#0021 Donald Trump - Part 2

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan experience number 2219 with guest Donald Trump again.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

It's a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as anyone who wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Cecil Cicarello.

I'm joined by MicroMarshall, and today we're going to be covering an October 2024 interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump.

And so this is the second part of that interview.

We covered the main event last time.

And what are we covering today, Marsh?

So today we've got a toolbox section and we've got an undercard, a special undercard, which we'll come to later.

So we're going to be just doing the toolbox side of things.

You've got two different tools to add to your toolbox.

We're going to be talking about rhetorical vagueness and Donald Trump's technique of the weave.

So we'll tell you all about that when we get to the toolbox section.

So before we get to the toolbox, we want to thank our Area 51 all-access past patrons.

That's 11 Gruthius, Chunky Cat in Chicago Eats the Rich.

Fred R.

Gruthius, Daleen, Laura Williams, no, not that one.

The other one, Martin Fidel, am I a robot?

Capture says no, but maintenance records say yes, stone banana.

And definitely not an AI overlord.

They subscribe to patreon.com slash no rogan.

You can too.

All patrons get early access to episodes and a special patron-only bonus segment each week.

And this one is combined with last week.

So you will get one big, fat,

gigantic, chubby patron section that you get to listen to.

It will not be cut into two, it will be in one big portion, and you will have gotten that last week.

But now for our toolbox section.

Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the toolbag.

All right.

So for our toolbox section this week, we have a couple of two techniques here.

We're going to talk about Trump's sort of rhetorical vagueness in part.

And then also

something that's very connected.

It's something Trump calls the weave.

Yeah, absolutely.

So let's look at the first of those.

Trump's rhetorical techniques.

They're very well known by this point, but I think we can sum them up in a few different ways.

When he's talking to to somebody he doesn't like or doesn't care to be liked by, he's going to go on the attack.

Okay, you don't have to answer questions if you're the one doing all of the asking and you're putting people on the spot.

We don't see that in this interview because he wants to be liked.

So when he's talking to someone like Joe Rogan or when he's giving speeches and rallies, he can't do that.

So he'll fall back on two main techniques that we'll see a lot.

rhetorical vagueness and what he's come to subsequently call the weave.

So with the former, with rhetorical vagueness, when you're asked about something factual, when Trump gets asked about something factual, he'll respond with a series of claims that have the illusion of specificity without ever really getting to anything concrete or anything that actually shows an in-depth knowledge.

And you can think of it like a school book report.

You've not read the book, now you've got to talk about it in front of the class.

So you talk about how the book was really well written and how you found some of the imagery in the book to be really profound.

And while you didn't enjoy this book as much as other books that you've read, you can see why it's such an interesting book for a lot of people.

And you loved where the plot took you.

But, you know, you're not going to give any spoilers, but when people read it, they'll see exactly what you mean by the direction that it takes.

If people aren't listening closely and if people are predisposed to already like you, it sounds a lot like you've got some pretty strong insights into this book that, again, you absolutely have not read.

And we'll see this from Trump all the time.

I have a friend of mine who does this with sports.

He'll just say things about sports.

So he'll say, yeah, it's all about the coaching.

Or, man, if they could just stay healthy.

And none of that has anything to do, but it always relates to the sports.

So it's easy.

This is an easy thing to do about literally anything.

You could pretend to know about a whole bunch of things.

And that's what Trump does.

And especially, even in that case, you know, sports, we might, we might, if we're talking about a specific match, we might have both, I might have seen the match and you might be trying to bluff your way into saying what you have as well.

But if you are meant to have specific knowledge that I don't have, I can't even check you on that if you're talking in ways that sound like it's specific.

I've never worked with Secret Service.

Trump has.

So Trump could bluster his way around being vague about the specifics of things.

I wouldn't know that they're not right.

He's you, if he's, if he's talking the right kind of way.

Yeah.

That's rhetorical vagueness.

Now, as for the weave, the other technique, we should probably let Trump explain what he means by that.

All right.

So this is happening much farther into the episode.

So I want to mention that this is happening about two-thirds of the way in.

It's great, but this is too exciting.

This is more exciting than anything you can do.

Also, it's the home stretch.

It's the home stretch.

Who would take a day off?

So we have 11 days left now.

And

think of it.

So I think I've gone 54, 55 days in a row, no days off.

And I make speeches oftentimes, you know, sometimes not, but I make speeches.

And when you make a speech, and my speeches last a long time because of the weave, you know, I mean, I weave stories into it.

And if you don't, if you just read a teleprompter, nobody's going to be very excited.

you got to weave it out so you but you always have to as you say you always have to get right back to what yeah otherwise it's no good but the weave is very very important very few weavers around

but

it's a big strain on your you know it's a big it's a lot of work it's a lot of work uh you got to be careful of the voice you can lose that voice the voice wasn't designed i said today so i made a big one last night I was in Las Vegas, a big one the night before in Arizona.

Big one, I mean, they're all big.

There's never been anything like it in terms of crowd, never been close.

So here's Trump telling you what the weave is.

Now, the weave is actually a fairly new term for this.

I actually looked up mentions online of the weave and Trump prior to 2024, and there aren't any.

So he's been talking in this way for quite some time, but he's never called it this before.

So in my opinion, this is Trump trying to brand his conversational meandering, his inability to stay focused on the question or the topic at hand.

He's trying to brand all that as a strength, actually.

It's not a weakness.

This is actually a strength.

And if that's the case, his supporters seem pretty happy to accept this as a strength.

It means that when he's given rallies, he can just completely diverge from what's on the auto-cue or explain a way where he's misread a word and said the wrong thing.

It's not that he was wrong.

He actually meant this other version over here and it'll go over there.

That's all part of the weave.

It's not about lacking focus.

It's not about avoiding the question.

It's not about not understanding fundamentally what he's being asked.

He's just doing the weave.

Yeah.

And

ask yourself when you just listen to that clip, what did you learn?

Did you learn anything from him in that, in that, you know, that's over a minute long clip.

What did you learn from Trump in that?

I think we can maybe glean that campaigning is hard.

I think maybe that's something you can glean out of that.

The rest of it, though, all extraneous information.

It's all just, it's all just bouncing around to to try to get to a point.

That's meandering.

That's not getting to a point.

That's just saying things as filler words, waiting to make a point.

And so this is just, it's like you suggest, it's just a filler for the hours that he stands in front of people and meanders and talks.

And he has since then trademarked it.

And so now it's called the weave.

And it is now.

our logical fallacy this week.

We've let him explain it.

Let's go on to the first one.

This is a question about being

This one I wanted to ask you, what was it like when you actually got in?

Because nobody really can prepare you for that.

When you're running for president, you don't really know what it's going to be like when you actually get into office.

What did you think?

When you were in office or when I decided to run?

No, when you got in.

So when I was in and won and was in the White House, essentially.

Well, first of all, it was very surreal.

It's very interesting.

When I got shot, it wasn't surreal.

That should have been surreal.

When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on.

I knew exactly where I was hit.

They were saying you were hit all over the place because there was so much blood from the ear.

You would know that better than anyone.

When they get the ear torn out, ears bleed a lot.

Anyway, so and I was thinking the other day,

when that happened, I really knew where I was.

I knew exactly what happened.

I said I wasn't hit anywhere else.

With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience, okay?

What's day one life?

Okay, so he's asked the question.

What is it like to be president?

And he says surreal, but then he never expands on it.

He starts talking about what it was like to be shot.

And it feels like when you like, you know, when you ask someone for directions, you're like, hey, which way is the beach?

And then they do that flex.

They're like, it's this way.

And then they're like, that's kind of what he's doing here with the

assassination thing.

By the way, I was, I was, there was an opera, there was a chance, there was an attempt on my life this summer.

I have to bring this up.

There's no prompting.

He just brings it up out of nowhere.

And it feels like he 100% wanted to talk about this.

And so this was an opportunity to weave it in.

Yeah.

And in his defense, I probably would as well.

I probably would as well.

If I'd want to, I'd want to mention that.

Later in the interview, he will say, I don't like to talk about it.

It's like you brought it up out of nowhere.

But yeah, the question was, what was it like to be president?

And his answer starts by talking about getting shot four years later on the campaign trail, which isn't related at at all.

And we actually could have let this clip play on because he continues overseas.

He starts talking about his experience of being president.

He starts talking about the hotel that he owned in Washington, how many vehicles were in his motor kid one time, how bad the traffic was in Washington, and how he met with some specific people on the day.

Is any of that offering any insight into what it's like to be president?

Which was, again, the question he was specifically asked.

Yeah.

And Marsh filled in a few of these already, but we're going going to actually pick it back up about at this point, about four minutes later, three or four minutes later, they're talking about Lincoln's bedroom.

That room was so beautiful to me, much more beautiful than it actually is.

You know, to me, when I looked at the bed, and the bed, you could see it was a little bit longer, had to be a little bit longer.

He lost his son, and they suffered, the two of them suffered from melancholia.

They didn't call it depression.

They called it melancholia, and they suffered from it.

He was a very depressed guy, and she was a very depressed woman, more so than him.

And on top of that, they lost their son, whose name was Ted Tad.

And it was

just seeing it in the little pictures, a little tiny picture.

I mean, you can't see the details there, little tiny, everything at the word was a little tiny picture of Tad, who he lost.

And it was devastating.

And he was, you know, he was,

look, he was in a war.

And he was having a hard time because he couldn't beat Robert E.

Lee.

Robert E.

Lee won like 13 battles in a row.

And he was getting like a phobia, like a fighter.

You know,

not about the fight stuff.

But like, I went to a UFC fight, and it was a champion who was 14 and one about a year ago.

You would know the names.

14 and 1.

And the only guy he lost to was this one guy.

But the guy that he was fighting was like

almost just an average fighter, lost numerous times, but he beat this one guy.

So I said, okay.

I really don't know who you're talking about.

I'm trying to.

I will figure it out.

But about a year ago, but the point is that he lost.

He wasn't nearly the fighter.

But the one who was not nearly the fighter had beaten, he's the only guy that beat the champ like five years before.

And I said, I'll take the guy that won the other fight.

And that's what happened.

He beat him a second time.

Sometimes

psychological adventures.

You know, what is this crazy thing?

Lincoln had a, I don't know, I've never read this.

I heard it from people in the White House who really understand what was going on with the whole life of the White House.

But Lincoln had the yips about, in a way, as the golfers would say, he had a phobia about Robert E.

Lee.

He said, I can't beat Robert because Robert E.

Lee won many battles in a row.

Okay, now understand the question he's being asked here is, what is it like to be president?

That was the question.

He's only answered that question very vaguely, right?

It was surreal.

Then, like,

we've now progressed.

Now we're nine, we're now 11 minutes in and he's still.

11 minutes into the same answer.

Yeah, this is the same thing.

Now, this is just a ridiculous, convoluted story.

And they get to talking about what it's, you know, here they're trying to talk about what it's like to be president.

And then he's talking about lincoln yeah who needed a long bed yeah who's and his dead child yeah which made him and his wife depressed and the war and robert e lee who had a great battle record by the way and the ufc fighter he can't name and another ufc fighter he can't name and not even joe can figure out who he means by it back to lincoln again and his yips yeah and like here's the what is it like to be president

like they're just like what is it like and he has to he has spent like at this point we're talking eight minutes discussing nothing.

He's only said twice that it was surreal.

It's not even a good question.

It's a bad question, to be honest.

It's really a bad question because it's way too open-ended.

But there is no way for Trump to condense his thoughts.

And if you think this is over, this is not over.

We are not done.

He is still going to talk about it.

The same question.

I have to be with my state, you know, and the state was his whole thing.

And he went to the South.

And he was, I've had generals tell me, we have some great generals, the real generals, not the ones you see on television, the ones that beat ISIS with me.

We defeated ISIS in record time.

It was supposed to take years, and we did it in a matter of weeks.

These are great generals.

These are tough guys.

These are not woke guys.

But their favorite general in terms of genius was Robert E.

Lee.

He turned strategy.

Strategically.

He took a war that should have been over in a few days, and it was, you know, years of hell, a vicious war.

Okay, so the question, like I suggest, seven minutes ago was asked, what is it like to be president when you finally got in?

And he hasn't answered it yet, except for to say it was surreal.

Yeah, and Joe's going to ask the question four times in this first 15 minutes and not get an answer out of it.

Not a single one.

Now,

contrast this.

What if Biden was asked this question and he gave this kind of seven plus minute rambling weird answer without ever addressing what was actually actually asked would joe decide he was unfit for the presidency if he couldn't get to the point within seven minutes ask yourself that question and see what answer you come up with

now we're still uh now we're talking about uh experience this is this is still covering the weave Everyone's aware of all this stuff, but what I want to get to is like, what was the experience once you got inside?

What did you think it was going to be like in terms of like your ability to govern?

Like this is your first experience governing anything you've never been a governor you never been a mayor yeah private private separate business yeah but now all of a sudden you're inside the white house the biggest thing was just that first moment of being in this hallowed it was really a hallowed place to me it was surreal was beyond to me that's that was the experience it was a surreal experience and then with time that wears off with time it becomes you know your place where you stay and right uh i was doing a lot of i was i had two things that I really focused on, governing the country and survival.

Because from the moment I won, before I got to office, all of a sudden, I mean, they came down.

I mean, nobody has ever been treated that way.

And you see that.

I mean, you see where in the Washington Post very early on, they said, well, now the impeachment stuff starts.

And it did.

I mean, it literally started from the beginning.

So I had survival and run the nation.

I had a combination.

Most people don't have the survival.

they get in.

Yeah, so I think it's pretty clear to me, at least, Trump doesn't really understand what he's being asked here.

And okay, that might be a fault of Joe.

His question is kind of not, as you say, it's not specific enough.

So in response, Trump is throwing all sorts of stuff at the wall.

And he's employing this rhetorical vagueness.

It was surreal and then it was normal.

Okay, sure, think start out weird and then they get normalized once you're used to them.

That just happens all the time.

He was focused on governing the country.

That's a job description.

It's not an answer here.

He was trying to politically survive too.

That's not really anything other than his standard narrative about his personal grievances.

None of this is telling you what it's like to be president.

Yeah, it's just basically a rambling mess.

There's nothing there.

Yeah.

And is this any close to explaining what the job of being president is like?

His entire answer boils down to, it was weird at first, but then I focused on doing the job.

That's it.

That's all he said.

That's the job you were asked to do.

He was governing the country.

Yeah.

I would imagine that eventually, as president, that would be something you would focus on, and that isn't even worthy of an answer.

Now we're going to talk about race cars and bulls.

You know, I mean, I understand what I'm doing.

You make yourself a target, and it's a very dangerous business.

But if you just look at statistically,

so I said, I saw a thing, I don't know if it's right, but one-tenth of one percent for a race car driver.

Yeah, it's a pretty dangerous business, right?

Yeah.

One-tenth One-tenth of one percent for a bull rider.

I tell you, to me,

these guys that ride the bulls is worse than UFC.

It's worse.

These guys, you see these big monster bulls, and you see it in slow motion where the foot is like, you know, an inch away from the head.

If it hits him, the guy's gone.

But they die.

You know, they die.

So one-tenth of 1% die.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, one-tenth of 1% die.

Right.

And they certainly get hurt badly, really.

I mean, they can't walk after a certain period of time.

But with a president, if you look at the amount of assassination attacks, and attempts, too.

And attempts.

No, it's a very dangerous position.

I never thought of that, by the way, when I did it.

So Joe, you can hear him here.

He's having to work really hard.

This is half an hour into the conversation.

It's just been like this all the way through.

Joe is working really hard to try and keep Trump on track because we are weaving all over the place.

And even Joe is sort of saying, So what are you saying?

Death?

One-tenth of 1% die?

Is that what you're saying?

And he's just trying to bring this back together here at this point.

It's just not clear yeah joe can't even fell him joe literally can't even fell him he stops him and says wait are you talking about death of people i don't know what you're referring to trump is still at this point still talking about what it's like to be president but now he's bringing in all these other dangerous jobs trying to make it seem like you know the presidency who is constantly someone who's constantly protected and has you know all all those security needs met et cetera they're all they're all

it's not as dangerous i mean i i granted there are people who are going to try to attempt at your life, but there's also people who are constantly looking out for you.

So it's a little different.

But in any case, you know, how is this?

Let's just ask ourselves, we're 27 minutes in.

How is this any better than traditional ways to get to know a candidate, right?

We haven't learned a single thing from anything he said so far in this interview, up to 27 minutes so far.

There's certainly nothing that has been brought up that makes people think that, which I would think would make anyone think he's the best person to run for this nation.

He hasn't said anything like that.

And Joe, throughout the entire episode, will be talking about how debate is bad, how this other type of, you know, these, these softball interviews are bad that they give on like 60 minutes.

They decry the 60 minutes interview that Kamala Harris did.

They talk about how bad debate is.

To be honest, debate seems to me to be a much better way to get to know somebody than this, because in this, he's not saying anything.

At least in debate, there's a, there's an opportunity to hear how he's going to talk about a question and how he might react and

how he might speak and how he might think under pressure, right?

In this, there's no pressure whatsoever.

So what am I learning about him?

Nothing because he hasn't said anything yet.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because this long form conversation, okay, this could actually be valuable.

It could be more valuable than debate.

It's not just lending itself to short sound bites and the odd zinger kind of pre-prepared zinger.

But for this to be better than a debate, it has to have an interviewer who pushes back, who looks for specificity, who doesn't let you just weave your conversation all over the place.

That's not what we're getting here.

And as you say, this isn't a good way to get to know a candidate.

It certainly isn't a good way for Joe, who says he was persuaded to vote, that he came to follow Trump and believe in Trump after this interview.

This is one of the pivotal points in him coming to think that Trump was a good bet.

This interview, what we're listening to now is meant to have added towards persuading Joe to vote for Trump.

We're half an hour in, and it's not even clear that Trump is, he's not saying anything concrete.

It's not even clear that he's saying anything that Joe can even follow conversationally because it's just incoherent.

All right.

So now we're going to talk about

Trump's going to tell Joe how he should vote.

Yeah.

By the way, he gave me the nicest endorsement too.

The tough, he said, the country's going to fail.

You should do the same thing, Joe, because you cannot be voting for Kamala.

Kamala, you're not a Kamala person.

I know you.

I've watched you.

I know him better than he is.

You know what?

Without speaking to you, I think I know you maybe almost as well as your wife.

I have watched you for so many years.

You're not a Kamala person.

You're a Khabib person, but you're not a Kamala person.

Nobody's going to know who Khabib is.

Oh, they know who.

He was not bad, right?

Oh, he was phenomenal.

But that's your kind of thing.

Your weave is getting wide.

We're getting wide with this.

I want to bring it back to tariffs.

But wait one second, before we finish with tariffs, so they said, they said, could you get him?

We need Starlink.

And I call Elon.

He got it for him so fast, saved so many lives.

Okay.

They were talking before this about

Elon Musk for a second, and then they weaved into this piece here because he's basically saying Elon Musk was the one who endorsed me and you should endorse me too.

And that's where this conversation picks up.

But before that, it was tariffs.

It was tariffs.

It went to Elon Musk, who's nice, you endorsed me into this.

But what about a guy called Khabib?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And Khabib is a UFC fighter, by the way.

If you didn't know that, maybe Marsh didn't know that.

But in any case, there's this point where Joe says your weave is getting a little wide.

Would he have that same kind of comment if Biden were to do the same thing?

Ask yourself that question.

Would he say at this point, Biden is incompetent?

Did you see him the other day?

He talks about Biden throughout this entire interview about how incompetent he is.

And he doesn't do it just once.

He talks about him multiple times.

And he says things that make it seem like Biden is incompetent, but there is somebody in front of him who cannot follow a single train of thought.

Yeah.

And Joe, giving given somebody space in conversation is fine.

He's given him so much space.

That would be fine if this was just a conversation.

That's perfectly fine.

It would also be fine if it's the charity he'd extend to anybody else, especially people he politically doesn't agree with.

But as you say, he's not extending that charity.

And the reason he's not extending that charity is because he had already made up his mind coming into this interview.

This interview wasn't about persuading Joe.

It was about Joe and Trump persuading you.

All right.

So this next piece is essentially two parts of the same piece.

This is talking about defeating ISIS.

And so that's the question that was asked about, they were talking about Trump using the military and Joe basically asking, well, how did you go about

defeating ISIS?

Yeah, because Trump has said throughout that he defeated ISIS in record time.

They said it would take a long time, but I was able to defeat it in record time.

And Joe understandably asks how, and

this is, I think, a little bit into that answer.

So this isn't even the very start of that answer.

And

I flew and

left at three o'clock in the morning.

Nobody knew I was going.

I got on Air Force One and we started flying.

And when we reached about half an hour away from Iraq, that was where the airport was, big airport,

about a half an hour away, they said, sir, I'm sorry, you'll have to turn off all your lights.

Why?

We're getting close to our site, our land.

I said, you mean we spent $8 trillion and we can't leave the lights on?

Think of this.

20 years, $8 trillion, and we can't leave the lights on in a plane.

I said, that's okay.

Turn the lights on.

I'm not going to fight them.

That's what I'm going to do.

Well, this is because it's too dangerous?

Yeah, too dangerous because they see the light up in the air if they'll shoot at you.

So i said turn the lights off then they said sir we're going to also pull your shades if that's okay i said that's okay the plane was pitch black all the lights outside you know the blinking the golden the blinking reds they were all turned off and i like to sit with pilots a lot of times and these guys are specimens i always say they're better looking than tom cruise okay

and they're even taller like perfect specimens.

These guys, like for a fighter, you know, you have some guys that are perfect specimens.

And, you know, they picked the best pilots in the Air Force, United States Air Force, to fly Air Force One.

And I get up there

and I'm sitting, and I'm feeling my way up.

You know, it's up high 747, so you go through the stairs, but I sort of knew my way up.

There wasn't a light in the plane.

I'm saying, can you imagine?

We spent trillions of dollars, and we're trying to fly in blind.

But I got into the plane.

The cockpit's dark black, little tiny light.

You could see the pilot, a perfect looking human being.

His co-pilot, everybody was perfect.

They were all like movie stars.

You know, it's like I could have cast a movie with these guys and nobody would believe it because they were too good looking.

So I said, How are we doing, Captain?

Sir, we'll be landing in 10 minutes.

And I look outside.

There's not a light.

And I'm saying, you know, I've landed a lot of planes.

And you see, like little lights, at least.

There's nothing.

It's just pure desert.

And I said, okay, Captain, good.

but I'm looking.

Now we're.

Okay, so this anecdote started as this is how I defeated ISIS in record time.

And it quickly became, I was sat in the dark on a plane with some very attractive pilots who were landing the plane without lights.

This will, this answer will continue in this vein for three more minutes.

We're going to come back to it in a little bit.

Repeatedly throughout this answer, it keeps coming back to how fuckable the pilots and the generals and the sergeants were.

Not entirely clear why that's deeply important, but apparently it is.

They were very bangable military guys.

He was around at all times.

That's an important part of how he defeated ISIS with hotness, I suppose.

I've seen that movie, yeah.

But all of this is to explain how we defeated ISIS in a matter of weeks when everyone would take five years.

It's an impressive claim that I managed to defeat ISIS in a matter of weeks.

And it would, it's the kind of claim that when pressed on it, would require specifics.

How did you do it?

What was the strategy?

What was the plan?

What were the holdups?

Why could nobody else have done this?

If you don't have those specifics, you need to be vague.

You need to employ this rhetorical vagueness and you weave your way through stories that show you that you were there for sure.

But those stories aren't about anything strategic at all.

Putting

the shades down on the plane is not about the strategy of defeating ISIS, but

it's true that he was there because that's a detail that he knows.

In the end, where we'll actually come to, and we'll hear it in a moment, in fact, is the generals told us they could defeat ISIS quickly, but chain of command told them not to.

And that is it.

I mean, this is the end here, literally, in fact.

So we go into the room, and they have these guys.

I say, how long can you do it?

How long?

We can do it in a couple of weeks, sir.

He said, wait a minute.

They told me five years.

We can do it.

And

he gave me a number, like,

just like in no time.

I said, why haven't you done it?

Because the orders came in from Washington, sir, and they would come here and tell us what to do.

Don't you challenge us?

We're not allowed to do that, sir.

That's not the military way.

They tell us what to do, and we have to respect.

That is how he defeated ISIS.

This is zero insight into

how he defeated ISIS in record time.

And over the course of this anecdote, that involves Trump speaking for over a full five minutes solidly.

And it sure sounds to Joe that Trump read that book he's been talking about because he's got a lot of details that feel very specific.

Right, right.

I,

you know, look, in the end, according to him, according to what Trump said, he did nothing but trust the people who do this work, which is literally what everyone else who has this job does, okay?

Or at least should do, right?

I'll put that, I'll put that caveat in there.

At least that's what they should do.

But notice, every time he talks about this, he says he defeated ISIS.

Now, look, we're willing to allow that if he's going to take the praise for what his advisors do.

We're willing to allow that sort of colloquial understanding that Trump is the one who defeated ISIS if he's willing to claim it.

And he's willing to say that these are what this is what my advisors do, because he clearly didn't do anything, right?

But if we're going to allow that, we can't apologize for him when he picks bad advisors and has to fire them because they're bad people, because that's a double standard.

So we can't praise him in this opportunity if he's not willing to take the blame for all the bad, quote, bad people he put in there as well.

Yeah, you don't get to have the credit if you're not willing to take the responsibility.

So now we're going to talk about nuclear bombs.

And I rebuilt the military, and then they gave a chunk of it.

I have to tell you, as much as it is, it's a tiny little piece, believe it or not.

We have an unbelievable, I rebuilt the military.

I rebuilt our nuclear.

And in a way, I hated to redo it, but I got to realize how powerful that nuclear is, Joe.

One bomb, Israel is gone, but forget.

One bomb could take out the entire East Coast.

It's so bad.

And I watch these poor fools talking about our oceans will rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 500 years.

I mean,

we have people, we have countries.

Right now, you have five countries.

And don't underestimate North

North.

If you take a look at North Korea,

I was there.

I mean, I was with Kim Jong.

I had a great relationship.

I got along great with him.

Okay.

Let me see if I can summarize this.

I rebuilt the military.

I rebuilt nuclear.

One bomb could do a lot of damage.

People say the oceans will rise.

You have five countries.

Don't underestimate North Korea.

I get along great with their dictator.

What is that?

Like, he changes the subject to an occasionally tangential subject six times in 50 seconds.

Yes.

And then to be clear, this came up about a minute or less than a a minute after the last clip we shared.

It was 50 seconds after the last clip.

So this is him picking up on his control of the military.

And again,

these are tangent.

These are all tangential subjects to what he was talking about when he's talking about the military.

So they must be evidence that he knows what he's talking about because they're all things in the same vague area.

But they're not telling you anything that anyone with any insight would be able to offer about military strategy.

Also, it's not a surprise, surely, that nuclear bombs are really bad.

Now, it seems to be a surprise to him as to how bad.

And with Trump, you can always tell the things he didn't know because he tells stories about them like nobody knows those things, even if they're fairly well-known things.

Nobody knows how bad nuclear bombs are.

We've got a pretty good idea how bad nuclear bombs are.

What you're telling me is that you didn't think they were particularly bad.

Yeah.

When I heard him do this very particular piece where he switches subjects so quickly in such a short amount of time, time.

It reminded me of someone who is sort of flipping through a book on a subject and then picking a line to read and then flipping several pages and then picking a new line to read.

That's what it, it feels like we're missing pages between what he's talking about.

He's just sort of skimming over the top of all these different types of things that are related.

It's almost, I mean, One could almost say he doesn't know what he's talking about.

He's just saying things that are vaguely what someone would want to hear when they ask ask a question about a certain subject.

That might be a conclusion you could come to when you hear him do his weave.

All right, so now we're going to do the, we're going to talk about Trump's vagueness

in the toolbox section.

And this is perfectly illustrated near the end of the podcast when Joe starts talking about the release of the John F.

Kennedy files.

One of the things that I want to talk to you about is the JFK files.

And one of the things that you said was that if they showed you what they showed me, this was your quote, you wouldn't want people to know it either.

So

I opened them up partially.

I was met with from good people.

I mean, you know, look, I mean, good people.

People that were well-meaning.

Mike Pompeo was one of them.

He's a good person.

They called me, they said, sir, would rather have you not.

After, and I did open them,

but I was asked by some people not to open them.

There's a Martin Luther King file, too, by the way, that they'd like to see.

I don't know if you know, but there is that.

But JFK in particular.

So

they called me, a lot of good people called me, people that I, you know, that you would find reasonable people.

And they asked me not to do it.

So I said, well, we'll close it for another time.

But if I win, I'm going to open them up.

I'm just going to open enough.

So yeah, these last clips are going to be perfect illustrations.

The rhetorical vagueness in action.

Joe wants to talk about JFK.

Joe knows a lot about the JFK assassination and the conspiracy theory around it.

Trump, I would suggest, knows a lot less than Joe about this.

But he was president.

He can't just admit, I don't know very much about this.

So he talks around it.

Well, you know, if you knew what I knew, you wouldn't want to share it either.

That might sound really specific, but does the kid really want to avoid giving plot spoilers for that book?

Or have they just not read the book and don't know the plot?

I think it's the latter of those so think of the vagueness that we're getting here he opened i opened some of the files does he does he think these are literal folders like folders of paper that we're opening up he opened some of these he had a look at he opened some but not all of them here's a specific named person who was nearby at the time mike pompeo so i must be telling the truth because that's a real person There were other people they called about it, not named ones, but you'd think they were reasonable.

He even says people you'd think were reasonable.

So if you knew who they were, you'd think they were reasonable, but you don't know who they were because I haven't said who they were.

But I have cited people.

So it must be true, right?

Because there's people.

Next time, I'm going to open them up.

Phew.

Question dodged.

Except Joe actually cares about this topic.

So he's not going to accept this vagueness.

He's going to carry on asking questions.

It's the one time in the interview that he actually pushes.

Look, we are at this point two hours and 43 minutes in.

And this is the first time Joe has shown any journalistic integrity because it's something he absolutely adores.

And you can just hear, you can feel Trump seeing the finish line of this interview inside, but then suddenly

he goes down the dip before a finish line and seems there's a massive mountain to climb before he gets the finish line.

You got to get through.

You got to get through your final boss, which is Joe asking about

Joe asking about the JFK files.

Okay, they're still continuing the conversation.

Why didn't you open it up the first time?

There's a lot of times the hesitation addresses people that are still still living there are people that are affected

and it could be some national security reason that for you know that I don't have to necessarily know about but some very good talented people asked me not to do it I opened it up and then they said would it be possible for us to do that a different day

okay so again Trump why why didn't he do it?

Joel's not letting go.

Well, Trump's now thought about addresses.

Addresses.

That's why he couldn't open them up.

Addresses.

But the problem is, whose addresses?

Why are they in there?

Why can't those addresses just be redacted while the files get released?

These are obvious questions.

So that line won't hold.

So Trump instead falls back on.

You can see, hear him get to, oh, and there could be some national security reason.

Okay, that sounds specific.

But what if Joe asks what the reason it is?

That's okay, because it's a reason that Trump thinks I don't necessarily have to know about.

So that absolves him of the responsibility.

There's a reason that I don't know about that they weren't put out.

But hang on.

He's now just

suggested that it's it's okay that there's some sort of deep state that hides inconvenient truths from the presidency.

Not an ideal thing for him to have invented as part of his avoidance in front of Joe Rogan.

It makes him look weak.

So it's also, there were some very nice people, some good and talented people who asked

not to open it today, to do it on a different day, like a scheduling issue, put on a different day of the Canada.

Who are those people?

They're not named.

Don't worry about it.

But they asked me to do it a different day and I said yes.

So it makes me look nice to them.

Phew.

Question dodged.

we can move on we don't have to carry on talking about this except

how much of it did you read into uh uh

I think it's gonna be just fine to open it let me put it that way I think it's fine it's gonna be time nice it's a cleansing you know it's really a cleansing so I'm gonna do it I'm gonna do it immediately almost immediately upon entering office

So Joe's just not letting this up.

So Trump kicks the can down the road.

It's fine.

Actually, just thinking about it now.

Yeah, no, I will open it up.

As soon as I get it, it'll be a good thing.

I'll open up as soon as soon as it'll be good for all of us.

I'll do it immediately on entering office.

Well, almost immediately, because almost immediately is more specific than immediately.

It implies the steps to go through, which I don't have to explain here because I clearly know about them because I just referenced a timeline that it takes them to do.

Rhetorical vagueness.

And the questions dodged.

That's amazing.

Can I just stop before we play the next clip, which again is going to be about the JFK thing?

I just want to say, like, this is like kids standing outside of someone's wardrobe that they said leads to a magical land.

And the person is now waving their hands and saying, well, we can't go in there because it only works on Sunday or whatever.

This is literally that moment where he...

Special pleading is the fallacy that it would also be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He gets caught in this moment and he can't back out of it.

He just can't do it.

And it's, it's actually delicious.

So this is the last clip.

58 million views get to this point.

50 million people get to watch Trump squirm.

Here's him squirming a final time.

Well, the thing, when people look at it from the outside and you sort of imagine what could be a reason why they would not release those files, it would be there's people that were implicated in

the assassination.

Yeah.

Well, when there are living people, you generally tend not to want to do it.

When people are still living.

Living people that formerly worked for the government.

For the government, and living people that were somehow involved in it, and you tend not to do that.

But it's time to open them.

I can't tell you whether or not they're going to find anything of interest.

And I did partially open.

I think I've opened 50%,

but I was asked not to do it.

And

I thought that was a reasonable ask, but now I'm going to do it.

I'm going to do it very soon.

There's a lot of interest in it.

One of the things that I'm going to do is...

There's a lot of interest in the people coming from space, you know.

Yes.

And I know you're interested.

Oh, very interested in that.

How much do they tell you about that?

A lot.

Really?

So this is a masterclass in this vaguer to try and squirm out of it.

Joe really wants to know what these reasons are.

And Trump is very happy to agree, yes, the reasons that you think are the reasons, those are the reasons.

Those are the ones that I was referring to as to why we haven't announced those.

But who are these people?

Joe's asking, you know, the people who you can't release it because their addresses, their information, do they work for for the government?

And Trump says, yes, but also other people involved somehow.

Incredibly specific there.

But he says, and you tend not to, he says specifically, you tend not to open these things up.

That sounds like a reference to the kind of norms and policies that a president might know about.

It sounds specific, but we still haven't said anything here.

And Trump even says, I can't tell you if they'll find anything of interest, despite having looked at the files.

Well, maybe not all the files, because maybe, you know, there's this floated idea of someone whose job it is that's perfectly okay that their job is to withhold this stuff from the president and not tell them about it for national security reasons the president can't know about except he has opened the files up he says he's opened them up a little bit he's opened up them up 50

that's a specific number that can't be made up but what is the 50 there half of the pages half of the files Is it just people's surnames, but not their phone?

I mean, it sounds meaningful, but it's not specific.

it doesn't mean anything it's not actually tied to anything and what i love about all of this is trump can absolutely tell that he's not getting out getting out of this like in this bit towards the end joe even tries to ask another follow-up question because joe thinks he's now in a conversation of specifics joe has referenced this conversation multiple times like when i talked to to trump and he said if the things that i that i've seen if you knew about them you wouldn't want them open you see he says i he said in other interviews trump said things about jfk that i'm trying to figure out what he meant by them.

Joe thinks he's in a conversation about specifics, and he is not.

So Trump throws in his absolute final gambit, which is to distract Joe with an even juicier bone and talk about people coming from space.

And Joe immediately bites, instantly bites on the bone.

We can't get into the wardrobe today, but have I shown you my ring that makes you invisible?

It's kind of amazing.

You know, and also let's go back to, because now we're listening to this and we're months into Trump's presidency.

So we know, did he release the files immediately?

One, the answer to that is not as quick as Joe would have liked him to, because we did hear Joe complain about it on the show that he hasn't released those files enough.

Then they released the files.

And from what I've read about them, there is not a lot new.

And what is new is sort of a sort of sloppy release of former workers' social security numbers.

I mean, really a bad release of information that should have redacted information that they didn't bother to redact.

And there's not anything new that really shows us anything that could change the narrative in any real way.

It's just a bunch of stuff that just got released.

And these are people who were,

the people who were questioned on this that I read articles from.

Those people were people who were involved in, and

they're not sure what happened in the JFK assassination.

These aren't people who are 100% Oswald people, right?

These are people who are actively looking for this information and they just released this information and it was mostly out there already and nothing really new came out.

And it essentially was a publicity stunt.

He did it on Joe Rogan to entice people, to get people in.

This is one way to reach the millions of viewers that watch Joe who also believe in conspiracies in a real easy way.

It's a real easy hook.

And he, and he played those people because they never really released released anything that was of worth.

Yeah, yeah, completely.

So, if I recall correctly, the files, the JFK files they released actually contained less information than was already in the public domain about it.

So, they were so that the secret information was actually less comprehensive than was already available elsewhere.

All right, we're gonna take a short break and then we're gonna move on to our undercard.

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Well, it's just factually inaccurate on so many different levels.

I don't understand why you wrote it like that.

So our undercard this week is going to be a little different than something that we would normally do.

I am going to ask Michael Marshall some questions.

Now, the questions I'm going to ask him

happened on the 60 Minutes interview.

Now, we didn't play any clips on this particular episode of Joe and Trump trashing the 60-minute interview.

But we have heard the interview with Kamala Harris.

With Kamala Harris, thank you.

But we have heard them mention it in the past, right?

So they've mentioned, certainly Trump has mentioned it multiple times.

Trump actually reached out to CBS, tried to sue them.

They were forced to release the entire transcript, which is where I found all these questions directly from the transcript.

And so they have been trashing this for quite some time.

Joe has trashed it on his show as saying that this is media manipulation.

They manipulated this interview, et cetera, et cetera.

They made it look like she was smarter than she actually was.

They, in this episode, call her a low IQ person multiple times, very demeaning toward Kamala Harris.

So this interview happened on 60 Minutes.

I found the transcript as suggested.

Like I suggested, this transcript is available for anyone to download.

It's a PDF.

You can read the entire transcript.

They also released the entire video.

So anybody who wants the unedited video, they can watch this unedited video.

But I thought it'd be fun, Marsh.

You know, we just heard an entire episode where Joe talks to Trump and asks him what he thinks are hard-hitting questions.

So I'm going to have you rate these questions.

I'm going to ask you the question that they would, that the person who was interviewing Kamala Harris, and I would ask you, is it a softball question?

Is it just a regular, simple question that doesn't go either way?

It's kind of neutral.

Or is it a hard-hitting question?

I'm going to ask you these questions verbatim, and then you tell me whether it's one of those three things.

Okay, so let's start out.

The first question, the events of the past few weeks have pushed us to the brink.

What can the U.S.

do at this point to stop from spinning out of control into an all-out regional war in the Middle East?

I'd say this is a pretty difficult question, depending on who's asking it and what's coming next.

Because I think if you're asked this question and you're a presidential candidate and you're on 60 minutes, you have to be really careful how you answer this because anything you say will be scrutinized by the person sat opposite you who's going to answer, going to ask you follow questions in the moment.

You don't get to just get out of it.

If this was a question that Joe would have asked, and this feels like a question Joe could have asked, but only in the way that whatever Trump is saying will be accepted and the follow-up question is not there.

And if what Trump is saying is inadequate, Joe's going to help him fill that in.

And we've seen some earlier on, some harder ball questions that Joe is clearly asking Trump, but is willing to help him out of.

So this is a difficult question but even more difficult when you know the person sat sat opposite you isn't just going to fill in the answers for you if you haven't filled in all the blanks not going to be as charitable as joe is throughout this interview all right so in that vein the next question is about israel we supply israel with billions of dollars in military aid yet Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to be charting his own course.

The Biden-Harrison administration has pressed him to agree to a ceasefire.

He's resisted.

You urged him not to go into Lebanon.

He went anyway.

Does the U.S.

have no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Yeah, this is a really difficult question, especially that end bit of it, because you could present that fact pattern and say,

what will be your plans to do something next?

And that would leave it much more open-ended.

So, oh, I can sit down around the table.

We can talk.

I think I'd be able to persuade him.

You could do that kind of bluster.

But that

end of it is, does the United States have no sway?

That is a hardball question because you can't get out of that with bluster you have to answer that bit of it and it's saying you're being embarrassed and that's for how how 60 minutes have put this across you're being embarrassed by the measures you're taking being ignored so yeah this is a this is a a really solid interview question um i haven't seen kamala's answer to this what i think is interesting will will be i i actually think she typically does relatively okay in these uh in these kind of uh interviews uh questions i'm not a a massive kamala harris fan i don't need to be i'm british i could never afford to either of these people in your election.

But what Trump's and Joe Rogan's issue with this interview wasn't even that her answers were bad, but that when they put out a promo, when 60 Minutes put out a promo, they used one part of the answer to a question.

And then in the main show, they used a different part of the answer that she gave when they edited it down.

And they said, well, you've made her look smarter.

Now, obviously, any answer you give this is going to be very...

difficult it's going to be long it's going to be it's going to be multifaceted it's going to be edited when it goes out live the answer is the crucial part of this.

And I just think it's important to point out that when they're saying 60 minutes try to make her look smarter, they're putting questions like this to her, which are not trying to make her look good.

And if they edit, they're editing for what was the best representation of her answer rather than how do we make her look as smart as possible.

Yeah.

And again, another question about Israel here.

Here's the next one.

And this, to me, seems like she has said, I'm going to sit down with them and talk to them and show them what our demands are.

And they respond with, like you do, when you're asking questions and there's a back and forth.

It seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening.

The Wall Street Journal has said your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu.

And in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration's entreaties.

Do we have a real close ally in Prime Minister Netanyahu?

Again, this is such, this is a genuinely difficult question for somebody running for president to answer, because you know full well that your answer will be used to scrutinize you during this election, but your answer will also be seen by the people we're talking about here and could influence America's standing with Israel and standing with other countries.

So especially someone in the administration has to walk a tightrope here because Trump.

If this question came up and it wouldn't come up in this format, if it came up on the Rogan show, so Trump isn't just in a space where he can attack and push the question back because he wants to be liked, Trump wouldn't need to mind so much about what line he draws.

He could draw all of the lines and say,

well, you know, we're very respected and we work really hard.

And actually, I know Netanyahu really well.

And we go back and I can sit down and talk to him.

And other people can't talk to him like I do.

But I know that when I sit down and talk to him, he will listen to me.

And I've got plans.

I've got ideas that will make this.

And this will be very easy.

People have done this wrong in the past.

And he could bluster his way through like that.

when he's on Rogan, because Rogan's going to let him do that.

Kamala Harris on the 60 Minutes could not do that.

And I would argue no serious presidential candidate on 60 Minutes could get away with doing that because they'd have their feet held to the fire.

So journalistic standards make this an exceptionally hard question to be asking during an interview.

And I also want to point out, too, the three questions that are asked are about Israel to start out.

One of the biggest problems that Kamala Harris had was reaching people that were pro-Palestine.

So one of the biggest divides in her support was about the people who were saying she was following way too closely with Israel.

And here's all these questions about whether or not this is actually our ally.

And she has to ask that and dance that tightrope, a tightrope that Trump never had to dance.

And so, again, this makes it even harder to answer those questions because now she's trying to court two different sides of a conflict that we are sort of tangentially involved in.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Now, this next question is a real simple one.

Why do you deserve the American people's votes?

Okay, yeah, that's a pretty easy one.

I think that's a softball question.

Yeah, that's a very much a softball question i would say it's not quite as much of a softball question as does whoopie goldberg like you i think that's a slightly more softball question as what do their masses on the view reckon about you yeah but this is a really this is basically tee up and tell me who what your pitch to the american people is

The other thing to bear in mind is this is 60 Minutes version of a softball.

60 Minutes aren't saying voting for Kamala Harris is super cool.

If you want to seem like a really cool rebel type, you should do the warfare for Yeah, if you want to be

even in

the context of these kind of softballs, we can see from just the conversation we've analyzed between Trump and Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan is not just throwing the softball, he's going around and batting it for him as well.

He throws it and like Popeye, he runs really fast and he grabs it and he hits it out.

Okay.

Here's the next question.

Let me tell you what your critics and columnists and the columnists say.

They say there's a reason so many voters don't know you and that you've changed your position on so many things.

You were against fracking, now you're for it.

You were a supporter of looser immigration policies, now you're tightening them up.

You were for Medicare for all, now you're not.

You've shifted on so many issues that people don't truly know what you believe or what you stand for.

I know you've heard this criticism.

You've said your values haven't changed, but your positions have.

People want to know: is this evolution, or as your critics say and suggest, opportunism?

I think this is just above a softball.

This is kind of a fairly standard question because this will be something that was already a line that Kamala Harris would have practiced.

It's a line that you would have been aware of.

And it's basically giving you the open door of saying, well, I've looked at lots of the evidence and situations change and it's important for us to be adaptable.

And we need a politician who isn't just blind, ideological, but I'm willing to listen.

And the fact that I've listened to people and changed my views on some of these things, and maybe the extent that I've changed my views has been exaggerated by some of the people out there, but I certainly have evolved my views.

The fact that I've been willing to evolve shows that I'm willing to listen to reason, willing to listen to advisors.

I surround myself with good advisors, and I can be, and I will make sure I pick the path through that best follows the advice of the best evidence.

It gives you the space to do something like that.

Yeah.

It's not the why does, why does Netanyahu not listen to you?

It's, it's more, more nuanced than that.

It's an easier one to answer than that.

It's a medium question.

I think you're right because it's like you suggest, there's almost certainly this is something she's been asked before, and she can easily sort of tee up what she's said in the past.

Here's another question.

You just got a blockbuster jobs report the other day, and that all signs of the American economy is doing very well, better than most countries, yet the American people don't seem to feel that groceries are up 25% higher when you took office than when you took office.

And people are blaming you and Joe Biden for all that.

Are they wrong?

So that's an interesting one because it started like a softball question.

It sure did.

And then took a turn.

And it's a bit like if they'd asked the question,

how do you stay so healthy?

But then followed it up with when everybody else in this country is dying.

It's like, okay,

we've taken this thing.

We haven't gone for the Joe Rogan softball here.

They also end with kind of like, when did you stop beating your wife?

Because at the end, it's like, how are they wrong?

And you're like, now I've got to frame my question with how the American people are wrong right yes that's a real

it really turned into from a softball into something that's like really not great

yeah exactly I'd say it's a medium one but only because it started so soft and then took a turn yeah okay

it is estimated that the non-partisan committee for responsible federal budget that your economic plan would add three trillion to the federal deficit over the next over the next decade.

How are you going to pay for that?

Okay, I don't think this is too bad.

I think this is relatively, again, it's just a nudge above a softball because

anybody who's putting forward a plan like that will have ideas about how they're paying for it.

So this will all be, even if it's not fully costed out and doesn't fully add up, they will have ideas that they are pitching.

So I think that's pretty solid there, especially when one of the big attack lines that even Joe Rogan brings up with Trump on his show is that Trump added so much to the deficit.

And we actually, we might, I don't think we particularly touch on it in Trump's conversation with Rogan.

Rogan brings that up as a, you've been criticized on this a lot of times, but then actually lets Trump just say what he likes and doesn't particularly hold into it.

So I think this is quite an easy one for Harris to answer, really.

This is a softball that didn't look like it was a softball, but probably is.

Here's the next one.

Donald Trump says tariffs on imports would solve all our economic woes.

Wow, in retrospect, that is such a great question.

You've criticized his tariff plan, yet Biden-Harris administration has left many Trump-era tariffs in place, especially regarding China.

And President Biden has even expanded some of those tariffs.

Would you continue the Trump-era tariffs if you were elected?

Yeah, this is a softball.

It allows you to say, well, they aren't the Trump era tariffs.

We take everything based on the merits of any given situation.

Trump's idea is to put blanket

tariffs on everything.

That's clearly a terrible idea, but tariffs are part of the political landscape, the geopolitical landscape.

They're a tool that needs to be used.

Yeah, I think that's a softball question.

Okay, next one.

Let's move on to immigration.

You've recently visited the southern border and embraced President Biden's recent crackdown on asylum seekers, which produced an almost immediate and dramatic decrease in the number of border crossings.

You said you'd take it even further.

If that's the right answer, why didn't your administration take those steps in 2021?

Yeah, this is a pretty spiky question.

Yeah.

It's not full out

the hardest question imaginable, but it's pretty spiky, I'd say, especially with that ending of, you said you're going to do this.

It's the right thing to do.

Why didn't you previously do it?

That's a really tricky one to answer.

So yeah,

pretty tough question.

Yeah.

Here's the next one.

There was a historic flood of undocumented migrants coming across the border during the first three years of administration.

Arrivals quadrupled compared to last year of President Trump.

Was it a mistake to loosen immigration policies as much as you did in 2021?

Yeah, this is a continuation of the spiky one, I think,

because it puts you in a position where you either have to say, we made a mistake and politicians don't like admitting errors.

or no, this was a good thing.

And then you're defending something that, at least in the conversation, isn't as straightforward as saying, this is,

nobody in America is campaigning on let's have higher migration open the borders easier it's such a politically charged topic so yeah this is a pretty spiky one it's one of those tracked in the corner kind of questions it's also hard to answer a question too that's three years in the past because most people will have forgotten sort of all the geopolitical problems that were happening three years ago and so it's also a really difficult question just to ask an answer and expect all the people to be in as in the know as the administration was about all the problems and their decision making based on those problems, because they're not just based on one thing, they're basing it on all kinds of things: the economy, geopolitical landscape, how things are working between our countries, et cetera.

So, again, I think it's a really tough question.

Yeah, I think so.

Here's another one.

You've accused Donald Trump of using racist tropes when it comes to the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, when it comes to birtherism, and when it comes to Charlottesville.

In fact, you've called them racist and divisive.

Yet, Donald Trump has the support of millions of Americans.

How would you explain that?

I think this is the opposite of where we were going, what we would, what we've seen before, where I think this is a softball question that doesn't immediately seem like it, because

it could seem spiky.

You're calling all these people racist.

Whereas actually, I think it allows you to say, well, millions of Americans might have voted for Trump, but they would say they don't like everything he says and everything he does.

And so

this might.

Yeah, you can separate that out.

We can say that the stuff that he said is unequivocally racist.

When he's talking about cannibalism, these are extreme things that I don't think any good American looks at and says they're right.

I think Americans are good people and maybe they like some of the things he's saying.

They don't like everything he's saying.

I don't think that's the kind of stuff that most Americans would identify with because I think we're a welcoming place who's right.

Sure, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it definitely could have a backfiring effect if you answer it incorrectly, right?

If you answer it in the sense to be like, yeah, he's a racist and a bunch of Americans are stupid, that's a real hard

sell.

So it's going to be, it would be a harder thing to do.

All right.

Was democracy best served by President Biden stepping down and effectively handing you a nomination?

You didn't have to go through the primary process or fight off other contenders.

That is not really the way our system was intended to work.

Yeah, this is a tricky one.

This is a tricky one.

This is kind of a middling one that I think actually, well,

from over here in the UK, I might have thought this a middling.

It might well be actually particularly spiky because this was a real weakness of

Kamala Harris's candidacy, certainly in in retrospect.

I think you could get out of that.

I haven't seen her answer to it.

I think you could get out of it by saying democracy is best served by having the candidate who is in the best place to do it.

And it was actually a remarkable thing for Biden to recognize that he wasn't in that place.

I think it's right.

To do the sacrificial thing of standing down,

you could do it that kind of way, but then you're not answering the primary issue, which turned out to be such a

may have been one of the things that turned out to be such a deciding issue or important issue for Harris.

So, yeah, it's on the spikier edge, I think.

There's ways of spinning parts of it out, but you're still left with some spikes at the end.

What is the U.S.

responsibility for keeping China from simply taking over the South China Sea?

Oh, this is interesting.

I would imagine this is somewhere between, it's a step up from a softball.

It's probably a fairly standard question.

Yeah.

Because this is the kind of question that leads into policies that

given that Harris was in the administration at the time, would be fairly well established.

You would hope.

So I think this is straightforward.

Yeah, you would hope.

Yeah.

What about Russia in Ukraine?

What does success like in ending success look like in ending the war in Ukraine?

Yeah, I think this is probably another fairly straightforward question in

policies in the administration for it.

Last question.

You're sitting here with us today.

The Trump campaign has canceled an interview they agreed to participate in for this broadcast.

What do you make of that?

That is the softest of softball questions.

That is just a feather on the face softball question right there.

That is.

That is

like, trash the guy who refused our interview.

But also, I mean, that is, it's a softball question, but it's only a softball question because Trump like canceled the interview.

Because Trump ran away from that interview.

If Trump does the interview, there's no opportunity for that.

So it is, it's a teed up, it's a teed up question, but it's teed up by Trump and not 60 Minutes.

Now, I know that their argument is that these were edited and that's their argument and stuff.

But when we think about these questions, do you think that that was a softball interview that she did for 60 minutes?

Would you rate it as overly softball?

No, I don't think so.

I think she's been asked plenty of pretty spiky questions.

But again, the key is in what the chances of follow-up on specifics are.

And I think in 60 Minutes, and again, I haven't seen that interview in full.

We haven't gone through the transcript together.

We haven't seen where she gets pushed on any particular points.

But I know that if you were sitting down with 60 Minutes, you'd be very aware you're going to be pushed on specific points.

Compare that to the Rogan conversation with Donald Trump.

We might get, and Rogan likes to say you get a much better sense of who the person really is and what they're about.

I don't know that you get a great sense of who Donald Trump as a person is.

So even Rogan's premise that the conversation, this three-hour conversation, lets you know more about who they are, I don't think you get a sense of that.

So I think when you compare this 60 minutes to the Rogan one, it's really clear which of these is a total softball, that you know you're not going to get any pushback from Rogan really at any point, that Rogan, the only pushing he's doing is on your side, he's pushing the boulder in the same direction.

Yeah, you're sitting on it, yeah, and he's rolling you up the hill like cis.

Exactly, yeah, yeah.

Um, I, you know, I also think too, when we talk about these long interviews that Joe does and he's, he makes it seem like it's, you know, this sort of amazing insight into people and their thought process.

And it's a great way to get to know somebody without all the bullshit and all the lies.

You can't lie in these interviews, et cetera, et cetera.

What you're seeing, I think, when you're looking at something like this, especially when it's coming to someone who's going to be in a difficult job, right?

This person is applying for a very, what could be probably the most difficult job in the United States.

They're applying for it.

They've been asking for it.

They've submitted their resumes.

These are the interview process to get that job.

And in the in the interview,

there's nothing that feels contentious.

There's nothing that puts this person in a position where they might be in that actual job, right?

Running the United States has got to be a stressful, difficult thing.

You're constantly being harried on all sides.

People are Monday morning quarterbacking every single decision you make.

There's always this sort of constant hum of the media criticizing the things you're doing.

I can't imagine that it's not a stressful job and it's not, it doesn't have these sort of hard edges.

And to have a really soft space for somebody to talk doesn't feel right.

It feels like somebody should have some sort of contentiousness in there.

I want to see how they act under pressure.

I don't want to see how they act in an easy chair, relaxing while Joe torches up a bong.

Like, that's not interesting to me because for me, I want to see like the debates and things.

Like, if they can't hold their composure in a debate, how can I expect that they would hold their composure when they're doing this job for four straight years?

It doesn't, to me, now that's just my personal opinion, right, on how I view this, but I don't feel like Joe hasn't convinced me that his way is better is all I'm saying no that's true although I would say maybe there's space for both of those things in that if you're looking to vote for someone you want to see how they perform under pressure you want to see what their policy ideas are you want to see how they perform when talking to a journalist who's going to press them on really specific tough issues and you also want to know who are they what are their values what's their life like what's their um what what's their tastes and preferences and personality i think if Joe was saying, we're going to give you the opportunity to show who you are as a person, that would actually be relatively fine.

I think a long form conversation about that would be valuable.

The problem is Joe thinks he's doing more than that.

He thinks he's showing how good this person would be at running the country.

And the problem is he's not doing that from a place of

giving each of the candidates the same opportunity, the same space to show who they are.

And then says, well, I am that.

That's exactly what I'm doing.

So if you refuse to talk to me, that shows that you're not willing to have a person show your personality.

He's talked so many times about saying, I'd get Camela Harris on and we would talk about just anything.

We'd talk about aliens.

We'll talk about whatever she wants.

We'll talk about wherever it goes.

I just want to know who you are.

I think it's pretty clear that isn't the case.

I'm pretty clear that's not how that interview with Camel Harris would have gone from just how the interview with Donald Trump goes.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

All right, Marsh.

We've really talked about this issue and this episode quite a bit.

We spent a lot of time putting everything together.

Did anything strike you as good?

So, yeah, I think so.

We always try to look for something good.

And I think there were some little nuggets of points where Joe asked a question that wasn't too, that was pretty decent.

But there's a point where Trump and Joe are talking about UFC.

that we didn't talk about because it wasn't deeply involved in Trump's candidacy or any sort of misleading claims.

But actually, it's pretty interesting, I think.

I mean, Trump seems genuinely very interested in UFC and fighting and boxing as well.

And Joe is genuinely very knowledgeable about that.

Now, I'm neither of those things.

I'm not interested in those subjects.

I'm not knowledgeable about them.

But seeing these two guys who do seem to care a lot about those subjects talk about

something that isn't awful, something they're interested in, it was actually quite nice.

That said, part of me also wonders how much of Joe's essential adoration of Trump comes from how willing he was to talk about fighting with him, how willing he was to ask Joe about his life and his interests and something that Joe knows and cares an awful lot about.

I wonder how much of that was enough to get to get Joe on side.

But yeah, seeing them talk about UFC, I don't care about it personally, but it wasn't horrible to watch.

It was quite enjoyable to see them talk about the thing they care about.

Yeah, you could sort of see that ideas from how to win friends and influence people sort of work its way in here because you ask about the other person, be interested in what they have to say, ask follow-up questions about what their interests are,

try to listen to them and pay attention to them, et cetera.

And so I think all those things come through when he's talking to Joe.

I think he very much uses that, you know, charm to, and I'm using quotes again when I say charm, but use that charm on Joe Rogan.

And I think it works.

I think it's easy to convince Joe.

I think because in a lot of ways, when you hear how this interview is framed, he wanted to be convinced from the beginning.

I think, you know, they might have had a couple of questions and comments to each other and shook each other's hand at UFC events, but it doesn't sound like they'd ever really sat down and talked and had a good conversation.

This is the first real time they've done that.

And I think Joe was just.

anxious and happy to make it seem like it was, you know, a good thing.

You know, this is a good thing.

This is a good thing that I'm having this conversation with you.

And I want it to be successful.

And so, you know, there's also a lot of that in there, too.

I, in retrospect, listening to this in retrospect, it's very painful.

It's very hard for me as someone who is seeing sort of our nation having this economic downturn and authoritarian crisis under Trump.

It's hard for me to watch that and

put this interview in anywhere but propaganda.

So I don't really have a lot to say that's good as an American citizen living through this Trump second term.

Yeah, yeah, that's understandable.

I'm at a distance.

So I have a little bit more of,

it's not as directly relevant to the minute-by-minute of my life.

Not yet, not yet.

Okay, well, on that note, that is it for the show this week.

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