Season One Wrap Up

On this episode, we cover a season wrap-up.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

Hey, it's me, Cecil Cicerillo and Michael Marshall.

and we are doing a season wrap-up today because we thought marsh i thought it would be interesting to sort of data dump all the stuff we did this season we covered 26 different episodes 25 different what not even 25 different people 24 different people because Trump was twice, but 24 different people,

24 different episodes, because there's more people in there because there's extra people in certain episodes.

It's 25 episodes, 27 people, I think.

But in any case, there was that we had a lot of, we had a lot of, we had a lot of different variation on what we covered.

And I sort of put together a little document, a data dump on what we covered, what we were sort of talking about, the

logical fallacies and the

decisions on main event stuff that we covered.

And we sort of went through it.

Both of us went through it separately.

And then we also asked the patrons if they had any questions.

So this is going to be sort of

our

observations of what we covered this time and what we thought about it, what we thought about this particular batch of Joe Rogan episodes we just covered.

And so we're going to start by talking about like.

How did we,

how what we experienced compared to what our expectations were going in?

So we had some serious expectations.

When you and I talked about the birth of this show, we had some expectations about what we were going to cover, what we're going to think about,

what kind of avenues we were going to take.

So let's start there.

How is it different at all from what you thought it was going to be?

Yeah, I think it was.

I think there's a couple of ways it kind of

differed from what I had in mind, having, as we said at the start of every show, having had no experience of Joe Rogan previously, apart from the little snippets that we see from time to time, there's a few things that were different.

First of all, I expected it to be

way more aggressively masculine than it actually was.

I thought it'd be way more of a bro space than it was.

And it was fairly broish at times.

We talk about hunting a lot.

We talk about fighting a lot.

But

I expected it to be a more aggressive form of masculinity in there.

And I think partly it's because I thought there'd be some conflict from time to time.

I thought this would be alpha males kind of locking horns occasionally and jostling for position occasionally and that kind of like hyper masculine uh alpha kind of space and it wasn't that at all it just doesn't seem to be that um at all uh and i think part of the reason for that the more that i've seen of jaw is he takes that alpha-ish position until there is any hint that the person he's speaking to is more of an alpha and i'm using the term alpha in the bullshit sense it's not a real thing but

yeah exactly uh but as soon as he gets a hint that the person he's talking to might be slightly more alpha, more respected, more authoritative, he just rolls right over.

And there is no conflict.

There is no pushback.

He's not wanting to...

in any way antagonize them or come away.

There's almost no arguments.

Like, I think we saw maybe one or two arguments across the entire 26 episodes we did.

And one of those arguments, he's mediating between two other people.

And even then, he's trying not to upset either of them as they go.

And yeah, that was a real surprise to me.

I was expecting a much more kind of combative space.

It's interesting that you say that because now that I think about it, I'm trying to think back on the sort of any kind of sharp edges as we worked our way through.

Was there anything that happened?

And I remember us being sort of.

Really interested during the Mel Gibson episode because it's something that he cared about, the sort of, you know, evolution and all that.

And when Mel just says, well, I don't know, Joe, that was the end.

That that was literally the end of the conversation that was it and joe even apologizes for him right afterward and says well you don't have to you don't have to know this stuff that's okay you don't have to you don't have to know whether or not you know there was actually evolution or you know uh iver mech doesn't cure cancer or whatever he was going to say next you don't have to know that stuff and and so you're right it's not only that joe doesn't really push back, but even when he does, he kind of just says, well, I'm real sorry.

I didn't mean to push you that hard.

I'm sorry about that.

Yeah.

And I think that's those are the times that Joe thinks he is pushing hard.

And we've seen that in some of the other, some of the borner shows.

Obviously, the patrons would have seen us do some borner shows where he's having conversations with people he does disagree with.

And again, there's not a lot of conflict in there.

He's rolling over on his views in order to placate the person he disagrees with.

But I think, interestingly, when we do see conflict, it's when he's talking to Douglas Murray.

He will have a go at Douglas Murray and ridicule Douglas Murray on the next episode when Douglas Murray's not there.

And I think we see, I've seen a little bit of that across, especially where we've seen some of the Borner shows where he'll talk about people who aren't there anymore.

And even then, only in then will he be willing to express his conflict and his

friction at it.

But yeah, it's a very frictionless show.

The show is almost as frictionless as Joe's head, essentially.

It's got that kind of perfect round smoothness to it.

He's a very smooth human being and it's a smoothly run show.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

For me, one of the things that jumped out at me was

this was, we're coming into this cold, pretty cold.

I had listened to one or two episodes in the past that had been sent to me from my other show that I do.

And someone had sent me a long time ago, a Jordan Peterson

appearance.

And I listened to it because someone had said, you should listen to this.

And I was appalled.

I was like, this is terrible.

And the person was actually trying to get me to like jordan peterson which was hilarious because i listened to it on joe rogan i was like oh my gosh this is the worst stuff like you're completely wrong um but in any case this i don't listen to one or two episodes so i thought to myself i thought well this guy's got to have a pretty amazing podcast because if he is the type of guy who can garner this kind of support and this kind of audience and have millions of views on youtube for essentially

a talking head video for three plus hours every time and it's not even well edited when you talk about how things should be edited on YouTube.

It's not even really,

it's edited for YouTube as an afterthought, and it's getting millions of views there.

And then it's getting millions of listens on Spotify.

And the video gets, you know, they have a video version there too.

The editing is essentially someone's gone to the bathroom, so we probably should take out the time it took for them to pee.

That's as much editing as we see.

Or, or, hey, they're watching a space launch, so let's cover their faces with two different images while they're going.

Like, it's ridiculous.

It's a, it's terribly, it's terribly edited in any case for video.

But I thought to myself, I thought there's got to be something here.

And I was really shocked at how bad of an interviewer he is.

I was really shocked at how, how sort of.

I don't know, just sort of mundane and boring the show is on almost every episode.

I was actually really shocked.

I thought it would have more draw, but I don't know why.

I can't, I can't, after a a season, explain why it's the best podcast out there.

Yeah, I think that's, I think I agree.

Although, I do think

there is something to be said for having a space that is unmediated, having a space that is unbound by the realities of time,

by the constraints of time.

I think there is genuinely something to be said for having a conversation that does that.

Unfortunately, he's then having a conversation with a lot of people who've got some very harmful views, or he's introducing things things because he's so free-flowing and flying by the seat of his pants.

He's introducing things that are potentially harmful.

But I do think there is, from a format, from a structural point of view, I get why some people would like to watch a long conversation that just meanders wherever it kind of goes.

Sure.

I think the problem that it is unmediated

leads Joe to be...

relatively easily manipulated in a way, and especially because he is so trying to placate the guest.

He wants to be liked.

He really seems to want to be liked by the person he's speaking to, regardless of what perspective they're coming from.

He wants them to have a nice time and to like him.

What that can lead to is people come on and use his show as a vehicle for their

harmful views or their propaganda.

And I think we've even witnessed, and we'll come to it as we kind of run through a few of our broader thoughts on the series.

But we've witnessed guests come on with an agenda knowing if I can get on Rorgan, I can present this to millions of people and they'll be more likely to believe it and they're more likely to vote the way I want them to vote or call for the policy changes that I want them to call for or be happy with the stripping of their rights and protections that I'm going to be doing.

And that's a function of Joe having this unmediated space where he just wants everyone to get along and isn't willing to push back even when really incorrect things are being framed there.

Yeah.

And one of the things I noticed too, and this is helpful from going back to some of our bonus episodes, is that, you know,

there's sort of a chameleon property to Joe that depending on who comes on his show, he will adopt some of the views and some of the points of view of that person.

So I'm reminded of Kai Dickens when we covered Kai Dickens.

There's a part on that show where, you know, Joe had just had a lineage of billionaires on his show, billionaires, millionaires, bunch of rich people come on his show and like you suggest,

do PR for their businesses or for what they're going to change in government, take away your social safety nets, things like that.

And Kai Dickens is basically like, yeah, I don't know why people have that much money.

And gosh, it's just crazy that people accumulate that much wealth.

It's insane.

And Joe, just right alongside her, yeah, it's insane that people accumulate this much wealth.

And then at the same time, he's had opportunities to ask all those same questions to people who came before that were on his show.

Elon Musk was the very next day.

He had Elon Musk in the same seat that Kai was sat in 24 hours later and didn't bring those questions up.

Didn't bring that up.

Yeah.

So it's it, I see this sort of chameleon property to him where you were talking earlier about how there's no conflict.

And I think some of some of the reason for that is because he adopts the views of all these people who come on his show.

So in his mind, there is no conflict.

And when you say adopts the views, I think you're absolutely right.

But some people might hear that and think it's a cynical,

you know, a very surface level amount of adoption of those views.

And I think in the moment, I don't think it is.

I don't think Joe is cynically in that moment saying, well, if I pretend I like this thing as well, we'll have a better time.

I think it's just that he's so

happy to be in that space with somebody that he will adopt their views and

he'll try their intellectual outfit on for size, their ideological outfit on for size, and then he's cosplaying as them kind of thing.

He's not supplied and dressed about it.

I think when he's talking about it, it's like he believes it.

And I think that's genuinely interesting.

And it might make for him to be a more interesting conversationalist for the person he's talking to, but it doesn't make for a useful way of getting towards anything that is real or true.

Yeah.

So we put together a few clip montages from the show this last time around, Marsh.

Let's talk about what we learned.

Yeah, because I was thinking about

how do we look back over this series?

And are there lessons we've learned that fit into kind of buckets and categories?

And I think the first thing I wanted to point out was

how do you get on Rogan?

I think we've learned something about how you actually get onto Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan's audience is huge.

If you want to spread your ideas to as many people as possible, getting onto Joe Rogan is going to be a massive way to do that.

And it seems like, and I know we've got to click to illustrate this, if you want to get Rogan's attention, you want to get it ashore, you should be claiming that you're revolutionizing something, or that you're a maverick thinker, or that you've seen through the thing that no one else understands.

You know, this area better than the experts, better than the other people who study it all the time.

You've got this new idea that's going to change everything.

And even from the shows that we watched and reviewed, we saw this happening time and again.

Yeah.

So here's

a short clip montage of that very phenomenon.

In fact, I think we're at the tip of the iceberg, and what people are going to see on this is going to completely reorient their mental map of how they think the world works.

And essentially, that culminated in me publishing a piece in the British Medical Journal in 2013, October, basically, which was titled Saturated Fat is Not the Major Issue, and suggesting we should be focusing on sugar.

We got it wrong on saturated fat.

We're over-medicating

millions of people on statins.

Cholesterol is not that bad as a risk factor for heart disease.

And I had access to all the knowledge.

The proof of it is the 97 patents that I have now.

The proof of it is the industries that I've innovated.

I should say that I interviewed Vladimir Zelensky and I will be traveling to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.

I'm aware of the risks, I accept the risks, and the goal, the mission is to just push for peace, to do my small part in pushing for peace.

As I kind of just looked around, and again, these are just statistics, I started trying to put the pieces together.

And that led me on what is now a seven, eight-year journey, ultimately leaving the surgical world, putting down my scalpel forever.

Because what I realized is that when you go to the science with a root cause perspective, you see a very obvious, blaring answer, which is why we had to write a book about it, which is that it's all caused by metabolic dysfunction.

And so I'm comfortable with reading science, and I know how to read it critically.

I know how to look for the flaws in it and how to weigh the

attribute weight to various studies, etc.

But before I was six inches down in that pile, I recognized that there was this huge delta between what the public health agencies were saying, were telling us about vaccine safety and what the actual peer-reviewed published science was saying.

I see people who do believe what they're saying and who think I'm wrong, but who feel that I'm such a threat to the narrative that they present that I must be neutralized in any way possible.

And that's a sad state of affairs.

What's interesting, Marsh, when I was putting some of these clips together, some of these people that were actually Mavericks never really had a great sound bite that you could cut down, right?

So Suzanne Humphreys, of course, we didn't cut,

she didn't appear on this, but genuinely, Suzanne Humphreys is changing the face of vaccination in many ways and like upturning the entire medical medical understanding.

I mean, you know, she's, she's saying it's all wrong, but she didn't have a good 20 second, 30 second sound bite to even clip.

So she didn't appear, but you could go back.

And there's other people too that are mavericks in those fields that we just didn't cover, but are actually mavericks in fields that he's had on.

Yeah.

And even there, we heard people like Brett Weinstein, Graham Hancock, Asim Malhotra, Casey Means,

I think Terence Howard obviously was in there as well.

And again, what we sort of hear a lot is

everyone thought it worked this way, but I alone was able to figure out it worked the other way.

And I think this kind of, this leads into a couple of things for Joe, I think.

Partly, it's that Joe expects any new discovery to be revolutionary.

If it's something new, it has to completely overturn something we've known before.

It has to be a complete revolution in thinking.

There's no such thing as making the axe head slightly sharper.

You have to have a brand new axe head or

a whole different tool.

And it also feeds into this idea of the great man of history.

or great woman of history, but this is a Joe Rorgan show, so it's almost always men who are the great things of history, where it's one individual thinker is what it took to overturn everything.

That new discoveries are made by the Eureka moment rather than by teams of people working in collaboration, building on consensus, building on what we already know, and making breakthroughs in that kind of way.

It's got to be the individual person

making the breakthrough on themselves and not being believed by the rest of the world, by having to fight against the oppressive forces of scientific consensus and standing alone against a tide of expertise.

These are the things that make for a Joe Rogan interviewee.

And I don't think these are good traits to train his audience to look for when it comes to what a real discovery would look like.

Yeah.

And

building on that, we just released the Neil deGrasse Tyson bonus episode.

But in that Neil deGrasse Tyson interview, there's a moment where Joe wants to know sort of, what's this big discovery that the James Webb telescope, what is this, the James Webb telescope just gets put into orbit.

It's got to have made a sort of tumultuous, overturning discovery.

So tell me what that discovery is, because that's the thing that Joe hungers for.

And Neil says, well, you know, a lot of the knowledge that we get doesn't overturn anything.

It just builds on what we had.

And he uses Newton and Einstein as an example of that, that Newton's laws and the things that Newton discovered didn't get thrown out the window by Einstein.

They just got added to by Einstein.

They just got added to by physicists that came after him.

So it wasn't that we just decided, well, planetary motion doesn't work the way Newton says.

Instead,

we all thought, yeah, no,

that's good.

And there's other stuff too.

And I think Joe misses that a lot of what you suggest is just sharpening the axe head rather than, you know, redesigning it so it has like turbojets on it or something, you know?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

For Joe, it's not enough that we now know this thing, but to several degrees more of a decimal point of accuracy.

Yeah.

Exactly, exactly.

One of the things that we found, too, when we were looking at some of this data was that if you're ever called out on what you're saying, you can just claim that you're not an expert.

Yes.

It's like some weird jiu-jitsu move.

You say, I'm not a historian, but I'm going to spend my time talking about history.

I'm not a journalist, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing.

I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to spend my time talking about this thing.

And apparently, I'm not an expert on mercury poisoning, but.

I'm not really an expert on quantum computing.

I've never claimed to be an expert on anything.

And on the AI question, everyone I've ever talked to about, I'm hardly an expert.

Well, that I believe we have.

I'm not expert in it, but.

I say the same thing Dan Carlin always says.

I'm not a historian.

So I think there is a...

I'm not a total expert on this stuff, but...

Look,

I'm not at all the expert on World War II.

People should always just look it up and just start typing things in that I'm saying and see if you can figure it out and what you think.

Because I am not an expert.

I'm just a dude.

That's got, we need that shirt.

I'm not an expert.

I'm just a dude.

I'm just a dude who has, in Ian Carroll's case, a massive following on TikTok for my anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

But not an expert in those things.

It's fine.

Not an expert.

I think the key with this is something that you'll hear quite often.

And it's a get out of jail free card when you say something that is controversial or that like we just suggested all these people who are overturning entire studies of, you know, books full of studies from people or changing the face of medicine or changing the face of physics or et cetera, et cetera.

Oftentimes when people are pushed in certain places, in certain ways, they will say, well, I'm not an expert in that.

Well, I'm not an expert in that.

Well, I'm not an expert in that.

And it's a get out of jail free card for saying something controversial and trying to get away with it.

Yeah, it is.

And the thing is, we aren't, we don't all have to be experts in everything.

If you're not an expert in anything, that's totally fine.

Yeah.

Especially in your everyday conversations.

But these aren't everyday conversations.

These are media broadcasts on one of the largest media platforms in the world.

I think there was even I saw an article, I think, on the BBC very recently about how the majority of Americans no longer get their news from newspapers.

They're getting them from videos and podcasts and places like this.

This is a go-to news source.

And so if you imagine this was the old days and this is, you know, the BBC or CNN and CNN brought somebody on to talk about an international conflict who was not an expert in that international conflict, who were there to talk about it.

And as soon as they said anything that was, you know, on shaky ground would say, well, you know, I'm not an expert in this conflict.

You'd have a very good question of, then why are you here?

Then why are we talking?

Why are we listening to you about this?

And that's the thing about Joe Rogan's show is he'll bring people on to talk about a specific topic, you know, Darryl Cooper talking about World War II.

And Darryl Cooper will say, I'm not an expert in World War II.

Then why are we talking about this with you in front of these people?

You did stumble in here.

You do here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also am reminded.

of the Brett Weinstein episode, where it's right after the USAID stuff drops and Brett Weinstein comes on, who's just a guy who has a podcast.

and they have a conversation, a deep conversation about this stuff.

I don't mind that people talk about this stuff, that doesn't bother me, but at the same time, they're talking about it.

And he has an opportunity, which he does the very next show, is bring on somebody who quote unquote is a State Department expert.

Have that guy on instead.

Instead, they spent much of their time talking about all of the waste, fraud, and abuse because they, and it was because they found certain things on Twitter that they wanted to have a conversation about.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And so these kind of conversations, I think the fact that it's not through expertise is one thing.

But I think it's also something I've noticed, and I hope you agree with me.

I assumed that the harm that we'd see from Joe Rogan's show would be when the person is on the show making a specific claim.

So here are the person who's on the show.

They said this thing isn't that bad.

One of the things that I noticed the more that we watched was it's not even necessarily about the episode in which that claim is first made.

So guest comes on and says this controversial thing.

It's about the fact that over subsequent episodes, Joe will start repeating this thing as if this is true.

And he'd say to other people, well, did you know that this thing is true?

And we saw this with when he was talking about the war, the war in Russia, Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

And Joe would be saying, well, did you know that only happened because the U.S.

instituted a coup in Ukraine and NATO promised it wouldn't expand towards the east.

And then it broke that promise with Russia.

And so Russia was provoked into it.

And Joe is the one bringing that up on some of the conversations we've seen and in that show when we looked at that we went back through Joe's archive and found the time that his guest gave him those talking points and those talking points originated with Vladimir Putin bubbled their way around a right-wing conspiratorial ecosystem until they found a guest on Joe Rogan's show who came on and give those talking points to Rogan and then Rogan repeated them several times over several different episodes bringing them up to his his new guest and that repetition repetition, I think, is important because if you happen to see the episode where his guest came on and made those claims initially, you'd say, okay, that's this person who said this.

But when you see Joe bringing it up multiple times, it feels like this is a thing that Joe knows because this is common knowledge.

And I keep hearing it and it keeps coming up.

And that repetition embeds it.

But it also allows, in the case of that particular piece of Russian propaganda, a completely clean-handed laundering of that talking point because Joe is now bringing it up, believing that it's true, spreading spreading it to more and more people.

The fingerprints from where it came from are completely gone at that point because Joe doesn't know he's spreading Russian propaganda because he's not the one who picked it up from Russia, but he was seeded it by someone who did pick it up from someone further down the line.

So, yeah, that repetition is key.

I wound up putting together a piece of both Joe and his guests talking about very specifically how the war started in Ukraine.

Political instability in the country caused by the U.S.

State Department is the reason Zelensky ultimately became president.

The 2014 coup in Ukraine was U.S.

and U.K.

orchestrated political instability to have a January 6 style mob destabilize the government and literally run it out of the country.

And so from a position of strength there, he wants to go further, recapture all of the land.

that he sees belongs to Ukraine.

But that's exactly when you make peace.

They were pushed to this by a more powerful country, which would be the United States of America, with the threat of including Ukraine in NATO.

It's really simple.

And right before the invasion, days before the invasion, they send poor Kamala Harris, who has no idea what day it is, to the Munich Security Conference, an area she knows nothing about, no experience in at all.

And they send her there for one purpose, which is to announce at a press briefing with all the cameras rolling, to Zelensky right there, she says, we want you to join NATO.

Russia has a point.

This is what they're saying.

So Russia was very upset about the movement of the weapons closer to their borders,

the

joining NATO, all the stuff that was the hard red lines that Putin had already set.

Like if Russia, Russia would definitely do something if Ukraine joined NATO.

We all knew that.

And we've been doing that ever since, using the intelligence agencies on behalf of the corporate blob, which is not always distinguishable from organized crime,

and just going off and whacking people and overthrowing governments and starting coups like right to this day, to like Ukraine 2014.

And his point was, well, there's a backstory here, which is that NATO has been moving eastward since 1991.

And that's a massive threat to Russia.

Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat.

And the Biden administration accelerated that.

And in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine.

Now, Russia invaded.

Why?

You know, what did they do?

And then you got to get into the whole U.S.-backed coup in 2014.

And then you have to think about NATO and the agreement that was made the fall of,

you know, when the wall came down in Berlin, the agreement that NATO would not push forth and move closer to Russia, which they violated over and over and over again.

Pretty obvious.

Pretty obvious when you listen to it.

You can hear that thread work its way through Joe's work.

Yeah, you really can.

And the thing is, that's only from the shows that we covered.

We could look at, we could dip into his catalog elsewhere and just look for times that he's talked about it.

And I guarantee he's brought this up to more of his guests.

And this talking point just kind of recurs and recurs.

Yeah.

And

now, one of the things that we wound up finding over and over and over again, and it's something that you and I mentioned quite a bit, is Joe will often exclaim surprise.

So we put together a very short clip, a group of clips, of Joe exclaiming surprise and here they are radio frequency radiation exposure has been shown to affect the permeability of the blood-brain barrier as well as altering the expression of micro RNA within the brain which researchers state could lead to adverse effects such as neurodegenerative disease whoa

let me just give you an example you'll you'll probably have this this is 10 years old whoa

it's gonna go through a cloud right now whoa it's a high ass cloud

shit.

20 kilometers up.

Check this out.

Meth is cheaper than beer there.

Whoa.

And it says 29%

of all statin users are likely to get significant muscle symptoms or side effects from statins.

Whoa.

You'll compare Walter Russell's to it, and you'll see something completely different.

It's unwinding.

Whoa.

Are you still rescuing those people that are stuck in the space station?

Yeah, that's coming up in a couple weeks, I think.

Whoa.

Like, try to do something different and try to

get.

This is where the Secret Scholar Society came from.

It's this story, and I found it in the Harvard Archive when I was researching for my thesis film.

Whoa.

They'll say that the tree is appling.

Well, what happens with the planets?

Oh, it's peopled.

Whoa.

And that's why we are left to rely on sources like Whitney Webb, who's done sort of the definitive dig, because they won't fucking tell us because a bunch of them are blackmailed.

Whoa.

My favorite one is that I think they're the most surprised that meth is cheaper than beer there.

Yeah, yeah, that is excellent.

That is excellent.

But it's this classic thing of if you want to,

if you want to land

your piece of rhetoric,

your bad idea, one of the ways to switch off Joe's any kind of pushback he might have is to say something that's going to blow his mind and say something that elicits a whoa.

And he will stop.

If he gets that sense of amazement, he's not going to think, he's not going to say, well, hang on, that's probably bollocks, isn't it?

Like, meth is cheaper than beer.

Okay, what's the parameters around this?

Yeah.

He's just going to be like, whoa.

And the thing is, this is just one of the tactics that I think, I don't know that his guests are using it deliberately, but certainly it is an effective tactic, even if they've stumbled on it accidentally, is to blow his mind and they will no longer, he will no longer question.

I think Asimo Hotu was deliberately bringing up stats that were going to blow his mind.

Mark Andreason was bringing up

talking points to make Joe do this and it's to stop his pushback.

And this is just one of the ways you can shortcut Joe's brain to stop him pushing back the other is to um uh play to his bias around freedom and free speech anything if you if you couch anything in terms of free speech he's right there on that train regardless what it might be uh might be involved and it was interesting that again something that's in uh one of the the most recent bonus episodes when we talk when he talks to neil degrasse tyson neil degrasse tyson tries to frame trans rights as a freedom a personal freedom issue free issue and it's so so interesting and joe doesn't push back And I think that's for various different reasons, as well as like wanting to make sure his guest is never challenged.

But I think it's a very smart, tactical point to point out the freedom element of these attacks on individual rights, because that is perfectly shaped to fit Joe's narrative.

Or the other thing you can do, and I think you pointed this out when we did the episode, he's talking to Mel Gibson about the Bible and evolution and creationism and to stop to

and he's pushing back and all those things.

And Mel gets him to stop pushing back by by pivoting to a different aspect of the Bible and talking about how they've discovered the Ark of the Covenant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it fits into his love of conspiracy.

And he's no longer asking questions about biblical literacy,

biblical literalism, rather, because he's on that train of weirdness, the high weirdness, the conspiracy stuff.

And that just stops him pushing back.

You can hear his brain switch off the second Mel pivots the conversation.

Joe is

a pit bull.

And if you have a steak that's labeled conspiracy and you throw it over his shoulder, he will run after the stake and let you steal whatever he wants, which is his audience very quickly.

And then you can leave.

And he'll do the same thing if you do freedom.

If you have a freedom stake or a conspiracy stake, it doesn't matter.

He will go after either one of those.

Yeah, exactly that.

Exactly that.

So that's one of the things we learned.

We also learned that for all of his, I'll say anything to anyone, I'll talk about anything.

There are some people who are above questioning.

Like you cannot in any way insinuate they are anything other than these perfect heroic beings.

And I think you've got a montage, a compilation to illustrate that yeah for sure here we go but there's no one person who's like our other than elon but elon's like such a unique character you can't even like you can't put him in the same category as an einstein because he's just like a cultural weirdness like who is this guy like making memes cracking jokes dunking on people telling people to go fuck themselves buys Twitter.

Elon did two things that really opened a lot of this up.

One is he bought Twitter, which really gave us a place to talk about this stuff, all of us.

But then also he himself, of course, started to actually express himself, and so he gave a lot of the rest of us permission structure.

The difference between the new Twitter, thank God for Elon Musk.

Elon freeing X actually liberated the others, and they were beginning to move in the right direction, which, frankly, is part of why this era just feels different.

So the actual amount of the information that gets out is far more than it would have ever happened without Elon taking over Twitter.

You know, I used to joke as the main difference between, or was, I think, until Freedom opened up when Elon acquired X and a few institutional changes began to happen.

You know, it runs a bunch of different companies simultaneously while playing video games constantly.

It's like so many things are just so on the nose that you're like, is the simulation real?

Yes.

I mean, it has to be real.

Yes, exactly.

Exactly.

And Elon is programming it in the back room late at night in between playing games.

We certainly got a good position in the game.

And tweeting, exactly.

He's the number one Diablo player in the world right now.

now, by the way.

He just got number one.

He's fucking bananas.

How does he have the time to do that?

Which means he could be the guy steering the simulation.

The thing about Elon is weird is like he just does so many things.

You get confused.

You're like, how can you do this?

He's talking about possibly buying TikTok.

By the way, Elon is great.

That guy is such a great guy.

I think you're a fan of Elon.

I love Elon.

He is from a different planet.

We talked about it before, but there was two major forks in the road.

The big one was Trump didn't get shot.

The other big one was you buy Twitter.

And if those two things don't happen, the whole world looks different.

Yes.

We don't want to be on that timeline.

While he's doing Starlink,

while he owns Twitter.

And then he agrees to Starlink and tweets 100 times a day.

Those people got on board with the Trump administration, and I think that was huge.

And now with Tulsi, I think that's huge as well.

I think, you know,

when Elon took over Doge, that was like the final Avenger.

Fuck me.

It's so bad.

It's so bad.

At one point, it's almost like Elon, peace be upon him.

He literally says, thank God for Elon.

Elon, thank God for Elon.

It's just absolute worship and completely uncritical.

There's not a hint of criticism of somebody who, even if you thought Elon Musk had a lot of talents, Even his biggest fans would say he's not above criticism.

You would imagine there's some things you could criticize him for, but not Rogan.

Rogan has no criticism of Elon.

And it'd be interesting to see how much, how long that hero worship continues.

Yeah.

And,

you know,

we talk about Twitter too, but like, you know, talk about the media diet that Joe Rogan has.

And Joe Rogan has a ton of people on that are.

media personalities, right?

So many of the people that come on, they're either podcasters or they're part of this sort of media ecosystem, that media ecosystem that he belongs to.

And then, you know, he saw,

if we look through some of these people, we look at Ian Carroll, he saw his TikTok and all the things that he's done on TikTok and all the conspiracy theories he talks about there.

With Diane, with Suzanne Humphreys, he read her book.

And I think those two in particular are really interesting to look at together because nobody really knew who Ian Carroll was.

And nobody really knew who Suzanne Humphreys was.

When those names came up in the podcast feed and we were looking at shows to potentially cover, those names didn't stand out to us.

It's because Joe has plucked them from obscurity, from whatever his own personal media diet is.

How did Joe come across Suzanne Humphrey's book?

Well, he's got it.

And now he goes from, she goes from this mine little figure to watched by millions of people.

Same with Ian Carroll.

He's able to find these obscure people because his own media diet is kind of bad, but he then amplifies them to this massive, massive audience.

I think that's a really interesting thing that we picked up from that.

Yeah.

And then you look at somebody like Daryl Cooper, who has a podcast.

Again, neither of us really knew who he was.

We only found out about him because he was being talked about by two other guests because he was a guest on Joe Rogan previously.

And these other guests had listened to that show.

And they very vociferously disagreed on his positions on how World War II.

played out and who he was backing and who he was saying was sort of free of blame.

And then we listened to that show too.

Then you think about Callie and Casey Means, another sort of shadow figure in the metabolic health scene in the United States, someone who, after we listened to that, we thought, oh my gosh, all the names they mention wind up in the cabinet, essentially, or in large positions because they were the movers and shakers behind the scenes that we didn't get really a chance to know about until we listened to that show and then realized, wow, how much influence these two people had over the Trump administration.

Yeah.

And Joe says in that interview, I found out about you guys because I saw you and Tucker Carlson.

He has Daryl Cooper on because Daryl Cooper was on Tucker Carlson.

And I don't know whether Joe knew his work before then, but he certainly says, I saw you, I had you on because of this thing that happened on Tucker.

And this is the other problem with Rogan is even if you think, and I personally do think that Rogan, almost every episode we've seen, has gone into that show with a genuine openness.

He doesn't have an agenda.

He's just trying to have a conversation.

He comes from a bias, but he doesn't have an agenda.

It's not like there's a pre-planned purpose apart from a couple of episodes.

But even if you believe that, as I do,

the fact that he is picking up guests from Tucker, Tucker is not open and honest in that way.

Tucker is cynical in his booking policies.

Tucker does have an agenda and he's in service to that agenda.

And the fact that Joe is...

essentially farming Tucker for guest suggestions means that the biggest podcast in the world can be easily hijacked by what is pretty obviously an overtly white supremacist podcast in Tucker Carlson's space, a very extreme right-wing position.

And I think that's a real problem with Joe's media diet: that he might not be looking for these guests initially.

He might never have found these guests initially, but once they appear on Tucker, they hit his radar, he puts them on his show, and suddenly they are watched by millions of people.

And this is how these bad ideas make it from the fringe into the mainstream via these vectors along the way.

Yeah.

And one of the things about Tucker too is this is a show that very often just regurgitates Russian propaganda, right?

And so you get an opportunity to see too, some of these people that have come on are also being pushed by this far-right group of people who are also regurgitating Russian propaganda.

We talked about it with Daryl Cooper.

Why would you want to be pushing forward Daryl Cooper's ideas about how the Nazis didn't do a lot wrong?

And, you know, hey, maybe it's okay to let certain states go in and just take over other states.

Why would you push that narrative?

Maybe it has something to do with Russian propaganda and where we sit right now.

And maybe he's just astooch.

Maybe he's just someone who believes this stuff, but he's getting amplified very specifically because it matches so well with this other stuff that's being pumped out.

and all this other right-wing media that's being pumped out that matches that Russian propaganda.

Yeah.

And so

we also put together another clip, a montage, of Joe talking about where he gets stuff.

So where do you get stuff?

Well, let's find out.

I'm going to read off some of the things that this guy, Kenakota the Great, on Twitter, listed.

Jamie, have you seen, there's been some talk of some new drug that they've found that's very effective for cancer.

Have you seen this?

It starts with an F.

I'm I'm trying to remember what the hell it's called.

I saw a story about that as well.

Yeah.

Let me try to find it here.

I know I have it saved in my

Instagram, I think.

Give me one second here.

Saved.

It's either I saved it on Instagram or I saved it on Twitter.

Well, we're now learning to spot the propaganda and to understand what it really means and to figure out what it's cloaking.

And a lot of that is happening on Twitter because it can.

But we all know that one of the oddities of Twitter, including since Elon took over, is that what you hope is a restored marketplace of ideas ends up pushing you really crazy shit.

Didn't they count that in staff?

But this is, no, I don't know.

This all comes from like Twitter.

I don't know where it comes from.

Well, if it comes from Twitter, Jamie, it's real.

I try to stay off Twitter because I generally think, especially when it comes to things like that are high anxiety subjects, whether it's climate change, the war in Ukraine, or COVID,

I think it facilitates mental illness.

And I think a lot of these people are,

they fester on things and

they have high anxiety.

I try to stay out of Twitter as much as I can, honestly, because I think it's bad for your mental health.

I mean, it might be bad for his mental health, but he clearly is not staying out of twitter it's his source of a lot my favorite bit of that whole montage is him when he's looking for a saved tweet and he's just sort of going saved

as he's just like filling noise time while he tries to find it but it's amazing to do so good yeah super great uh yeah so so we got an opportunity to see a lot of people scrolling through in fact one of the episodes we covered was literally guys scrolling through an entire twitter feed that was mike benz's episode where he just directed Jamie to go to his Twitter feed every 30 seconds of that episode.

So we got an opportunity to see a lot of Twitter.

And neither of us, I don't even have an account anymore.

So I get an opportunity to see a lot of Twitter this time around.

It's not great.

But yeah, and then the other thing I think that I've learned, and I think looking back over the series, it becomes really apparent, is that you can almost chunk together certain episodes you've covered into a broad theme.

So, for example,

there's a bucket that I would label kind of government takeover/slash permission structure material, which he interviewed, you know, Callie and Casey Means, he interviewed RFK Jr., he interviewed Donald Trump and helped Donald Trump get elected.

So, very much kind of pushing.

And that thing, that seemed to me that Donald Trump one is the only one that I got the sense he went into cynically with an agenda of I need to pivot my audience towards supporting this guy.

Everything else seems like it was pretty open, but it really felt that one he had a plan going in.

But then we also have the kind of the tech

hacking of the American democracy with figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk,

Mark Andriessen.

The Mark Andriessen one and

the reason I've called this, that I call this book a permission structure is that Mark Andriessen was very clearly there in order to set up a permission structure for the removal of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the demonization of these consumer protection rights that stop people being exploited by financial companies.

Similarly, the conversation they had with Callie and Casey Means was the permission structure for dismantling American healthcare, but instead putting in place this alternative framework, as you mentioned already, the names they were mentioning about who's going to go in where when RFK gets in, RFK got in, and those names are now in those kind of places, or at least been nominated to those places.

So it feels like

in multiple occasions here, there was a project, a political project that people had

a will to make happen.

And they used the Joe Rogan experience as the way to lay that groundwork and to soft launch it into an audience to make sure that audience was receptive and wouldn't kick up a fuss when suddenly unelected billionaires have access to all of your personal data.

Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And then there was also a stream of conspiracy theorists this last time, Marlon.

We covered, you know, like we suggested,

it was 26 episodes.

And, you know, just to name them off, you had Evan Hafer talking about JFK conspiracies.

James Fox talking about UFOs and other types of conspiracy, governmental conspiracies to cover that up.

Terrence Howard, multiple different conspiracies there.

But one that jumps to mind is that the government's shutting down his phone.

I forgot about that.

Do other things and reboot his phone.

Suzanne Humphreys talking about the conspiracies of all the doctors who are trying to feed their kids.

Yeah, you're big pharma stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Graham Hancock talking about the conspiracies of big archaeology to silence his work and the things that he's discovering.

Ian Carroll was just a smorgasbord of conspiracies.

There's too many to even mention in a short show.

Mike Benz, of course, the soft power is actually

an arm of the CIA.

And it's the government that's using this money to go out and

create to fluff up the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, of course.

It's only the Democrats who are getting money from this.

And they're using this as the soft power is actually hard power that the CIA is going in and destroying things around the world.

We had Mel Gibson, who was talking about several different conspiracies, medical conspiracies, as well as

a ton of other stuff.

And then Tucker Carlson bringing up multiple conspiracies while he visited was specifically about Nixon, talking about Nixon Nixon and other things that he brought up.

Yeah, yeah.

And then obviously, those are just the ones that were mostly about conspiracy theories.

But then the topic kind of came up regularly when he talked to Elon Musk or Kai Dickinson, Dickens of the telepathy tapes, rather.

Brett Weinstein, they brought him on and talked about conspiracy theories.

Warren Smith, Lex Friedman.

It was a recurrent theme across these shows.

More than half of the shows, I think that is,

ended up just touching on conspiracy theories, theories.

And that's because that's where Joe's instincts will lead him.

And I think partly they lead him that way because, as we've said already, he needs new discoveries to revolutionize and overturn everything we already knew.

Yeah, he always wants to be the did you know this thing that'll change, you know, this one weird thing will change the way you look at X forever.

Um, and it's the same thing.

Uh, his approach to science is the same as his approach to conspiracy theories.

Um, and then there is the

um the PR

episodes, basically, or it was very clearly mobilized PR.

So, you had um

Asim Malhotra, for example.

Yeah, he's talking about vaccines and he's talking about statins.

But very heavily in that show, he talked about his new documentary that they're raising funds for, how he made a direct pitch for celebrities to speak out and join him in his anti-vax crusade.

He knew that platform was a way to reach people and he made an explicit pitch to those people.

And he was using Joe as part of his PR tactic.

Mark Zuckerberg, that's why Mark Zuckerberg was even in that room to be able to argue that poor little Facebook is being bullied by the evil EU and was being downtrodden by the Biden administration who said, stop doing that.

And Facebook said, no.

And that was bullying.

That was bullying that the Biden administration

did that.

I've touched on Mark Anderson with his permission structure.

There was a point in Graeme Hancock's interview where he even says, oh, there's this new research into psychedelics at this particular university, which they're raising money for.

And he says, Elon, if you're listening, could you give money to this?

So he's talking, it's not even like it's PR to a broad audience.

He's narrow casting to one person in that audience.

Kai Dickens talked about her documentary and how it needs funding.

James Fox convinced Joe to show a long trailer, like a two-minute trailer.

It's not the only one either.

Multiple people did this.

Asim Malhatra had a trailer as well.

He did the first do no farm.

Yeah.

Do no farm.

I don't know.

I think he's put out, I think subsequently he's put out a second film that's coming out soon called Farmageddon.

And this is the very reasonable doctor.

He's a very reasonable guy.

You know, he's a sensible, respectable doctor, but do no farm and farmer getdon.

Yeah.

Rate that pun, Farmageddon.

Rate him.

Yeah.

And then obviously the Donald Trump one, I think, was the most interesting form of PR because that's the one that felt like Joe was in on it.

The rest of them, it felt like they were using Joe as an opportunity for PR.

On the Donald Trump one, it felt like Joe was using his own show in order to basically be Trump's campaign manager at that point.

And then, and there's another one where he is doing very specific PR, and it's for Elon when he wants to get Elon to not be a Nazi.

Yeah.

He comes on and he says, and that thing you did, because he waits till near the end of the episode.

And then he's like, then that thing you did with your hand was just, you were just kidding, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so he very specifically brings him on so he can clear Elon's name so he doesn't have a guy who does two Nazi salutes in a row to a crowd as one of the guests he has had on multiple times.

He tries to do a little cleanup there.

Yeah, he absolutely does.

We're going to take a short break.

We'll be back right after this.

Step into the world of power, loyalty, and luck.

I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

With family, cannolis, and spins mean everything.

Now, you want to get mixed up in the family business.

Introducing the Godfather at champacasino.com.

Test your luck in the shadowy world of the godfather slots.

Someday, I will call upon you to do a service for me.

Play the godfather now at champaccasino.com.

Welcome to the family.

No purchase necessary.

VGW Group void where prohibited by law.

21 plus.

Terms and conditions apply.

So let's end this episode with some patron questions.

We got a bunch of patron questions this time around.

Very specifically, we asked our patrons, do you have any questions about the series so far?

And they came up with some good ones.

So why don't we start?

Why don't you read the first one from Andrew Cook?

Yeah, so Andrew Cook asks, Early on, it seems like a goal of the podcast was to be a space for Rogan fans, or the right generally, to come and listen to measured criticism of Rogan and his guests without feeling attacked, hence the need for the more unfiltered patron episodes.

Could you speak on your goals when starting the pod and if you feel like those goals have changed at all in the time that you've been doing it?

So I think the goals are still the same.

I think the goals for me are still the same.

I'd like Rogan fans to be able to listen to it and not feel too attacked.

I think it has been difficult for us to maintain as much of the openness to everybody as I was hoping, just because we've seen, especially in some of the episodes, it's been particularly egregious.

It's been quite difficult.

We're not here to be totally...

balanced and totally dispassionate.

It's why we put our biases up front and say, look, this is what we're about.

But I think it has been harder than I expected to be

a space where if you were a massive fan of what you're hearing, you're going to be able to listen to us and not feel too bothered.

I hope we've still managed to get it.

I don't know.

We haven't heard from many of Rogan's fans.

Yeah, we've heard from this amid listening.

But yeah, what do you think?

I think the difficulty I'm having is what you're suggesting, which is I can't lie to you.

I can't come in and say I'm totally unbiased.

I am biased.

I listened to this show and I came in with an idea that this was a harmful diet of media for the average consumer.

I came in with that idea.

I don't think that I've come in and confirmed my biases.

I think that I've reinforced the things that I thought were true.

Other people may think I've confirmed my biases by, you know, because we do select the shows we listen to, et cetera, et cetera.

So there's a possibility that maybe I am feeding our biases in some ways.

And I'm willing to admit some of those things.

I'm willing to admit that I'm a biased human being and that, you know, like I, when I view this stuff, I am thinking that it is a bad thing that people are learning information from Joe and not just treating it like entertainment.

I also think, too, that

if you were to hear the unfiltered, the unfiltered.

completely edited podcast, unedited podcast that we record, I do edit things out that I think may come off as a little too much.

And so there are moments where I cut entire clips because they feel a little snarky, or I cut

my comments or Marsha's comments because I think, no, that's not going to come off real well.

And so if you were to hear the actual completely unfiltered regular episode that goes out on the main feed, you might think we're even more so

anti-Joe than what I try to keep in there.

I do cut things that I think come off as a little petty or as a little snarky.

I will cut those directly from the show.

Yeah.

And that's what the

bonus segments are for.

And the thing is with the bonus segments, it's not all us ridiculing Joe.

Sometimes it's just us having a little bit of fun in the same way that we would, if you're, if you're there to interject on any conversation that already exists, you're going to make some jokes along the way and look about.

It's a little bit that.

It's not necessarily us kind of targeting Joe or anything like that.

But yeah.

So Anna W asks, what do you both think of the idea that there needs to be a Joe Rogan for the left?

And I, we talk about this on a, we interview Marsh in a coming week on cognitive dissonance.

We did a whole episode with Marsh where we talked about the No Rogan experience with Marsh and Tom.

And so you can listen to that.

It's on an upcoming week.

I'm not sure exactly what week it's going to release.

It'll be when I'm on vacation.

But really,

we talked about it.

And I'll kind of repeat what I said there is, I don't think you can just organically create a Joe Rogan without

making, you can't just like say, we're going to do Joe Rogan and just expect that it's going to be the same thing.

You have to create a Joe Rogan that's going to reach the same things that Joe Rogan reaches, which is a guy who has some very traditionally masculine stuff that he talks about all the time, be that fighting, hunting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And then also have a mix of guests that

follow Joe's interests, which would be stand-up comedy, which is what he does as a profession, as well as all the other things that interest Joe and a steady diet of conspiracy theories, because again, Joe has sort of taken the mantle from Art Bell.

So there's a lot of things that you would have to do in order to create a Joe Rogan.

And I don't think you can just say, we're going to have a Joe Rogan and then expect that you're going to just have this message that you can give.

I think Joe Rogan gives his message to young men couched in all the stuff that they're already interested in.

Yeah, I think so.

I agree.

And obviously, we have this conversation, you say, on cognitive dissonance.

I think the thing to bear in mind as well is that I do think there is a space there.

There is a space on the left, but that has to be a space that is unapologetically male without including the

toxic elements of society's version of masculinity historically.

So there are things that, you know, that

you certainly could have somebody who has progressive views, but is very happy to sit and talk about sports and various other kinds of things that would traditionally appeal more towards men.

I think there's something there.

I think there's something as well in, and I was actually having this conversation very recently at one of the skeptics in the pub nights that I run in Liverpool around how there are young men being left behind because they used to have access to everything.

Their forebearers would have had access to everything as men in that society, and they don't have that now.

And it's right that they don't have that now, but it still feels like a loss, especially if those people are underprivileged because they might be from a lower class or a lower socioeconomic status, so won't be able to afford a house.

These things, these anxieties, we have the choice of saying, well, suck it up, buttercup.

Women have had it worse for centuries, but that's not going to help.

That's not going to make anything better.

We have to have something that is speaking to the real problems that young men have, not in a paternalistic way, not in a looking down on them kind of way, but in an honest and unapologetic kind of way, but then offering them good solutions to that.

And I think the problem with Joe Rogan is he's doing some of those things, but he's offering them bad solutions.

And the offering of bad solutions is the easiest thing in the world to do.

The offering of good solutions is the hard thing.

So

any Rogan for the left is always going to be fighting an uphill battle because the left

would be sort of obligated to try and be accurate, to try and be fair and reflective.

And those aren't obligations that a right-wing worldview necessarily has.

So Sharon Horgan asks, I saw clips of Bono talking about how ending USAID was killing children, hurting farmers, and allowing food in warehouses to rot.

Rogan seemed sympathetic.

Is it possible that Rogan will grow and push back against far-right influence?

And my answer to that is, no, I don't think that's possible.

And I think the thing is, Rogan would have been sympathetic.

And I think he's sympathetic to all of those.

When you sit him down and explain those things, as someone like Bono has done, he'll be sympathetic.

And then the next time he talks to somebody who says, USAID is government waste run by the CEA, he'll see I hear, he'll be sympathetic to that too.

So it's that thing of in the conversation, he can dress in the other person's clothes and take on their mantle and understand them pretty well.

But then, as soon as that

recording sign goes off, he'll go back to his existing worldviews.

And his worldview, unfortunately, has him drifting in the direction of these more right-wing kind of ideas and more influenced by them.

We've seen, we've already talked about his media diet.

His media diet is the stuff on Twitter that he saves that fits his pre-existing biases.

It's people like Darryl Cooper and Suzanne Humphreys and Ian Ian Carroll and Tucker Carlson's guest list.

That is the influences on Rorgan.

And so you will, you'll affect a wobble in his trajectory when you're talking to him, but he'll straighten that wobble out and he'll be going on exactly the same path afterwards.

And I think that's the unfortunate thing.

I don't think he's a bad guy.

I just think he's got

a series of bad influences on him and he's designed himself to best fit and best respond to bad influences.

Yeah.

And I think he doesn't have a cognitive dissonance chip in him, right?

So he can hold these two ideas and they don't conflict for him.

So for him, he can be like, yeah, USAID is all waste, fraud, and abuse.

Oh, that's terrible that people are dying.

And he won't even connect those two things.

They don't even connect in his head, I don't think that they would, that one would cause the other in his mind.

I feel like he's almost like a goldfish.

Like he forgets who he talks to and then talks to someone brand new and he's filled with wonder yet yet again and then forgets that he has these conversations.

He remembers certain parts of those conversations, but I think he selectively forgets that he had this conversation with Bono when he has Mike Benz on next year.

Yeah, yeah, he will do completely.

Yeah.

So Laura Williams, no, not that one.

The other one says, have you encountered Joe Bros in the wild?

If so, what was your experience with them?

Well, I was at the No Kings protest last week and I presume several Joe Bros flipped me off.

That's what I'm presuming.

I'm not sure.

But, you know, I can't can't say that I've experienced a lot of them in the wild.

I did have the experience of overhearing a conversation at a restaurant with my wife once.

We were sitting, you know, enjoying dinner together and we overheard a very loud young man talking to what was obviously another young man and that young man's parents.

They were probably, you know, maybe college students.

And the young man was

imploring the parents to listen to Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan is the, he is, he's such a great interviewer and you're just going to love everything he does, et cetera, et cetera.

And so we had an opportunity, this was years ago, maybe, you know, six, seven years ago.

And so it was right before the pandemic and all this stuff.

And Joe has changed quite a bit since then.

But I remember the young man imploring the adults at that table to please listen to Joe Rogan.

He's the next, he's the next Larry King or whatever, you know, he's going to be the guy who's going to interview people and you'll get a lot of insight from it.

Yeah.

And I don't think I've encountered Joe Brose as such.

And maybe it's just not as

likely in the circles that I move in and often moved in.

About nine or ten years ago, when I was working for a marketing agency, one of our freelance graphic designers was explaining to me that he listens not like to everything, but sometimes a lot of the stuff, I don't believe everything he says, but a lot of the stuff he says, I think is really good.

And a lot of the kind of interviews he does is pretty good.

But I had not listened to Joe at the time.

And all I had to say was essentially, yeah, well, do you not think he kind of talks about conspiracy theories in a way that he thinks they're real?

And he thinks the moon landing was faked, or certainly it used to.

And those are, yeah, well, you know, those are the ideas that I don't get on board with.

But I don't really come across Joe Bros.

I did, at a skeptics in the pub event that I was running recently, somebody did come.

I don't know that he was a Joe Bro, but he was repeating the kind of talking points that we absolutely will see in those kind of spaces.

He was explaining that Ghillaine Ghillaine Maxwell was an agent of Mossad recruited specifically to honey trap Jeffrey Epstein into all these awful things so they could use him and recruit him.

Was it Enay?

Use him.

Well, it wasn't far off.

Yeah, exactly.

But it was an interesting spin on it because.

We've seen Joe have conversations with people about how Jeffrey Epstein was being used by Israel in order to get compromat on all these high-powered people.

But this was the first time I'd heard somebody extending that into he was a victim of the seductive techniques of Mossad agent Ghillaine Maxwell.

And it's like, yeah, but did you know that her dad was an Israeli spy?

Okay, I mean, it's Robert Maxwell.

For you to believe that, you'd have to believe Robert Maxwell.

And that's not a good, like, Robert Maxwell was a famous media figure in the UK on newspapers, but.

He changed his names like eight different times.

He

was absconded with a load of pension money from the from the Daily Mirror newspaper.

He was like a very bad guy who then drowned in mysterious circumstances on his yacht, i.e., probably fell overboard or threw himself overboard.

But he was trying to then go into, well, he was part of it.

He was part of Marsad, so she was part of Marsad.

So Jeffrey Epstein was recruited by her in order to get him to do these things.

It's like, Christ, you're working a long way around to incorporate your misogyny into forgiving Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious paedophile.

Is it not bad enough that he was just a paedophile who'd like doing these things and like having these powerful people?

So I suspect that I may have been a Joe Bro, but he didn't mention Joe Wogan.

Yeah, yeah.

Kelly Burke asks, if you could pick one episode of your show to go viral and reach a wider audience, which would you choose and why?

This is an interesting one.

I think it depends on when, really, because early on I would have said the Mark Andreasen one would be good because there was an active attack on the consumer financial protection bureau, and that would have been a very good way to help unpick those attacks.

That That became less of an issue as people like RFK Jr.

got in.

So then I'd maybe say something like

Callie means and Casey means to show that this was an institutional capture all along.

So maybe that one.

But maybe I've got to settle on the Suzanne Humphreys one because there's so much harm in anti-vax.

And I think we went into some pretty specific detail about some of the anti-vax talking points and why her particular talking points were wrong.

So yeah, I'd go for one of those maybe.

How about you?

For me, I think it'd be the Donald Trump episode very specifically because of how Joe portrays that interview.

Joe has talked about that interview multiple times as if I had no idea who the guy was.

I didn't know about him.

I didn't know about his policies.

I didn't know anything about him.

I just wanted to have a conversation with him.

Just wanted to talk to him.

Just wanted to have a conversation with him.

But then you listen to all the questions that he asks and the deafening silence of the questions he doesn't ask.

Yeah.

And you get a very clear picture that Joe had every intent on making it the softest, softball, cuddly, right out of the dryer blanket interview that you could possibly imagine.

And I think that's what Joe did.

And he made, he, he made, he tucked, he tucked Trump in the entire episode.

And, and made sure he had plenty of hot cocoa.

Like it was, it was ridiculous.

Like it was, so I, I would say that that one, in my opinion, is the one that I would love for other people to hear, mainly, mainly mainly because it is totally different than the way Joe remembers it and the way Joe promotes it today.

And I do think he's very proud of it.

I think he is.

I understand your reasoning.

I'd push back on why I don't know that that one would be the best one to go viral because ultimately that ship has sailed on Trump.

That's for sure.

He's not going to get unelected by it.

No, no.

If he gets elected again, something far bigger has gone wrong.

That for me is that.

It's not a Joe Rogan guest appearance that gets him elected a third time.

Exactly, exactly.

So yeah, for me, it would be one of the ones that I think if people could hear some of the stuff in some of those other things, maybe they'd understand what's happening a little bit closer.

But yeah, it's a good point, regardless.

The reason why I say I still think it's a good idea is then maybe you could say,

It doesn't have anything to do with Donald Trump.

It has whether or not Joe is being truthful, whether or not Joe is being honest with himself and with other people.

And that could measure how much you believe what he has to say about the myth of himself as well as other people.

Yeah, okay, that's fair.

Yeah, yeah.

All right.

So Sable the Chonk asks,

when are you going to change the tagline from no previous Rogan experience?

I'm not sure you could say that anymore.

And they put a rolling on the floor emoji afterwards.

Yeah, you're right.

We're going to change it in season two, and we're going to change it every time from that point on.

We're going to make a change.

So we're not going to say no previous Rogan experience.

We're going to let let you know how much Rogan experience we have as we move forward because we can't say that in season two and beyond.

Well, I mean, it is still true that we had no prior Rogan experience.

We came into this with no prior Rogan experience, but we are, we're 80 hours deep on Rogan at this point and counting.

So we'll, we'll be making that clear on future shows, I'm sure.

Yeah.

Speaking of future shows, Iculus, 90, asks, any chance of you going into the archive, so to speak, for season two?

I was a daily Rogan listener between 2011 and 2018 when I I started falling off and then completely disconnected during the pandemic.

One of the key pieces to Rogan that I think is yet to be talked about is how he used to be for, he used to be Oprah for bros.

Back when he was having Neil deGrasse Tyson, Anthony Bourdain and Bernie Sanders, you really saw a different side of him.

He was just a dude who got really staunched and talked to interesting people while being sponsored by Flashlight.

Or is that Flashlight?

Is that Flashlight Flashlight?

I think it was Flashlight.

Yeah.

It might be interesting for those who've never heard what the old Joe sounded like to get a glimpse and see where he started and just how far he's dragged a lot of his audience to the right.

Yeah, I mean, we are going to be going into the archive.

Absolutely.

It's something we've already been doing on the Patreon bonus shows.

So we've already looked at

a couple of shows.

I think we've gone back as far as 2015 or 2014 on the Cara Santa Maria show.

We talked early on in the pandemic with when he did an interview with David Packman.

So before he really kind of got lost in some of the pandemic stuff, we've done Bill Burr.

We've just done one with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

And we're going to be doing a really old episode where he talks to Brian Dunning from Skeptoid podcasts.

So we are doing some of those.

We're going to be peppering them in as bonus shows.

I think we'll probably do them on the main feed as well.

Like there'll be some archive shows we'll do on the main feed.

The first one of the season.

We're going to

be Stefan Molyneux.

So we discovered while we were listening to Cara Santa Maria

that.

Very specifically, the show right before Carol was on was Stefan Molyneux and it was taken down.

So we found that episode.

We've found it on Rumble.

We listened to it and now we have a transcript and we're going to go through it and that'll be how we launched season two.

So with Stefan Molyneux, an old show, a show from the 500s will launch season two.

So we do have a plan.

Can I mention really quickly how he calls Joe Rogan Oprah for Bros?

Because I really love this.

And one of the reasons why I love it is because Oprah also pushes medical misinformation with Dr.

Oz and Dr.

Phil.

That's a good point.

It's kind of a perfect, great marriage of saying Oprah for bros is perfect.

I mean, they both do the same thing.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's good.

It's good.

All right.

Uh, last question: When will season two premiere?

And how long will you need to heal?

Well, it's mainly about going on vacation and leaving the country and not being around a computer and not being able to record.

Uh, that's the main thing.

So, uh, so the season two, our great hope is that season two premieres on the 15th, but it may be the 22nd.

So it's possible that it's the 15th if we can maybe, you know, do a very fast turnaround because I don't come back to the States until the 11th.

But July 15th with a extremely fast turnaround, it could be July 15th with a regular turnaround.

It'll be the 22nd, but it'll be one of those days.

In the meantime, We're going to be giving people extra

bonus episodes on the patron feed.

We're going to be giving people who haven't heard any of our behind the scenes stuff.

We're going to be releasing some of that out on our main feed.

So you get an opportunity to listen to that.

And so

there's going to be lots of stuff that you can listen to in the meantime that we're going to put on there.

The other thing that we're going to be doing too is launching season two with an opportunity for everybody who listens to become a patron for free for a month.

month.

So listen to our

come back at the beginning of next season for the Stefan Malinu because we'll have an announcement on how you can become a patron for free for a month to get a taste of it to see if you like it.

So come back for that specific episode so you can join in on the fun if you wanted to try out the Patreon without actually, you know, becoming a patron to see if it's something that you would enjoy.

All right, Marsh.

Well, hey, can I just say that I enjoyed the shit out of doing this show with you?

I really

say the same thing.

This has been great.

Yeah, it's been really amazing.

And I can't think of anybody better to do this show with.

I'm so happy that I learned something new from you every episode.

You're a really smart,

really

meticulous person to work with.

And I just want to say I appreciate the shit out of you doing the show with me.

I think it's amazing.

And I think you do a great job.

And so thank you for joining me on this project.

Well, I mean, it's a pleasure.

And I'll say that your professionalism, I don't think if this was me driving it, this show would be anywhere near as successful as it is.

Your professionalism, getting things moving, getting everything done.

You're so tight on getting everything together.

So, yeah,

it's a perfect collaboration, frankly.

Yeah, it's been great.

It's been really great.

We hope everybody joins us for season two.

So, that's going to wrap up this season.

Like I say, keep your eye on the feed.

We're going to have a bunch of other stuff, and we're going to catch you next season for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

If you love the show, please rate and share it.

If you want to get in in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to knowrogan.com, k-n-o-w-r-o-g-a-n.com.

At Coldwater Creek, we take a thoughtful approach to design, giving attention to what matters most to you.

From quality fabrics to the fits you love to artful details that captivate.

Coldwater Creek caters to your wardrobe in every season, for every occasion, and in every size.

We create comfortable, confident styles with endless versatility that reflect the life you live.

Discover why Coldwater Creek is the sought-after choice in women's clothing.

For new seasonal looks, shopcoldwatercreek.com.

This Labor Day, gear up, save big, and ride harder with cycle gear.

From August 22nd to September 1st, score up to 60% off motorcycle gear from your favorite brands.

RPM members get 50% off tire mount and balance with any new tire purchase.

Need to hit the road now?

Fast Lane Financing lets you ride now and pay later with 0% interest for three months.

And here's the big one: August 29th through September 1st only.

Buy any helmet $319 or more and get a free Cardo Spirit Bluetooth.

Supplies are limited.

Don't wait.

Cycle gear.

Get there.

Start here.