Transcript: Bret Weinstein on Joe Rogan Experience #2427

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.

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 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, a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes.

The Research Landscape: Evolutionary Biology vs. Evo Devo

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. Evo Devo is the evolution of development. 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.

What Adaptive Evolution Explains and What It Doesn’t

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. So let me just start by saying the thing I said at the beginning about protein coding genes being altered by random mutation resulting in changes, I’m not arguing that that is in any way a false story. It explains a great many things.

My point is that what it primarily explains are things at nanoscale. It can explain the difference in a pigment molecule very easily, and we know that it does. It can explain things somewhat larger than that, like the very special structure. When you’re a kid, do you ever play with the feathers of a bird? You pull them apart and then they zip back together. 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.

The Bat Wing Example

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 foot of a shrew. And it won’t surprise you at all. It looks exactly as you would expect. It’s got digits, and it looks like every other mammal’s foot. So here we have an example of it.

Okay, now let’s take a look at the wing of a bat. So here we have the wing of a bat. Now, that wing is a highly modified front foot. The ribs that suspend, that hold the membrane, what we call the patagia apart, are highly elongated fingers. So what you’re seeing are the phalanges of that little shrew’s foot elongated very much.

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 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, structures from the primitive structures.

With me so far?

JOE ROGAN: Yep.

The Evolution of Flight: From Ground to Sky

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. So telomeres, you’ll remember, are structures at the end of every chromosome that are not genesis. They are repetitive sequences. They’re written in DNA, but it’s basically just a repeated series of letters again and again and again.

And the telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there, dictates how many times a cell line can duplicate. It loses repeats each time it duplicates. And when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing.

Now, we’ve talked before about why that system exists. The short version is, in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening, because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this limit, the Hayflick limit, and stops reproducing. So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a lifetime. So it causes us to senesce, to age and grow feeble as we do so.

But what it said to me when I was doing that work was that there is a kind of information that can be stored in genomes, in DNA that is not protein oriented. It’s not what we would call allelic. It’s not written in three letter codons. It’s actually a number stored the same way you would store a variable in a computer program, right? The telomere. The length of the telomere is a count of how many times a cell line is allowed to divide over a lifetime. It’s a number.

And what occurred to me all those years ago was that the ability to store a number in the genome is fantastically powerful. What it means, if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome, is that you could describe creatures by allotting something, either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development, that you could specify things in the language of numbers that you can’t specify in the language of amino acids.

So the hypothesis that I’m putting on the table is that the evolutionary process has built a system in which variables 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 phalanx, 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 or is this 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 double stranded 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.

Microsatellites and Genetic Variables

But what there are are a bunch of sequences that were traditionally dismissed as junk DNA that have been used as a molecular marker in biology for decades. We use something called microsatellites. 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 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. With 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. 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 a dosage compensation. You can have a gene that’s repeated multiple times, and the more copies you have, the larger dose of the product that you get. Right. So if you have three copies of alcohol dehydrogenase, you’ll have more alcohol tolerance than two copies. Something like that. So that demonstrates a way, in triplet codon language, that you can store a variable.

But what I’m arguing is that there’s, at least in principle, the possibility for a vast library of variables that have developmental implications for the way creatures look that allows you to go. I mean, imagine for a second the 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.

JOE ROGAN: Can I pause and ask a question?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: So here’s the real question, specifically in regards to flying, 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. 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?

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of the most fantastic abilities of all the animals.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s obviously it’s possible.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, no, I mean, you know, let’s steel man the opposing position.

JOE ROGAN: Intelligent design position.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. There’s certainly a lot of people who would argue that actually, no, there are gaps you can’t jump.

The Intelligent Design Debate

JOE ROGAN: We should explain that as well. 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. 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 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. 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. 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. Have you seen flying squirrels?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay. You’ve seen them fly?

JOE ROGAN: Mm.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: Not a person, but videos.

The Silent Flight of Flying Squirrels and the Evolution of Gliding

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, okay. I have actually twice seen it. Yeah. 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 d* silent. Right.

So the two times I’ve seen it was when they got into an argument with each other. 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? 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.

But any squirrel that had just a little advantage in getting to that next tree would out compete ones that got consumed or died because they, you know, hit the ground too hard or fell in front of a predator that took advantage of it or something like that. So there is an advantage that comes from even a tiny little increase in the distance you can jump.

So that gets you pretty clearly from no ability to glide at all, ability to jump as is, to the ability to glide a little, to the ability to glide a lot, to the ability to glide the way modern flying squirrels do, which is so impressive. Right. But it’s still not, it’s not flapping flight, it’s not powered.

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

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, that’s just. It is, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Is that random mutation? Is that.

Explorer Modes and the Adjacent Possible

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 an explorer mode, right? Our consciousness allows us to 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 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. 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.

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, you know, the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles, and that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available.

And therefore evolution can explore what Stuart Kauffman would call “the adjacent possible.” Right. Have you heard that term?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Have you had Stuart on?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BRET WEINSTEIN: So Stuart Kauffman 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 another seed that’s similar but much bigger, well, then you need to access the adjacent possible in order for a second species or subspecies of this rodent to evolve to take advantage of this untapped resource.

So if you think of, you know, all of the things that you’ve got and then all of the things that you might want that are similar, that’s the adjacent possible. And my point is variables as one of the primary modes of information storage in the genome provides a mechanism for evolution to explore the adjacent possible in a radically more effective way than the story we typically tell about random mutations to protein coding genesis, 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. 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, 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. I’m not in a university anymore. I’m not primarily working as a biologist, so it’s possible I’ve missed something. But there’s. Well, I mean, as you know, we have massively dysfunctional institutions and they. I, you know, I’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 really that’s what I think.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, and what was that?

The Selfish Gene and the Stagnation of Evolutionary Biology

BRET WEINSTEIN: “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 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 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, is basically an enhanced. It’s 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. These were people who were focused on mechanism.

And so in some sense the, the story of the failure of biology to update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident. Right. So the first Darwinists, including Darwin himself, were not focused on molecular scale mechanisms because they couldn’t be. They didn’t have any tools to look at those things. And so they looked at the creatures and they saw patterns. And so they became very focused on recognizing the patterns and what they imply about what must be going on inside. But they got out of the habit of thinking about mechanism because the mechanisms weren’t available to them.

The developmental biologists were exactly the inverse. They didn’t really have patience for evolutionary thinking. They were purely about mechanism and all kinds of experiments, like, you know, taking a piece of one egg and grafting it into another egg and watching the weird monster that is created when the egg is getting the same signal from two different directions. Right. That kind of thing.

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 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, well, how do we look into a particular genome and see the mapping of those variables onto the creature that we see running around in the forest? Right. That. That would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have.

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 much more powerful than the story we’ve been told about it.

Rapid Adaptation in the Congo Rainforest

JOE 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, too, is the rapid development of new abilities that these animals have that live in the Congo that used to be on the plains. And as the rainforest expanded, they were kind of trapped in here.

And one of them they pointed to was duikers, you know, those small antelopes that now have the ability to swim underwater for as much as 100 yards, and they eat fish. And they were talking about it like, this is this fantastic development because they know how long it took for the grasslands to have been overtaken by the rainforest. And it wasn’t that long. And it didn’t seem to account for the adaptation that they were seeing in these animals.

The Enhanced Evolutionary Toolkit and Survival

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, right? That’s the story again and again, right?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s a story with humans, right? Inuits. So the 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 they moved them to that environment, they would die.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s the story with every clade of creatures. This is a chaotic planet, right? At levels that I think maybe we don’t even fully yet appreciate the difference between committing to a particular way of existing that seems really awesome for some period of time and then is suddenly impossible.

And the ability to leap from one way of being to another is the key to getting through time, which is what evolution is doing, right? I always phrase it as the purpose that evolution points towards is lodging your genes as far into the future as you can get them.

And people don’t, I think, fully appreciate when I say that, that it’s not just a clever rephrasing of what might be more standard might be found in a textbook. The point is, anything that satisfies that objective is valid.

So, for example, if you have… So we have a process, it’s one of my favorites 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 a thousand 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. But what we do know is that we have 11,000 species of these things now, all doing subtly different stuff, right?

JOE ROGAN: Some of them not even flying.

Evolution’s Search Through Design Space

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 a hundred niches that you could move into. From there, it creates a hundred species. And it turns out most of those niches are durable on the scale of 10,000 years, but not 50,000 years.

So you get a bunch of them going extinct. But as long as one of them or two of them have gotten through that bottleneck, right? The huge blooming of branches and then the pruning of branches. The ancestor has now gotten to the future in the form of however many species made it through that destructive process.

It is selection at a different scale than we typically think of it. And so thinking of evolution as this dynamic process that is not only searching design space, but learning to enhance its capacity to search design space in order to get into the future is the way to think of it. It’s much more powerful than the clumsy version that we describe, even if we don’t yet understand where that power is lodged.

If we were imaginative and we said, okay, what would I do if I was evolution to enhance the likelihood of getting to the future? Well, then you start finding these explorer modes. And, you know, I understand that I will be ridiculed for saying that because it imposes on selection a 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. 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? It feels a lot like it is to me.

Living Fossils and the Lindy Effect

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Crocodiles, dragonflies, sharks, horseshoe crabs. Yeah, 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. 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 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.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just essentially evolution. Nailed it. They developed an animal that’s so adaptive and so designed to succeed in this particular environment that it doesn’t really need to change.

The Human Generalist Strategy

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes. And in fact, you know, we are… In some ways, we haven’t been around that long, but our… It looks like we are a variation on that theme precisely because we have a generalist body plan. Right. The physical robot, that is the human being, is capable of doing a tremendous number of things.

And the software program can be essentially entirely rewritten. Right. The culture that you inherit can take a person and it can rewire them for a very different niche, including the ability to avail themselves of whatever tools are necessary to do whatever things that the body plan doesn’t do on its own. Right. So that’s a cool strategy.

Right. 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.

Right. This is what Heather and I describe in our book as campfire. Right. The light has faded. It’s too dark for you to be productive at whatever your niche is. You gather around the campfire and you talk. You talk about problems that you’ve run into, solutions that you’re working on. You pool the information.

People have different histories. They have different skill sets, and they parallel process the puzzles and they come up with ideas which, you know, the most amazing adaptation of all is the one we’re using right now. 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.

JOE ROGAN: Pretty crazy.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s amazing. And, you know, that we can prove that we’re not fooling ourselves. I could say something, you know, that nobody’s ever thought of, 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 good strategy.

Environmental Threats to Human Reproduction

JOE 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. Shanna 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 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… is this something… Are we in the middle of an adaptation or some sort of a change of the human species? No. Or is it just being poisoned?

Hypernovelty: When Change Outpaces Adaptation

BRET WEINSTEIN: We’re being poisoned and we’re being poisoned in a particular way. I would say we have effectively threatened to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. The normal pattern for human beings is you inherit your 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 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 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 because we’re good at parallel processing puzzles. Right? A population of people can figure out how to live here when the way to do it doesn’t look like how we lived there.

However, there is a threshold at which our amazing ability to adapt culturally and physiologically is outstripped, and that is the point at which technological change is so fast that you’re not even an adult in the same environment you grew up in. That’s what we now consistently live in, right?

The world you and I now live in doesn’t look anything like the world we grew up in, right? The number of radical differences in terms of the chemicals that we encounter, in terms of the behavior of other people, in terms of the information that comes into our eyes. These things have all been revolutionized.

I’ve frankly seen several revolutions. You and I have both seen several revolutions already. You know, we had the computer, then we had the Internet, then we had the smartphone, then we had social media. Now we’re facing AI, right?

Each of these things would take time to metabolize, to deal with the harms of them, to learn how to address them in a wise way. But we never get the chance to figure that out because the next one is already upon us.

In fact, 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 settle.

And our rate of change is so high. This is what Heather and I call hypernovelty. Hypernovelty 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.

The Impact of Environmental and Social Changes on Human Development

JOE ROGAN: That really concerns me. With humans that drop off of testosterone, the miscarriage rate increasing, like that’s really spooky because I don’t see any change in the environment. I don’t see any change in the use of plastics. I don’t see any change in these endocrine disrupting chemicals being in our systems.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, we have a radical change in the way human beings are interacting with each other. And it is unclear to me 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. 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, 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 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 onto 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, we would slow the pace of experienced change way down.

JOE ROGAN: But how is that even possible at this point?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m not saying it is, 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 reign in the pace of technological change? You can certainly, and we should. If we were wise, we would insulate young people from exposure to, 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 figuring out what its consequences are is insane. Right. We need to provide young people with a chemically and informationally stable environment where the puzzles are solvable and they are relevant to the adult world we expect them to live in, which is difficult because we don’t know what world they’re 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 guaranteed to make you a fish out of water as an adult. It’s extremely disruptive.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Completely new.

JOE 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. Suicidal ideation, actual suicide.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I mean, in other contexts I have said, I probably said to you, you know, there are no adults. That’s one of the shocking discoveries of becoming adult age. 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.

Rites of Passage and the Transition to Adulthood

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that this is where, like, 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. In fact.

JOE ROGAN: Or a woman.

BRET WEINSTEIN: In “A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century,” Heather and I argue that rites of passage are the place. So they’re 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. And the point is, you know that that date is coming.

You. 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 and the abandonment of these things. Right. What we have is such a preposterous dim shadow of what once was. You know, okay, you graduated high school. Right. Well, I assure you, graduating high school means very little in terms of whether or not you know how to navigate the adult world.

JOE 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 behavior, 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.

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

JOE ROGAN: But these are good examples though, because they’re preposterous, ridiculous. 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s. They’re solving some other problem.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 are wrong.

The Failure to Course Correct

JOE ROGAN: And then another thing, we’re not course correcting.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right? Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: 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 fing horseshit. And I’m not going along with this and f your company. And then all of a sudden that company gets. 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 it being soundly rejected and financial consequences.

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

JOE 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. I said, well, this guy must be right, you know, and my parents must be really stupid and they’ve ruined society. And you know, we got to give communism a shot. It just hasn’t been done correctly, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: We just got to 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 that they know as if it was high minded and important. And then they are 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, 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 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. Yeah, right.

The Problem with Social Safety Nets

JOE ROGAN: It’s a 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 that social safety net, you stifle all growth and development. You make people dependent.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, my argument, you turn them into infants. 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.

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: That we’re going to essentially make an entire civilization dependent upon its overlords.

Universal Basic Income and Human Purpose

BRET WEINSTEIN: I can’t see how it could go well. I understand.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 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 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 who were well adjusted to the situation.

In our environment there is nothing like this. And the 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, that doesn’t sound very appealing to me, but at least I understand what it is. Right. 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 and succeeding at it causes them to feel good. They need at least that much direction.

JOE 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 seem, would just be, it would just be a thing that you’re using to acquire the means to survive. And now you pursue this other thing, maybe not necessarily for a monetary reason, not necessarily to acquire wealth, but instead to educate yourself instead, you know, to, as a process of human development, a skill that you’re learning, a thing that you’re competing in something.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Sure. Except for one thing. What has to be true at the end of that substitute purpose is some undeniably valuable reward. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Because that’s the motivating factor.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That’s the thing that will cause you to do it. Right, Right. So not starving is a great motivation. Right, right. 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.

I think nothing is going to substitute for the difficulty of, well, for males, the difficulty of winning 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…

JOE ROGAN: Prostitution.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Prostitution. Right. And you know, part of me is wondering why women are not up in arms over the fact that they are being competed with, with ever more sophisticated technology. I’m confused by why that is not an affront.

Modern Gender Dynamics and Pornography

JOE ROGAN: I think some women are. They’re definitely at arms about porn and they think that not only are they competing with this, but it’s changing young men’s view of sex.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, I think it absolutely is. In fact, I think, you know, it’s…

JOE ROGAN: Much more rejected amongst women.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That is not what I’m hearing, really, from my sons, I’m hearing…

JOE ROGAN: Okay, what are you hearing?

BRET WEINSTEIN: That women are increasingly involved with porn. That it’s really… Yes. And which…

JOE ROGAN: Involved in the creation or the viewing? Watching it. God, that’s… That was never the case when I was young.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, of course not. No, I think it…

JOE ROGAN: If you went over a girl’s house and she had a collection of porn, that was a f*ing warning signal. Huge red flag run.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Like the boss lady is the lady that behaves like a man at work.

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

JOE ROGAN: Right. And in a lot of films, it’s shown as a sign of character for the woman.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: The woman’s just a boss bitch and she doesn’t give a f*. And she kicks these men to the curve and they’re distraught and they’re, like, emotionally wrecked, and she’s just back to business.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Get to work. Yeah, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: Weird.

BRET WEINSTEIN: The whole thing is weird.

JOE ROGAN: So unattractive, too.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s really unattractive.

JOE 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. Yeah, Well, 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, f* 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 and what happens to the world.

Complementarity and the Yin Yang Symbol

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It makes no sense. And I think men and women are obviously substantially different.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a controversial statement.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 are looking, you’re not looking for somebody to be the same as you. 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, 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 Homath?

JOE ROGAN: Homath, Homath.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, Homath is pretty darn funny. He’s very insightful about a lot of things that have gone wrong. But he’s also, 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.

JOE ROGAN: That’s ridiculous.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: It wasn’t obvious when I was young either. But you 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.

Pornography’s Impact on Sexual Development

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but imagine, imagine the following thing, right? 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. 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.

JOE ROGAN: It’s almost like a superhero movie. Yeah, it’s like it doesn’t exist in the real world.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s nonsense for the most part. 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?

Well, that guy is like the cartoon that men have been painted as. Right. You and I bristle at what the MeToo 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 with, 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 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, which is what men at their worst are, is they are 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.

JOE ROGAN: That’s revolutionary.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yes, that’s parasitic and predatory. Okay, that is a mode that exists in men, but it’s not the only male mode.

JOE 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.

The Impact of Pornography and Modern Dating Culture

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 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.

Okay. On the one hand, it is a barometer. It 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. 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 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 are vital to civilization working. Right. 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.

The Future of AI and Sex Robots

JOE ROGAN: It just 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 successful, to be someone that’s good at conversation so that someone who’s reasonable, so you form a great bond with your partner, all that goes away because the robot just loves you.

BRET WEINSTEIN: The robot loves you. And your potential partners are getting less desirable. Yeah, the robots are getting more desirable.

JOE ROGAN: The robot doesn’t argue.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: The robot wants me to play golf.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Exactly. So I think that, 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.

I would say this is, you know, if I was writing the rules, one of them would be no sex with somebody that you know is not a long term partner. You’re not committing to a long term relationship when you have sex with somebody, necessarily. But if you know somebody’s not a candidate, you shouldn’t be engaging in baby making behavior with them. Right. That’s bad.

JOE ROGAN: The problem is that’s like such a primary force in our society for almost everything. For selling things, for exemplifying social status.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, but nobody’s happy. So given that they’re not happy, the answer is, okay, well, I’m doing something.

JOE ROGAN: Nobody’s happy. I would say happiness is difficult to acquire.

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

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. Right. Like it’s not a real place.

And I think that’s a dangerous thing. And I would love to see. I mean, and maybe it’s happening in religious communities that people are opting into a different set of rules and looking for mates within their community because those mates will abide by it.

The Return to Religious Communities

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of that. 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, makes sense to me.

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Gender ideology with religion. How so?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Just a lot of wokeism in some.

JOE ROGAN: 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 going to have these weird offsets.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, I’m glad to hear if you. Well, did any major religion pass the.

JOE ROGAN: COVID test in terms of. Well, first of all, almost no institutions passed the COVID test correctly. None of them.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

Institutional Failures During COVID

JOE ROGAN: And I think you have to look towards what they know. It’s very easy to look back in 2025 and say all these institutions failed the COVID test. Well, I think I probably would have failed to, you know, if I had been a different person in a different job, in 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 conversation. Now you’re seeing now this most recent study that showed that without doubt, children were killed by the COVID-19 vaccines. So that’s not surprising. But what is surprising to me is the enormous number of gaslighters on social media that are not just denying this data, saying this data is inaccurate, and saying far more children, healthy children, were killed by COVID-19 than were killed by these vaccinations.

There’s a bunch of problems with that. First of all, the problem is the reality of the VAERS system. It is a very small percentage of people that have actual vaccine injuries that get recorded into the VAERS system. And then of course, the opposite side of that, they would say, “Yeah, but anybody can say they have a vaccine injury and anybody can get their vaccine injury put into the VAERS system, even if it’s not accurate.”

That’s kind of true, but also not because doctors are very incentivized to not put you into the vaccine injury category for a bunch of reasons. One, doctors are financially incentivized to vaccinate people. And this is something that I was not aware of at all until the COVID lockdowns, until the vaccination push.

Mary Talley 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. And then you had these punitory. You had punishment that would be befalling upon your business had you not met the threshold.

If you have more than X amount of people, everyone must be fully vaccinated, not just had COVID and recovered from it. So it’s not logical. You have the antibodies, you’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.

Myocarditis and Data Manipulation

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: They did that by measuring troponin levels. Correct.

BRET WEINSTEIN: There are multiple mechanisms.

JOE 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’re measuring while they’re.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Infected, they’re measuring proxies. But the problem is the category vaccinated versus unvaccinated. Right. By categorizing people as unvaccinated until they reach the category fully vaccinated.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. In fact.

JOE ROGAN: Which is f*ing fraud.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, not only that, but there’s.

JOE ROGAN: Also a mechanism for what would cause these vaccine injuries.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Multiple mechanisms. Yes, 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 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. 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 Makary’s recent set of podcast appearances in which he talks about the reality of all sorts of things, including bio weaponized ticks and things.

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. Can we talk a little bit about Ivermectin? Yeah, because I think I was just.

The Ivermectin Controversy

JOE ROGAN: Going to ask you about that. Like, how has he been bad? How has Vinay Prasad bad on Ivermectin?

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

JOE ROGAN: Does he not know? Have you communicated with him?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, it’s been a little difficult. I have. When he was promoted at his university, 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.

JOE ROGAN: And you also have to take into consideration that for him to even say what he said is a giant risk. It’s a huge leap. And you almost—I mean, I think everyone knows anecdotally somebody who was f*ed 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: If not killed.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: And whose doctors have gaslit them and said they’re totally unrelated. This is just something genetic. You are going to get this no matter what.

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

The Difficulty of Confronting Uncomfortable Truths

JOE ROGAN: But it’s a difficult equation because you have to be confronted by so many different realities that are incredibly uncomfortable. 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 somehow or another twist, gaslight, obfuscate, investigate, 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? Did it really save millions of people? Is it worth the risk?

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. 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.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The FDA Memo and Children’s Vaccine Deaths

BRET WEINSTEIN: We will get back to Sam Harris in a second here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about 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 beyond criminal negligence. It’s unforgivable. It’s a very positive sign.

But you and I know that the vaccine story has been breaking because I think in large measure, so many people, virtually everybody knows somebody who was injured. And so it’s very hard to keep people in the dark about that. And people’s acceptance of the boosters has plummeted.

People do need to understand that there’s a huge number of mRNA shots that are being cooked up at this very minute, that the damage is not from the COVID part of the shot, it’s from the platform itself. And so we need to stop that vast array of mRNA shots from ever making it to the market. And we need to get the COVID shots pulled.

Which, again, 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 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.

The Ivermectin Story That Hasn’t Broken

But anyway, back to Ivermectin. We’ll return to Charlie a little later. The vaccine story is breaking. Vinay Prasad is helping it break inside of FDA. That’s a marvelous thing. The vaccine committee that Robert Malone is on with Martin Kulldorff and Retsef Levi is also doing excellent work.

So there’s lots of positive signs on the vaccine front, although it’s painfully slow from the point of view of shots that shouldn’t be on the market are still being injected into people. The story that has not properly broken is the Ivermectin story. More generally the repurposed drug story.

But this is when you and I lived very personally. I don’t know what they did to you. They colored you green.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, they made me green on CNN.

BRET WEINSTEIN: They made you green on CNN. And basically even people who are awake about the vaccines largely have arrived at the conclusion that Ivermectin showed promise and then it turned out it didn’t work and that the evidence is overwhelming that it didn’t work and that those of us who said otherwise, it’s time that we admitted that.

And this is a maddening nonsense story. Even the trials that say that Ivermectin didn’t work, if you dig into what they actually found, you find 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.

The Principal Trial: Buried Evidence

And there is something I want to show you one of these that I think you probably haven’t seen yet that makes this point really clearly. So can you bring up that tweet, Alexandros Marinos’ tweet on—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—did you know that the Principal trial out of the UK found that Ivermectin was superior to the usual care in practically every subgroup it tested, but it sat on the results for 600 days?

When it finally published, buried these results on page 346 of the appendix. Now look at this chart. The way to read this chart—

JOE ROGAN: 346. Page 346.

BRET WEINSTEIN: What did I say?

JOE ROGAN: 364.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, okay. Dyslexia strikes again.

JOE ROGAN: If they go back and—

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, 346. Okay, so what this is is a forest plot in which the—there’s a line, a vertical line at 1.00. That’s the line that delineates effective with Ivermectin on the right and with the usual care on the left.

In every single tested category, Ivermectin is better than no Ivermectin. 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 3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. But there’s a sneaky thing that they slide into the methods where if your weight is above a certain number, they cap the dose. So you’re under-dosed, so you don’t spot it unless you go looking for it. But in any case—

JOE ROGAN: And overweight people are the most vulnerable, right?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Exactly. So it’s a great way of making a drug look not very effective.

JOE ROGAN: And a lot of people are overweight.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

And actually, can you scroll down to the next tweet in this thread? Can you—let’s see, click on the link to the paper. Now scroll down 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 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. 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 of the evidence that it seems to meaningfully improve outcomes, it’s a good bet. 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.

Pierre Cory’s Natural Experiment: 80 Court Cases

Now, there’s an even better one, though. There is a—have you read Pierre Cory’s book, The War on Ivermectin?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 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.

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, and they wanted the courts to intervene and force the hospitals to administer Ivermectin. 80 cases.

In 40 of those cases, the courts granted the family’s request and Ivermectin was administered. In 40 cases, they refused to intervene and no Ivermectin was given.

In 38 of the cases where Ivermectin was given, the patient survived. In two, the patient died anyway. In 38 of the cases where no Ivermectin was given, the patient died, and in two, the patient survived.

Wow. Okay. 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 out.

So assuming that the data is accurate, the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical. I had Heather run a chi-squared calculation. And the P value—I checked it also with two different AIs—the P value comes out to be 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15.

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. I mean, it’s through the roof. This is the level of statistical significance we essentially never see.

JOE ROGAN: And CNN turned it into a veterinary medicine.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It turned you green.

JOE ROGAN: Hilarious.

The Ivermectin Evidence and Medical Science

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

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.

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: I am still not sure. I know the crime is so ghastly. Maybe I’m just naive.

JOE ROGAN: Let’s hold this talk because I have to pee real bad. But I want to get to it from here, and I don’t want to be compromised. Yep, we’re back. All right, so Ivermectin.

The Court Experiment and Statistical Evidence

BRET WEINSTEIN: Where were we with it? 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 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.

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.

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. 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?” with Pierre Cory. Actually, we were at the CHD conference and this podcast, great name for a podcast.

JOE ROGAN: It is a great name for a podcast.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 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.

JOE ROGAN: Why did they have a problem with the data?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think, you know, let’s give them their due. They’re sitting down talking to two people who I think they don’t know, can’t assess whether or not we’re being honest, whether the data is as reported. But 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 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, P equals 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15. That is an amazing level of statistical significance.

JOE ROGAN: How did the conversation play out like when you gave them this data, when you discussed this?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, what they said was, well, there could be lots of explanations for that, which is not true. Right.

JOE ROGAN: Really?

BRET WEINSTEIN: What explanations do they provide as possible?

Examining Potential Biases

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think they were reserving the right to go find some explanation. Because think about it this way of a crowd. No, no. Okay, 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 court granted that access, you would expect the people who got Ivermectin to be more likely to die.

JOE ROGAN: Because that would be logical.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. And so the fact that we see exactly the inverse means that actually the result, if there’s any bias at all, is probably conservative. Right. It’s probably more effective than we think. Right.

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 and you discover that actually, you know, they’re playing games, they’re telling you, let me give you an example. You can create the impression that a drug doesn’t work by setting an unrealistic endpoint, right?

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. 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?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You’ve completely recovered.

Simple Science Over Complex Trials

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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. 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.

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

The Propaganda Campaign

JOE 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?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Overdosed on. I remember. Which is virtually impossible.

JOE ROGAN: It’s pure lies. Not only that, these are stock photo of people in Oklahoma in August with winter coats on.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, man. Yeah. The propaganda was f*ing.

JOE ROGAN: It was designed for idiots.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It was designed for idiots, by idiots, for idiots.

JOE ROGAN: 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 on ivermectin, which didn’t exist. There’s a few people that call it the poison control hotline because they panicked.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. They worried. That’s not the same thing as being poisoned. Right. 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. This was an experimental technology that was fraught with dangers that turned out to be massive harms.

The Real Motivation Behind the Suppression

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t think that’s what happened.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think?

BRET WEINSTEIN: I did think that’s what happened, but I don’t anymore. Oh, interesting. 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.

JOE 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.

Sam Harris and the COVID Debate

BRET WEINSTEIN: Oh, it’s coming. They’re already in the pipeline. And I think people need to be aware that the plan is to blame the COVID shots, not the platform, so that people will take 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?

JOE ROGAN: Sure.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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…

JOE ROGAN: And what was that?

BRET WEINSTEIN: In masks. 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 mouth is a decent bet.

But anyway, okay, so my error was masks. I don’t think Sam has acknowledged any of his errors, and he said some really aggressive stuff about me, and I think recently he said some stuff about you, and he’s actually still beating this drum about your podcast killing people. Am I right about that?

JOE ROGAN: Allegedly. 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.”

Yeah, 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, 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. 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, there’s one day that sucked, and then I was fine three days later when I made that video. It didn’t, there was no logical… It was the same conversation that I had with Sanjay Gupta on the podcast. He’s like, “Are you going to get vaccinated?” 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 protection.” I go, “I just got through it pretty easily. Like, I am a healthy person who exercises all the time. I take a f*ing 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 prescribe, that I described, rather.”

And only one of them was problematic, 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.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: I remember.

JOE ROGAN: And I’m better.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: And CNN’s response was to turn me green and to say that I’m promoting dangerous horse dewormer and that it’s misinformation that’s going to cost people’s lives. And the fact that Sam is still saying that it cost people’s lives is f*ing crazy.

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

The Problem with Vaccine Mandates After Natural Immunity

BRET WEINSTEIN: I totally agree with you. And there’s something just weird about the fact that here we have a, I think you and I would both agree, a highly intelligent person who prides himself on analytics. And yet, even as the story is breaking, even as the evidence of vaccine harms becomes unambiguous, and maybe more to the point, in this case, even as Paul Offit has now in several different places said that all the top people in the public health regime who were issuing these diktats all knew that natural immunity was the best immunity you were going to get.

Right? So the evidence is right there that they lied to us in public, that you had it right. There would have been no purpose in you getting a vaccination after you had already recovered.

And I would add one other thing. The evidence that vaccinations often make you more vulnerable is unambiguous. In the case of something like a COVID vaccine or, you know, in the recent revelations about flu vaccines making people more susceptible to flu, there’s a strong argument to be made that what’s going on is you have acquired an immunity through an infection.

Now, somebody injects you with something that either in the case of the flu shot, has a bunch of antigen in it, or in the case of the COVID shot, causes your body to produce a bunch of antigen. Well, what’s that 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. 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, now 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…

JOE ROGAN: I wouldn’t say he is. I would only say he is if he’s saying that I am.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: That’s not something that I would go out and say. I wouldn’t.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: I would agree with that.

BRET WEINSTEIN: However, as soon as you start making the argument that you’re wrong and that means you’re putting people’s lives in jeopardy, my feeling is, well, then you’re changing the rules. You’re setting a standard that we have to be right or we’re responsible for whatever deaths might befall us. We have to do more than just participate in good faith in the conversation. We have to be right.

So that means, Sam, when you’re wrong, you become responsible for the deaths that resulted from your bad advice. You wouldn’t have been responsible in the first place, except that you decided these were the rules of engagement. You decided that the people who were wrong in the argument are responsible for the deaths.

And guess what, Sam? You were wrong. People died. People got a vaccine that they shouldn’t have gotten, and they died. Children died. Right? That’s on you, because you decided those were the rules. And I don’t know. I hope Sam can find his way back.

The Difficulty of Admitting Error

JOE 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 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 who 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, got COVID, got really sick and wound up getting very f*ed 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 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 was 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 okay.

That was my position. I couldn’t, I would have to go to the clinic. 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.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: We’ll do it then.

JOE ROGAN: In that time period, the vaccine was pulled. It was the Johnson and 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, bunch of other people, got it and recovered. And I’m like, “All right, well, this isn’t a f*ing 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. It’s clearly not what everybody’s saying it is.”

Especially not to, I would say on the healthy scale, I’m an outlier. I’m very healthy because I spent a lot of time working on it.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

The Psychology of Pandemic Groupthink

JOE ROGAN: 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 under the guise that it’s to protect the people that are unhealthy. If this f*ing stuff works. Because if it works, they should take it and they’ll be protected.

It didn’t make any sense that everybody who was not vulnerable was going to 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, right? 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 f*ing masks. People are still putting masks on when they go into Starbucks. It’s bananas. 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yep.

JOE ROGAN: But 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 the solution, you were keeping them from returning to a normal life. And you were a f*ing 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. First of all, 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. 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.

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 f*ing cold and gotten over it.

This is pure madness, with no objective analysis of all the details and the facts and a logical conclusion, a logical breakdown of their perspective on what this thing was. No, it was all groupthink. It was all adherence to this one doctrine. There’s the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. I had people on my podcast. “This is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” Shut the f* up, you parrot.

Like, are you a man? Are you an actual human being? How the f did we survive a million years of evolution to get to you, you fing 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 dance. You sat on the f*ing bench. You did nothing. And now all of a sudden, you’re talking about health. This is crazy.

The Peter Hotez Paradox

It’s like the moment that I had Peter Hotez on, 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 find solutions for and for that guy to be sitting on the podcast. And then I started saying, 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?

Like, what do you think you’re made out of, man? Do you. Okay, if you know anything about biology, you’re. Your f*ing cells are literally constructed based on the food that you eat. It’s the only thing they have. It’s all you have to keep your body robust and vital. 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 probably don’t take any vitamins. 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 f*ing important is be healthy. The fact that you can ignore that while giving advice is wild, just absolutely wild.

Terrain Theory vs. Germ Theory

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, it raises two things. One, in Peter Hotez’s case, 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, and a lifetime of abuse makes you highly vulnerable.

And people like Hotez don’t get it. I remember that interaction that you had with him. Goes to Shake Shack with his daughter.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s crazy.

BRET WEINSTEIN: His daughter, who has autism, and he swears it’s not the vaccines, but.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s the other thing. I said, well, what does cause autism? And he said, it’s. We’ve narrowed it down to five environmental factors. I said, what are they? And he couldn’t tell me. I’m like, listen, man, if my daughter had autism and I knew for a fact that it came from five things, I would tell you what those things were because I would know what those things were because I’d want to warn other people.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It would be on billboards.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: He’s an expert in quotes.

JOE 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 try to be as nice as possible.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I know.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s hypocritical.

JOE ROGAN: It’s also to be a public expert and to have that kind of flaw in your thinking that exposed by a f*ing 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 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.

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.

The Public Health Coup

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 brings me back, actually to Sam, because there’s a dire lesson here. For one thing, I quite like Sam also, and I will tell you, one of the early experiences I had as I was getting to know him was that I heard him say something that I had said many, many times as a professor, which is that. And I said it, I think, at the beginning of this podcast, that when you are wrong, that as painful as it is to acknowledge it, you are far better off to get it done as quick as possible so that you can get back to being right.

And I heard Sam say something almost exactly like that, right? And I thought, ah, here’s somebody who has the same intellectual approach, somebody who appreciates that same maybe slightly subtle piece of wisdom. And yet here in the case of the pandemic, I think he got everything wrong.

And worse than that, I mean, you know, you and I both think that, you know, you can get stuff wrong, and it was a very confusing time and the information was very low quality and lots of people got stuff wrong. However, you are now making unforced errors, refusing to see that you got it wrong. In fact, you’re not even acknowledging what you know. Sam, you have stopped getting boosters for Covid, despite all of the things that you said about it.

JOE ROGAN: And how do you know he stopped getting boosters?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Because he said so. I believe he said so.

JOE ROGAN: Did he say why? How many did he get?

BRET WEINSTEIN: That I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: That might be also part of the problem.

BRET WEINSTEIN: But my feeling could be, well, that.

JOE ROGAN: 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. Well, here’s the thing which is really wild.

The Haphazard Nature of mRNA Technology

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, 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.

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.”

JOE ROGAN: That thing was crazy. 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?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if I was right, then I would be right, basically, what he’s saying. Like, 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 f* are you saying?

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

Sam Harris and the Burden of Being Wrong

JOE ROGAN: So let me explain that. This conversation was after we talked about this on the podcast, and I thought I handled it very charitably. He was upset that people were going to attack him. So he called me. 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 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 or what, have a conversation with him. But it’s like a guy who knows he can’t beat up Mike Tyson. He’s like, f Mike Tyson. Like, why don’t you go say it to his face? I don’t have a desire to be in a room with that guy and like, oh, f that guy. If I see him, but I’m not going to see him. I’m going to, 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 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. It’s like, we’ve watched it. He’s destroyed it in front of our eyes. Like, so many people that I talk to that used to love Sam Harris will tell me, like, I used to love that guy. What the f* happened to him?

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: No, I don’t think they know it either. Well, I’m one of them. You know, I think you got to parse out the correct things that a person said from the incorrect things 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: But if he thinks he’s right, have a f*ing 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.

The Joe Rogan Method vs. The Expert Method

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

JOE ROGAN: Absolutely not.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, look at your table.

JOE ROGAN: No mammoth teeth. And I got a f*ing Olmec head here. And wolf tooth. I got a wolf tooth.

BRET WEINSTEIN: This is the method. The methods section tells the tale. On the other hand, by what degree did you beat Sam Harris? Whose method amounted to listening to the right people? 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 method that you used, which was talking to people and hearing them out and 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, 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. I will take that accidental natural experiment run by the courts over some fancy randomized 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.

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, but one that was funded and designed specifically to achieve a desired result. And if it didn’t, they hid it.

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

The History of Fraudulent Studies

JOE 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. There’s 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 show that there was real f*ing problems. So they buried those studies and then rigged 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.

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

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

The AZT Example

JOE ROGAN: I think the best example of that is probably AZT use during the AIDS pandemic, because AZT, look, to come up with a new drug would take a long time. You had to develop it. You had to do this. But they knew that they had AZT drugs that wasn’t being used anymore because it was so problematic and used 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 have tested positive for HIV, presumably probably with a PCR method. There was a lot of them.

That was one of the things that Kary Mullis famously was talking about Fauci 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, 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 f*ing disease. That’s not what it’s intended for.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, right. And I mean, the short answer in that case is it’s an inappropriate test because what it is is an amplifier. And if you turn the cycle threshold up, it can amplify absolutely anything to a point.

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

Beyond Money: The Priming of a Pandemic

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, you know, this is why when you say it was about the money, that I’m just not convinced. I can certainly tell a story about lots of places where a huge profit was made. But the commitment across the board to making sure that certain things happened, that we were maximally spooked, and what’s more, not only maximally spooked, but primed before the thing supposedly hit our shores, we were primed to be expecting a certain disease. And so we hallucinated that disease.

Doctors were primed to imagine that they were about to be dropping like flies because they were going to be forced to deal with these sick people who had this very destructive disease. And I don’t know why this happened. For one thing, I don’t think we have properly figured out what the meaning of tabletop exercises is. You remember Event 201?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Like shortly before.

JOE ROGAN: Explain that to people.

BRET WEINSTEIN: So Event 201 was a tabletop exercise shortly before the COVID pandemic, in which a scenario suspiciously like the COVID pandemic was portrayed with sort of medium production values. You know, false news reports and things were broadcast to the participants. You know, and so basically you took a bunch of people who would ultimately play some role in the pandemic and you put them through a trial run where they got to make the decisions that caused them to censor the misinformation spreaders and to mandate the this and that and to advocate for the so and so.

I don’t think we have yet understood why a tabletop exercise happened. It’s possible it was just a coincidence. I think it’s highly unlikely it was just a coincidence. But I don’t think we know why they run them. I think there’s a meaning to it. 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. Is that what it was?

Is it a mechanism of spreading a kind of word in a way that has plausible deniability so that people will understand that some powerful force is engaged in something? I don’t know. But what I do know is that we haven’t figured it out, that it’s just this weird historical anomaly that, oh yeah, there was a tabletop exercise, wasn’t there? And it looked an awful lot like COVID.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And people would just say that was a coincidence that they did.

The Lab Leak Realization

BRET WEINSTEIN: That 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 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. 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 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 disease came from, all of that.

And I tweeted to my followers, you know, this is a developing story, but it adds up based on what I know about the bats. And one of my longtime followers tweeted back. He says, oh, so you think it’s just a coincidence that it happened on the doorstep of a biosafety level 4 laboratory studying these very viruses?

And I thought, first of all, what’s a biosafety level 4 laboratory? And then I thought, well, maybe that’s not a piece of information worth processing if there are a thousand laboratories studying these viruses, but if there’s only one, then I just got it wrong. Then this is significant. And so it literally is exactly one hour between my tweeting, hey, this story makes sense to me, my getting this pushback and my tweeting, I take back what I said. The story may not be what it appears to be.

JOE ROGAN: This is very, very early on.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s right. It’s my first awareness. It took exactly one hour.

JOE ROGAN: How does other guy know about the biosafety lab already? Well, I don’t know what’s his background or her background?

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

JOE ROGAN: Probably a fed.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I don’t think so.

JOE ROGAN: Whistleblower.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I think this was already being discussed in public, and because I was coming out of the Amazon, I was a couple weeks behind.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, I see.

BRET WEINSTEIN: And so anyway, I’m really glad that it got caught on Twitter, both my error and my correction one hour later, like almost exactly one hour later, just by pure accident. So that was the beginning of my being red-pilled on COVID, was getting schooled over biosafety level 4 laboratories studying bat coronaviruses and the exact place where this thing emerges.

So in any case, point is, if there were a thousand biosafety level 4 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. Did we hear this?

JOE 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.”

BRET WEINSTEIN: Whoa. I’ve never even heard anybody talk about that. There’s an article posted in the New York Times on March 19, 2020, about that.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

BRET WEINSTEIN: March 19. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: 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. Well, it might be they were preparing for whatever the hell this was that they knew was going to come.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Not ready with cures.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

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, 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 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 that just…

JOE ROGAN: When they say contaminated, do you think they realized that it was contaminated? And by contaminated, we’re talking about SV40.

BRET WEINSTEIN: We’re talking about DNA. Yeah, DNA. I think they knew. Yes, they had to know that it was contaminated.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Okay, but if we’re going to talk about the money, then we have to put the money in the proper context. 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…

JOE ROGAN: And that’s not an understatement. Imagine if we had to live off the narrative of the mainstream television.

The Censorship Question and Free Speech

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, this is why the First Amendment is this absolute, 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. 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.

Financial Vulnerabilities and The Great Taking

They may have noticed Michael Burry, who was famous character from the Big Short. 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. 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 Take?

JOE ROGAN: No.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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 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 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.

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? 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.

But okay. The punchline though is this. That’s not the only place where we and 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 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, you’re now in jeopardy with your house because almost everybody, it’s in fact considered financially wise not to have your house paid off. If you borrowed money to buy your house under favorable conditions, then you can make more money by not paying off your house and taking the money that you would use to pay off your house and putting it into investments that pay better. Right.

You’re actually financially ahead if you do that. But if you suddenly can’t pay your mortgage, then your house can be taken. Right? So if there’s a collapse that causes us to be unable to service our mortgages not because of anything we did wrong, but because the whole system is now not in a position to allow us to just simply service our debts, your house can be vulnerable.

The Central Bank Digital Currency Threat

And then here’s the punchline of the story. Your bank account is insured by the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. So I’ve forgotten what the exact number is. It might be a quarter million per account, something like that.

If the banks can’t deliver your money, if they were to collapse and the federal government were to say, “Don’t worry, your account is insured, but we’re going to pay you in central bank digital currency, you’re going to have to take your money in central bank digital currency. You can spend it just like real money, but you’re going to get it in this form.”

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 debanked, you can be told what you’re allowed to spend it on and what you’re not allowed to spend it on.

So the question is, if we rerun the pandemic, let’s say, but all of our money is in CBDC, how likely is it that people like you and me get to put information into the public square that allows people to make higher quality decisions to avoid the shots, to avail themselves of alternative…

JOE ROGAN: Very unlikely.

BRET WEINSTEIN: That’s what I think, too. So anyway, hopefully we know this, but…

JOE ROGAN: Just based on Elon buying Twitter and the examination of the Twitter files.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right, exactly. So Elon buying Twitter carves out an exception where we can still talk there. It’s not perfect, but it’s so far ahead of anything else that it does create a place you can go for information that is not being filtered by the regime.

But at the point, if it is true that we can be forced into a CBDC, and I believe the plan to force us into a CBDC exists, whether the scenario I’m painting is plausible or not. But 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.

Erosion of Rights in the UK and Ireland

JOE 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. Yeah, 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: I’m aware of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Which is crazy. And you’re having trials just by judges and the judge will just appoint a sentence.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right. It’s apocalyptically bad, if you understand what our… what the West is based on.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

The UK’s Erosion of Free Speech

BRET WEINSTEIN: You’re watching a shining example of Western freedoms getting pushed over the cliff. And, you know, 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 as wrong think.

That acknowledging that you have an immigration problem and that there’s a dynamic in play that involves certain populations that are prone to seeing the British people not as their countrymen, but as something else, as prey—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.

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I do, too. I know quite a few.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it’s spooky. 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.

Intelligence Agencies and Information Suppression

JOE ROGAN: 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Yeah.

JOE 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 had children’s corpses buried in his basement or whatever the f he said. Like what? You know, you wouldn’t care about that? Like that wouldn’t be nuts to you? I don’t know. I get you’re trying to be hyperbolic and you’re trying to be, you know, entertaining, but that’s fing crazy to say.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Well, and, you know, what he was trying to say is absurd.

JOE ROGAN: Trump is really bad.

Biden Family Corruption and Ukraine

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, 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 got to pay attention to that stuff because these things aren’t unconnected. It’s not that somebody who happens to share 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.

JOE ROGAN: Well, 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?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Pardoning his whole family plus Anthony Fauci.

The Fauci Pardon

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

BRET WEINSTEIN: Right.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t know if they took that into consideration. Also, does that leave him vulnerable to perjury? Well, 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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, 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 an 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 courts. But I do think they’re telling us an awful lot by virtue of the fact that Anthony Fauci was pardoned.

JOE 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.

BRET WEINSTEIN: 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.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s crazy. We’re well over three hours here.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Anything else?

JOE ROGAN: Should we wrap this up?

BRET WEINSTEIN: Maybe we should wrap it up.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. Thank you, Bret.

BRET WEINSTEIN: It’s always great to see you, my friend.

JOE ROGAN: Great to see you, too.

BRET WEINSTEIN: Thank you for everything. Really appreciate you.

JOE ROGAN: Thank you, pal, bud.

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