent. The subordinate purposes, which came later, right? The ability to invest in a career, to climb some corporate ladder. It doesn't sound very appealing to me, but at least I understand what it is.

• 1:17:54Joe Rogan?

  Right?

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  At least, you know, okay, there's a game. The company wants certain things accomplished. To the extent that you accomplish them better than your competitors, you rise farther. It leaves you an income that you can spend in whatever way you want. That will impress a mate, right? It's at least understandable. The puzzle that we have given people now is completely incoherent. And universal basic income, I presume, will keep people from starving, but it ain't nearly good enough. People have to know what they're supposed to be doing because not doing it causes them to suffer

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  and succeeding at it causes them to feel good. They need at least that much direction.

• 1:18:42Joe Rogan?

  But is it possible that we can move past the idea that providing people or a person being able to provide themselves with shelter and food, which is essentially what we're saying with universal basic income? We're saying you will have enough money to have shelter. You will have enough money to have food and you could acquire basic goods. That this is not really what we should be working towards in life anymore? And that it's possible to find some other purpose, goal, or task that would replace those things? And money would just be what's...

• 1:19:19Joe Rogan?

  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. Not necessarily to acquire wealth, but instead to educate yourself. Instead, you know, to as a process of human development. This episode is brought to you by Simply Safe. Stuff can always be replaced, but your loved ones, a sense of security. Those are priceless and often overlooked in security systems, but not with Simply Safe. In fact, they have a pretty interesting and smart approach, taking action before the worst can happen. Instead of after.

• 1:20:01Joe Rogan?

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• 1:20:42Joe Rogan?

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• 1:21:26Joe Rogan?

  Visit betterhelp.com to explore your payment options. That's better H E L P dot com. That you're learning, a thing that you're competing in, something.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:21:39Joe Rogan?

  That gives you meaning.

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  Except for one thing.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  What has to be true at the end of that substitute purpose is some undeniably valuable reward. Right?

• 1:21:54Joe Rogan?

  Cause that's the motivating factor.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  That's the thing that will cause you to do it.

• 1:21:57Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  Right? So not starving is a great motivation. Right?

• 1:22:03Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  well, for males, the difficulty of winning,

• 1:22:35Speaker 02

  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. There are things, you know, obviously there's porn, there's going to be sex robots. So that most-

• 1:22:58Joe Rogan?

  Prostitution.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Prostitution, right. And, you know, part of me is wondering why women are not up in arms

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  over the fact that they are being competed with, with ever more sophisticated technology.

• 1:23:17Speaker 02

  I'm confused by why that is not an affront.

• 1:23:20Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it absolutely is. In fact, I think, you know.

• 1:23:38Joe Rogan?

  It's much more rejected amongst women.

• 1:23:42Speaker 02

  That is not what I'm hearing.

• 1:23:43Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  From my sons.

• 1:23:45Joe Rogan?

  I'm hearing, oh, okay. What are you hearing?

• 1:23:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:23:52Joe Rogan?

  Really?

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  Yes. And which surprises me.

• 1:23:54Joe Rogan?

  Involved in the creation or the viewing? Watching it. God, that's- That was never the case when I was young.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:02Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  Huge red flag.

• 1:24:07Joe Rogan?

  Run!

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

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

• 1:24:43Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, right. Like, the boss lady is the lady that behaves like a man at work.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Behaves like a man at work. Treating sex very casually is not a normal thing for females to do.

• 1:24:56Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:25:01Joe Rogan?

  The woman's just a boss bitch, and she doesn't give a fuck, and she kicks these men to the curb, and they're distraught, and they're like emotionally wrecked, and she's just, "Back to business. Get to work."

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:25:14Joe Rogan?

  Weird.

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  The whole thing is weird.

• 1:25:16Joe Rogan?

  Because it's so unattractive, too.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  It's really unattractive.

• 1:25:19Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's odd. I mean, it's odd to even say that it's unattractive, but, look, I find it unattractive in men.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well-

• 1:25:25Joe Rogan?

  I mean, if I was a woman and a guy that was just wholly desiring, conquering, and moving ahead, and didn't give a shit, if he's like, "Fuck off, everybody eat shit," like, no compassion for other people, just only focused on success, and winning, winning, winning. It's Gordon Gekko, you know? It's like, the most unattractive characters in films, the greedy billionaire character that doesn't give a shit about the consequences of his actions, what happens to the world.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  Right. It makes no sense, and I think-

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  Men and women are obviously substantially different.

• 1:26:08Joe Rogan?

  That's a controversial statement.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  It really shouldn't be. It really shouldn't be. But I will just say, I have puzzled over the fact that our culture does not have a profound relationship with the symmetry represented by a yin yang symbol. The yin yang symbol is profound, as far as I'm concerned, because it describes a perfect symmetry that is not superficially symmetrical, right? It's a complementarity that is, I think it's a very proper description of what you're actually searching for in a mate, in a marriage, right? You're not looking for somebody to be the same as you.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  You are looking for somebody to be as perfectly complementary with what you are as is possible in essentially every regard. And what we are getting instead is this sort of mind-numbing belief that, you know, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, which, as I keep saying, it has robbed us of all coherence. And I think it also, you know, I've started paying attention to a bunch of these male accounts that are fed up with females.

• 1:27:35Speaker 02

  People that I consider insightful, but who are not in any way where I am with respect to this topic. You know, so people, I don't know, do you know the account Hoemath?

• 1:27:45Joe Rogan?

  Hoemath?

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Hoemath. Well, Hoemath is pretty darn funny. He's very insightful about a lot of things that have gone wrong, but he's also...

• 1:27:59Speaker 02

  It's tragic. He's just bitter about the state of modern women and has given up on finding anyone because he thinks he's discovered that it's impossible.

• 1:28:10Joe Rogan?

  But that's ridiculous.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Well, it depends. I mean, I think you and I are in the fortunate position of being happily married to wonderful people and I will tell you that having two sons and looking at the world that they are supposed to be finding a mate in, it's not obvious how this is supposed to work.

• 1:28:33Joe Rogan?

  It wasn't obvious when I was young either, but you've just got to pick wisely. And you also have to find people. You have to find them the type of people that you're actually interested in.

• 1:28:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, but imagine the following thing.

• 1:28:48Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Imagine that, first of all, who you are as a sexual being is the result naturally of your exposure, right? You come to understand what sex is and how you're supposed to behave from stories. In ancient cultures, you would observe a certain amount because perfect privacy wasn't a thing. That has all now been disrupted by porn, right? So people get developmental experiences of sex from this commodity, which is not accurate. It is not a description of the way people actually interact, right?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  It's meant to captivate you and the different pornographers are in competition with each other. So they're providing you an increasingly extreme view of sex in order to get your attention.

• 1:29:41Joe Rogan?

  It's almost like a superhero movie.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Joe Rogan?

  Like it doesn't exist in the real world.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  It's nonsense.

• 1:29:46Joe Rogan?

  For the most part.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  But given what a human being is and given that it doesn't come wired with a sexual persona, that it acquires a sexual persona through exposure, the fact that we are flooding that channel with this very unrealistic stuff means that, well, what do women discover when they end up in bed with a guy?

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Well, that guy is like the cartoon that men have been painted as, right? You and I bristle at what the Me Too movement portrayed men as. Not because there aren't bad men, there are lots of bad men. But it's not universal. And the story of how men and women are supposed to interact, you know, in terms of flirting and dating and all of that is not as straightforward as people will paint that picture. But if you've got a generation of men that's being exposed to the same, frankly, violent garbage, and that is informing them

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  about what sex is, and then women are discovering that, oh, yeah, men are kind of brutal and awful, you know, in the bedroom. So that reinforces their sense of, well, you know, these aren't decent people. They're putting on an act when they're in public. So it creates the exact thing that men were falsely accused of. And it makes women, I think, become very unsympathetic as people, right? That to the extent that women start viewing sex as antagonistic,

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  which is what men at their worst are, is they're sexually, they're predators, right? They're... Men trying to have sex with women they have no intention of investing in are, whether they understand it or not, engaging in behavior designed to impregnate that female and stick her with the job of raising the offspring.

• 1:31:50Joe Rogan?

  That's... Evolutionarily.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  Yes. That's parasitic and predatory. Okay? That is a mode that exists in men, but it's not the only male mode.

• 1:32:01Joe Rogan?

  And it's a mode that is a relic of ancient times, when it was just an opportunity to spread your genes, because you weren't going to live very long. So you had this built-in desire to try to spread your genes as much as possible.

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I would also say that women were wise about not getting stuck with offspring. So the fact that men may have that mode built into them did not manifest as...

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  Successful males behaving in this way because in general, women shut them down. And the fact- Then birth control came along. Right, and now women don't shut them down. And basically, what you have is people exploring some landscape that's been primed with porn, violent porn, because that's how pornographers compete with each other. And it is causing them to live an entirely different life. And I think frankly, I think sex is really important. That in a marriage, it is playing a very powerful dual role.

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  Okay? On the one hand, it is a barometer that tells you what the status of your relationship is. And it's also a tool for enhancing, fixing, modifying your relationship. It is- And evolution built it to be that, right? Sex is something very unique in humans because in humans, unlike almost every other creature, we have sex when not fertile. Right? Why is sex pleasurable when not fertile? Because selection has given it to us for a reason. It's given it to us for a purpose.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Why does sex continue after menopause? Right? Seems pointless, but it's not pointless. It has everything to do with maintaining that relationship. Why would selection care if you maintain your sexual relationship after you've stopped producing offspring? Because the way human beings work, your job isn't done at the point that you've stopped producing offspring. Right? You have kids who need guidance and help in the world. You're going to have grandkids, right? Your union is still important. And so, the idea that we've disrupted this with a consumer good that pushes men into the worst of their modes and is now exposing women to that, and that women are now being

• 1:34:43Speaker 02

  induced to think that that's sophisticated to behave in this way that men, at their worst, are behaving. And so, women are now behaving this way. It's like, well, you couldn't ask for a better recipe for disrupting functional relationships. And those functional relationships-

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  Are vital to civilization working. Right, the the family unit is profoundly important and we are disrupting. Not only are we disrupting the way it functions, but we're disrupting whether or not it even forms because frankly, it's not that attractive a deal to sign up for a lifelong relationship with somebody who's been broken in this way.

• 1:35:25Joe Rogan?

  It's just, it doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the future. You know, when you look at where this is going and then the possibility of AI porn, that's, you know, virtual reality porn, and then the sex robot thing, which is, they're getting really close to that, these lifelike robots. It's hard to tell what's real and what's not online with AI. But there's definitely work being done on lifelike robots to be housekeepers or to be companions or someone you could talk to in your home. And it's just a matter of time before those become sexual companions and they replace regular sexual companions and then all of the motivation to be a better person, to be

• 1:36:08Joe Rogan?

  successful, to be someone that's good at conversation, so that you, someone who's reasonable. This episode is brought to you by Chime. And I know people don't usually get excited about banking, but Chime is doing something different and it's worth paying attention to. In a recent survey, they ranked the number one choice for new checking accounts in America. That means real people, millions of them, are choosing this over traditional banks. That's because banking at Chime is fee free. No monthly fees, no overdraft fees, and thousands of fee free ATMs. But here's the real kicker. If you get their Chime card, it gives you 5% cash back on a category you actually pick yourself. Your savings rate, crazy high, it's nine times the national average.

• 1:36:53Joe Rogan?

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• 1:37:14Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:00Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  The robot loves you, and your potential partners are getting less desirable.

• 1:38:42Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 02

  The robots are getting more desirable.

• 1:38:44Joe Rogan?

  The robot doesn't argue.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:38:45Joe Rogan?

  The robot wants me to play golf, right?

• 1:38:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. So I think, look, I keep waiting for a movement to start in which young people 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.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  I would say this, 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's bad.

• 1:39:35Joe Rogan?

  The problem is that's like such a primary force in our society for almost everything, for selling things, for exemplifying social status.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but nobody's happy. So, given that they're not happy, the answer is, okay, well, I'm doing something-

• 1:39:50Joe Rogan?

  I wouldn't say nobody's happy. I would say happiness is difficult to acquire.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Well, I would say it is rare to find young people who express that they are happy with this part of their life.

• 1:40:06Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever met young people in any time in history while you've been alive that were happy with that process? The process is kind of brutal.

• 1:40:14Speaker 02

  The process kind of sucks, but I've met plenty of people and I've been a happy young person. Not, you know, it's not all, you know, flowers and rainbows, 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.

• 1:40:41Joe Rogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Right? Like, it's not a real place.

• 1:40:43Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:40:44Speaker 02

  And I think that's, 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-

• 1:40:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of that.

• 1:40:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Joe Rogan?

  That is the place where people are going, and 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.

• 1:41:10Speaker 02

  Well, makes sense to me.

• 1:41:11Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Especially if they're looking at the world that, you know, they find themselves and they find their friends in that are just crashing out left and right, and it just seems like a very, very bad path.

• 1:41:23Speaker 02

  I agree. I will say I wish that the religious communities had navigated the landscape of COVID and gender ideology better, that there's, you know, I don't know how healthy those communities are in light of the fact that they seem to have, I don't think universally, but largely failed those tests.

• 1:41:45Joe Rogan?

  Gender ideology with religion, how so?

• 1:41:47Speaker 02

  There's a lot of woke-ism in.

• 1:41:49Joe Rogan?

  Some, some religions, but not traditional religions. It's almost like these break-off versions of a traditional religion. We have a transgender pastor and LGBTQ flag behind them and you get like, but you're always gonna have these weird.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Joe Rogan?

  Offsets.

• 1:42:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'm glad to hear if you, well, did any major religion pass the COVID test?

• 1:42:15Joe Rogan?

  In terms of, well, first of all, almost no institutions passed the COVID test correctly.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:25Joe Rogan?

  None of them.

• 1:42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:27Joe Rogan?

  And I think you have to look towards what they know. It's very easy to look back in 2025 and say, all of these institutions failed the COVID test. Well, I think I probably would have failed it, you know, if I had been a different person in a different job and a different part of my life and I didn't have access to the information that I had access to. I didn't know what games were being played and I didn't know the landscape. I didn't know what games had previously been played, especially in regards to the way the pharmaceutical drug industry distributes propaganda and information and then hires people to gaslight folks. You're seeing this now, right? It's a good way to pivot to this

• 1:43:10Joe Rogan?

  conversation now. You're seeing now this most recent study that showed that without doubt, children were killed by the COVID-19 vaccines. So that's not surprising. But what is surprising to me is the enormous number of gaslighters on social media that are not just denying this data, saying this data is inaccurate and saying far more children, healthy children. Children were killed by COVID-19 than were killed by these vaccinations. There's a bunch of problems with that. First of all, the problem is the reality of the VAERS system. It is a very small percentage of people that have actual vaccine injuries that get recorded into the VAERS system.

• 1:43:55Joe Rogan?

  And then, of course, the opposite side of that, they would say, yeah, but anybody can say they have a vaccine injury and anybody can get their vaccine injury put into the VAERS system, even if it's not accurate. That's kind of true, but also not, because doctors are very incentivized to not put you into the vaccine injury category for a bunch of reasons. One, doctors are financially incentivized to vaccinate people. And this is something that I was not aware of at all until the COVID lockdowns, until the vaccination push.

• 1:44:33Joe Rogan?

  Mary Tally Bowden, who's been on the podcast before, she said that her own practice, a very small practice in a strip mall, she would have made an additional $1.5 million had she vaccinated all of her patients. That's a huge financial motivation for one person with a private practice. Scale that out to large places. You scale that out to large hospitals, large medical institutions, large establishments. And then you have financial incentives that businesses had to vaccinate their employees.

• 1:45:11Joe Rogan?

  And then you had these punitive, you had punishment that would be befalling upon your business had you not met the threshold. If you have more than X amount of people, everyone must be fully vaccinated.

• 1:45:30Joe Rogan?

  Not just had COVID and recovered from it. So it's not logical. You have the antibodies, you're protected. No, no, no. It's vaccinated and then boosted. And then they continued that practice even when it was shown that the vaccine, unlike what we were told initially, did not stop transmission, did not stop infection. It didn't do anything.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:46:06Joe Rogan?

  They did that by measuring troponin levels, correct?

• 1:46:10Speaker 02

  Uh, there are multiple mechanisms.

• 1:46:13Joe Rogan?

  But the way they were trying to phrase it, that more people are getting myocarditis that are unvaccinated than are vaccinated. What they're doing, they were measuring while they were infected, correct?

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  They're measuring proxies. But the problem is the category vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

• 1:46:32Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  Right. By categorizing people as unvaccinated until they reach the category fully vaccinated.

• 1:46:40Joe Rogan?

  Not just that, but two weeks or plus after the injection, you're still up to, you're still considered unvaccinated. So if people died during that time period, they were listed as unvaccinated deaths. Even if they potentially died from the vaccine itself.

• 1:47:00Speaker 02

  Right. In fact.

• 1:47:01Joe Rogan?

  Which is fucking fraud.

• 1:47:03Speaker 02

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

• 1:47:14Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Multiple mechanisms.

• 1:47:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  Multiple mechanisms that actually arise because of the defects of the platform itself, not even the particulars of the COVID vaccine. So I will say, I am very heartened and surprised to see Vinay Prasad putting this memo out within FDA, saying that at least 10 children seem to have died from the vaccines. I don't know if you've read his letter. It's quite good. It is clearly the tip of a much larger iceberg. Those of us who have circulated in communities of the vaccine injured know just how many

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  orders of magnitude more we're really talking about. But he says in the letter, "Look, the number of people of kids who were killed by this is actually higher, but these 10 are ones in which it was so unambiguous that their analysis regards it as causal." Right? In other words, they threw out all of the cases in which somebody died, a child died days later. They took only cases where, you know, a person got the vaccine and then died. So, anyway, I'm heartened because Vinay Prasad has been a mixed bag, in my opinion. He's been pretty good on vaccines. He's been rather terrible on ivermectin.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  And in some ways, he, you know, he's one of the academics who managed to hold on to his position through all of the tyranny, right? Most of the people that you and I know, the Pierre Corys, the Robert Malones, Ryan Coles, these are people who were driven from jobs, had their licenses threatened, that sort of thing. Vinay held on, and then he got a position in the administration, and now we can see in this memo that he's on the right side of history. And he's being cautious, but nonetheless, it's a very positive sign, as is Marty Marquez's

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  recent set of podcast appearances in which he talks about the reality of all sorts of things, including bio-weaponized ticks and things. Yeah. So, we have people in the administration who have managed to hold on to their position in the institutional world, who are seemingly either waking up or telling us what they have understood, and it's a very positive sign.

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  Can we talk a little bit about ivermectin?

• 1:49:59Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:50:05Speaker 02

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

• 1:50:20Joe Rogan?

  Does he not know? Have you communicated with him?

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:50:54Joe Rogan?

  And you also have to take into consideration that for him to even say what he said is a giant risk. Yeah, it's a huge leap. And you almost have, I mean, I think everyone knows anecdotally somebody who was fucked up by the vaccine. Almost everyone that I've ever talked to, other than Sam Harris, almost everyone that I've ever talked to claims they know someone who was irrevocably harmed by the vaccine.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:51:23Joe Rogan?

  If not killed.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:35Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:53Joe Rogan?

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

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:52:00Joe Rogan?

  And then you also have the problem of people that have asserted a very specific thing and done so very aggressively and now realize they're wrong and do not want to admit they're wrong and will fight vehemently to sound... Somehow or another twist, gaslight, obfuscate, use data that they know to be incorrect to try to prove a position that intellectually they must know is not accurate. You see a lot of that to protect themselves, protect ego, to protect their reputation. Their very careers, like the longer they can keep this ruse going and the more they can make the data foggy in terms of like, is it really effective?

• 1:52:44Joe Rogan?

  Did it really save millions of people? Is it worth the risk?

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Those people probably don't listen to your podcast, but to the extent that they might hear this, there is a piece of wisdom that you need, which is however painful it may be to face the error that you've made, you are far better off to face it, right? I'm not saying there's not a big cost, but the weight off your shoulders of setting the record straight with respect to your errors, it's a slam dunk.

• 1:53:19Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:21Speaker 02

  We will get back to Sam Harris in a second here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about, you know, people and this recent memo inside of FDA about children who had no reason to get the COVID vaccine in the first place because they stood to gain nothing from it, dying of it is a, is a, it's beyond criminal negligence. It's unforgivable.

• 1:53:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:54:35Speaker 02

  And we need to get the COVID shots pulled, which again, another thing I want to get back to is Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk and I were working together 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. He sent me a text at one point. I had congratulated him on, I think, the shots having been pulled for no longer being recommended for kids and pregnant women. And he said something, I think it

• 1:55:18Speaker 02

  was, we're doing holy work together. And 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 to ivermectin, we'll return to Charlie a little later. The vaccine story is breaking. Jeanne Prasad is helping it break inside of FDA. That's a marvelous thing. The vaccine committee

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  that Robert Malone is on with Martin Kuldorff and Retzif Levy is also doing excellent work. 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 very personally. You know, you were, I don't know what they did to you. They colored you green.

• 1:56:37Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they made me green on CNN.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  They made you green on CNN. And basically, even people who are awake about the vaccines.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  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, something I want to show you, one of these that I think you probably

• 1:57:32Speaker 02

  haven't seen yet, that makes this point really clearly. So can you bring up that tweet, Alexandros Merinos's tweet on the, I think it's called the principal trial? Anyway, this is shocking. This is another one of these multi-arm platform trials. So these are these highly complex structures in which many drugs are tested simultaneously so that they can share a placebo group. Okay, let's look at the whole tweet. It says, I think that's supposed to be, "No. Did you know that the principal trial out of the UK found that ivermectin was superior

• 1:58:15Speaker 02

  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 way to read this chart-

• 1:58:32Joe Rogan?

  346, page 346.

• 1:58:34Speaker 02

  What did I say?

• 1:58:35Joe Rogan?

  364.

• 1:58:35Speaker 02

  Oh, okay, dyslexia strikes again.

• 1:58:38Joe Rogan?

  If they go back and-

• 1:58:39Speaker 02

  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 with ivermectin on the right and with the usual care on the left. In every single tested category, ivermectin is better than-

• 1:59:16Speaker 02

  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 3mg 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, so you don't spot it unless you go looking for it. But in any case-

• 1:59:58Joe Rogan?

  And overweight people are the most vulnerable.

• 2:00:00Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. So it's a great way of making a drug look not very effective.

• 2:00:04Joe Rogan?

  And a lot of people are overweight.

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So on this plot, every, so you see those horizontal lines, you've got a box in the middle of a bunch of horizontal lines. 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 effectiveness. Okay? And they buried this in this appendix, page 346, right? And, actually, can you scroll down to the next tweet in this thread?

• 2:00:48Speaker 02

  Can you, let's see, click on the link to the paper. Now scroll down, let's get a background, method, stop, go back up a little bit. Interpretation. So this is their take-home message from the paper. It says- Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide a 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

• 2:01:28Speaker 02

  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 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

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  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. Now, there's an even better one, though. There is a... Have you read Pierre Corry's book, The War on Ivermectin? No. Okay. There's something reported in this book that it really stops you in your tracks. It is an accidental natural experiment, okay? So a natural experiment is something

• 2:02:53Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  And they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer ivermectin. Eighty cases. In forty of those cases, the courts granted the family's request and ivermectin was administered. In forty cases, they refused to intervene and no ivermectin was given. In thirty-eight of the cases where ivermectin was given, the patient survived and two, the patient died anyway. In thirty-eight of the cases where no ivermectin was given, the patient died and in two, the patient survived. Wow. Okay.

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  Now, I find this, like, this is incredibly, I cannot vouch for the data itself. 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 didn't make it up, so, assuming that the data is accurate, the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical, right? I had Heather run a chi-squared calculation and the p-value, I checked it also with two

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  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, are something like the chances of you guessing a random 15-digit number on the first try.

• 2:05:21Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  I mean, it's through the roof, right? This is a level of statistical significance we essentially never see.

• 2:05:29Joe Rogan?

  And CNN turned it into veterinary medicine.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  Right, it turned you green.

• 2:05:35Joe Rogan?

  Hilarious.

• 2:05:36Speaker 02

  Right, so my point here is a couple fold. One, the ivermectin story and the repurposed drug story more generally is a very important puzzle piece because if repurposed drugs had been allowed to be used, if doctors had been allowed to go through the normal process of medicine that doctors go through, where they look at a patient who's ill, they see what their symptoms are, they try to figure out what might work for them, they talk to other doctors, they pool their information. If that process had been allowed to unfold, COVID is an entirely manageable disease in all but the most compromised people, right?

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  There was no important pandemic. Repurposed drugs could have addressed it. Instead, what we got was a propaganda campaign in which people like you and me were gaslit and slandered, and the public was fed a story in which we did the work, randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of science, and they tell us that ivermectin is not effective against COVID. This is total nonsense, right? So part of the crime was in denying us the stuff that did work, which then forced people into the stuff that didn't work, that also happened to compromise their health, right? The vaccine. So that's the sum total of the story.

• 2:07:01Joe Rogan?

  Well, the story is really profit, because you've got to get to the motivation of why would one do something like this?

• 2:07:06Speaker 02

  I am still not sure I know. The crime is so ghastly, maybe I'm just naive.

• 2:07:14Joe Rogan?

  Let's hold this thought because I have to pee real bad.

• 2:07:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:16Joe Rogan?

  But I want to get to it from here, and I don't want to be compromised.

• 2:07:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:07:19Joe Rogan?

  All right, we're back. All right, so ivermectin, where were we with it?

• 2:07:27Speaker 02

  Well, one, the evidence is actually really powerful that ivermectin works. It also reveals something about what's wrong with medical science at the moment. Because what's really going on here is we don't

• 2:07:48Speaker 02

  Correctly respond when we are told that randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific tests. Randomized controlled trials, in principle, are capable of doing something best in class, and that is revealing very subtle effects. However, they are very prone to being distorted by biases of the researchers. And in these cases of the together trial, and the principal trial, and the others, what you seem to have is a cottage industry of generating results that are favorable to the pharma regime.

• 2:08:29Speaker 02

  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, where the particular endpoints that are targeted are adjusted to make some drugs look good and other drugs look bad, all of those are places where fraud can hide.

• 2:09:09Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 2:09:50Speaker 02

  But if the data is what it says it is, then the result leaves no question whatsoever that ivermectin works in very sick people relative to an endpoint of death. That's a very powerful kind of evidence. And, you know, I was recently on a podcast called, "Why Should I Trust You?"

• 2:10:13Speaker 02

  With Pierre Corey, actually. We were at the CHD conference in this podcast.

• 2:10:17Joe Rogan?

  Great name for a podcast.

• 2:10:18Speaker 02

  It is a great name for a podcast. And actually, I loved the podcast. The podcast was, we didn't really know what we were sitting down to, 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 Pierre and I told them about the accidental 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

• 2:10:57Speaker 02

  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 fraud is a serious problem.

• 2:11:13Joe Rogan?

  Why did they have a problem with the data?

• 2:11:16Speaker 02

  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 so I think there's a natural reaction to reject that which seems, 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

• 2:11:58Speaker 02

  with very powerful, in fact, if the data is what it's supposed to be, incontrovertible proof, and I don't use the word proof lightly, but you know.

• 2:12:10Speaker 02

  P equals 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15. That is an amazing level of statistical significance.

• 2:12:18Joe Rogan?

  How did the conversation play out? Like, when you gave them this data, when you discussed this?

• 2:12:23Speaker 02

  Well, what they said was, "Well, there could be lots of explanations for that," which is not true, right? Really...

• 2:12:31Joe Rogan?

  And what explanations did they provide as possible?

• 2:12:36Speaker 02

  I think they were reserving the right to go find some explanation. Because, think about it this way.

• 2:12:43Joe Rogan?

  Was this in front of a crowd?

• 2:12:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:12:46Joe Rogan?

  No, okay.

• 2:12:48Speaker 02

  Let's imagine how this experiment could not, could be something other than it seems to be, right? Let's say that the courts were biased in who they granted the right to have ivermectin 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 were...

• 2:13:28Joe Rogan?

  Right, that would be logical.

• 2:13:29Speaker 02

  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? So, in any case, I just think we've forgotten how science works, right? It doesn't take any, all of the money and 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,

• 2:14:13Speaker 02

  and you discover that actually, you know, they, they're playing games. They're telling you, like, let me give you an example.

• 2:14:23Speaker 02

  You can create the impression that a drug doesn't work by setting an unrealistic endpoint. Like if I, let's say that I had a drug that was perfectly successful at 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 endpoint of the experiment is 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.

• 2:15:07Speaker 02

  So the point is it makes the drug look totally ineffective. That's one trick you can play. You can also underdose it. You know, one of the games played in the principal trial is 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?

• 2:15:31Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you've completely recovered.

• 2:15:32Speaker 02

  Right. So anyway, there's all kinds of games and the point is actually, we do not, you know how when you go to buy a car, nobody prioritizes the simple vehicle, right? The point is what they sell you is the features, right? This car has all of these different new features that your last one didn't. But there's no value placed on, actually, I want fewer features. I want 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.

• 2:16:17Speaker 02

  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 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, 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.

• 2:16:50Joe Rogan?

  So in the case of this podcast, how did you guys resolve it? How did it end?

• 2:16:53Speaker 02

  Well, it actually ended really well. I hope people will go listen to it. 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 in a way that is not the usual these days. So anyway, I thought it was a very encouraging.

• 2:17:18Joe Rogan?

  Well, I think 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 window has shifted.

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  Yes, although I find it shifted radically on vaccines and in large measure because ivermectin was made difficult to get and people were spooked away from it. It's a much more abstract question to most people.

• 2:17:47Joe Rogan?

  Well, just the sheer propaganda that was, the amount of propaganda was preposterous. It was unbelievable. Rolling Stone magazine, remember that article that they had about people that were waiting in line at the emergency room for gunshot wounds? Because so many people were overdosing on horse medication.

• 2:18:08Speaker 02

  Overdosed on ivermectin, which is virtually impossible.

• 2:18:11Joe Rogan?

  It's pure lies. Not only that, they used a stock photo of people in Oklahoma in August with winter coats on.

• 2:18:19Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Yeah, the propaganda was.

• 2:18:22Joe Rogan?

  Fucking, it was designed for idiots.

• 2:18:25Speaker 02

  It was designed for idiots.

• 2:18:26Joe Rogan?

  By idiots for idiots. They just like, they didn't care how provable it was, how quick it was to, you could research it very quickly and find out that this is not true. You could visit those hospitals and find out it's not true. You could look up the cases of people that were overdosing. Dosing on ivermectin, which didn't exist.

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:18:46Joe Rogan?

  There's a few people that called the poison control hotline because they panicked.

• 2:18:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, they worried.

• 2:18:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Speaker 02

  That's not the same thing as being poisoned.

• 2:18:52Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:18:53Speaker 02

  Well, what I want people to understand is that all of those vaccine injuries are actually downstream of the propaganda campaign about repurposed drugs. Because this was a manageable disease with well-known repurposed drugs that were readily available, there was no argument for these vaccines in anybody. Right?

• 2:19:15Joe Rogan?

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• 2:19:57Joe Rogan?

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• 2:20:38Joe Rogan?

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• 2:21:18Speaker 02

  This was an experimental technology that was fraught with dangers that turned out to be massive harms.

• 2:21:26Joe Rogan?

  But the gaslighting was all about profit because of the emergency use authorization. So to have the emergency use authorization, you couldn't have any effective drugs that existed to treat it, right? Otherwise, you wouldn't have had an emergency use authorization for a new drug that hasn't really been tested.

• 2:21:41Speaker 02

  I don't think that's what happened.

• 2:21:43Joe Rogan?

  What do you think it is?

• 2:21:44Speaker 02

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

• 2:21:46Joe Rogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

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

• 2:22:13Joe Rogan?

  So you think this was all about rolling out the mRNA platform for many other purposes other than just COVID? This is just the introduction to this? And we've actually heard talk about this. It's going to be used to treat all these different diseases and cancer and this and that.

• 2:22:29Speaker 02

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

• 2:22:57Joe Rogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

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

• 2:23:25Joe Rogan?

  Was that in?

• 2:23:25Speaker 02

  Uh, masks.

• 2:23:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 2:23:27Speaker 02

  I thought masks stood a decent chance of being useful. And at the point that it turned out, there was no evidentiary support for that, I said so. I still think, you know, given that we didn't know at the beginning whether or not COVID was transmitted by fomite, in other words, by droplets on surfaces, something that covers your face and prevents you from coughing out droplets or touching a droplet to your, your mouth is a decent bet. But anyway, okay, so my error was, was masks. I don't think Sam has acknowledged any of his errors.

• 2:24:08Speaker 02

  And he said some really aggressive stuff about me. And I think recently he's said some stuff about you. And he's actually still beating this drum about your podcast killing people. Am I right about that?

• 2:24:25Joe Rogan?

  Allegedly. I, I don't listen to any things he says anymore because it's depressing. Sam is the reason for the joke that I had in my special. We lost a lot of people during COVID and most of them are still alive.

• 2:24:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:24:38Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:25:23Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:26:03Joe Rogan?

  protection. I go, I just got through it pretty easily. Like, I am a healthy 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 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 the kitchen sink at it.

• 2:26:43Speaker 02

  I remember.

• 2:26:43Joe Rogan?

  And I'm better.

• 2:26:44Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:26:45Joe Rogan?

  And CNN's response was to turn me green and to say that I'm promoting dangerous horse dewarmer, and that it's misinformation that's gonna cost people's lives. And the fact that Sam is still saying that it costs 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 these vaccines have caused serious injuries and death to people that didn't need them, I would say you caused death. Especially if

• 2:27:27Joe Rogan?

  you're a person that people high, that people hold, rather, in very high esteem. For someone that people respect their opinion and, and take it very seriously, and would refer to them as an expert.

• 2:27:40Speaker 02

  I, I totally agree with you. And there's something just weird about...

• 2:27:46Speaker 02

  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 dictats, all knew that natural immunity was the best immunity you were going to get, right?

• 2:28:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  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 going to 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 going to occupy them. So, one of the mechanisms by which a vaccine can actually make you 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. So, Sam is saying something nonsensical. Sanjay Gupta was saying something nonsensical.

• 2:29:58Speaker 02

  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 just simply not saying something analytically robust. And I would also point out, you know...

• 2:30:15Speaker 02

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

• 2:30:24Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:30:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:30:29Joe Rogan?

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

• 2:30:32Speaker 02

  Right. 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.

• 2:31:03Joe Rogan?

  I would agree with that.

• 2:31:04Speaker 02

  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

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:31:57Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:59Speaker 02

  I don't know. I hope Sam can find his way back.

• 2:32:01Joe Rogan?

  I think Sam has a real problem with admitting wrong. Admitting you're wrong requires you to admit that you're fallible, 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-

• 2:32:27Joe Rogan?

  Deliver this propaganda that was this was the only way out of this, you had to get vaccinated. And I think a lot of it was he had an initial 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 I don't know what treatment they got. I don't know what the 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. And wind up getting very fucked up by it. I think that scared him. And I think he was initially, he was one of the bigger, like the people that I was in contact with,

• 2:33:10Joe Rogan?

  that was warning me that this is not the flu, this is really dangerous. And I took it to heart. And like I've publicly said many times, I was not just willing to get the vaccine, I tried to get it. The UFC allocated, this early on in covid, UFC allocated 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 it was like a flu vaccine. I'd take a flu shot and go commentate, it wouldn't even bother me. I don't think, maybe I'd feel a little bad, but it would be fine. I'd drink coffee, whatever, I'd be, I'd be okay. That was my position. And I couldn't, I would have to go to the clinic.

• 2:33:51Joe Rogan?

  They told me, can you come back on Monday? I said, I cannot, but I'll be back in two weeks for the next fights, we'll do it then. In that time period, the vaccine was pulled. It was the Johnson at Johnson. 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. And 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, alright, 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 and I didn't get it. And I'm like, okay, well, this isn't what everybody's saying it is.

• 2:34:35Joe Rogan?

  It's clearly not what everybody's saying it is, especially not to. I would, I would say on the healthy scale, I'm, I'm an outlier. I'm very healthy because I spent a lot of time working on it. Yep. And I don't think you should punish people that are unhealthy, I don't think, but I also don't think you should punish me and force me to take a medication out of the guys that it's to protect the people that are unhealthy if this fucking stuff works. Because if it works, they should take it and they'll be protected. It didn't make any sense that everybody who is not vulnerable was gonna have to take this medication. It was just complete illogical thinking. Does it work? Does it stop transmission? Does it stop infection? That's the initial assertion. If it works, I don't need to take it.

• 2:35:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:35:20Joe Rogan?

  They need to take it and I'm the fool if I don't take it. None of this made any sense, but it was just like cult thinking. It was like it had become this, we had been isolated, this bizarre psychology experiment had been done on every living human on the planet. We'd all been isolated, removed from everybody. A lot of people had been forbidden to go to work, people were working remotely. Everyone was like huddled together in fear without any contact with the outside world for a prolonged period of time. And in California, which I think to this day is probably the most devastated by it psychologically. I was back recently, people are still wearing fucking masks. People are still putting masks on when they go into Starbucks, it's bananas.

• 2:36:04Joe Rogan?

  There's a bunch of people like that, like way more than you see in Texas. If I see someone with a mask in Texas, I assume it's either a very vulnerable person who's filled with anxiety, is mentally ill, or severely immunocompromised, someone with cancer, someone's going through chemotherapy, what have you, which makes sense.

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:36:21Joe Rogan?

  But the, the, the, the psychology aspect of it was very strange because people just thought that this one solution was the only way out and if you resisted this solution, you were keeping them from returning to a normal life and you were a fucking problem. And I saw people that I knew, that I was friends with, that were referring to unvaccinated people as plague rats online. I was like, this is crazy. You're so unhealthy. I wanted to post, but I'm not a mean person. I don't want to attack people. But I was like, I know you motherfucker. You eat donuts all day. You haven't worked out a day in your life. And now you're telling everyone that they have to do this, or they're the problem?

• 2:37:03Joe Rogan?

  Like, you're so vulnerable to everything. You have no vitamins in your system. And you're out there telling me that the only way for me to get healthy is that I have to get vaccinated. I have to get injected with some experimental gene therapy? And that's the only way? Even after I've gotten the fucking cold and gotten over it? This is pure madness with no objective analysis of all the details and the facts and of a logical conclusion, a logical breakdown of their perspective on what this thing was. No, it was all group think. It was all adherence to this one doctrine. There's the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.

• 2:37:47Joe Rogan?

  I had people on my podcast, like, this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated. Shut the fuck up, you parrot. Like, are you a man? Are you an actual human being? How the fuck did we survive a million years of evolution to get to you? You fucking bag of milk? Like, what are you talking about? Everybody has to do what you did? You're not even healthy. This is so crazy. You're jumping into the game in the fourth quarter and telling people how to play. Like, you didn't play the game. You didn't do a di- you sat on the fucking bench. You did nothing. And now all of a sudden, you're talking about health? This is crazy. It's like the moment that I had Peter Hotez on.

• 2:38:27Joe Rogan?

  And we're, you know, this is back when I was like, very pro-vaccine. I had him on because I had talked to him early on, way before the pandemic, when I did a television show in 2012. I found it to be very interesting. He did a lot of work on infectious diseases, particularly oddly enough, and ironically enough, on parasites. You know, which is what ivermectin is so good for. He was talking a lot about parasites in tropical climates and how so many people have parasites. And this is a giant issue that he works very hard to discuss and to educate people on and to, you know, find solutions for. And for that guy to be sitting on the podcast and then I started saying, you know, what do you eat? Do you work out? Oh, I'm kind of a junk food junkie. I eat a lot of candy. Like, what? What?

• 2:39:13Joe Rogan?

  Like, what do you think you're made out of, man? Do you, okay, if you know anything about biology, your fucking cells are literally constructed based on the food that you eat. It's the only thing they have. It's all you have to, to keep your body robust and vital. Your, your, your body needs protein, it needs vitamins, it needs carbohydrates, it needs all these things. They've been documented. You're ignoring that? Because you like mouth pleasure. You're obese? You're ignoring that. You don't work out. You're not fit. Your body's not robust. You don't sauna? You, you probably don't take any vitamins.

• 2:39:58Joe Rogan?

  Like, this is crazy that you're giving out advice and you're doing it publicly. You're publicly discussing all these things as if it's not that big of a deal that you don't do these other things. Because you, vaccines are very important. You know what's fucking important is be healthy. The, the fact that you can ignore that while giving advice is wild. Just absolutely wild.

• 2:40:25Speaker 02

  Well, it raises two things. One, in Peter Hotez's case, um, he 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 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. The health of the terrain dictates how vulnerable you are to the germs. And a very healthy person has very low vulnerability, you know? Um, and a lifetime of abuse makes you highly vulnerable.

• 2:41:10Speaker 02

  And people, like, people like Hotez don't get it. I, I remember that interaction that you had with him. Uh, goes to Shake Shack with his daughter.

• 2:41:18Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:41:19Speaker 02

  His daughter who has autism and, uh, he swears it's not the vaccines. Um, but in any-

• 2:41:27Joe 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 could- 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 because I'd want to warn other people.

• 2:41:47Speaker 02

  Right. It would be on billboards.

• 2:41:49Joe Rogan?

  He's an expert who wrote a book about his daughter, right? And he couldn't tell me what those environmental factors are that contribute to autism rates being higher.

• 2:41:58Speaker 02

  He's an expert, in quotes.

• 2:42:03Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just the limited thinking. And I like Peter as a person. Outside of all this stuff, my interactions with him, but nothing but pleasant. I, you know, I try to be as nice as possible.

• 2:42:13Speaker 02

  I know.

• 2:42:13Joe Rogan?

  I try to be as charitable as possible. But that ability to live a life that is measurably, demonstrably unhealthy, like clearly unhealthy, and yet be talking about health. That kind of thinking is wild. It's wild thinking.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  It's hypocritical.

• 2:42:36Joe 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, just a guy who's like asking you questions. And it's so blunt, so obvious by your response that 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

• 2:43:19Joe Rogan?

  with 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?

• 2:43:36Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  Well, there's something very wrong with our entire approach to public health. And hopefully, we are going to confront it because they've effectively 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

• 2:44:27Speaker 02

  that I had said many, many times 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,

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  you and I both think that 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.

• 2:45:37Joe Rogan?

  How do you know he stopped getting boosters?

• 2:45:39Speaker 02

  Because he said so. I believe he said so.

• 2:45:42Joe Rogan?

  Did he say why? How many did he get?

• 2:45:44Speaker 02

  That I don't know.

• 2:45:45Joe Rogan?

  That might be also part of the problem.

• 2:45:47Speaker 02

  But my feeling, huh, it could be.

• 2:45:48Joe Rogan?

  Well, that is an issue that people are discussing. There's a mental decline in people that have had too many of these boosters because of the impact that it has on the body.

• 2:45:57Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing.

• 2:45:57Joe Rogan?

  Which is really wild.

• 2:45:58Speaker 02

  It is a, oh, and this is another thing that people need to understand about it. We are way too focused on myocarditis and pericarditis. This is a random tissue, maybe not random, haphazard tissue destroying technology, the platform itself, right? It's like rolling the dice on destroying cells. There are cells in your body you can afford to lose, and there are other cells in the body that you can't afford to lose. And if you take a bunch of boosters, each time you take one, you're rolling the dice on losing a bunch of cells that you may or may not be able to afford losing. So the fact that that includes things in the nervous system, well, of course it does. It's completely haphazard.

• 2:46:39Speaker 02

  So, anyway, what I don't get is somebody who obviously believes in rigorous thought must believe in correcting their course when they've got something wrong. That's the key to rigorous analytical thought. And yet, in this case, he appears, it's, I mean, ironically enough, coming from Sam, it's faith. He has faith that whatever he said must have been right, even if he has to do that little trick he does where it's like, well, if the facts had been different, then I would have been right.

• 2:47:17Joe Rogan?

  That thing was crazy.

• 2:47:18Speaker 02

  What is that?

• 2:47:19Joe Rogan?

  That argument was the most bizarre, and that was the first conversation that I had with him, where he was upset that we were making fun of that. No, that actually was the second. The first one was him asking me to get vaccinated. The second one was this, we were talking about how crazy it is to say that if it killed a bunch of kids, then of course you would have to take it. Like, what? What?

• 2:47:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 2:47:40Joe Rogan?

  Well, if I was right, then I would be right. Basically saying like if the the disease was way worse and I was right, then I'm right. But the disease wasn't that and you weren't right and they didn't have to say, what the fuck are you saying?

• 2:47:54Speaker 02

  Right, and other people were right. And again, you could be on the same level with all the people who got it more right than you if you were simply decent about what it meant to disagree.

• 2:48:05Joe Rogan?

  So, let me explain this. So this conversation was after we'd talked about this on the podcast and I thought I handled it very charitably. He was upset that people were gonna attack him, so he called me and we talked. He wanted to talk to me. And I said that I won't do it until you talk to Brett. He's terrified to talk to you. He he claims to be willing to sit down and talk to everybody. He said he won't platform you or something about the disinformation that you spread. Have a conversation with him. But it's like a guy who knows he can't beat up Mike Tyson. He's like, fuck Mike Tyson. Like, why don't you go say it to his face? I don't, no, I don't have a desire to be in the room with that guy. I'm like, I'll fuck that guy if I see him, but I'm not gonna see him.

• 2:48:46Joe Rogan?

  I'm gonna, you know, it's like he's avoiding you. And he's avoiding you because he has said so many things that are incorrect, that are provably incorrect. And he has not admitted any of that. So he has the burden of this, these years of saying all this incorrect stuff and then being supported by a bunch of other people that have also said a bunch of incorrect stuff and they all kind of group up together and gang up and talk in the comments and then they get destroyed by everybody else. It's kind of wild to watch, like, some of these posts and the chaos that goes on in the comment section. It's just the complete dissolving of the appreciation of him as an intellectual.

• 2:49:32Joe Rogan?

  It's like we've watched it, he's destroyed it in front of our eyes. Like, so many people that I talked to that used to love Sam Harris will tell me like, I used to love that guy. What the fuck happened to him?

• 2:49:42Speaker 02

  Oh, the people who are angriest at him are people who were devoted fans of his. I don't know if he even knows that.

• 2:49:48Joe Rogan?

  No, I don't think they know it either. Well, I'm one of them, you know? I think you you gotta parse out.

• 2:49:56Joe Rogan?

  The correct things that a person said from the incorrect things that a person said. I think Sam's had some pretty spectacular debates in the past. I thought they were fantastic. He's a great thinker and a great speaker. But he's just been so wrong on this for so long that he's stuck. And so now he's not making sense.

• 2:50:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's stuck. And I would say, you know, look, the principle that you and I shared, Sam, where it doesn't matter how painful it is to admit that you were wrong. You're just far better off doing it at whatever point.

• 2:50:26Joe Rogan?

  But if he thinks he's right, have a fucking seat across the table from Mr. Weinstein and talk. And he don't want to do that. He wants to talk to me. He says that I'm responsible for people's deaths. He said that my show is a cultural disaster. I think that was the quote that he used.

• 2:50:44Speaker 02

  Right. And in fact,

• 2:50:45Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 2:50:46Speaker 02

  I think it makes the same point as this accidental natural experiment run by the courts. Right? Is the Joe Rogan experience like the, you know, the gold standard of how to make intellectual progress?

• 2:51:04Joe Rogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 2:51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, look at your table.

• 2:51:08Joe Rogan?

  No. Mammoth teeth and I got a fucking, an olmec head here and wolf tooth. I got a wolf tooth.

• 2:51:15Speaker 02

  Right. This is the methods, the methods section tells the tale. On the other hand, on the other hand, by, you know, how, by what degree did you beat Sam Harris, whose method amounted to listening to the right people? Right? The right people were lying. I don't exactly know why they were lying. I don't know how they got there. Maybe it's a wide range of explanations. But the point is actually the

• 2:51:43Speaker 02

  method that you used, which was talking to people and hearing them out and challenging, challenging them when they said stuff that didn't make sense. That method worked pretty well. Were you going to get the shot? You were. Did you get it? No. Did you end up avoiding it? You know, did you get wise fast enough to stay away from it? You did. Did you have ivermectin when you got sick? You had it available and you used it. These things worked well. And I guess the point is this is a classic case of the proof is in the pudding. Right? You, I will take. That accidental, natural experiment run by the courts over some fancy randomized

• 2:52:27Speaker 02

  control trial where I can't even figure out what they did and why they kept moving the goalposts in the middle of it any day of the week.

• 2:52:34Joe Rogan?

  Not only that, but of one that was funded and designed specifically to achieve a desired result, and if it didn't, they hid it.

• 2:52:41Speaker 02

  Right. So, the point is, we should just be way more ready to say, "I don't know what that complicated thing is, but it doesn't look reasonable. And then here's some stuff that actually I can be pretty sure I can check myself. There's nothing that can hide in the statistics of a chi-square test. So, all I need to know is, is the data accurately represented?" And then the chi-square test leaves nowhere to hide shenanigans. So, I radically prefer that style of method rather than the fancy stuff. And I think people

• 2:53:22Speaker 02

  are just addicted to, you know, the highest tech version of everything, whether it's a drug, or stats, or whatever.

• 2:53:30Joe Rogan?

  It would be great if we knew that there's never been a time ever where they lied during these studies. There's never been scientists that were bribed, like the whole sugar versus saturated fat thing. This has been too many times where the course of civilization has been altered because of fraudulent studies. I mean, that's, you could demonstrate that really quickly with a good, quick AI search. You could find all the different times where that's been the case, where studies have been proven to not just been inaccurate, but then the drug gets released, kills a bunch of people, and gets pulled off of the market. And then they go through the studies, and they realize, "Well, there's 10 studies that showed that there was real fucking problems." So, they buried those studies, and then rigged

• 2:54:14Joe Rogan?

  one study with very specific parameters to try to show some... Statistically significant result that was very small, just so they could sell these drugs.

• 2:54:23Speaker 02

  Right. It's, it's, I call it the game of pharma. And the idea is they are trying to own a piece of intellectual property.

• 2:54:31Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:31Speaker 02

  To find a plausible use case for it, to portray it as safer than existing drugs, whether or not it is, to portray it as more effective than existing drugs, whether or not it is. And if they manage to do those things, it starts spitting out money.

• 2:54:47Joe Rogan?

  I think the best example of that is probably AZT used during the AIDS pandemic. Because AZT, look, to come up with a new drug, it took a long time. You had to develop it, you had to do this. But they knew that they had a drug that wasn't being used anymore because it was so problematic in use as a chemotherapy, that it was killing people quicker than cancer was. So what did they do? They just said, well, we'll take this drug that we already own and we could already sell. And now we'll prescribe it to people that have HIV, which killed them. And killed a lot of people that were asymptomatic, which is really wild. You know, people that had tested positive for HIV, presumably, probably during, with a PCR method, right? There was a lot of them. That was one of the things that Kerry Mullis famously was talking about Fauci.

• 2:55:32Joe Rogan?

  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.

• 2:55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:55:39Joe Rogan?

  And it was in regards to the AIDS crisis. He'd done, I believe he'd done that interview in the 1990s. And he was saying that that's not a way to detect whether or not someone is infected with a fucking disease. That's not what it's intended for.

• 2:55:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:56:07Joe Rogan?

  And the admission in false positives with COVID is through the roof. I mean, false positives were an immense part of the situation.

• 2:56:14Speaker 02

  Well, you know, this is why when you say

• 2:56:18Speaker 02

  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

• 2:57:00Speaker 02

  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?

• 2:57:22Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:23Speaker 02

  Like shortly before.

• 2:57:24Joe Rogan?

  Explain that to people.

• 2:57:25Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 2:58:08Speaker 02

  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 think there's a, there's a meaning to it, right? 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

• 2:58:51Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:59:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and people would just say that was a coincidence, that they did that.

• 2:59:14Speaker 02

  And it 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, 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.

• 2:59:55Speaker 02

  And we emerged to this military checkpoint at which you transition from out of contact to back in contact. And so we're sort of looking at our phones, and 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 the zoonotic, this, that, and the other. And because I was a bat biologist, I Briefly looked into it, figured out who the bats in question were, where the

• 3:00:36Speaker 02

  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 four laboratory studying these very viruses? And I thought, first of all, what's a biosafety level four laboratory? And then I thought, well, maybe that's not a piece of information worth processing if there are a thousand laboratories studying these viruses. But if there's only one, then I just got it wrong. Then this

• 3:01:19Speaker 02

  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, I take back what I said. The story may not be what it appears to be.

• 3:01:34Joe Rogan?

  This is very, very early on.

• 3:01:36Speaker 02

  It's right. It's my first awareness. It took exactly one hour.

• 3:01:39Joe Rogan?

  How did this other guy know about the biosafety lab already?

• 3:01:42Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know.

• 3:01:43Joe Rogan?

  What's his background or her background?

• 3:01:46Speaker 02

  It's an anonymous account. He still follows me, but I don't, I don't know what his background was.

• 3:01:51Joe Rogan?

  Probably a fed.

• 3:01:52Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 3:01:53Joe Rogan?

  Whistleblower, someone from China?

• 3:01:54Speaker 02

  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 of weeks behind.

• 3:02:00Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 3:02:01Speaker 02

  And so anyway, but anyway, 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, just by pure accident. So that was like the, you know, the beginning of my being red pilled on COVID was getting schooled over biosafety level four laboratories studying bat coronaviruses in the exact place where this thing emerges.

• 3:02:29Speaker 02

  So in any case, point is, if there were 1,000 biosafety level four labs studying bat coronaviruses, then the fact that there happened to be one nearby where this virus showed up wouldn't necessarily mean anything. But if there's only one, it means a ton. If there were a tabletop exercise per year simulating a pandemic, then the fact that there happened to be one right before COVID wouldn't be very meaningful. But if there aren't one a year, then it is highly significant that something happened. It's a conspicuous piece of evidence. Of what, I don't know. But I think we need to understand how it works.

• 3:03:10Speaker 04

  Did you ever hear this?

• 3:03:11Joe Rogan?

  Crimson contagion was a joint exercise conducted from January to August 2019 in which numerous national, state, and local and private organizations in the US participated in order to test the capacity of the federal government and 12 states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China. Whoa.

• 3:03:30Speaker 04

  I've never even heard anybody talk about that. There's an article posted in the New York Times on March 19th, 2020 about that.

• 3:03:38Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 3:03:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, March 19th.

• 3:03:41Joe Rogan?

  Wow. Okay, before virus outbreak, a cascade of warnings went unheeded. Government exercises, including one last year, made it clear the US government was not ready for a pandemic like the coronavirus, but little was done. That's one way to put it. You know, it showed they weren't ready.

• 3:04:01Speaker 02

  Well.

• 3:04:01Joe Rogan?

  It might be they were preparing for whatever the hell this was that they knew was going to come.

• 3:04:06Speaker 02

  Well, and you know, I think what I now know as somebody who got educated by the pandemic is they were very ready. Not ready in the way that you and I would want them ready.

• 3:04:18Joe Rogan?

  Not ready with cures.

• 3:04:19Speaker 02

  Right. Not ready with ways to protect the public, to inform them and how to behave and all of that. What they were ready with was a campaign of lies designed to do what? That I don't know. Like, if the idea was to make money, I don't know why they delivered such a dangerous shot. Seems to me, and I've wondered a lot about this, if they had delivered an inert shot.

• 3:04:51Speaker 02

  I don't know what world we'd be living in today because they could have pretended that it was highly effective, that it saved us from the terrible disease, that those of us who worried about the technology were wrong. They could have used their statistical shenanigans to pretend that anything had happened. And they seem to me to have screwed up, having delivered a shot dangerous enough that we can all detect the safety signal among our friends, right? So that raises the question to me. Did they not understand that it was as dangerous as it was? I don't think that can be true. Based on what we know from Robert Malone about the history of this technology, they didn't think it

• 3:05:34Speaker 02

  was safe. So is there something important about injecting people with it? Do they want people actually injected with the thing? That's not consistent with the argument that they were just trying to make money, right? Because blanks would have been safe, not effective, but what they gave us wasn't effective. What was the purpose of injecting people with a contaminated, dangerous novel platform so-called vaccine?

• 3:06:01Joe Rogan?

  When you say contaminated, do you think they realized that it was contaminated? And by contaminated, we're talking about SV40, we're talking about DNA.

• 3:06:09Speaker 02

  I think they knew. Yes, they had to know that it was contaminated.

• 3:06:17Joe Rogan?

  So what would be the motivation to do something like that? It doesn't even make sense, other than money. And the money was substantial, right? To dismiss the money aspect of it, when you talk about hundreds of billions of dollars.

• 3:06:28Speaker 02

  Okay, but if we're going to talk about the money, then we have to put the money in the proper context.

• 3:06:33Joe Rogan?

  Okay.

• 3:06:34Speaker 02

  The huge amount of money that was made on the mRNA platform during the pandemic is nothing compared to the money that will be made from the mRNA platform in the aftermath of the pandemic, except that because podcast world caused the dangerousness of the vaccine campaign to become famous.

• 3:06:59Joe Rogan?

  And that's not an understatement. Imagine if we had to live off the narrative of the mainstream television.

• 3:07:06Speaker 02

  Well, this is why the First Amendment is this absolute

• 3:07:12Speaker 02

  Must be protected at all costs question, right? The censorship, you know, just as the ivermectin story doesn't get enough play because really the ivermectin story is the flip side of the vaccine story. The vaccine campaign wouldn't have worked if people had safe alternatives, of which there were many. Okay? The vaccines were... Would it have been possible if censorship had succeeded in masking the safety signal from the public? I think probably yes.

• 3:07:53Speaker 02

  Something about the way podcast world functioned allowed us to break through, but we are now in danger of whoever these people are having understood what their errors were and working to correct them for next time. Which actually brings me to another matter. It's a little strange, but I do want people to be aware. They may have noticed Michael Burry, who was a famous character from The Big Short,

• 3:08:35Speaker 02

  the real broker who's represented in The Big Short by Christian Bale, has been sounding the alarm about bubbles in the stock market. I'm concerned that there is also a great deal of fraud in the stock market. So these are two different mechanisms by which the wealth of average people gets transferred to well-positioned people who have better information.

• 3:09:17Speaker 02

  The degree to which the stock market may be overvalued is substantial. And I don't know if you've been tracking, have you ever read The Great Taking? No. The Great Taking is a very good, very scary, short book. David Webb is the author. And what he describes is a trap that we in the public have been subjected to that we don't know is there yet because it hasn't been tripped. And what he argues is that there are a great many assets that we think we hold, that we

• 3:09:59Speaker 02

  believe we understand our relationship to, that are actually poised to be taken from us in a financial collapse. So, for example, stocks used to be held in paper form. You had stock certificates in your safe, right? And so the laws that govern physical ownership governed them by virtue of the fact that this piece of paper was your indication of ownership. The way we own stocks has now changed. So if you have stocks, you don't have a stock certificate. Your stocks are held in sort of the same way that your cryptocurrency is held if it's in an exchange.

• 3:10:42Speaker 02

  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 solvent, then it's the same. You can use it, you can take it out, you can put it in. 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.

• 3:11:26Speaker 02

  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, or the debtors in question aren't going to go insolvent.

• 3:11:50Speaker 02

  But, okay. 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. 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

• 3:12:26Speaker 02

  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

• 3:13:11Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 3:13:48Speaker 02

  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."

• 3:14:32Speaker 02

  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 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

• 3:15:13Speaker 02

  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...

• 3:15:25Joe Rogan?

  Very unlikely.

• 3:15:26Speaker 02

  That's what I think, too. So, anyway, hopefully...

• 3:15:31Joe Rogan?

  We know this, but just based on Elon buying Twitter and the examination of the Twitter files.

• 3:15:37Speaker 02

  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...

• 3:16:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:16:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and we're seeing the consequences 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 Irishman, God, I can't remember his name, I believe he's a religious guy who's a schoolteacher who refused to address someone by their transgender pronouns, and now he's being jailed?

• 3:17:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:17:12Joe Rogan?

  And 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.

• 3:17:19Speaker 02

  I'm aware of that.

• 3:17:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, which is crazy. And you're having trials just by judges, and the judge will just appoint a sentence.

• 3:17:28Speaker 02

  Right. It's apocalyptically bad if you understand what our, what the West is based on.

• 3:17:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:41Speaker 02

  You're watching a shining example of Western freedoms getting pushed over the cliff, right? And, you know, it's not, 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 grooming gangs raping young women. And talking about it is understood it's wrong think, right? That acknowledging that you have an immigration problem and that there's a, a dynamic in play that involves certain populations that are prone.

• 3:18:31Speaker 02

  To seeing the British people not as their countrymen, but as something else, as prey.

• 3:18:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 3:18:55Joe Rogan?

  And that same society is having digital ID pushed on them.

• 3:18:59Speaker 02

  Yes, they are. And their ability to discuss the wisdom of this is, of course, downstream of their right to speak freely. So, I mean, I will say, I have multiple friends in the UK who are all looking at the system and thinking about getting out.

• 3:19:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I do, too. I know quite a few.

• 3:19:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19:20Joe Rogan?

  It's spooky.

• 3:19:21Speaker 02

  It's beyond spooky because, 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.

• 3:19:36Joe Rogan?

  Right, clearly. Just the Twitter files alone just shows you what happens when intelligence agencies get involved in distribution of actual factual information and they suppress it.

• 3:19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:19:50Joe Rogan?

  Whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story, which Sam Harris also had a wild take on. Like, that was, he didn't care if Hunter Biden, 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? I don't, I get, you're trying to be hyperbolic and you're trying to be, you know, entertaining, but that's fucking crazy to say.

• 3:20:13Speaker 02

  Well, and, you know, the, what he was trying to say is absurd.

• 3:20:21Joe Rogan?

  That Trump is really bad.

• 3:20:22Speaker 02

  Well, as always, that's what he's trying to say. But in this case, what he was really trying to say is Hunter Biden isn't Joe. But that's not really true because Hunter Biden and Joe are tied together in their corruption. And that's obvious from the fact that Hunter Biden was at Burisma on the board, making deals in Ukraine, which then breaks out into war, a war whose purpose, I'm not sure we understand, seems to have multiple purposes, a money laundering operation.

• 3:20:57Speaker 02

  You know, who knows? I mean, all sorts of ghastly things are possible, but we out here in public are forced to guess at the meaning of all of these events. And when Sam says that it wouldn't matter if Hunter Biden had, you know, children's corpses in his basement, the answer is actually, there are children's corpses. They're not in anyone's basement. They're in Ukraine, which has some relationship to Biden family corruption, which has some relationship to DNC corruption. So, listen up, Sam. You gotta pay attention to that stuff because these things aren't unconnected. It's not that somebody happens to share

• 3:21:39Speaker 02

  the last name of the president, you know, has a drug problem and a sex problem. It's that the presidential family is deeply corrupted by something which is manifest in this son who can't keep a lid on it.

• 3:21:57Joe Rogan?

  Also, just the obvious take of them all being pardoned? Like, the whole family being pardoned for everything? Like, what did you do? You're not even charged with anything. Like, why are you pardoning his whole family if there's not some real thing that you're concerned with them being prosecuted for?

• 3:22:17Speaker 02

  Pardoning his whole family, plus Anthony Fauci.

• 3:22:21Joe Rogan?

  Yes. From 2014 on, which is just, first of all, leaves him very vulnerable to the AIDS crisis.

• 3:22:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:22:28Joe Rogan?

  I don't know if they took that into consideration. Also, does that leave him vulnerable to perjury?

• 3:22:34Speaker 02

  Well...

• 3:22:34Joe Rogan?

  Because like, when it comes to like, the Rand Paul stuff, like, where he was saying that it was not in any way, shape, or form, gain-of-function research. You do not know what you're talking about. That was not gain-of-function research. Everybody agrees it's gain-of-function research now.

• 3:22:49Speaker 02

  That was just a flat-out, bald-faced lie. I think the pardon, well, A, I think the pardon is invalid on at least one, maybe two grounds. Not my area of expertise, however...

• 3:23:04Speaker 02

  The idea of a blanket pardon, where you do not specify what the person is being pardoned for, I believe that that is a violation of equal protection under the law. Because what it effectively does is allows the person with the power to pardon to create a enabled class of citizens that are capable of simply engaging in whatever crime they want. Secondly, there's a question about whether or not Joe Biden actually pardoned Anthony Fauci knowingly, given his compromised mental state, given the likelihood that the pardon was auto-pen signed. So I think there is a question about whether or not the pardon would be upheld by the

• 3:23:49Speaker 02

  courts. But I do think they're telling us an awful lot by virtue of the fact that Anthony Fauci was pardoned.

• 3:23:58Joe Rogan?

  Right. He's supposed to be the guy that saved us? And he gets a pardon that goes all the way back to 2014?

• 3:24:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. He just so happens to be both the guy who saved us and the guy who offshored the research to Wuhan that produced the thing. And it's a little too coincidental.

• 3:24:17Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. It's crazy. We're well over three hours here. Anything else? Should we wrap this up?

• 3:24:23Speaker 02

  Maybe we should wrap it up.

• 3:24:24Joe Rogan?

  Okay. Thank you, Brett. It's always great to see you, my friend.

• 3:24:26Speaker 02

  Great to see you, too.

• 3:24:27Joe Rogan?

  Thank you for everything. Really appreciate you. Bye, everybody.