#2427 - Bret Weinstein

Good to see you back so soon; we spun off in a bunch of directions last time and never got to the evolution ideas you wanted to lay out.

I’ve hinted there’s another Darwinian layer doing far more heavy lifting than random mutations alone, and with AI racing ahead I want to put it on the table before brute force computation stumbles into it.

Quick refresher: genes produce proteins that either build structures or act like tiny machines, and the textbook story says copying errors tweak those proteins and selection filters the results.

That works well for pigment changes and microscopic tweaks, but it feels underpowered for big shape-shifts, so I’m proposing an extra layer that boosts evolution’s reach, the way higher-level code boosts what binary can do.

Evo‑Devo has shown that many dramatic differences are about where and how much material gets deployed, not new molecules; think a bat wing versus a shrew’s hand, built from similar stuff but allocated differently.

Years ago telomeres convinced me DNA can store numbers, not just recipes, because telomere length acts like a counter that controls how many times a cell line can divide.

Genomes are full of variable repeats we’ve treated as markers, not messages, yet they look like ideal places to store integers that set developmental parameters like timing or bone length.

We already see crude versions, like extra gene copies boosting output, but a wide library of genomic variables would let selection rapidly test adjacent forms, such as stretching specific finger bones to refine a wing.

So how does a ground‑dwelling creature make the leap to flight; what are the plausible steps from hopping to moving through 3D space?

I respect the intelligent design crowd for flagging gaps, but gliding offers a clean path: small gains in lift and control pay off immediately, as you can see in flying squirrels that silently bridge huge gaps.

Selection doesn’t just discover forms; it evolves ways to search design space, what I call explorer modes, and consciousness is one of ours because it lets us pre‑test ideas before we build them.

If the genome stores tunable parameters—say, each phalanx as an adjustable setting—then evolution can quickly explore Stuart Kauffman’s adjacent possible rather than waiting on rare protein changes.

None of this dents Darwin; he didn’t know genes, he knew heritable variation and selection, and numbers are just as heritable as codons.

Our institutions haven’t fully integrated this; The Selfish Gene was the last big leap in my field, memes opened a door to cultural evolution, and Evo‑Devo’s mechanism‑first work came mostly from development, not classic Darwinists.

I saw a BBC piece on the Congo where small antelopes, dykers, now dive and swim underwater to chase fish, and the change seemed way too fast for the standard story.

Exactly; without an enhanced toolkit that kind of pivot often means extinction, and we see quick, functional shifts across lineages when environments flip.

We see it in humans too, like people thriving in extreme cold where others would die.

This planet is chaotic, so the game is to keep your lineage alive far into the future by finding new niches fast, which is why adaptive radiations bloom and then get pruned until a few lines make it through.

We say evolution can’t look ahead, yet it built beings who can, so in practice it outsources foresight to organisms that can model outcomes and act on them.

I’m fascinated by creatures that barely change, like crocodiles and horseshoe crabs.

Those aren’t relics so much as winners whose designs are so durable they outlast waves of innovation, a Lindy effect in animal form.

Humans might be a variant of that strategy: a generalist body that can do many things, plus cultural software we can rewrite together around a fire, sharing abstract ideas through language.

A lot of people are worried about endocrine disruptors and microplastics lowering fertility and testosterone; are we adapting or just getting poisoned?

We’re being poisoned, and the damage is compounded by hyper‑novelty, a barrage of revolutions—computers, the internet, smartphones, social media, now AI—that arrives faster than we can metabolize their harms.

We should slow exposure for the young and stabilize their chemical and informational world, because childhood is training for an adult life that now shifts under their feet.

Every new breakthrough becomes a brand‑new environment with no manual, and we’re watching mental health buckle, especially in girls.

There are no adults because the world changes too fast for wisdom to form, so the best we can do is build robustness and limit the churn kids are forced to absorb.

Is that why rites of passage mattered, to mark a real shift into responsibility rather than pretending you’re grown at eighteen?

Yes; they’re deliberate thresholds that tell a child they’re a prototype until they pass, then the stakes are real, which is far stronger than a diploma that barely maps to adult competence.

Kids feel pushed to act adult without the skills, so they copy behaviors they think signal maturity.

Meanwhile schools often shield themselves from real‑world feedback and push dogmas that train students to ignore evidence, which is civilizational self‑harm.

Companies only course‑correct when the real world punishes bad ideas, and even then it’s slow.

Consequences are too indirect to reach the drivers of change, and we’ve over‑insulated people from the fallout of bad decisions when what builds adults is grappling with those consequences.

That’s my fear with universal basic income; you risk lifelong dependence on the state.

People need purpose tied to undeniable rewards and costs, and while I don’t know the full problem set we should aim them at, protecting from bad luck while letting choices bite is crucial.

Could we decouple purpose from survival if basics are covered, and have people pursue growth for its own sake?

It only works if success is tangibly rewarding, and we’ve already undermined the strongest motivator—mating—with porn, soon sex robots, and other substitutes that detour effort away from building real relationships.

Some women are pushing back on porn’s impact because it reshapes how young men see sex.

I’m hearing more young women are consuming it too, and culturally we’ve glamorized women imitating the worst male traits instead of honoring complementarity.

You see that boss‑bitch trope everywhere, which is strange because ruthless greed is unattractive in men too.

A better model is the Yin‑Yang fit—different but matched—and we’ve lost that script, which leaves a lot of men bitter and many young people unsure how to even start pairing up.

It wasn’t obvious when I was young either, but you’ve got to choose carefully and seek the kind of person you truly want.

Porn has hijacked sexual development, teaching a caricature of intimacy that pushes some men toward rough, performative scripts and leaves women feeling like sex is antagonistic; that predatory mode exists in men, but it’s not the only one.

It’s like a superhero fantasy—spectacle, not real life—and that old impulse to spread genes fast is a relic from shorter, harsher times.

Women historically filtered out those guys, but porn-driven expectations changed the terrain; sex in humans evolved as both a relationship gauge and a repair tool, including outside fertility and even after menopause to keep bonds strong for raising kids and grandkids.

We’ve flooded that channel with extremes, pushed both sexes into worse behavior, and made long-term partnership less appealing, which undercuts the family unit that civilization depends on.

Add AI porn, VR, and lifelike sex robots and you remove the pressure to grow, communicate, or earn a partner’s love, because the robot always approves.

We need a counterculture with simple rules—no porn, no robots, and no sex with someone you already know isn’t a long-term candidate.

Sex sells and signals status, yet few seem satisfied, though happiness is tough for anyone to nail down.

I still meet young people who make this work, and some may be finding it by opting into communities with shared norms, often religious ones.

That’s part of why more young people are returning to religion when friends keep crashing out of the hookup script.

I wish religious communities had handled COVID and gender ideology better; many didn’t pass those tests.

Almost no institution did, and pharma’s propaganda playbook made it worse; now a new analysis shows children died from COVID vaccines while online enforcers deny it and claim the opposite.

VAERS undercounts injuries, doctors have financial incentives to vaccinate—Mary Talley Bowden said her small practice would have made about one point five million dollars—and mandates ignored natural immunity even after it was clear the shots didn’t stop infection or transmission.

They also gamed the numbers by calling people unvaccinated until two weeks after the shot, so early vaccine injuries and deaths got tallied in the wrong column, which is fraud; myocarditis tied to COVID was inflated by proxies while platform risks from mRNA had multiple plausible mechanisms.

I’m encouraged that Vinay Prasad pushed an FDA memo noting at least ten clear pediatric deaths post-vaccination—likely the visible tip—and we’re hearing bolder work from folks like Marty Makary on broader biodefense issues.

How was Vinay bad on Ivermectin, and credit him for the risk he’s taking; almost everyone I know knows someone hurt by the vaccine.

He leaned on randomized trials that said Ivermectin didn’t help and didn’t dig into how those trials were run, but lately he seems more awake and I welcome it.

Many injured patients were told by their doctors it was unrelated or genetic.

Actuarial data shows something real, and lots of people have quietly put two and two together.

Some who were loud and absolute now can’t admit error and will gaslight or muddy the data to protect reputations and careers.

However hard it is, you’re better off owning the mistake; meanwhile, that FDA memo is a start, booster uptake has cratered, countless mRNA shots are in the pipeline, and we need COVID shots pulled because the platform, not just the payload, is the problem.

I worked with Charlie Kirk to move this along—he told me we were doing holy work—and his loss slowed momentum even as others like Robert Malone, Martin Kuldorff, and Retsef Levy press from the inside.

On Ivermectin, the UK PRINCIPLE trial actually showed better outcomes across almost every subgroup, but they buried the figure hundreds of pages into an appendix while capping doses for heavier patients and dosing late, then declared no meaningful benefit.

Pierre Kory documents a natural experiment in eighty court cases: forty patients received Ivermectin by court order and forty did not, and among those denied, thirty-eight died while two survived, yielding a p-value around 5.03 times 10 to the negative 15 if the data’s sound—which is extraordinarily strong.

And the media mocked it as horse paste and literally turned you green on TV.

If doctors had been free to use repurposed drugs, COVID was manageable for most, but propaganda blocked that path and steered people toward a product that didn’t deliver and carried risks.

Randomized trials can detect small effects, but they’re easy to game with shared placebo groups, midstream endpoint switches, and underdosing, so we should prize simple, fraud-resistant tests like that court ‘natural experiment’ where a basic chi-square leaves nowhere to hide.

When Pierre and I presented it on the ‘Why Should I Trust You?’ podcast, the doctors struggled to accept it, yet any court bias would likely favor sicker patients getting the drug, which makes the survival difference conservative, and trials also bury efficacy by choosing unrealistic endpoints or dosing tricks.

In general, older drugs with known profiles are often safer bets than shiny new ones, and simpler studies help the public actually see what works.

How did that podcast end?

Respectfully and productive—we disagreed, felt heard, and stayed civil.

Even early true believers have shifted a bit.

The shift on vaccines is dramatic, but Ivermectin remains abstract to most people because access was blocked and it was stigmatized.

The propaganda was absurd, like that Rolling Stone piece about ERs jammed with people overdosing on horse meds, complete with winter-coat stock photos in August.

That spin helped smother repurposed drugs that could have managed the disease, clearing the path for experimental shots that brought real harm.

And the emergency use setup only worked if they could claim there were no effective treatments.

I used to buy that, but I think the bigger play was debuting mRNA under emergency rules because normal safety testing would have exposed the platform’s risks; they’ll blame the specific COVID shots, not the platform, so I wouldn’t touch future ones.

On Sam, I’ve owned my one big miss—masks—but on the whole we were right, yet he keeps insisting your show cost lives.

I still like Sam, but he tried to talk me into vaccinating after I’d recovered, which made no sense; I’m fit, I used multiple treatments, never told anyone to skip vaccines for ivermectin, and CNN still painted me as pushing horse drugs, while Sam keeps saying that harmed people.

Officials knew natural immunity was strongest, and vaccinating post-infection can misdirect immune resources and raise vulnerability; if Sam sets the rule that being wrong equals killing people, then his advocacy for unnecessary shots carries responsibility too.

I think he’s afraid to admit error; a friend’s bad case scared him early, and I was initially ready to take J&J until it was paused and I saw people stroke out, then watched friends recover and realized mandates and the logic around transmission didn’t add up.

The psychology got weird—mask theater in LA and people branding the unvaccinated as walking contagion while many of them ignored basic health.

Take Peter Hotez: by his own words he eats junk and doesn’t train, yet lectures on health; when I asked what environmental factors might drive autism if not vaccines, he couldn’t name them, which is wild for a public expert.

That’s pharma-as-faith and a false split between terrain and germ; your biology’s condition shapes your susceptibility, which folks like Hotez downplay even as they celebrate interventions.

Public health captured medicine and pushed low-grade advice; I liked that Sam once preached quick course-correction, but now he won’t, and he’s even stopped boosting despite his prior stance.

People are even talking about cognitive issues after too many boosters.

Focus shouldn’t be only on myocarditis; this platform randomly destroys cells in various tissues, so each booster is another roll of the dice, which makes Sam’s “if the facts were different I’d be right” move even stranger.

I told him as much, but he won’t sit down with you; he’s piled up public claims that didn’t age well, and now his own fans are turning on him.

The most upset people are longtime admirers.

I still rate his past debates, but he’s dug in so deep he’s not making sense.

The rule still stands—admit you’re wrong as soon as you see it.

If he thinks he’s right, he should face you across a table; instead he calls my show a cultural disaster.

Your messy method—long talks, pushback, changing your mind—beat his “trust the right people” approach, which relied on sources that were lying; you avoided the shot and had treatments ready, which worked in practice better than slick trials with moving goalposts.

And we know studies get gamed—buried negatives, selective parameters, sugar versus fat all over again.

That’s the pharma game: own IP, craft a narrative of superior safety and efficacy, and print money.

Look at AZT in AIDS and the way PCR thresholds can inflate positives; Kerry Mullis called out Fauci back then, and false positives were a massive factor this time too.

But it wasn’t only profit; we were primed to expect a hyperlethal plague, and tabletop drills like Event 201 rehearsed censorship and mandates—maybe a coincidence, but its timing and specificity matter.

People brush it off as coincidence.

Early on I tweeted the zoonosis story, then reversed an hour later when I learned a unique high-containment lab studying these viruses sat at the epicenter; rarity makes proximity meaningful, just as the rarity of such drills makes that one stand out.

There was also Crimson Contagion in 2019, a big China-flu drill that officially showed we weren’t ready.

They were ready—for narrative management; if the goal were only money they could have sold inert shots, but instead we got a dangerous, ineffective platform, which suggests the injection itself mattered.

Do you think they knew about DNA and SV40 contamination?

I do.

Then why do it, besides the enormous profits?

The post-pandemic market for the platform dwarfed the initial haul, but podcasts blew the safety story open; free speech saved lives, and next time they’ll try to seal those cracks.

Michael Burry is warning again, and The Great Taking explains how modern custody lets your stocks satisfy someone else’s debts without paying you if things unwind.

If bubbles pop and banks fail, you could lose your mortgage and be made whole in central bank digital money that’s programmable and can be shut off, which would make it much harder for voices like ours to reach people in a rerun.

You can see the machinery already in the Twitter files since Elon took over.

Elon buying Twitter left at least one big room where we can still argue in public, even if it’s imperfect. If we’re pushed into central bank digital currencies as the only way to transact, that tool can be used to punish dissent and lock in medical and political control.

We’re already seeing versions of that drift in the UK, from harsh penalties over pronoun disputes to moves that sideline jury trials in favor of judges. That should scare anyone who values due process.

That is a direct hit on the foundations of the West. At the same time, you’re told not to speak about grooming gangs or immigration patterns that put vulnerable people at risk, and the country’s weaker constitutional guardrails make open debate even harder.

On top of that, digital ID is being rolled out there.

Exactly, and friends of mine in the UK are looking for exits because they feel muzzled. Our Constitution has buffered us, but it has been under sustained pressure.

The Twitter Files showed what happens when intelligence services lean on platforms and bury true stories, like the laptop saga. I also thought Sam Harris’s claim that it didn’t matter went off the rails.

It does matter, because Hunter’s business in Ukraine and Joe’s position are entwined. We don’t know all the motives behind that war, but ordinary people die while corruption routes may be at play, so brushing it off isn’t serious.

This isn’t just a troubled relative with the same last name. It points to a compromised political family that keeps leaking evidence through the one member who can’t contain it.

And then you hear talk of blanket pardons for the whole clan, which only raises more questions. Why pardon everyone if there’s nothing to fear.

That list even includes Anthony Fauci. He told Congress the work in question wasn’t gain of function, which was a flat lie.

Would a pardon that stretches back to 2014 still leave him exposed on perjury, given his exchanges with Rand Paul.

I think sweeping, unspecified pardons are likely unlawful on equal protection grounds because they create a privileged class above the rules, and a signature done by autopen from a diminished president invites court challenges. Legalities aside, the mere attempt signals exactly who is being protected.

He’s marketed as the rescuer, yet he gets a shield reaching years back.

It’s a little too tidy that the person who helped move risky research overseas later became the face of the response.

We’re well past three hours, so let’s wrap it up. Bret, thanks for coming in, always great to see you.

Great to see you too, and thanks for having me.