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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 we talked last time about the impact of the sexual revolution and the reliable birth control and abortion on the way males and females ...
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>> The Joe, Rogan, experience.
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>> Showing my day Joe Rogan podcast my night.
All day.
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>> What's happening?
Hey, good to be back.
Good to see you.
So the reason why we had such a quick turnaround is because the last episode,
one of the main reasons why you wanted to come on the first place is you wanted
to further discuss some discoveries about evolution.
>> Yes, specifically, I have alluded in a number of different places,
including here to there being another level to Darwinian evolution that does a lot
of the heavy lifting that we require in order to explain the diversity of forms
that we see in biology.
But I haven't been specific on what I believe that layer is.
And I felt like it was time.
I think for one thing, the advances in AI mean that such things are going to emerge naturally.
And I wanted to put it on the table before it simply gets discovered as a matter
of computing horsepower.
>> And we were just rambling about so many different things that we never got to
it last time, so I said, let's do another quick turnaround, come back.
>> Right. So let's talk biology.
And let me just say, you know, I know that it's not everybody's bag,
but I do think just about everybody has, at some point,
listen to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution.
And wondered if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures
that we all know and love.
>> Right. So the classic story is that you have a genome,
that it contains a great many genes.
A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced.
The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein.
And a protein would typically be one of two things.
It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term.
But an enzyme is a catalyst, catalyst is misleading.
It's really a machine that puts other chemicals together.
So a lot of the genes in the genome are these little molecular machines that assemble molecules.
And the other thing that proteins are likely to be are structural.
So something like collagen proteins can make a matrix that allows you to sort of build a sculpture biologically.
And what we say is that the amino acid sequence is specified by the genome in three letter sequences, right?
Codons. Each three letters specifies a particular amino acid that gets tacked on.
You get a sequence of amino acids that then collapse into whatever they're going to be,
whether it's an enzyme or a structure based on little electromagnetic affinities.
That they have little side chains that have a positive or a negative charge that attract each other.
So basically these machines assemble themselves by folding in very complex ways that then causes them to interact with the molecules around them in very specific ways.
Ways that greatly reduce the energy necessary and make the reactions much more likely to happen.
And that's why we call it a catalyst. But really the way to think of it is a little molecular machine.
So we say the way evolution works is random changes happen to the DNA because DNA is imperfectly copied or is impacted by radiation,
which will eliminate a letter in the DNA. And then that letter will get replaced by a different letter.
There are only four choices. But some fraction of the time you get a three letter combination that specifies a new amino acid.
Almost all of the time that will make the little molecular machine worse or break it all together.
Occasionally it will leave the machine functional in a way that's somewhat better than the previous one.
And then evolution will collect all of those advances. And that's how evolution works. That's the story we typically tell.
And in fact, that's the story that is encoded in what's called the central dogma of molecular biology.
Now the problem, most people will have thought about that and they will have heard, okay, random mutations that change this code in ways that alter proteins.
That doesn't sound, that sounds like a very haphazard process and a very difficult way to get from one form of animal or plant or fungus to another.
So if you've had that thought, that just doesn't seem powerful enough. And then biologists have said, well, you're not realizing how much time elapses that allows these very occasional positive changes to accumulate. And that's true.
If that's a thought you've had, this process is powerful enough to explain the creatures I'm aware of.
Then what I'm going to tell you is a way in which that process is not the only process. And by adding a different process, very much a Darwinian one, we can see that the power to create all of the creatures that we see is much greater than the story that we've been told.
Okay, so I'm going to put a hypothesis on the table about what enhances this and essentially what I'm arguing is if you sat down to a computer game, right, something very realistic.
And somebody says, well, that's all binary. That's true. It's all binary. But what they're not telling you is that there's an intervening layer that greatly increases the power to use binary to make something like a computer game, right. So there are multiple different levels inside your computer.
One of them is that your computer can be programmed in a language that is much closer to English. And then a compiler can take the what you've written that a computer can't understand and turn it into a computer understandable code.
And so the ability to make powerful programs depends on our ability not to have to program our computers in binary, but to be able to program them in C++ or whatever. That's the kind of thing I'm pointing to is a mechanism that enhances the power of evolution to do the stuff that we know evolution accomplishes.
Okay. So here's what I think is the missing layer. And I will say I've done a bunch of research to figure out how much of this is understood. And I find a very confusing picture. It actually depends which field I come at it from to see what the blind spots are.
But I'm going to leave that primarily for another time. Let's just say the two fields in question are my field evolutionary biology and a interdisciplinary science called Evo Devo.
Okay. 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. Okay. So now let's talk about adaptive evolution and what adaptive evolution is 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 you ever play with the feathers of a bird you pull them apart and then they zip back together. Right. Those kinds of things can be readily explained by the mechanism as we present it.
What I'm going to argue is difficult to explain is the change from one macroscopic form to another. So for example.
The wing of a bat. The wing of a bat evolved from the foot of a terrestrial or arboreal meaning tree dwelling mammal like a shrew.
So I sent 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, you know, digits and it looks like every other map.
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Here we have an example of it. Let's take a look at the wing of a bat. Here we have the wing of a bat. That wing is a highly modified front foot.
The ribs that hold the membrane, what we call the pategia, apart are highly elongated fingers. What you're seeing are the philanges of that little shrew's foot elongated very much so.
Now, what the evodivo 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 from the primitive structures.
With me so far. 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 genes. They are repetitive sequences. They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters, again and again and again.
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 of 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 a leelick. 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. 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 failings, 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.
Am I confusing you or is this making sense?
The question is, 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 deloup.
And then you get this one little single stranded DNA that inserts between a double stranded and makes a very tiny triple stranded like a cap so that it holds the loop in place.
You can't do that in the middle of a chromosome. So it's not like there are telomeres all over the place.
But what there are are a bunch of sequences that were traditionally dismissed as junk DNA that have been used as a molecular marker in biology for decades.
We use something called microsatellites. So a microsatellite is a repetitive sequence in DNA that does not code for 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. Thus with some confidence we think it's more close.
It evolved from population A something like that. So we use them as a tool for assessing things like relatedness.
But we don't typically think of them as a storage modality for a kind of information that might be useful. So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table and by the way these things are extremely common in the genome.
There are many more variable number 10 and repeats in the genome than there are genes. 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 code on 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.
So if you have three copies of alcohol dehydrogenase, you'll have more alcohol tolerance than two copies, something like that. So that demonstrates a way in triplet code on language that you can store a variable. But what I'm arguing is that there's at least in principle the possibility for a vast library of variables that have developmental implications for the way creatures look that allows you to go.
I mean, imagine for a second 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.
Can I pause right there and ask a question? 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 it? So like how how would you get an animal that's completely stuck on the ground and can only hop a little bit to something that can literally traverse 3D space?
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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.
It's one of the most fantastic abilities of all the animals.
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.
Well, it's obviously possible. Well, no. I mean, you know, let's steal man the opposing position. Intelligent design. There are certainly a lot of people who would argue that actually know there are gaps you can't jump.
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.
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? Yes.
You've seen them fly. I have actually twice seen it. 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 are nocturnal and they are so damn silent.
So the two times I've seen it was when they got into an argument with each other. And they started chattering and I was like what is this and lo and behold it's flying squirrels and they're moving through a patch of forest and it's the most amazing thing.
These things 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. 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.
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. They land on the trunk so it doesn't make a big noise as they hit some branch and the leaves rustle and all that.
But anyway, if you've seen these creatures do it, then you can imagine a pretty clear story. 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 without compete ones that got consumed or died because they hit the ground too hard or fell in front of a predator that took advantage of it or something like that.
So there is an advantage that comes from even a tiny little increase in the distance you can jump. So that gets you pretty clearly from no ability to glide at all, ability to jump as is to the ability to glide a little to the ability to glide a lot to the ability to glide the way modern flying squirrels do, which is like so impressive.
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.
And you could imagine once you get on to that little foot hill, 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.
But what would cause them to develop the webbing in the first place?
Well, that's just it is, you know.
Is that random mutation? 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 pry 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 from, you know, the right 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 of 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 slip 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 failings in the finger is stored as a variable.
And those variables get readily modified. In other words, if you looked at the hand of every human being, you would see that there's already a ton of variation in the relative lengths of the different digits and the relative lengths to each of the knuckles.
And that if those things are reflective of a particular state stored as essentially an integer in the genome, that all of the adjacent states are very available.
And therefore, evolution can explore what Stuart Kaufman would call the adjacent possible, right? Have you heard that term? No. Have you had Stuart on? No.
So, Stuart Kaufman is a complex systems theorist and his point, one of many, is that effectively the creatures we see exist in a design space and that selection finds the things that are similar to what you've got near enough to be accessed and advantageous.
So if you have a rodent of one size and there is, you know, let's say you have a rodent that specializes on a particular seed and it exists in a habitat where there's another seed that's similar but much bigger.
Well, then you need to access the adjacent possible in order for a second species or subspecies of this rodent to evolve to take advantage of this untapped resource. So if you think of, you know, all of the things that you've got and then all of the things that you might want that are similar, that's the adjacent possible.
And my point is variables as one of the primary modes of information storage in the genome provides a mechanism for evolution to explore the adjacent possible in a radically more effective way than the story we typically tell about random mutations to protein coding genes.
Right? There's nothing undarwhinny in 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 evodivo 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 is, well, I mean, as you know, we have massively dysfunctional institutions. And they, 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. Yeah. And what was that? The selfish gene provides us a mechanism. It's basically a synthesis of what we understand about adaptive evolution. It provides the first gateway to understand cultural evolution in rigorous Darwinian terms.
I don't think that that that gateway, I don't think we ever went through it. In fact, when I've talked to Dawkins about his effective discovery, the meme, he doesn't seem to understand the power of it.
He thinks of it as, I mean, he says in chapter 11 of the selfish gene, he says that the landscape of memes is like 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. We can evolve at a cultural level, which solves a problem for the genes that the genes can't solve directly.
And that means that all of the space of human culture and the culture of other creatures, but our culture is vastly more refined and powerful and diverse.
But that space is basically 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.
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 evodivo, evolution of development.
But it didn't come from the Darwinist. It came primarily from the developmental side. These are people who were focused on mechanism.
And so in some sense, the story of the failure of biology to update our evolutionary model is the result of a historical accident.
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 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.
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 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, OK, 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?
That would be an amazingly powerful mapping to have. So anyway, I didn't want to leave it as a vague illusion 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.
I was watching a documentary once on the BBC about the Congo. And it's a really amazing documentary. And one of the things that it points out to is the rapid development of new abilities that these animals have that live in the Congo that used to be on the plains and as the rainforest expanded, they were kind of trapped in here.
And one of them they pointed to was dikers, you know, those small antelopes that now have the ability to swim underwater for as much as a hundred 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.
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 would have gone extinct.
Right. That's the story again and again.
Right. Well, it's a story with humans, right? Inuits. It's a story with people that live in extremely cold climates, right? They've developed all these adaptations to be able to survive in this intense weather where people who live in the tropics if they moved them to that environment, they would die.
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.
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.
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?
Some of them not even flying.
Right, some of them have lost the ability to fly. So the point is the discovery of birdness opens up a huge number of potential discoveries.
Evolution would be a dumb process if it didn't effectively search that space. If it randomly waited to find each of those opportunities, that's so much less powerful than searching the space.
And then once you get the search of a space, okay? So you get, you know, 100 hits. You get some innovation. It provides 100 niches that you could move into from there. It creates 100 species.
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.
And it is selection at a different scale than we typically think of it. And so thinking of evolution is 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. 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.
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.
Crocodiles, crocodiles, sharks, horseshoe crabs. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a place where I think a good evolutionary course says the right thing about it. But 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. If you've watched a dragonfly, it's a super agile creature. 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. Yes. 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 platform. 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.
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 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. Right.
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 America. Pretty crazy.
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 the piece of paper, your interpretation. And I could say, yeah, that's the thing I was thinking of. Right. That ability to prove that we are, in fact, exchanging abstract ideas across open air. And that that allows multiple minds that are not physically touching each other to process together.
Concepts is it's truly stunning. And in conjunction with the generalist robot that can use tools, it's an amazingly good strategy.
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 were 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.
And you're one of the things that people are talking about with a great concern, like Dr. Channis Juan, 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.
Different things that she attributes to thalates and various chemicals that are endocrine disruptors that are ubiquitous in our world.
Is this something that you think about? Is this something, are we in the middle of an adaptation or some sort of a change of the human species?
No, 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 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 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 curve ball 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 onto the next and the valley doesn't change very much.
That process is sustainable. Humans are excellent at dealing with it, right? Because we're good at parallel processing puzzles, right?
A population of people can figure out how to live here when the way to do it doesn't look like how we lived there.
However, there is a threshold at which our amazing ability to adapt culturally and physiologically is outstripped. And that is the point at which technological change is so fast that you're not even 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, even I have both seen several revolutions already. You know, we had the computer, then we had the internet, then we had the smartphone, then we had social media, now we're facing AI, right?
Each of these things would take time to metabolize, to deal with the harms of them, to learn how to address them in a wise way. But we never get the chance to figure that out because the next one is already upon us.
In fact, it's the 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 do that, right? You need time to settle.
And our rate of change is so high, this is what Heather and I call hyper novelty. Hyper novelty is the state at which even our amazing ability to rapidly adapt is incapable of keeping pace with technological change. That's where we are.
That really concerns me with humans, that drop off of testosterone, the miscarriage rate increasing, 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-describing chemicals being in our systems.
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Well, I agree and I think 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 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 we talked last time about the impact of the sexual revolution and the 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 robbed us of the central organizing principle of civilization and the consequences of that central organizing principle evaporating are incredibly far reaching.
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 are 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.
So what effect are all of these things having? 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. But how is that even possible at this point? 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? Maybe you can't rain in the pace of technological change.
And we can certainly, and we should, if we were wise, we would insulate young people from exposure, especially to new stuff. Right? There's a question about what stuff that we already have, what effect it's having on them, but the fact that we're just going to expose them to every new revolution without figuring out what its consequences are is insane.
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 in not immunizing them is a terrible error. It can't work. Right? 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.
That's extremely disruptive. And essentially every new ground breaking technology, every new breakthrough, every new paradigm shifting thing that gets created is a completely new environment for these children.
Completely new road map, 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.
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.
Yes. 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.
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?
It's in principle impossible to deal with this level of change. So at most what you can do is become very robust.
Do you think that this is where like rights 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.
Yeah. In fact, in a 100-gatherer's guide to the 21st century, Heather and I argue that rights 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. 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.
And 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.
Well, I assure you graduating high school means very little in terms of whether or not you know how to navigate the adult world.
And in fact, at least people with more anxiety because you don't feel like you're an adult, but yet you're supposed to be one. I'm 18 now. I need to get a job and you're out there in the world and very confused and trying to figure it out along the way and also trying to pretend that you're a man because maybe that somehow will make you feel more like one or
take on male behaviors, start smoking cigarettes, whatever it is, like whatever you see adult people do go to the bar, like whatever it is and try to emulate what you think are men or women.
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
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, you know, I always say that the more ridiculous the idea is the more aggressively people fight against the resistance of this idea.
Yeah, it's, they're solving some other problem, but at the level of how civilization is going to run, we are signing our own death warrant, putting our children in environments in which what they pick up is a determination to be unrealistic in the face of evidence that they're wrong.
And that's, and then another thing that we're not course correcting, right? Yeah. I mean, people complain about it when their kids are going to that school, but more kids are going to that school and it just keeps happening over and over again.
And then they go into the workforce and they have these crazy ideas and they tank companies, you know, because they try to impose these ridiculous ideologies in the real world and actual people that have become actual adults and are out there working and struggling.
So this is fucking horseshit and I'm not going along with this and fuck your company and then all of a sudden that company gets to and then there's some adaptation that way because people realize like, hey, we can't do this anymore.
This is bad for our business. We've got a course correct, but that seems like it's one of the only ways that they do is by real world application and that being soundly rejected.
Well, and financial consequences. The problem is that all those consequences are way too indirect to correct the people who are driving the change and the people that aren't connected to that world at all because their entire existence is based on this Lala land where they're being funded by Lala land, they're teaching Lala 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 stream words together well so they look impressive.
Well, this guy must be right, you know, and my parents must be really stupid and they've ruined society and, you know, we've got to give communism a shot.
It just hasn't been done correctly. Right. 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're immunized from consequences by what I think you and I would agree was initially a well-intentioned attempt to protect people from bad luck.
You know, that people who are liberal-minded as you and I both are don't want to see people suffer because of bad luck.
But when you start immunizing people from the consequences of their bad decision making, whether the people you're immunizing are corporate executives who have gambled badly with the resources of their corporation or, you know, children who make bad decisions 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.
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 reliant on that social safety net, you stifle all growth and development and make people dependent.
Well, my argument is 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.
Well, this is my fear, my great fear about the concept of universal basic income.
Yep, that we're going to essentially make an entire civilization dependent upon its overlords. I can't see how it could go well. I understand.
I can't see how it could go well. I think if you're a nice person, you look, well, all these jobs are going to be replaced by AI and automation.
You 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.
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.
The 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 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 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?
The purpose has become in coherent. The subordinate purposes, which came later, right, the ability to invest in a career to climb some corporate ladder. It doesn't sound very appealing to me, but at least I understand what it is.
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 we'll 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.
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 or 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 is possible to find some other purpose goal or task that would replace those things and money would see, it 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 as a process of human development, a skill that you're learning, a thing that you're competing in, something.
Sure, except for one thing, what has to be true at the end of that substitute purpose is some undeniably valuable reward.
Because that's the motivating factor, that's the thing that will cause you to do it. So not starving is a great motivation, being able to buy stuff is a decent enough motivation to the extent that there is stuff that's desirable that's out of reach unless you get enough wealth, that's a decent enough motivation.
The nothing, I think, nothing is going to substitute for the difficulty of, well for males, the difficulty of winning the ability to have a sexual relationship with a desirable female.
We now have all sorts of things that cause people not to want to pursue that. There are things, obviously there's porn, there's going to be sex robots.
So that 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.
I think some women are, there's 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.
Oh, I think it absolutely is. In fact, I think, you know, it's much more rejected amongst women. That is not what I'm hearing from my sons.
I'm hearing, okay, what are you hearing that women are increasingly involved with porn that it's really yes, which involved in the creation or the viewing watching it. God, that's, that was never the case when I was young.
Oh, of course not. No, I think it's not. If you went over a girls house and she had a collection of porn, that was a fucking warning signal.
Huge red flag. 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.
Right. Like the boss lady is the lady that behaves like a man at work.
Behaves like a man at work. Treating sex very casually is not a normal thing for females to do. Right.
It's in a lot of films that's shown as a sign of character for the woman. Exactly. The woman's just a boss bitch and she doesn't give a fuck and she kicks his men to the curve.
And they're distraught. They're like emotionally wrecked and she's just back to business. Get to work. Yeah, exactly.
Weird. The whole thing is weird. It's so unattractive too. It's really unattractive. Yeah, it's odd. I mean, it's odd to even say that it's unattractive, but look, I find it unattractive in men.
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 fuck off, everybody eats shit.
No compassion for other people, just only focused on success and winning, winning, winning. It's Gordon Gecko.
It's like the most unattractive characters in films, the greedy billionaire character. It doesn't give a shit about the consequences of his actions and what happens to the world.
Right. It makes no sense. And I think men and women are obviously substantially different.
That's a controversial statement. 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. 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.
You're not looking for somebody to be the same as you. You're 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 at Home Math?
Home Math? Home Math. Well, Home Math 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.
That's ridiculous. 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.
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.
Yeah, but imagine imagine the following thing.
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.
It's almost like a superhero movie. Yeah, it doesn't exist in the world world. It's not 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?
That guy is like the cartoon that men have been painted as, right? You and I bristle at what the Me Too movement portrayed men as.
Not because there aren't bad men. There are lots of bad men. But it's not universal.
And the story of how many women are supposed to interact 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 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, as they are sexually their predators, right?
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.
- Revolutionarily. - Yes. That's parasitic and predatory, okay? That is a mode that exists in men, but it's not the only male mode.
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.
- 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 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 that tells you what the status of your relationship is.
And it's also a tool for enhancing, fixing, modifying your relationship. And evolution built it to be that. Sex is something very unique in humans because in humans unlike almost every other creature, we have sex when not fertile.
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? It 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. 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.
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.
It's just it doesn't paint a very rosy picture of the future. You know, when you look at where this is going and then the possibility of AI porn, that's, you know, virtual reality porn and then the sex robot thing, which is they're getting really close to that.
These lifelike robots, it's hard to tell what's real and what's not online with AI, but there's definitely work being done on lifelike robots to be housekeepers or to be companions or someone you could talk to in your home.
And it's just a matter of time before those become sexual companions and they replace regular sexual companions and then all of the motivation to be a better person to be 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.
The robot loves you and your potential partners are getting less desirable.
Yeah, the robots are getting more desirable. The robot doesn't argue.
The robot wants me to play golf exactly. So I think look, I keep waiting for a movement to start in which young people who have yet to form these relationships put out a set of rules.
And they say, "Here are the rules I'm going to abide by, and I'm only going to date people who abide by them too." Right? No porn, no robots. I would say 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.
The problem is that it's like such a primary force in our society for almost everything, for selling things, for exemplifying social status.
Yeah, but nobody's happy. Right. So given that they're not happy, the answer is, "Well, I'm doing something..." Well, if nobody's happy, I would say happiness is difficult to acquire.
Well, I would say it is rare to find young people who express that they are happy with this part of their life.
Have you ever met young people in any time in history, while you've been alive, that we're happy with that process? The process is kind of brutal.
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.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. Yeah, that is the place where people are going, and I think it's probably one of many reasons why you're seeing an uptick in religious participation amongst young people.
Well, it makes sense to me. Yeah. And especially if they're looking at the world that, you know, they find themselves and they find their friends in, that are just crashing out, left and right, and it just seems like a very bad path.
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.
Gender ideology religion?
There's a lot of wokeism in some, some religions, but not traditional religions. It's almost like these break-off versions of a traditional religion.
We have a transgender pastor and LBGTQ flag behind them and you get like, but you're always going to have these weird offsets.
Well, I'm glad to hear if you, well, did any major religion pass the COVID test?
In terms of, well, first of all, almost no institutions pass the COVID test correctly. None of them. 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 it.
You know, if I had been a different person and a different job and a different part of my life and I didn't have access to the information that I had access to, I didn't know what games were being played.
And I didn't know the landscape, I didn't know what games had previously been played, especially in regards to the way the pharmaceutical drug industry distributes propaganda and information.
And then hires people to gaslight folks. You're seeing this now, right? It's a good way to pivot to this 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 gas lighters 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 VAIR system. It is a very small percentage of people that have actual vaccine injuries that get recorded into the VAIR 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 VAIR 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 Tally Bowden, who's been on the podcast before, she said that her own practice, a very small practice and 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 punishment that would be be falling 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 continue that practice even when it was shown that the vaccine, unlike what we're told initially, did not stop transmission, did not stop it infection, it didn't do anything.
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.
They did that by measuring troponin levels, correct?
There are multiple mechanisms. But the way they were trying to phrase it, that more people are getting myocarditis that are unvaccinated, that are vaccinated, what they're doing, they're measuring while they're infected.
They're measuring proxies, but the problem is the category vaccinated versus unvaccinated, right? They're by categorizing people as unvaccinated until they reach the category fully vaccinated.
It's just that, but two weeks or that's 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.
Which is fucking fraud. It is fraud and I believe the evidence will ultimately reflect that myocarditis is not being caused by COVID and that these are mis-categorized vaccine injuries.
There's also a mechanism for what would cause these vaccines to multiple mechanisms.
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 were really talking about.
But he says in the letter, look, the number of people of kids who are killed by this is actually higher. But these 10 are ones in which it was so unambiguous that their analysis regards it as a causal.
In other words, they threw out all of the cases in which somebody died, a child died days later. They took only cases where 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 Ivermackton.
In some ways, he's one of the academics who managed to hold on to his position through all of the tyranny. Most of the people that you and I know, the Pierre Corrie's, the Robert Malone's and Coles, these are people who were driven from jobs, had their licenses threatened, that sort of thing.
Vinay held on and then he got a position in the administration. And now we can see in this memo that he's on the right side of history and he's being cautious. But nonetheless, it's a very positive sign.
As is Marty Marquez, a 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 Ivermackton?
Yeah, because I think--
Please, I was just going to ask you about that. How has he been bad? How has Vinay Prasad bad on Ivermackton?
Well, he has regarded it as not useful based on the randomized controlled trials, which claimed that it wasn't useful. And in my opinion, he fell down on the job not pursuing what actually happened in those trials.
Does he not know? Have you communicated with him?
Well, it's been a little difficult. 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.
And you also have to take into consideration that for him to even say what he said is a giant risk.
Yeah, it's a huge leap. And you almost-- I mean, I think everyone knows anecdotally somebody who was fucked up by the vaccine. Almost everyone that I've ever talked to are then San Harris. Almost everyone that I've ever talked to claims they know someone who was revocably harmed by the vaccine.
Oh, yeah. If not killed. 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.
Right. And whose doctors have gaslit them and said they're totally unrelated. This is just something genetic. You were going to get this no matter what.
Right. So we see all of this in actuarial data. There are large populations of people who have put two and two together.
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 another twist, gaslight, obfuscate, use data that they know to be incorrect to try to prove a position that intellectually they must know is not accurate.
Well, you see a lot of that to protect themselves, protect ego to protect the reputation. They're very careers like the longer they can keep this rules going and the more they can make the date of foggy in terms of like, is it really effective? Did it really save millions of people? Is it worth the risk?
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.
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.
The dying of it is a, it's beyond criminal negligence, it's unforgettable. 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.
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.
But anyway, back to, I remarked that we'll return to Charlie a little later.
The vaccine story is breaking, Renee Prasad is helping it break inside of FDA. That's a marvelous thing. The vaccine committee that Robert Malone is on with Martin Coldorf and Retsiff Levy is also doing excellent works.
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 Ivermacken story, right? More generally the repurposed drug story, but this is when you and I lived very personally, you know, you were, I don't know what they did to you, they colored you green.
Yeah, they may be green on CNN and basically even people who are awake about the vaccines largely have arrived at the conclusion that Ivermacken showed promise and then it turned out it didn't work and that the evidence is overwhelming that it didn't work and that those of us who said otherwise it's time that we admitted that.
And this is a maddening nonsense story right even the trials that say that Ivermacken didn't work if you dig into what they actually found you find a huge amount of fraud designed to produce the impression that Ivermacken didn't work.
And amazingly enough even in trials that are designed to give that result it still shows that it's effective and there is a something I want to show you one of these that I think you probably haven't seen yet that makes this point really clearly.
So can you bring up that tweet Alexandros Morinos' tweet on the I think it's called the principal trial anyway this is shocking this is another one of these multi arm platform trials so these are these highly complex structures in which many drugs are tested simultaneously so that they can share a placebo group.
Okay let's look at the whole tweet it says I think that's supposed to be no did you know that the principal trial out of the UK found that Ivermacken was superior to the usual care in practically every subgroup it tested but it sat on the results for 600 days when it finally published buried these results on page 364 of the appendix now look at this chart.
The way to read this chart 346 page 346 what did I say 364 oh just don't dislex the strikes again if they go back and yeah 346 okay so what this is is a forest plot in which the there's a line of vertical line at 1.00 that's the line that delineates effective with Ivermacken on the right and
with the usual care on the left in every single tested category Ivermacken is better than no Ivermacken right the line 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 Ivermacken is superior to not giving Ivermacken even though these people were given Ivermacken late they were given Ivermacken in a sneaky way where the regular dose
regular dose is supposed to be something like three milligrams per kilogram of body weight but there's a sneaky thing that they slide into the methods where if your weight is above a certain number they cap the dose so you're underdosed
which so you don't spot it unless you go looking for it but in any case and overweight people are the most vulnerable right exactly so it's a great way of making a
drug look not very effective and a lot of people overweight absolutely so on this plot every so you see those horizontal lines you got a box in the middle of a bunch of horizontal lines 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 Ivermacken is statistically significant in its efficacy in the one category where it's not it's still effective it's just not statistically significant in its effectiveness
okay and they buried this in this appendix page 346 right and actually if you 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 to get a background method stop go back up a little bit interpretation so this is their take home message from the paper it says Ivermacken for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide a clinically meaningful improvement in recovery hospital admissions or longer term outcomes
further trials of Ivermacken for SARS-CoV-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted so here you have a trial
that overwhelmingly shows Ivermacken is effective it reduced the recovery time by a couple of days even though they gave it super late which with all antivirals makes them very much weaker than they would otherwise be
and here they are reporting that the answer is it's unlikely to create meaningful outcomes and there's no further work needed
okay this is absurd this is the quality of trial that we're going to and what it does this is them gaslighting us right you and I
said look the evidence suggests that this stuff works it's quite safe compared to almost any other drug you could take in fact I can't think of one that's safer
and that therefore in light of the evidence that it seems to meaningfully improve outcomes it's a good bet right they mocked us over that conclusion
this study makes it very clear that even when people are trying to hide that conclusion that it's there in the data if you go looking
now there's an even better one though there is a have you read pure cori's book the war on Ivermacken no okay there's something reported in this book that it really stops you in your tracks
it is an accidental natural experiment okay so a natural experiment is something in science where maybe you happen on an archipelago
in which you have a bunch of different islands that have different conditions and you can go to each island and measure the you know whatever
parameter it is because nature has given you an experiment that you can analyze you don't have to build islands right in this case
what Pierre reports is that there were 80 court cases in which a family sued a hospital that was refusing to give Ivermacken
to a desperately sick family member and they wanted the courts to intervene and forced the hospitals to administer Ivermacken
80 cases in 40 of those cases the courts granted the families request and Ivermacken was administered in 40 cases they refused to intervene and no Ivermacken was given
in 38 of the cases where Ivermacken was given the patient survived into the patient died anyway in 38 of the cases where no Ivermacken was given
the patient died and into the patient survived wow okay now I find this like this is incredibly I cannot vouch for the data itself
I because it's not published in the scientific paper I can't go look at the methods I can't go find the court cases but assuming that the data is accurately reported and I know Pierre well he didn't make it up so
assuming that the data is accurate the level of statistical significance on that accidental study is absolutely astronomical right I had Heather run a chi squared calculation
and the p value I checked it also with two different AIs the p value comes out to be 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15 right so what that means is that the chances of a result that strong if Ivermacken does not work
are something like the chances of you guessing a random 15 digit number on the first try wow I mean it's through the roof right this is a level of statistical significance we essentially never see
and CNN turned it into a veterinary medicine right it turned you grain hilarious right so my point here is a couple fold one the Ivermacken 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 whose 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 Ivermacken 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
the story is really profit because you got to get to the motivation of why would one do something like this I am still not sure I know
the crime is so ghastly maybe I'm just naive let's hold the stock as I have to be real bad I want to get to it from here and I don't want to be compromised
yep we're back all right so Ivermacken where were we with it well one the evidence is actually really powerful that Ivermacken 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 principle 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
these statistics are literally something that you can do on one sheet of paper
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 Corey actually we were at the CHD conference in this podcast
great name for a podcast
it's a great name for a podcast and actually I loved the podcast the podcast was we didn't really know what we were sitting down to
but it was Pierre and me talking to three alopathic doctors on a host and the alopathic 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. Why did they have a problem with the data?
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.
How did the conversation play out like when you gave them this data, when you discussed this?
Well what they said was well there could be lots of explanations for that which is not true, right?
Really? What explanations do they provide as possible?
I think they were reserving the right to go find some explanation because think about it this way.
Let's just run of a crowd.
No, let's imagine how this experiment could be something other than it seems to be.
Let's say that the courts were biased in who they granted the right to have Ivermackton 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 Ivermackton in more dire cases.
So you would expect people who got Ivermackton if there was a bias in the way the courts granted that access.
You would expect the people who got Ivermackton to be more likely to die because of that.
So the fact that we see exactly the inverse means that actually the result if there's any bias at all is probably conservative.
It's probably more effective than we think.
So in any case, I just think we've forgotten how science works.
It doesn't take any of 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 Ivermackton and you discover that actually 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 end point.
Let's say that I had a drug that was perfectly successful at stopping the common cold.
You take it and one day later your common cold has gone.
And I decide to run an experiment.
But the end point of the experiment is hospitalization.
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 Ivermackton and didn't get Ivermackton six months later.
Well, I'm not sure you would expect a difference between the population that didn't didn't get it six months later.
They have completely recovered.
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.
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.
So in the case of this podcast, how did you guys resolve it? How did it end?
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. 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 is shifted.
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.
So 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.
Overdosed on Ivermectin which is virtually impossible. It's pure lies. Not only that, these are stock photo of people in Oklahoma in August with winter coats on.
Oh, man, yeah, propaganda was fucking it was designed for idiots. It was designed for idiots by idiots for it. They just like they didn't care how provable it was. Oh, 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 called the poison control hotline because they panic.
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 that because this was a manageable disease with well known repurposed drugs that were readily available.
But there was no argument for these vaccines in anybody, right? This was experimental technology that was fraught with dangers that turned out to be massive harms.
But the gaslighting was all about profit because of the emergency use authorization. Well, 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.
I don't think that's what happened. 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 notice.
So you think this was all about rolling out the mRNA platform for many other purposes other than just COVID 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.
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 the new shots that come out and I wouldn't touch them with a barge pull.
So did you want to talk about given that we are in this quadrant? Did you want to talk about Sam? Sure. All right.
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 what was that?
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 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?
Allegedly, I don't listen to anything. 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 or not, it had a massive impact on the number of people that take his position seriously because he's unwilling to acknowledge that the vaccines clearly damaged a lot of people.
Unwilling to acknowledge that they weren't necessary, especially in kids and in younger people and I think any healthy person under a certain age, unwilling to acknowledge that many other things could have been done to prevent serious illness and hospitalization other than just this vaccination and that this vaccination is seriously flawed.
I had a conversation with them. 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 days 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 where he's like, are you going to get vaccinated? I'm like, why would I do that?
Tell me why I would do that. Well, in Sam's thing, it would offer you more protection. I just got through it pretty easily. I am a healthy person who exercises all the time. I take a fucking slew of vitamins. I sauna every day. I do all these different things that make my body more robust than the average person.
I got through this disease relatively easily with all the ways that I prescribed that I described other 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. And I'm better.
And CNN's response was to turn me green and 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 fucking 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.
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 cause death.
Especially if you're a person that people hold rather and very high steam for someone that people respect their opinion and take it very seriously and would refer to them as an expert.
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 Offett has now in several different places said that all the top people in the public health regime who were issuing these dick tots all knew that natural immunity was the best immunity you were going to get.
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.
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.
Sam is 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. I would also point out this question about whether or not Sam is responsible for people's deaths.
I want to do this carefully because I think it matters. I wouldn't say he is. I would only say he is if he's saying that I am.
That's not something that I would go out and say. I wouldn't. Here's how I would do it rigorously. I think the discussion, a robust open discussion about a complex set of facts.
That discussion is how we find the truth. The truth gives us an opportunity to become safer.
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 part of the solution. Even the people who get it wrong.
I would agree with that. 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 responsible for whatever deaths might befall us. We have to do more than just participating in good faith in the conversation. We have to be right.
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. That's on you because you decided those were the rules.
And I don't know. I hope Sam can find his way back. I think Sam is a real problem with admitting wrong.
Admitting your 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 yet 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 it was a young healthy person who was a skier relative 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'd been heavily drinking while they were there like on a ski chip getting drunk get COVID got really sick and wind up getting very fucked up by it.
I think that scared him. 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.
You see I look at this early on in COVID you see 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 take a flu shot and go commentated wouldn't even bother me. I don't think maybe I feel a little bad but it would be fine. I drink coffee whatever I'll be okay. That that was my position. And I couldn't I would have go to the clinic.
They told me can you come back on Monday. I said it cannot but I'll be back in two weeks for the next fights will do it that in that time period the vaccine was pulled it was the Johnson Johnson.
So it was pulled and I knew two people that had strokes to two people that were relatively healthy people that also had strokes.
And then I started getting nerves and then a bunch of people that I knew Jamie being one of them a bunch of other people got it and recovered.
And I'm like all right well this isn't a fucking death sentence also I was around Jamie. I didn't get it. I was around Tony. I didn't get it.
Then my whole family got it. My whole family got it and I didn't get it and I didn't do anything. I did the opposite of trying to not get it. I tried to get it and I didn't get it.
And I'm like okay well this isn't what everybody's saying it is. It's clearly not what everybody's saying it is especially not to I would I would say on the healthy scale.
I'm an outlier. I'm very healthy because I spent a lot of time working on it. 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 or the guys that it's to protect the people that are unhealthy.
If this fucking stuff works because if it works they should take it and they'll be protected. It didn't make any sense that everybody who 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. 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 have been forbidden to go to work. People were working remotely. Everyone was like huddled together in fear without any contact with the outside world for a prolonged period of time.
And in California which I think to this day is probably the most devastated by it psychologically. I was back recently. People are still wearing fucking masks. People are still putting masks on when they go into Starbucks. It's bananas.
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.
I don't know if the cancer or someone's going through chemotherapy would have you which makes sense. 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 this solution you were keeping them from returning to a normal life and you were a fucking problem.
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 want to attack people.
But I was like I know you mother fucker 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.
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 in vaccinated. I have to get injected with some experimental gene therapy.
And that's the only way even after I've gotten the fucking cold and gotten over it. This is pure madness with no objective analysis of all the details and the facts and a logical conclusion.
A logical breakdown of their perspective on what this thing was. No, it was all group think. It was all adherence to this one doctrine. There's the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. I had people on my pocket like this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
Shot the fuck up you parrot like are you a man. Are you an actual human being. How the fuck did we survive a million years of evolution to get to you. You fucking bag of milk. Like what are you talking about everybody has to do what you did. You're not even healthy.
This is so crazy. You're jumping into the game in the fourth quarter and telling people how to play like you didn't play the game. You didn't do it. You sat on the fucking bench. You did nothing. And now this and you're talking about health. This is crazy.
It's like the moment that I had Peter hotels 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 I've remarked and is so good for.
He was talking a lot about parasites in tropical climates and have so many people have parasites. And this is a giant issue that that he works very hard to discuss and to educate people on and to you know find solutions for.
And for that guy to be sitting on the podcast and then I started saying you know what do you do you work out all kind of junk food junkie I love candy like what.
What like what do you think you're made out of man do okay if you know anything about biology your fucking cells are literally constructed based on the food that you eat it's the only thing they have.
It's all you have to keep your body robust and vital your body needs protein needs vitamins needs carbohydrates 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 bodies 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 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 it's a fucking important is be healthy the fact that you can ignore that while giving advice is wild just absolutely wild.
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 it 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 is crazy his daughter who has autism and he swears it's not the vaccines.
But 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 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 want to warn other people right you would be on billboards he's an expert who wrote a book about his daughter right you couldn't tell me what those environmental factors are that contribute to autism rates being higher he's an expert.
Well it's just the limited thinking and I like Peter as a person outside of all this stuff my interaction with him but nothing but pleasant I you know I try to be as nice as possible I know I try to be as charitable as possible.
But that ability to live a life that is measurably demonstratably unhealthy like clearly unhealthy and yet be talking about health that kind of thinking is wild it's wild thinking for you it's also to be a public expert and to have that kind of
flaw in your thinking that exposed by a fucking comedian like I'm not even an expert just a guy who's like asking you questions and it's so blunt so obvious by your response that you 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 and virtually all measurable areas versus a healthy person with 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 espoused them publicly.
Well there's something very wrong with our entire approach to public health and hopefully we are going to confront it because they've effectively staged a coup against doctors and they're dispensing very low quality advice.
I mean it's really the inverse of good advice but this this brings me back actually to Sam because there's a dire lesson here for one thing I quite like Sam also and I will tell you one of the early experiences I had as I was getting to know him
was that I heard him say something 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 and I both think that you know you can get stuff wrong and it was a very confusing time and the information was very low quality
and lots of people got stuff wrong. However you are now making unforced errors refusing to see that you got it wrong in fact you're not even acknowledging what you know Sam you have stopped getting boosters for COVID despite all
of the things that you said about it and how do you know he stopped getting boosters because he said so I believe he said so they say why how many to get that I don't know that might be also part of the problem
but my feeling it could be well that that is an issue that you're 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 really wild it is a oh and this is another thing that people need to understand about it we are way too focused on myocarditis and paracarditis.
This is a random to 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 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 than I
would have been right 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 now that sex was the second the first one was him asking me to get back to 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 right like if I was right then I would be right basically saying like if the disease was way worse and I was right that I'm right but the disease
wasn't that and you weren't right and they didn't have to say what the fuck are you saying right and other people were right and the 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 so let me explain this so this
conversation was after we talked about this on the podcast and I thought I handled it very charitable he was upset that people
want to attack him so we call 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 talk to everybody he said he won't platform you or something about the disinformation that you spread what have a
conversation with him but it's like a guy who knows he can't beat up Mike Tyson he's like fuck Mike Tyson like why don't you go say it to his face
I don't just not have desire to be in the room with that guy and like I'll fuck 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 this these years of saying all this
correct 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 comments section it's just the complete dissolving of the
appreciation of him as an intellectual it's like we've watched it just he's destroyed it in front of our eyes like so many
people that I talked to that used to love Sam Harris will tell me like I still love that guy what the fuck happened to him
oh the people who are angry at him are people who were devoted fans of his yeah I don't know if he even knows that
no I don't think they know it either well I'm one of them you know I think you you got to
parse out the correct things that a person said from the incorrect things the 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 stuck and so now he's not making sense
yeah he's stuck and I would say you know look the principal that you and I shared Sam
where it doesn't matter how painful it is to admit that you were wrong you just far better off doing it at whatever
point but if he thinks he's right have a fucking seat across a 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 right and in fact
I think it makes the same point as this accidental natural experiment run by the courts right
is the Joe Rogan experience like the you know the gold standard of how to make intellectual progress
absolutely not yeah I mean it look at your table know that's kind of mammoth teeth and I got a fucking an old mech head here
right this is the methods the method section tells the tale on the other hand on the other hand by you
know how by what degree did you beat Sam Harris whose method amounted to listening to the right
people right the right people were lying I don't exactly know why they were lying I don't know how they
got there maybe it's a wide range of explanations but the point is actually the method that you used
which was talking to people and hearing them out and challenging challenging them when they said
stuff that didn't make sense that method worked pretty well were you going to get the shot you were
did you get it no did you end up avoiding it you know did you get wise fast enough to stay away from it
you did did you have Ivermectin when you got sick you had it available and you used it these things
worked well and I guess the point is this is a classic case of the proof is in the pudding right
you know 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 not only that but a one that was funded and designed
specifically to achieve a desired result and if it didn't they hit it 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 I've I've 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 it is
it would be great if we knew that there's never been a time ever where they lied
during the 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 then realize well there's 10 studies that show
that there was real fucking problems 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
right it's I call it the game of pharma and the idea is they are trying to own a piece of intellectual property
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
I think the best example that is probably AZT used during the AIDS pandemic
because AZT to come up with a new drug we took a long time you had to develop it
you had to do this but they knew that they had a drug that wasn't being used anymore
because it was so problematic and used as a chemotherapy that it was killing people quicker than cancer was
so what do they do they just said well we'll take this drug that we already own
and we could already sell and now we'll prescribe it to people that have HIV
which killed them and killed a lot of people that were asymptomatic which is really wild
you know people that had tested positive for HIV presumably
probably during with a PCR method right there was a lot of them
that was one of the things that Carrie 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's before and it was in regards to the AIDS crisis
he had done I believe he had done that interview in the 1990s
and he was saying that there's not a way to detect whether or not someone is infected
with a fucking disease that's not what it's intended for
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
and the admission in false positives with COVID is through the roof
false positives were an immense part of the situation
well you know this is why when you say it was about the money that I'm just not convinced
is I can certainly tell a story about lots of places where a huge profit was made
but the commitment across the board to making sure that certain things happened
that we were maximally spooked and what's more not only maximally spooked
but primed before the thing supposedly hit our shores
we were primed to be expecting a certain disease and so we hallucinated that disease
doctors were primed to imagine that they were about to be dropping like flies
because they were going to be forced to deal with these sick people
who had this very destructive disease and I don't know why this happened
for one thing I don't think we have properly figured out
what the meaning of tabletop exercises is
remember event 201 yes like shortly before
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 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 there's a meaning to it right
I don't know if it is a pump priming thing where the idea is we know this is coming for some reason
and in order to make it go down the way we want it to go down
everybody has to have practiced their role they have to go through a rehearsal
right is that what it was is it a mechanism of spreading a kind of word
you know in a in a way that has plausible 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
yeah and people would just say that was a coincidence
and it could have been
but the question is what I want to know is you know if you're constantly running tabletop exercises with infectious diseases
so that event 201 stands out because it just happened to be the one that was shortly before the pandemic
and it got lucky with respect to some of the parameters being right
okay but it's like it's like when I first discovered that I had
I think I probably mentioned this to you when Heather and I finished the first draft of our book
we were in the Amazon for two weeks intentionally insulated from all contact with the world
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
we're reading this in Spanish trying to understand what it is
and it's you know a bat coronavirus has escaped
the zoonotic this that and the other and because I was a bat biologist I briefly looked into it
figured out who the bats in question were where the disease came from that 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 for laboratory studying these very viruses
and I thought first of all what's a biosafety level for 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
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
am I getting this pushback and my tweeting I take back what I said
the story may not be what it appears to be
this is very very early on
it's right it's my first awareness it's exactly one hour
how does the other guy know about the biosafety lab already well I don't know what his background or her background
it's an anonymous account he's still follows me but I don't I don't know what his background was
probably a fed I don't think so
I think this was I think this was already being discussed in public
and because I was coming out of the Amazon I was a couple weeks behind I see right
and so anyway but anyway hey 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 like the you know the beginning of my being
redpilled on covid was getting schooled over biosafety level for laboratory
studying bat corona viruses in the exact place where this thing emerges
so in any case point is if there were a thousand biosafety level for labs
studying bat corona viruses 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 how it works
Crimson contagion was a joint exercise conducted from January to August
2019 in which numerous national state and local and private organizations
in the US participated in order to test the capacity of the federal government
and 12 states to respond to a severe pandemic of influenza originating in China
whoa you don't even know how to talk about that there's an article posted
in the New York Times on March 19th 2020 about that
wow yeah March 19 wow okay before virus outbreak a cascade of warnings
went unheeded government exercise including one last year
made it clear the US government was not ready for a pandemic like the corona
virus but little was done that's one way to put it you know that 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 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 not
ready with cures right not ready with ways to protect the public to inform
them and how to behave and all of that what they were ready with was a campaign
of lies designed to do what that I don't know like if the idea was to make money
I don't know why they delivered such a dangerous shot seems to me and I've
wondered a lot about this if they had delivered an inert shot I don't know what
we're all 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
seemed 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 did they want people actually
injected with the thing that 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
of injecting people with a contaminated dangerous novel platform so-called
vaccine well we say contaminated do you think they realized that it was
contaminated and went by contaminated we're talking about SV40 we're talking
about DNA I think they knew yes they had to know that it was contaminated so
what would be the motivation to do something like that it doesn't even make sense
other than money but the in the money was substantial right to dismiss the
money aspect of it when you talk about hundreds of billions of dollars okay but
if we're going to talk about the money then we have to put the money in the
proper context okay 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 and that's not an understatement imagine if we had to live
off the narrative of the mainstream television 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 ibermectin story doesn't get
enough play because really the ibermectin 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 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 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 bail 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 read the great taking no great taking is a very good very
scary short book david web 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
your 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 in
the public are vulnerable another place and this is speculative on my part I
would love to be told that I'm imagining things and the danger that I see is
not real I look forward to somebody telling me that but so far that's not
what I've heard as I've talked to people about this concept if the stock
market is wildly overvalued as a result of bubbles and fraud and it comes on
glued and it causes a run on currency people trying to get money out of
banks and the banks turn out not to be stable here's what I'm concerned
might happen and I'll connect it back to the question of free speech in a second
my concern is if your bank goes insolvent a you're now in jeopardy with your
house because almost everybody it's in fact considered financially wise not
to have your house paid off if you borrowed money to buy your house under
favorable conditions then you can make more money by not paying off your house
and taking the money that you would use to pay off your house and putting it
into investments that pay better right you're actually financially ahead if you
do that but if you suddenly can't pay your mortgage then your house can be
taken right so if there's a collapse that causes us to be unable to service our
mortgage is 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 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 numbers 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 where to say don't worry
your account is insured but we're going to pay you in central bank digital
currency you can 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 there's 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 or 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
very unlikely that's what I think too so anyway hopefully
we know this but just based on Elon buying Twitter and the examination of the
Twitter files 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 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 you wear of the the Irishman God can't remember his name
a 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 I'm aware of that yeah which is crazy
and you're having trials just by judges and the judge will just appoint a
sentence right it's apocalypticly bad if you understand what our what the west
is based on yeah you're watching a shining example of western
freedoms getting pushed over the cliff right and you know it's not it's bad
enough that somebody refusing to use somebody else's pronouns is being
jailed but this is happening at the same time that you have grooming
gangs raping young women and talking about it is understood it's wrong
think right that acknowledging that you have an immigration problem and
that there's a a dynamic in play that involves certain populations that are
prone to seeing the British people and not as their countrymen but as
something else as prey yeah 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 and that
same society is having digital ID pushed on them 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 yeah I do too I
know quite a few 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 right clearly just the
Twitter files alone just shows you what happens when intelligence agencies
get involved in distribution of actual factual information and they
suppress it yeah whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story which Sam Harris
also had a while take on like that was he didn't care of Hunter Biden children's
corpses burden as basement or whatever the fuck he said like what you
don't you wouldn't care about that like that wouldn't be nuts to you I don't
I get you're trying to be hyperbolic you're trying to be you know entertaining
but that's fucking crazy to say well and you know the what he was trying to
say is a Trump is really bad 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 happens to share the last name of the president you know it has a
drug problem and a sex problem it's that the presidential family is deeply
corrupted by something which is manifest in the sun who can't keep a lid on
also just the the obvious take of them all being pardoned like the whole family
being pardoned for everything like what did you do you know I mean charged with
anything like why are you pardoning his whole family if there's not some real
thing that you're concerned with them being prosecuted for pardoning his whole
family plus Anthony Fauci yes and I think from 2014 on which is just first
of all leads very vulnerable to the AIDS crisis right I don't know if it took that
in 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 gated function research that was just a flat out bald face 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 a enabled class of
citizens that are capable of simply engaging in whatever crime they want
secondly there's a question about whether or not Joe Biden actually pardoned
Anthony Fauci knowingly given his compromise 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 right he's supposed to be the guy that saved us and he gets a
pardon that goes all the way back to 2014 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 yeah it's crazy well
over three hours here all right should we wrap this up maybe we should wrap it
up okay thank you Brett it's always great to see you my friend great to see
you too thank you very much really appreciate you