---

I am going to do something unusual (for me) today. I have listened to long podcasts and summarized them or focused on particular aspects of them. I have also read books and done the same.

Today, I am going to link to a long podcast without much comment. the podcast is the Joe Rogan Experience, the most poplar podcast available today. I am not really a Joe Rogan fan. I don’t often listen to his podcast. I am not sure I have ever listened to an entire episode, so this is a first for me.

Joe Rogan is unquestionably a curious and surprisingly intelligent interviewer. He can say some stupid things, but then (I have to confess) so can I. I suppose that combination of “common guy” persona, willingness to ask the “stupid” questions and challenge the status quo, and a modicum of intelligence is why he is so popular.

In the episode I am embedding below, Joe Rogan interviews Stephen C. Meyer, a “proponent” of “intelligent design”. The interview is particularly interesting because Joe Rogan tends toward people like Sam Harris, and Bart Erhman, and other materialists, atheists, and skeptics of religion.

Rogan isn’t just a Cretan (to use an old biblical word) as his popular persona might suggest. Though he clearly favors materialist explanations of the world, he asks good questions and gives his guests opportunity to explore contrary points of view. This is the case in the embedded interview that lasts for over 3 hours.

I am still working my way through it, but I have heard enough at the 50 minute mark to consider it worthy of putting it out there. Maybe I will come back to summarize or focus on particular aspects of the conversation. If you have listened to it (or are listening to it as I am), feel free to post your own comments.

Stephen Meyer is the author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Times (of London) Literary Supplement Book of the Year Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. His many other publications include contributions to, and the editing of, the peer-reviewed volume Darwinism, Design and Public Education (Michigan State University Press, 2004) and the innovative textbook Explore Evolution (Hill House Publishers, 2007). His most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, is generating much discussion, like the interview embedded in this blog.

Meyer graduated from Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, in 1981 with a degree in physics and earth science. He worked as a geophysicist before returning to academia at Cambridge University, to earn an M.Phil. in 1987 and a Ph.D. in 1991 in the Philosophy of Science. His doctoral thesis was titled “Of Clues and Causes: A Methodological Interpretation of Origin-of-Life Research.”