The Joe Rogan Experience - #2427 - Bret Weinstein

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

Duration: 3h 22m
Broadcast on: 17 Dec 2025
Audio Format: other

Download the app or ask Perplexity anything at https://pplx.ai/rogan

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- Joe Rogan, why can't I check it out? - The Joe Rogan Experience. - Train by day, Joe Rogan, podcast by night, all day. (upbeat music) - What's happening? Hey, good to be back, good to see ya. 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 gonna 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 we said, all right, let's do another quick turnaround, come back. - Right. - All right, so it still means, let's talk biology, and let me just say, I know that's not everybody's bag, but I do think just about everybody has, at some point, listened to the story that we tell about adaptive evolution, and wondered if it's really powerful enough to explain all of the creatures that we all know and love. All right, so the classic story is that you have a genome that it contains a great many genes. A gene is a sequence in DNA that results in proteins being produced. The DNA describes exactly the sequence of amino acids in a protein, and a protein would typically be one of two things. It would either be an enzyme, which is a little bit misleading as a term, but an enzyme, well, enzyme is misleading, but an enzyme is a catalyst. Catalyst is misleading. It's really a machine that puts other chemicals together. So a lot of the genes in the genome are these little molecular machines that assemble molecules. And the other thing that proteins are likely to be

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