Shaun Newman Podcast - #1021 - Bret Weinstein

Episode Date: March 24, 2026

Bret Weinstein is an American evolutionary biologist, podcaster, author, and former professor. He earned his PhD in Biology from the University of Michigan, focusing on evolutionary trade-offs such as senescence, cancer, species diversity, and the adaptive roles of morality and religion. He taught at The Evergreen State College from 2002 to 2017, where he gained national attention in 2017 for opposing a campus racial equity initiative, leading to protests, his resignation, and a settlement with the college. Now a prominent public intellectual often linked to the Intellectual Dark Web, he co-hosts the DarkHorse Podcast with his wife Heather Heying, applying evolutionary thinking to science, culture, politics, and current events.Silver Gold Bull Links:Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] Grahame: [phone]Bow Valley Credit UnionBitcoin: www.bowvalleycu.com/en/personal/investing-wealth/bitcoin-gatewayEmail: [e-mail] Get your voice heard: Text Shaun 587-217-8500

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Now, let's get on to that tale of the tape. Today's guest is an American evolutionary biologist, podcaster, and author. I'm talking about Brett Weinstein. So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome from the Sean Newman podcast. Today, I'm joined by Brett Weinstein. Sir, thanks for hopping on.

Great to be here. You know, I assume you know this, but I got to go back. you're going to be episode 1,000, I think I'm at, Brett. Your wife, Heather, was on episode 569. It was like two years ago. I went back and listened to it. And I kind of chuckled at some things. You know, she told me a lot of the backstory on you, too.

And it was rather enjoyable. Your time as a bike mechanic and some things like that and dropping out of college and everything else. But, you know, it's your turn to come on the podcast. So, A, thanks for hopping on. And I just want to start nice and simple. I assume everybody knows who you are, Brett, but I don't love assuming that.

I'm going to, you know, so just tell the audience a little bit about yourself as long or as short as you want to go. Sure. I think one thing that gets lost, given where I show up in the world now, is that I'm a biologist, died in the wool. And that's a big part of how I see the world.

I think I use the same toolkit for thinking about biology as I do for thinking about human affairs, and frankly, human affairs are biology, so it's not even a stretch. People might wonder why I'm in the public eye at all. That happened as a result of the spectacular meltdown of the college, Evergreen, where Heather and I were teaching. she was there for 15 years. I was there for 14. And we had an idyllic teaching life because Evergreen was founded by radicals who got rid of every structure that a normal college or university would have, no grades, no departments. Administrators did not outrank the faculty.

The faculty did not have rank within them. And in effect, what they did was create a blank slate where you could reinvent teaching so that it worked really well for students. And I will say there were a lot of professors who took that freedom and abused it. It was hard to fire people. And so people who didn't have the creativity to figure out what to do with that freedom or just weren't inclined to spend the effort tended to hang on. There were a lot of those people on the faculty. But there were also a number of faculty like Heather and myself.

who used that freedom to teach, I would say I specialized in teaching students who had high potential but weren't well built for school, which is exactly what I was. And I couldn't have taught any other way because frankly it would have been hypocritical to teach to the students who had mastered school and leave the others adrift. When the college melted down, the students who were frankly sent by professors, who had decided to get rid of Heather and me. They were sent to create a spectacle in which they would accuse me of racism. And back in 2017, it was unthinkable that a straight, white male was going to stare down an accusation of racism.

So they created a protest, 50 students that I'd never met, stormed into my classroom, accused me of racism, told me I should apologize and resign. and they told the administrators that if I didn't resign, I should be fired. I said, you're mistaken, and I tried to reason with them. And when they stupidly uploaded all the video they had taken to the internet, people started scratching their heads. Why is a straight white guy staring down this accusation? Is there really nothing to it? And assuming there is nothing to it, what the heck is going on here?

And that really, I think, woke a lot of people up to the, the DEI woke revolution and what it really was. And it cost Heather and me our careers. We couldn't continue to teach at a college that was willing to, frankly, inside a riot and allow itself to be policed by students, students who hunted me with weapons, searched cars on a public road. So we had to leave and we had to reinvent ourselves. and we became authors and podcasters and public speakers. But in any case, that's the origin story.

And since then, I've gotten myself into trouble on many different topics. Heather and I were prominent COVID dissidents who didn't think the virus had come from nature, who thought that there were drugs available in the pharmacopoeia that were safe and seemed to be useful against COVID. and maybe most importantly, we knew that the MRNA shots were very dangerous. And those things resulted in the demonetization of our YouTube channel and a lot of time spent in the wilderness. But somehow, once again, we've survived all of the accusations that we are terrible people. And we are now foraying into new topics where we will become newly terrible for new terrible

for newly unthinkable thoughts. I'm glad you said safe and useful. I was waiting for safe and effective and I was going to, oh, and then safe and use. So I wrote that down. I'm like, yeah, Ivermectin, safe and useful folks. That makes sense to me, Brett. You know, I was saying to you before we started

that your conversations with Tucker, both on your podcast and the one on Tucker's, which I think people should go spend the, you know, roughly four hours and go listen to both of them. because I was saying I've had a book club since 2018. There's five of us. And we argue incessantly about everything. We came through COVID together and held that together.

And then on every iteration since then. And when Peterson went on Rogan, I remember Rogan telling him like the second or third time, like you got to stop going on like small, like little 10 minute interviews because they always get a gotcha moment. And then they just rally that. and Rogan and Peterson were such a match. It was just such a lovely conversation back and forth.

And the reason I point to that one is at times, Tucker is almost like an attack dog. I don't mean it that way. Maybe I do. He can be aggressive. And when you were on, I'm like, oh, my goodness, this is the most balanced I've heard Tucker. And it was this kind of ebb and flow. You guys had this wonderful discussion, right? anyone attacking you for it because I've seen some of the posts come out now that, you know,

I can just imagine, Brett and you can explain to the audience. But it was a wonderful chat. It was a very, very balanced chat of like concerns of two Americans on what their government is doing to a different nation. Yeah. I must tell you, my life is so oddly divided. I knew that talking to Tucker on this topic was going to cause all hell to break loose. And I said it to him, I think during both of the discussions. We did one discussion on his podcast and one discussion on Dark Horse.

And, you know, I said, this is not going to be a win for me. That's not why I'm here. I'm here because I feel obligated to have this conversation because, frankly, Tucker, I've seen the way you've been raked over the coals. and I know it's unfair because I've known you now for, well, back since 2017. And he said, I can't imagine why anybody will be mad at you. This is a very reasonable conversation. And I said to him, that's exactly why it's a problem.

The whole idea is if you're going to do something unforgivable, like talk to Tucker, like he's a decent guy, a patriot and a human being, then it's really important that there be some good reason to disqualification. dismiss you, like you have a history of saying insane things, you have a drug problem, you have a mental instability, something like that. And if none of those things are the case, if the crazy things you've said in the past have actually turned out to be largely true, if you have, let's say, an advanced degree in a science and you're known for very careful thinking, and if you're extremely measured in your analysis, then there is no way to dismiss you. So the point is

that's when they bring out the big guns. That's when they go after you because it is very important. Not that the people who watch the conversation be persuaded that it was crazy because they won't be. It really wasn't a crazy conversation. Neither of them were. It's really important to convince the people who haven't watched it yet that, A, they shouldn't. And B, if they do and they find it persuasive, there's something wrong with them. That's the trick. You convince people that if they think you're being reasonable, then that reflects badly on them.

And what most people do when faced with that is they say, I don't want any part of this. And they walk away and maybe they join the chorus of those saying, Brett's a crazy person. But, you know, obviously I'm not. So I find that really interesting. because, you know, in the middle of COVID, okay, I went from being a guy talking about sports, Brett. And then I started talking about politics and COVID and like all the things in sports you're not supposed to talk about.

And I would watch as the mainstream media would demonize a doctor, a lawyer, whoever. And where I sat, I went, I should talk to that person. That's very fascinating that they're attacking that person. I wonder what's actually going on there. So when you say, you know, a reasonable conversation, they had to bring out the big guns. I don't think what they understand is more people are going to listen to it now because they've watched this game play out. I think that. I like normally, not normally.

When they go after somebody like that, it can be anyone. I'm more drawn to it now than I've ever been because I watched it play out in COVID. So they're attacking you. But for all of us who came through COVID and listened to the Dark Horse, we're like, that doesn't make any sense. I've listened to Brett. He's pretty reasonable and actually methodical in his thinking. So if he's going on Decker and having a discussion, there must be some point to it. So to me, I feel like it's going to have the opposite effect.

More people will be drawn to the conversation. Am I wrong on that? A little. It's not that there aren't a lot of people who do what you're saying. There are. but it is a self-selected group of people who are abnormal in a way. Most human beings are, even though they don't know it, absolutely terrified of standing alone. They just are.

And the reason for that is not hard to understand if you go back 5,000 years and you think what would it have been like for an ancestor to be outcast, from their population. The answer is actually that's like the first and maybe the only necessary step to starvation. If your people decide to cast you out, you have nothing because a human being is not capable of surviving in the world alone.

I mean, literally not capable. If you think you are because you've got great outdoor skills, think about how you would do it if you didn't have, you know, rope made in a factory, fish hooks made of metals that you wouldn't know how to mine or refine or manufacture. It's impossible for a human being to survive truly on their own in virtually any habitat on earth. So if your people start making noises like, hey, if you go down that road, we're done with you, people cower. And what in effect they've done is they've divided the world. There are those of us

who either because it's our instinct or because we were left with no choice, stepped across that line, we endured the slanders. And it turned out the way civilization works, and given the number of us who suffered those slanders, yeah, you do end up getting outcast from your people, but you end up with other people. And frankly, you end up in a population of people that has courage, that has the ability to think rationally in an emergency.

Frankly, I wouldn't trade the group I lost for the group I gained under any circumstances. But look at what's going on with Tucker. Tucker had the biggest audience on cable television. He was literally forced out by the corporation that owned Fox. He built a media empire of his own. And now is he losing audience? Probably not. But the audience he's picking up is younger and less afraid.

And he's losing all of the boomers and most of the Gen Xers. They won't listen because the rap on him is that he is so broken. a human being. His decency is so absent that to listen to him is essentially to listen to the devil himself. And I mean, this is why I went on my mission to go talk to him, is I actually believed that about him more or less in 2017 when I met him. When he called and asked if I would come on his program as Evergreen was melting down and the entire mainstream press was ignoring the story, I thought long and hard about whether or not talking to Tucker Carlson was a reasonable choice to make. And what I decided was this is going to be terrible, but I have to do it because the only

way that Heather and I are not going to get snuffed out at our college with no alternative plan, And there's no way to get hired from a teaching college into a research university or something like that. So we were facing extinction. And I thought, I need to get this story to a wider audience because if they keep the venue to Evergreen, there's no escape. So I made what I thought was a Faustian bargain. And when I got to Tucker, having been raised a liberal, having thought horrible things about him, he just shocked me. He was clearly compassionate and incensed on my behalf.

And I saw another human being having sympathy with somebody he knew very well was at the far other end of the political spectrum. Just on the simple basis that I wasn't guilty of what I was being accused of, He didn't, for a moment, appear to consider the possibility that I was a liberal who got what he deserved. Right. And when he treated me with compassion and he spoke in my defense, I thought, what don't I know? How is it that Tucker Carlson is showing the kind of compassion that my colleagues, who frankly have been in my house, who I've broken bread with many times? How are they abandoning me?

and Tucker Carlson, Arch Conservative, is defending me and expressing his outrage that I would be targeted in this way. And in the years since, I've come to understand Tucker and I disagree on a lot. You know, you should hear us talk about the distinction between patriotism and nationalism. I think there's a huge difference between those two things. I think they're more or less opposite states, and I am no nationalist, but I'm very much a patriot. Tucker will tell you he's a nationalist. We can have that conversation. But in all the years of knowing him, it has never occurred to me that I'm hearing something that is not motivated by basic human decency and patriotism.

So I felt, frankly, I felt I needed to return the favor. I felt at a moment when he's being accused of being anti-Semitic, and I, a Jew who's known him since 2017, doesn't think that that's a a rational conclusion. I needed to stand up and say, you know what, Tucker? I think we both have concerns about where the country is. I don't think it's coming from that place in you. And I think other people need to hear that said clearly and without hesitation. Well, A, good on you for going on because I thought it was a wonderful discussion. There was lots of things both of you said in there that reminded me of honestly, I mean, it's a micro version. of it, right? But the book club will have discussions and heated ones that nobody ever gets to hear.

It's not on air where we're changing each other's minds all the time. And I thought there was multiple times in that conversation where he would say something and you would say something. Yeah, yeah, I should. You're right. I found that very, very fascinating. People have this idea that you have to agree on everything with your friends. That's not true at all, right? I mean, a true friend, And you go back and forth about very complicated issues. And one of the things, you know, you said painful upgrades, when you're going through an issue like bombing Iran and what's happening there, this is going to be a painful upgrade moment where you're going to lose some of your friends

and you're going to find some people you didn't even know about. Roughly, I'm oversimplifying, Brett, but that's the way I took it. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Because right now, with Iran specifically, a Canadian talking about Iran and our own prime minister will say, we knew nothing about it. And I'm like, that's how useless we are right now. We don't have anything to offer. Regardless, I brought on, I don't even know now, 10 different people talking about what's happening Iran. And the people that I thought would be for it, some of them are against it.

I'm like, oh, and some of the people I thought would be against it are for it. And I'm like, oh, this is one of those moments. This is one of those moments where people don't want to talk about Israel. They don't, it automatically brings in the Jews. That is like a taboo word. You can't talk about it. And it's become this very, I don't know, conversation that we need to have, but nobody wants to have. And Tucker's having part of it, right?

Like obviously, there are others as well. And you going on there was very interesting. But there's this, you know, once again, I'm not in the realm of Tucker and Brett and all these different people, Joe Rogan. But on the blue collar level, you can see this playing out right now where some people are not interested in talking about it whatsoever. They do not want to open their brain to it, which is really interesting for me to watch. Yeah, the reflex to shut down a conversation that you don't want to have is an indicator. that you're not in Kansas anymore. And let me tell you, I am now 57 years old. I have spent my entire adult life and frankly much of my childhood thinking carefully about things, reaching

conclusions. Most of my conclusions are probably pretty darn standard. Some of them are wild and radical. But I'll tell you something, I never take anything off the table permanently because it's unscientific to do so. I have things that I have believed for 50 years. And every so often, I dust them off and I say, why did I reach that conclusion? Has anything changed? Has anything that I've learned in the interim altered the priors that go into it such that I might reach a different conclusion. And if you're not doing some version of that, then you almost certainly have garbage in your model of the world that is going to have cascading effects. So, you know, I check things all the time. And in general, I realize I'm pretty much where I was. Maybe I update

something here or there. Every so often I discover that things that I was certain of, my certainty was based on things I no longer believe. Oh, that's an important discovery. So I think there's just something about the kind of mental discipline to figure out what you believe and why and leave it all as an active model subject to change because, frankly, we're great apes. It's amazing that we can do this reasoning stuff at all. It's even more amazing that we can explain it to each other, but none of it is secure. So the combination of people's lack of discipline in terms of how they reach conclusions and the fact that they don't have a firewall between their social thoughts and their analytical thoughts.

I think one of the things that has allowed me to go where others can't go is that for some developmental reason, you can frighten the hell out of me over what a particular conclusion might mean. either for the world or for me personally, but it doesn't affect what I think is true. What I think is true is in a separate compartment. I calculated independently. And, you know, it's not like my fears don't have an important meaning to me. They do, but you just can't let them adjust what you think is true. Can you walk me through social thoughts versus analytical?

Sure. You've seen the comments from my two Tucker conversations. And by the way, I would tell people, you're more likely to run into the conversation that I did on Tucker's program. I think the more unusual conversation is the one I did for Dark Horse because, frankly, it's my show. And I was able to have a conversation with Tucker that I've never heard before publicly. It's a version of conversations that we've had privately, but I've always thought those were very enlightening. So anyway, people should check it out. But you've seen the comments on both of these things. They include a bunch of different things. There's obviously bots and or sock puppets creating a hell of a lot of smoke. There are also people I know personally who are incensed by.

the very fact of the conversation, by some of the things that were said during the conversation, there is a whole chorus of people saying, well, I used to like you. I thought you were cool during COVID, but I'm done. Right. So what that is supposed to do, whether the people involved in it are real people, whether the real people know that they are involved in this, what that is supposed to do is say the equivalent of don't go their girlfriend, right? This is not. not the hill you want to die on, Brett. And indeed, I don't want to die on any hill. But if you think that I'm going to pretend to believe things that I don't or remain silent where I think something has to be said because you're threatening to leave my audience and I may think you

represent some huge constituency of people, I can't do it. And I can't do it for two reasons. one, I'm useless as soon as I start processing that kind of information as if it were indicative of what's true, right? As soon as I become the guy who is, you know, protecting my income stream by only saying things I think are safe to say, then who the hell am I? Why would you bother tuning in, right? You need me to tell you what you need to know, not what you want to hear. So I'm the, hey, you probably don't want to hear this, but I'm going to tell you anywhere guy, anyway guy. And frankly, there's an income in that. So I have to just kind of trust that even if I lose a whole fraction of my audience, that it's the right thing to do long term.

And I shouldn't pay any attention to that thing. But for most people, I mean, you know, think back during COVID. Heather and I were in the lucky position of having already been driven out of our personal. profession before COVID started, driven out over false accusations of racism. And then we started our own business, accidentally, really. We started the Dark Horse podcast. I originally started it with a whole other purpose in mind. But it became a source of income.

We replaced the income that we had lost, and there we were. What happened as I spoke out on COVID, as Heather and I spoke out together, which was really the whole magic of Dark Horse in the early days was Heather and me, two biologists, talking about the biological features of COVID and trying to understand how they were playing out in the cultural world. When we did that, for a while, things were great. The podcast was absolutely skyrocketing in viewership. That meant that our income was going up. The world was sending us a signal, hey, we need you doing this. And it didn't matter that it was pissing people off. But there came a point where I had put on Pierre Corey to talk about what was going on with Ivermectin, what was going on

with patients in hospitals. I put on Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone together. Interesting story, by the way, but I put them on. And wouldn't you know it? YouTube demonetized our two channels. We had two channels, a main channel and a clips channel. Both had about a half a million subscribers somewhere in that neighborhood, and they were both absolutely taking off. Well, YouTube somehow, without telling us they even did it, capped the subscribership. So it immediately went from skyrocketing to a plateau. And they demonetized both channels, and it was clear that they were going to kick us off if we didn't stop talking about vaccine hazards. Well, that was the replacement for the careers that we had already lost. Do you back down at that point? It would certainly have been a reasonable thing to do

if what we were trying to do was preserve our status in the world. We could have moved on to other topics. Maybe we could have, you know, taken our foot off the gas on COVID a little bit and still continue to talk about it. Who knows? But we didn't. What I did was called up Joe Rogan. I was like, Joe, they're going to kick us off YouTube. He held what he called an emergency podcast in which we discussed what YouTube was doing and what the implications were for us. And although I have no access to what was actually said, there was clearly a meeting in the C-suite of YouTube in which they decided a few things. We are not going to remonitize this channel,

but we are going to stop harassing it. It's not worth the price of hearing about it on Joe Rogan's podcast with 10 million viewers or whatever he had at the time. So we became free to do what we wanted. There were literally topics that other people couldn't talk about, that we talked about openly, but we couldn't make any money on YouTube. for a while YouTube didn't run ads and then because I guess they're terrible people they decided

they were going to run ads on our podcast even though they were claiming we couldn't because the podcast weren't suitable for ads you know anybody who wanted to could see what was going on but anyway my point is the tools for coercing people into shutting up into getting them to self-censor Those tools are, I mean, they go back presumably to the invention of language. People threatening each other to get them to change their behavior is the most ancient of patterns. People who don't respond to it have a particular value. I'm perfectly happy being one of those people. And I don't know why we keep surviving it.

I don't know. Frankly, I'm not a religious person, but I do see in the ranks of the people who have stood up to tyranny, there is an overwhelming preponderance of religious faith. Heather and I are like the outliers as de facto atheists. Why is that? Well, I think if you really believe that there's someone up there, that there is a right and wrong, and whoever it is who's up there cares deeply that you do the right thing, well, there's only so much people can scare you. So if I may, Brett, being a guy who's found faith along the journey of a thousand podcasts, you realize at some point that what's going on in this world, it isn't worth selling your soul for eternity, right? So all the things you just said, one, you're building, it's like,

you're building a skill, whether you knew it or not. You're going to through something ridiculously painful, right? You had your dream job. Then you get attacked for something you didn't do. The guy who comes and bails you out, not bails you out of it, but comes and treats you normally is a guy he never thoughts your brain. Like, what is going on? And so by the time you get to COVID, you're like, what are they going to do? Call me a white supremacist or something. I mean, honestly, I've been down this road before, folks. It's not that, right. And so it doesn't, It doesn't work. So then they go off to you monetarily, which sucks.

I mean, on this side, listen, I think I finally cracked the bar of 1,000 subscribers, well off your 500,000. And I talked to the leader of the Freedom Convoy, and boom, all of it gone. And I was like, you got to be kidding me. I work my butt off for that. And then you're just going to, we talk about this little thing called the Freedom Comboi, all goes away. well once again you you start to build this thing where in the time when now you're not supposed to talk about iran or israel or all these things you're like well i don't know i mean literally for a year straight i had warnings on every podcast they did because i was interviewing pericori or mccullough

or kersh or take your pick a bunch of canadians that did wonderful fabulous work and every one of them was like better be careful here and it just became another badge of honor So now when you come into the next one, you're like, well, I mean, I've already been here before. They have literally stripped everything that I thought I was back then. And now I've moved on. And that just isn't who I am anymore. So it's not that I want, I don't want the painful upgrade. It's going to be painful.

But I've been here before. And the thing with faith is, I don't know, it's, it's, Charlie Kirk said it best. And I believe it's out of the Bible. but like it gives you this piece that is incomprehensible to the human mind. So I just don't have this fear of what they're going to do to Sean because I'm like, if you make me go against what I believe is eternity, then I am going someplace I don't want to go.

It's, it's, you can't mess with that. I don't know. I hope that makes sense. It does. I'm in a weird spot here because, like I said, Yes, you're an atheist. Well, here's the thing. I'm not an atheist in some committed way.

I'm completely open to evidence that something else is going on. I just haven't seen it. And I'm not expecting to. In fact, part of my work as a biologist confronts the question of why faith and religious texts and things like this evolve in the first place. So I would just put the causality. in a different place. But in any case, the conclusion I've come to is a weird one. It's going to sound tortured, but if you think about it, maybe you'll see where I'm coming

from. I think there's nobody up there, not in a literal sense. I think there's no fate. But I'm quite convinced that it is better to live as if there's somebody up there. and as if there is fate and navigate that way. And I'm not saying that it protects you. I mean, Charlie had faith, and we all saw what happened to him. But here's the tortured part of it.

If there is a God, if I'm wrong about the literal existence of a creator, if there's a creator and he's up there and he's, let's say, He cares deeply about us and intervenes on some regular basis. I think he needs me to be an atheist. I think at this moment in history, somebody who is bilingual, I get along very well with religious people because I don't treat them with disrespect. And I think what they believe, which frankly many of my colleagues have called a mind, mind virus, I think my colleagues are out to lunch on this one. It's not a mind virus. It's an adaptation.

It's very valuable. Has everything to do with human success, at least up till the present. And so I don't think there's a God, but if there is one, I think he needs me to stand in that space in between so that we don't have a conflict between people who are rationalist, materialists, but honorable and religious people. We need those clusters to be able to interact productively with each other and to understand each other in terms that are respectful. So, you know, nothing would be better from my perspective than the discovery that there is somebody up there and he's looking out for me and he wants me to do this and not that.

That would solve a lot of problems for me. So I'm open to it. But having not seen it, I have to think, well, you should probably live your life as if you believe these things are true, even if you don't. And in the case that you're wrong, maybe that's for a purpose. So on Charlie, just because you have faith, doesn't mean you escape with your life until you're 150. I can't even begin to try and explain what God's plan for us all is. I have no idea. My favorite story in the Bible is, is Saul, because Saul is the one who persecutes Christians and then turns into Paul and pretty much writes half the New Testament, right? And I think that's

a wild story. So when you go, I feel like I'm supposed to be an atheist. I go, I have no idea, right? I have zero clue what God's plan for you is. Zero clue. I find it very interesting. You're open to it. I didn't, you know, on my side, I started off as atheist, that it was agnostic. And then I was just confronted with a whole bunch of things where I just saw it for the first. I was, oh, my goodness. How did I miss this for so long? And now it's become, I can't turn away from it. It's just part of life.

And I would have never thought that 800 episodes ago, probably. Probably, man, roughly that. And then it just, and it was one of those things, you know, you talk about your conversation with Tucker. And having those people say, well, I was a part of your audience, but I'm not listening anymore. When I brought up God for the first time on the podcast, you can imagine. So I run this really weird thing where I don't like social media. I'm on it, but I have a phone. My phone number's on the bottom of this episode and every other episode.

You can text me and you can call me. I may not answer every time, but I'm accessible. That's why I try and interact with people. And so anytime I touch the third rail, I hear about it. And I'm, you know, God was one. Politics was another. I went from interviewing some of the greats from the NHL to talking to doctors about COVID.

You can imagine there was some angry phone calls. And I brought up God. And that was a painful ordeal. I still get texts every once in a while saying, you know, I don't always love. when you bring up God. But you know, I've been along for the journey. And one of the things with Tucker, if I bring only,

I mean, we're talking about Tucker an awful lot today, Brett, I apologize, it's just fresh on the mind, is I find if you don't listen to a podcaster for let's say three months. If I went three months without listening to a Tucker, I'd be like, how the heck did he get to this conclusion? But when you go along for the ride with them, no different than your dark horse audience,

you're along for the journey, you get to hear the journey and you're like, oh, that kind of makes sense. It doesn't mean the third rail when you hit it for that audience is like, oh, no, don't go here. Please don't go here. I've been avoiding this conversation my entire life or whatever it is, right? But that's what happens. That's probably not a convincing statement on anything to do with God, just that I find it interesting.

You're open to it. To me, I think that leaves a whole lot of possibilities for your life. Well, you know, interestingly, I have been, I will not put it gently. trying to pick a very respectful fight with some of my religious dissident friends. Sure. I think, you know, I've told you what I believe is true of the universe. I've told you that I leave open the possibility that I've got a fundamental wrong, that there is a God and that I'm just not seeing the evidence.

But here's the thing I think my religious friends need to confront. I think many of them have been on a kind of productive intellectual dead-end path. And the intellectual dead-end is based on the idea that the story of Darwinism is wrong. Now, I'm a Darwinist. It's what I do, where I spend a lot of my mental time. I think the story of Darwinism as we teach it is very incomplete. And I'm embarrassed by that. I think my field has missed that it is incomplete, partly because they're so worried about handing any weaponry to creationists

that they pretend the story as complete as it is and that the creationist don't just get it. So we now have these intelligent design. folks looking at the evidence and doing rigorous work that points out it doesn't explain what we Darwinist claim it explains. The question is, what's the remainder? The intelligent design folks clearly believe that the remainder, what isn't explained by the Darwinism in the textbook, is God. I don't think that's the case. As I went on Joe Rogan's program and explained, I think there are missing pieces of the Darwinian puzzle that radically increased the power of the Darwinian mechanism

to create species as we know them. But the fight I'm trying to pick is the following one. If there is a god, a creator who made the universe, I believe there is one clear interpretation of the evidence in the universe that was created. And it is, that God used Darwinism to create species that he didn't expect. In other words, I believe that if there is a God, that that God created a universe that surprises him. Now, that causes religious people very frequently to freak out. The idea that being all-powerful somehow is supposed to overwhelm the idea of being surprised is deeply ingrained in most religious mythologies.

But if you think about it, and I'm not pretending to understand what it would be like to be God, but with my puny little ape brain, I look at the puzzle and I say, If I were a God, would I want to create a universe in which everything was preordained from the first instant? And, you know, it's like a screensaver that just unfolds in a completely predictable way. Or would I want, you know, an aquarium where things would emerge that I didn't expect, where I could be amazed and delighted in all of those things by processes that I had set in motion, but that unfolded in their own way. Right? Now, in one way, that sounds like a radical notion.

I don't think it really is. It's one assumption. Is there emergence in the universe? Maybe God intended there to be emergence in the universe, but that the emergence is real. And therefore, I think, frankly, I'm no biblical scholar, but it fits with the idea, you know, if I look at the Torah and I see, you know,

God is frustrated with Moses, right? Like, if it's all preordained, what does it mean to be frustrated with Moses? It's like Sam Harris, you know, haranguing me for saying unforgivable things about COVID at the same time. He's telling me none of us have any choice about anything. Like, okay, I have no choice about what I say. You have no choice about haranguing me. What sense does that make? So if there is a God and God created a universe with emergence in it, specifically perhaps for the purpose of it spitting out a bunch of biology that he could look at and say, that is marvelous, a platypus, who would have thunk? You know, if that's the universe, then I think that solves the problem of evil. Because the point is, a universe with real emergence will spit out evil. And you don't have

to explain why God would create a universe with evil in it, because that's not exactly what happened. So anyway, I think that this is a much more reasonable way of taking all of the evidence we do have and rendering it consistent with religious belief with one simple alteration. The simple alteration is did God build a screensaver or an aquarium? If it's the aquarium, everything else fits into place. you know one of the um so when Tucker was bringing on uh once again i'm bringing back up Tucker forgive me he was bringing on um the guy about the shroud and and all the different things right he's trying to prove to people that Christianity is in fact real and excuse me for my side

I don't need to be convinced and when I listen to you Brett I'm like you have such a wonderful mind Like where you're trying to, I have to, you have a, you're so methodical, right? It's, it's, it's why people like listening to you. It's why I like listening to you. Just the way you process thoughts is really, really fascinating. And I go, I don't, I don't have, I'm no biblical scholar, right? I mean, I started reading the Bible again, roughly 2022, right? So what is that?

Four years ago, I'm just, some guy. who started a podcast in the middle of nowhere. Some people joke. It's two hours east of the edge of the world. As I told your wife last time she was on, it was minus 38. Today I feel like it's about zero, you know? Like it feels like T-shirt weather here in Canada. And I go, it's one of the beautiful things about it.

Everything you just said, it's like, well, actually, if it's emergent and all these different things, I don't know. Because I agree with you on in different parts. It's like, why are you upset with any of these? people when you know it's already coming. It's a good question. But why would you allow certain things to happen? I don't know. It's a good question. I got people driving around right now yelling at the radio because they're going to text me saying you need to read this and you need to do this. It's great. It's great. I love it. I love it, folks. I just sit here and I go, I don't know. I ran into something that I could not wrap my brain around. I thought I had lost my mind. Full stop. I thought I had gone crazy.

came home. I stopped podcasting for 53 days. This is a freedom convoy. Then I come home. Then I had six months where I went, okay, I'm going to go solve this. I'm going to do what I do with the podcast and I'm going to attack it like I attack COVID. And so I'm going to search it out. And then I ran full stop into it all over again. And when I decided that it was Jesus, this is the way we're going. It all. It all ended. Just boom, done. I'm like, oh wow. And you don't have to believe me, but I mean, we've just met. And I don't need anyone else, honestly, to believe me. It doesn't bother me if people think I'm nuts at this point anyways. I mean, geez, I at sometimes I sometimes go, man, I have, I don't think the Sean of 10 years ago would recognize me anymore.

But regardless, it's what's happened over the last. I've had my own painful upgrades since COVID and onwards, and I expect more of them to come. And yet, every time that happens, I find new people such as yourself and others where I'm like, oh, these are wonderful. These are interesting people. I love an interesting mind. Brett, you got a mind that it's just fun to listen to. Thank you. But let's follow that through, actually. Sure. Here's the reason it's important, whether I'm right about, hey, if there's a god, he created a universe with emergence and he used Darwinism to make all the species knowing that he wouldn't have predicted them or described them in advance, right? If that's true, it actually has profound ramifications for all the stuff

that we fight over, stuff that doesn't sound like it has anything to do with evolution or emergence. Let's just go right for it. If it is, true that the universe is full of real emergence, that that's the way God created it, then we have a real puzzle on our hands with respect to what's going on in the Middle East, right? Because if that's true, if this is a universe of emergence that therefore has patterns in it that were not planned, now we have to ask ourselves, is the state of Israel, the biblical state of Israel, or is the modern state of Israel something else, which undeniably has a connection to the thing described in the Torah, but it might not be the same object. In other words,

in an emergent universe, could it fall into the hands of a raging maniac and his followers? And could they be doing the bidding of something other than God under the flag that contains this ancient symbol on it? That's at least a possibility worth considering. Okay. Let's talk about Jesus. Now, I will tell you, I'm a fan. I don't think that the likely explanation for the story is supernatural, because I don't believe I've seen any evidence of the supernatural. On the other hand, I will tell you that I look at all of the testimonies in the Gospels, and I think one explanation for that pattern is that people saw something that defied explanation. and described it somewhat differently the way humans will.

But that is at least an explanation for why we have testimonies to things that sound like they can't possibly have happened. I'm not saying I believe that's the most likely explanation. I've told you I don't. But nonetheless, it's on my list of possibilities of ways the universe could be different than I think it is. but as a fan of the teachings of Jesus, which I take to be primarily about broadening the in-group so that others who would not under prior traditions have been treated with human dignity, are treated with human dignity. That's what I take the meaning of the story of the Good Samaritan to be.

That's what I take the implications of the golden rule to be. and I think it's really the primary, it's the heart of the upgrade that came in the form of the New Testament. But that raises the question as to whether or not in a universe of emergence that if there's a God was set in motion by that God, what are we to think about people who subscribe to the moral teachings of the New Testament and therefore what is presented under the banner of Jesus, but are not believers in the literal divinity and supernaturalness of Jesus or anyone else. That's a live question, right? That becomes a question in which we have an emergent pattern, which is an atheist who is following the dictates of this

divine story because the game theory that underlies that story is clear from a logical level for anybody who wishes to pursue it with those tools. Again, just like the question of what do we do with the modern state of Israel, which may or may not be biblically described, what do we do with with a cosmopolitan world in which we, because of the nature of our economic relationships, because of the nature of the modern West, in which we intermingle mostly without friction with people who believe radically different things, right? That would be an emergent pattern that's not anticipated in at least the Torah. The Torah is very much a document. of a period in history in which people displaced each other from planet Earth so as not to be

displaced from it. That was the rule under the Torah. And I'm not, you know, it sounds awful to say that that's what that book is about. But it's just reality. Those were the rules. That was the game theory under which humans lived for most of our evolutionary history. That changes when you get this idea that all people are deserving of human dignity, that we should collaborate with people who are not from our tribe because it's a good thing to do, because it's the right thing to do. Those are the ideas that are the foundation of the modern West, to which I am absolutely patriotic. Modern West, as a set of nations, falls down on those principles routinely, but nonetheless, as described, We know what direction we're supposed to go.

We know what kind of people we're supposed to be. So anyway, my argument would be none of this is described in those books. All of it is on the table for discussion. And the real question that those books present to us is if there were a God who wants what it says those books claim he wants. What would he have us make of this situation which is not described, which is emergent? We have been presented with a puzzle. We've been presented with values. And I think we are supposed to be looking at that puzzle and saying, there is no prophecy here. What there is is a head scratcher as to

how to take those values and apply them to this situation with modern technologies that are not described in those books in play like nuclear weapons, what would, if there's a God, what would God want us to do in light of the values spelled out, especially in the New Testament? Well, it's a very good question. A couple of things you've brought up. The Israel thing is interesting, right? Because I think a lot of Christians, full stop, support Israel no matter what. no different than the mega group supports Trump, full stop, no matter what. And you're like, but wait, can Trump do no wrong? Is he infallible?

Or can he make mistakes? He's human. Of course he can make mistakes. Of course he can get bad information. Right? When you come to the Israel thing or religion, like you go through the Catholic Church and sorry Catholics to pick on you. But, you know, there's enough stories of child abuse and some stuff like that.

You're like, well, you've got to shine a light on the dark to get rid of it. So when you look at painful upgrades in general, just to kind of lump them all together, I didn't want to talk about Israel. I don't want to talk about the Middle East. I've never been to the Middle East, Brett. I sit here. I'm a Canadian. We weren't even told about the strikes going on.

I've already said that earlier. And yet here it is. We're on the verge of World War III. Maybe the United States knows what they're doing. Maybe they don't. Maybe they thought they had a plan. And then something they didn't predict is starting to happen. I don't know. But certainly, what I feel needs to happen is you need to put light on the dark, which means you have to open up discussion on it. That's why I've talked about, you know, I keep coming back to Tucker. what you did with him was that. It was a very balanced conversation. And so what can we do about it? I'm not a politician. I'm not sitting in Trump's office.

I mean, how did we get out of COVID in Canada? I played my little tiny part in that. Some will say it was bigger. Some will say it was tiny. It doesn't matter. It was somewhere in there. And helped. And what did Canadians do? We did the Freedom Convoy. And people can hate the Freedom Convoy. But it ended the lockdowns.

Within a week, everything was just gone. all the stuff. It changed where we were heading in society, full stop. So when you talk about what's happening in Iran, the Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, take your pick, we have to open up dialogue on it. Discussion is so important. It cannot be understated. It's so very, very important. And we have to continue to do that, especially when they come for you saying you're all the things you're not. You have to have those discussions. Yeah, I want to correct one thing, though. Sure.

Nothing frightens me more than people in charge of, frankly, God-level power, expressing certainty and clarity when they are intervening in a complex system. So you have Trump expressing perfect clarity about what is taking place in the Middle East during this war and what will happen during this war. Now, it could be that privately he is greatly uncertain about these things and he's posturing. but given what we know of the man i think it is more likely that he is portraying a story that he believes is that is based on actual certainty in his mind about what will happen certainty that could not possibly be logically justified because if there's one certainty that there's one certainty in the emergent universe, it is when you intervene in a complex system predicting the outcome

of your intervention is impossible, at least with any precision, right? You intervene in a complex system, you are going to get unintended consequences that you could not have anticipated. And anybody who doesn't walk into it with the humility of knowing that is a hazard. They are selling a story. I mean, you know, when Dick Cheney told us that we were going to be welcomed as liberators in Iraq, holy cow, is he off the mark? Now, did he believe it? We can debate that. But that he spoke with that certainty is frightening.

That Trump speaks with the certainty that he speaks with is equally frightening. And what I'd really like are to have adults in power. I realize they can't tell us everything. We don't want to telegraph to our antagonists abroad what we're thinking and why. He has to have room to negotiate. But I want to be leveled with respect to what the upside of intervention is, what the potential downsides are, how deep the playbook is with respect to contingencies. Is there a path out if this doesn't go as planned? And those things are important to know.

And frankly, we have the public whipped into a frenzy on two sides of this puzzle, both of which are overly certain. None of us know how this is going to come out. That's the one certainty. I agree with you, Brad. Appreciate you coming on and doing this. And very nice to finally meet you. And please say hello to your wife for me because it was a treat to have her on a couple of years ago. And if I may, forgive me, because I could do this for the next two hours, and I just crossed over the time limit.

So I just, if you'll indulge me, just one, it has nothing to do with what we're talking about. So I'm sorry, folks, I'm steering this square into the Tullies. But I've wondered now for two years, something Heather had told me. She said, you're on opposite sides of the country. and she dated a couple different guys and realized that she wanted to date you. And so she sent you a letter across country. And then she goes, you know, because I'm sitting there and I was born in 86. So by the time I'm dating, you know, there's email and whatever else.

So one of the things that has always fascinated me has been this, what your generation and generations before you had to deal with was this, this, this distance and time and letters in the, I don't know, anticipation maybe. So is that, not that the story's true. She just said, I should ask you about your side of this. And I know it's a completely reversal of where we went. Just that I've, I've had it written here the entire time and I was going to start with it. But then, of course, we went into very heavy things.

And I'd be curious your thought on, on Heather, because one of the things I admire about, you two is that you're marrying you're a couple you're very out in the open she defends you it's it's wonderful to watch to have a married couple uh when the world tries attacking the family unit over and over again i guess well i will tell you in no uncertain terms i fucked it up and it somehow worked out anyway um i did not fuck it up out of callousness i fucked it up out of basically a paralysis. When Heather contacted me and said that she wanted us to get together, I did not know how to respond. Obviously, the answer is yes, of course. And I would have been very wise to send a message that said, yes, of course, I'm thrilled.

I love you. I'll see you soon. That would have been wise. My 57-year-old self understands that full well. On the other hand, my whatever, 20-year-old self figured that's the most extraordinary letter you're ever going to get. And the response better be equally extraordinary. And how do you craft a extraordinary letter? And so, yeah, I fucked it up. And, you know, at this stage in my life, at 57 years old, I am aware of the following piece of wisdom. If I had it to do over, I would change nothing. And I would change nothing because I have a beautiful marriage that I cherish, that feeds me each and every day. I have two absolutely wonderful children.

And if you go back and you change something because you can't live with the pain of your error or whatever, you run the risk of something that you have evaporating. And frankly, I want for very little. I have as close to a perfect life as anybody ever gets, I'm pretty sure. And so it's painful for me to say, yeah, I kick myself over my many errors routinely. I spend a fair amount of time kicking myself over them so that I learn the lesson and don't make similar errors again. But I can't say I would

change anything, nothing, because I wouldn't risk what I've got. Brad, appreciate you coming on. And that was a great answer, by the way. Thanks again. Thank you.