#0019 Dave Smith and Douglas Murray

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2303

with guests, Dave Smith and Douglas Murray.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasts 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.

My name is Cecil Cicero.

I'm joined by Michael Marshall, and today we're going to be covering Joe's April 11th interview and debate between Dave Smith and Douglas Murray.

And I've misspelled Murray twice in the notes so far.

How did Joe introduce each of these fellas in the show notes?

Yeah.

So Dave Smith is a stand-up comedian, a libertarian political commentator and podcaster.

He's the host of the Part of the Problem podcast, as well as a co-host of the Legion of Skanks podcast.

Wow.

So lofty, lofty guests here.

We also have Douglas Murray, who is a political commentator, cultural critic, and author of numerous books, the most recent of which is Democracies and Death Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization.

Sounds dire.

Is there anything else we should know about?

Yeah, I think so.

So Dave Smith is pretty much a regular in the Rogan's sphere.

He's often appearing here on Rogan's podcast, or he appears on Lex Friedman's show or Tim Proul or in the broader podcast circuit in those kind of spaces.

This is actually his second appearance on Rogan this month.

He appeared earlier this month when he was talking about Ukraine and Gaza, which probably is what prompted this quick follow-up conversation with Douglas Murray.

In 2021, Dave Smith told Reason magazine that vaccine mandates are an infringement on personal liberty and that he would not be vaccinating himself or his child.

He also tweeted comparing vaccine passports specifically to the yellow stars Junes were forced to wear.

And he's described the noted white nationalist Nick Fuentes as a fellow traveler.

So that is the company he sees himself in.

Meanwhile, Douglas Murray, he may well be in many ways just as comfortable a traveling

companion to Dave and possibly even to Nick.

In March 2013, Douglas Murray said that London was a foreign country due to white Britons becoming a minority in 23 of the 33 London boroughs.

Very clearly they're associating non-whiteness with foreignness and

not any, you can't necessarily be born non-white and still be British, essentially, is what what he's arguing.

His book, The Strange Death of Europe, was described by The Guardian as gentrified xenophobia for its claims that Europe is committing suicide by allowing non-European immigration into its borders.

Murray's also a noted fan of Hungary's Victor Orban, specifically for the hard line he takes on immigrants.

And he's been criticized for promoting far-right conspiracy theories, including the Great Replacement and cultural Marxism.

Can I just say I'm glad we're finally talking about a British person who's a fan of Viktor Orban instead of all the Americans?

That's true.

Okay, so what did they talk about?

Well, first of all, Douglas makes some pretty good points about why Dave is completely wrong about Russia and Ukraine.

And then Dave makes almost the exact same point to highlight how Douglas is wrong about Israel and Gaza.

Wow.

It's so weird.

It's like in the middle of the show, there's this freaky Friday midpoint where they switch shoes.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Also, they talk a lot about Joe's recent interview with Daryl Cooper and why Daryl Cooper is or isn't a Hitler apologist, but we're not going to actually cover too much of that here because we're actually going to come back to Daryl Cooper in a future show.

All right.

Well, before we get to our main event, we want to say thanks to our Area 51, all access past patrons, 11 Gruthius, Chunky Cat in Chicago, Eats the Rich, Fred R.

Gruthius, Dollen,

Laura Williams, no, not that one.

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

Captcha 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 do that too all patrons get an early access episode along with a spa special patron only bonus segment every single week and uh this week we're going to listen to one of joe's ads and we'll also find out which slurs are back in vogue so check it out at patreon.com slash no rogan

so for the non-patrons, we're going to talk a little bit about our

process and how we put this show together very quickly, because we wanted to ask people who are not patrons, would you please, if you think this show is worthwhile, if you think this show is helping people,

if you share this show on occasion, please become a patron at patreon.com slash no rogan.

We're going to talk to you a little bit about how much time it takes us to put together each episode very briefly.

Marsh, we start the episode what day of the week?

What day do you crack open the episode and start working?

Yeah, so we start on each episode on Thursday,

which is roughly the time when I go off and I'll find, we'll have decided which episode we're doing.

I go off and grab the transcript from YouTube and I start listening to the show while going through the transcript.

And I'm the first person of the two of us to start doing that.

And what I'm looking for, I sort of break it down into between 40 and 50 interesting chunks of conversation and sort of pull those together.

And I'll normally do that and add a couple of notes across Thursday, Friday.

And that's kind of where the transcript will go.

And I'll spend, if a show is three hours long, I might spend four hours or something more listening through at that point and figuring out which bits are just interesting just with some initial notes.

And then I kind of hand it over to you to pick up from there.

Yeah, so I pick it up on Monday morning.

I start at Monday.

I get to my computer at 8.30.

I normally do not stop working until about 5.30 at night.

I will work all the way through and work my way through that entire transcript, listening and making notes and also trying to think of a structure in which to create a show.

And then I hand that back off to Marsh

for his daytime, which is my nighttime.

And Marsh gets back to work on it, putting back his stuff in.

And you normally work for how long on that second attempt.

Yeah, on Tuesday, I'll kind of look through and see which bits you've highlighted as being interesting.

And I'll figure out which bits I think kind of go into a main segment and which bits go into either a toolbox or an undercard.

We'll have been having a back and forth.

And then I'll see which bits are actually going to make it into the actual short.

And that's when I'll spend maybe another sort of two to four hours putting some notes in on there, depending on the claim, depending on who we're talking.

Sometimes you get people where a lot of what they're saying, you can wash through and understand straight away.

Other episodes, you'll get things like Terrence Howard, where the density of what's being said really takes the time to understand

what he's meaning.

Or you'll get people who, the things that they're saying, you actually really have to research quite hard to understand.

Well, what are they referring to and what actually is the truth?

And how do I explain that?

So that's like another four or so hours at that point, I'd say.

So then on Tuesday morning, I cut all the clips and finish my notes.

I normally spend between four and six hours doing that work.

And at that point, the show is ready to record on Wednesday morning.

And we record record from on Wednesday morning from nine until about, I would say, 1 p.m.

Central Time.

And then I start editing.

And I normally don't finish that edit until tomorrow around noon.

I'll work all the rest of the day, sometimes into the night.

And then tomorrow around noon, I'll finish that edit.

After I finish that.

You start to the next show.

Now, now Marsh is already on to the next show.

I still have to finish this show, of course.

I will then proof this show sometime around Friday because i have a whole bunch of stuff i have to do on thursday for another show i do and then i will finish uh the proof i will normally post this on saturday and so the show starts on a thursday it goes a full eight days nine days until it's done on a saturday or friday and at that point we've probably each at least uh one maybe two dozen hours apiece working on this show so i just wanted to sort of lay out like how long this show takes and how much sort of intense work goes into it.

So I just wanted to say, if you're not a patron, if you were considering it, please become a patron, patreon.com.

We think we give the patrons quite a bit of extra content.

So we'd like you to come on over and join us and listen to the behind the scenes segments and listen to the, you know, possibly listen to some of the extra shows that we're doing too.

Yeah, because that's the thing is every week in the episode, the stuff that doesn't quite fit the main theme and doesn't doesn't fit into either the undercard or the toolbox.

We'll do a lot of analysis that's there that we then put into this kind of gloves-off segment.

And sometimes those will be half an hour, but more often they're 40, 50 minutes of per one show that we do per week.

Largely because we've done the work analyzing and understanding, and we've got a point to make.

And sometimes, because we've got a slightly snarky point to make that we want to give to the patrons rather than have out on the uh on the main feed for anyone to stumble across and things.

So, yeah, there's a lot of content goes into this, a lot of content comes out of this, really.

Well, now for our main event.

It's time.

It's time.

Whatever.

All right.

Huge thanks this week to our veteran voice of the podcast.

That was Dan Turner announcing our main event.

Remember that you too.

can be part of the show by sending a recording of you giving your best rendition of it's time send that to no roganpod at gmail.com that's k-n-o-w norganpod at gmail.com, and as well as how you'd like to be credited on the show.

So our main event this week is going to be talking about Ukraine and Gaza.

These are two conflicts that are happening in the world.

It's the main reason that both of these people on that are on.

This is in a unique version of the show that we haven't ever, ever explored before because it's a debate style show where Joe is, he's not a moderator.

Let's not say he's a moderator because he's not moderating and he's not really involved and he's not really and he's also pretty clearly on one side.

So it's kind of two-on-one for most of the show.

And we're going to play the very first clip.

This is them starting their discussion about Ukraine.

I agree.

Although, as I say, I think you've massively underrepresented the pro-Ukraine argument and the pro-Israel argument in the last two years.

I don't know.

I mean, well, that's my observation.

Okay.

You're totally allowed to have that observation.

What is the what's the pro-Ukraine argument that you think is not being represented enough?

Well, my broad view is that, again, something to do with the algorithm, that anything that is

conspiratorial about Zelensky or the Ukrainians in the conflict does very well.

Anything that says actually the Ukrainian army is fighting to try to retain as much of their country as they can doesn't do as well.

I think that everything that is pushing the idea that, for instance, the Americans caused it or something like that does well.

I think everything that says actually in February 2022, Vladimir Putin's tanks invaded Ukraine and they shouldn't have done doesn't do as well.

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that what Vladimir Putin did wasn't horrific.

That's not my point.

Yeah, and I've actually heard Joe lessen it by suggesting that Putin was backed into a corner from a U.S.-based coup.

So while you haven't said it exactly, you kind of intimated it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And we will come to the accusations of the coup throughout this episode.

But Murray is quite right that his point isn't that anybody is saying that Putin didn't do something horrific.

He does have a point here.

It's that Joe, and largely due to the guests that Joe platforms and the narratives that Joe consumes, seems very, very happy to jump on board any story that plays up the blame on Ukraine and Zelitz.

Right.

Just look at the interview we covered with Lex Friedman, where all the way through, Lex Friedman is playing up that side of things and

lessening Russia and Putin's role in the aggression.

Look at every time Ukraine comes up in relation to Biden.

It's pretty clear where Joe's bread is being buttered here, which narratives catch Joe's attention.

And all of that said.

We need to hold this particular point that Murray's making in mind for when later in this episode, Douglas Murray will start talking about Gaza, where his position really is that anything that downplays Israel's role in what's happening in Gaza and the West Bank must be true.

And anything that blames the situations on Palestinians and Hamas does well for Murray.

Okay, so this next piece is talking a little bit about corruption.

So, and also I want to just mention to people, if you're not used to hearing so many different voices on here, the British voice is Douglas Murray.

The American voice that isn't Joe is Dave Smith.

And so this is going to be Dave Smith talking in this next clip.

But I also think that something like the reason why, say, talking about Ukrainian corruption is more interesting in a lot of ways than talking about Russian corruption is obviously because like, well, one of these countries is an enemy and the other one is one that we're sending tens of billions of dollars to.

And so, yes, well, debating on between Zelensky and the weapons companies, I don't know.

He says he only got $70 billion of it, but we've spent closer to 170, so whatever.

But the point is that obviously, if there is a country that we are propping up, funding, arming, and they're corrupt, I would say my starting point would always be to be more concerned with that corruption than an enemy country, which it's almost kind of a given, is a corrupt country.

Like, I don't know.

I'm sure there are fringes of the right who might say, like, Vladimir Putin, some great guy, or something like that.

But that is, I really do not think that is the argument that most people who are critical of this, of Biden's policy, are making.

I mean, I will point out, Tucker Carlson is very much pro-Putin.

And Tucker Carlson is pretty mainstream.

He's not on the fringes of the right at this point.

And Tucker Carlson is openly

pro-Putin pro-Putin at this point.

Yeah.

I'd also argue, too, if you can't identify corruption in your own country, you probably shouldn't be talking about corruption in a foreign country.

I mean, we can see that the current administration has done several corrupt things.

They are sending people to foreign prisons that don't belong there.

Our

current president, right before he became president, had a meme coin that he launched, along with his wife launching a meme coin.

There's been pretty obvious stock market manipulation manipulation that's been happening.

They're giving preferential treatment to people that he knows, giving people like tons of nepotism.

You don't even recognize it here, and you're a Trump supporter.

So it's hard for me to believe anything you have to say about something, a place that you don't even live.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

And what he's saying as well about Russia, how we expect them to be corrupt, but we should be holding Ukraine's corruption under more scrutiny.

This is sort of known as the bias of low expectations.

And we expect Russia to be corrupt.

So it's not remarkable when they do things that are corrupt.

So instead, they're going to spend all their time pointing out corruption in Ukraine.

And Dave is trying to claim that he wants to hold Ukraine to a higher standard, but it's not really clear why he wants to do that other than that it fits his narrative, the one that he wants to prop up.

And to Murray's credit, Murray calls him out on this and says, yeah, you can look at the edges of what's happening in Ukraine, but we have to take a step back and understand just how big an issue what's going on in Russia actually is.

This next piece is going to be a recurring theme.

They're going going to talk quite a bit about NATO through

the rest of the Russia-Ukraine clips.

And so I don't think it's unreasonable.

And I think this is a fair thing that we should do in all conflicts, is like to have, as

Mearsheimer puts it, to have strategic empathy, to say like, hey, listen, let's reasonably place ourselves in the other person's shoes and say, how would we react if somebody was expanding their military alliance that is explicitly anti-us and is bringing it up to our borders and now is openly for years and years and years saying that we are going to bring your largest neighbor, where you have very important strategic interests from your point of view, into our military alliance.

And you are saying over and over again, this is our brightest red line.

Do not do this.

And then they keep flirting with doing this over and over.

Then they back a street push that overthrows the government there.

Don't you think maybe that would be a provocation?

First of all, two things.

If you want that strategic empathy that

I'm not an admirer of,

but if you want to do that, you can do it the other way around as well, surely.

Yeah.

I mean, do the same thing with the Ukrainian, just

the Latvians and others.

Yeah, but I would never, Douglas, but my response to you was never, I can't understand why the Latvians or the Lithuanians would want to be a NATO.

I understand.

Yes.

Right.

And I can understand why Russia thought that Ukrainian membership of NATO was a red line.

I can understand that.

But that wasn't why Putin invaded in 2022.

Now, that's going to lead to another interesting bit of conversation.

But I want to pay attention to the sort of beginning piece of this clip with Dave Smith talking about this sort of red line and how if people on your borders are militarizing how that may cause you to invade.

By that logic, the things that North Korea has done to provoke U.S.-backed countries in that region should have resulted in an invasion, but it hasn't.

And so I just think that this idea that the only course of action you have is invasion is a silly, it's a silly standard and it's a silly thing that we seem to only let Russia get away with.

Yeah, exactly.

And he's talking about strategic empathy empathy and he's essentially talking about straw man, about steelmanning here.

What is the steelman version of the opponent's arguments?

But his initial steelman is, if we take everything that Russia is saying as fact, Russia is right.

But this is just Putin apologetics at this point.

It's arguing that it's very reasonable for Russia to have essentially said, look, I know it looks like we might hit you, but if you take any steps to defend yourself, we're going to take that as a threat.

That is what a bully does.

And you don't deal with the bully by giving them what they want.

Absolutely.

And there was an interesting moment that Dave talks about, and he'll talk about it again in the next clip, about the US backing a street putsch.

And I think that's a very, very telling characterization of what happened in the Maiden uprising in 2013 and 2014 in Ukraine.

It's what Joe has talked about, about US backing a coup.

A coup is one version of description of it.

Dave is talking about this as a street putsch.

Now, what actually happened here,

for the avoidance of doubt, is Ukraine had negotiated an agreement with the European Union that would see them become a cooperating third-party nation essentially.

So they wouldn't be in the EU, but

they'd be allowed to trade more freely with the EU.

They'd have freedom of movement, access to the European Investment Bank.

So lots of benefits that they didn't currently have, which would result in closer ties to Europe.

That was very, very popular in the country.

Ukrainians really were very fond of that idea, but it was seen as a threat by Vladimir Putin, because the closer Ukraine gets to Europe, the further they are from Russia and Putin's grasps.

So Putin told the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, who was himself a very close Putin ally, that he had to reject the deal.

And Yanukovych did that a week before he was due to sign this incredibly popular deal with the EU.

Instead, he rejected that deal and signed a deal that actually brought closer ties with Russia.

And the people, understandably, rose up and demanded that Yanukovych be removed for office because he violated his democratic duty to the people of Ukraine to uphold what they wanted, the wishes of the people.

That is not what I describe as a street push.

I would describe that as a pro-democracy protest.

Dave is mischaracterizing it because it allows him to continue his America are the bad guys' agenda.

Yeah.

But it's not true about what was happening in Ukraine.

And Murray is absolutely, he gets right to the heart of it here.

So again, credit to Douglas Murray here, because he points out that all the stuff about the red lines about NATO expansion in 2008, those aren't the reason that Russia invaded in 2022.

They can't still be using those arguments 14 years later or eight years after the Maidan uprising.

Yeah, those are great points, Marsh.

Next piece is going to be talking very specifically about that coup.

2014, this was a major, major

provocation toward the Russians that we backed this street protest against the democratically elected government there.

And that's again, it's tricky because the Maidan protests were genuine students in the center of the city who were uprising against a corrupt government.

I'm not even arguing that Ukraine's a corrupt government.

And that, again,

it's the people of Ukraine, like other countries, and they do have agency beyond what Washington.

Yeah, I'm not claiming any of those people don't have agency.

I'm just claiming that Washington poured $100 million into the thing and sent our politicians over there.

Our politicians openly saying, we're on your side.

You have the backing of America.

Let's talk about historically.

Historically, America does like to be, has liked to be on the side of people who desire freedom over autocracy.

yeah I just keep on hearing Dave Smith talk about this and I think so what like if a if Putin didn't like the new Ukrainian leader

after the country found a brand new one through whatever means right through whether he's we're suggesting that it's Washington or something like that something else there's a lot of other things you can do to try to ally yourself with that person other than invade them so let's not pretend that just because something happened happened, this had to lead to other things.

I don't agree with his assessment on how

that uprising came about.

But even if he's right, there's other ways to get that person to work with you.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I don't know whether this is a subtle barb from Douglas Murray, pointing out that historically, America has liked to be on the side of people who desire freedom over autocracy, because from a British perspective of what's happening in America right now, it's hard to say that that is an ongoing concern for at least the people at the very top of America to

push for freedom over autocracy.

Yeah,

I definitely feel like

I shouldn't be as upset when Douglas Murray is making fun of us, but I am right now.

All right.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Right.

So very specifically, you know, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I'll just get two like bullet points on this, and there's, we could talk about a lot of this.

But look, number one, in 2008, as you well know, right, the Joe Biden CIA director, who was the CIA director for the entire war up until Donald Trump just came back in, he wrote the Net Means Net memo to Condoleezza Rice, a private cable to the then Secretary of State when he was ambassador to Russia to let her know that this flirting with bringing Ukraine into NATO is going to end up in a war.

And by the way, the Russians don't want to do it.

His words exactly.

If you keep pushing with this, the Russians are going to have, they are going to have to make a decision that they don't want to make, which is whether they intervene or not.

And number two,

Straltonberg, I might be butchering that again, but the head of NATO,

he himself said that Vladimir Putin sent him a draft treaty in late 2021 and said, look, if you just put into writing that you will not bring Ukraine into NATO, I won't invade.

Now, if you want to argue that

this pre-I admire your appeal to authority to the head of the CIA, I just want to say that it's a very important thing.

It's not an appeal to authority.

How is that an appeal to authority?

You regard the view of the CIA director on that occasion as being useful for your argument.

But secondly,

secondly, there's an oddity to believing what Vladimir Putin said.

No, wait, hold on, but you didn't let me finish my point.

So don't believe what he says.

I'm not going to pretend to read his heart and mind or something like that, but at the very least, you handed him the giant excuse in order to do it.

I mean, maybe he doesn't really believe it, but this is his argument to his own people and to the world.

Credit to Murray here for bringing it up exactly what I would with the CIA director.

Just because the CIA director thinks something's going to happen doesn't mean it's going to happen or that it was somehow orchestrated to happen.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And, you know, it can be true that the CIA assessed it as a risk if Ukraine were to join NATO.

That doesn't mean that it's true that Russia...

didn't want to invade or that Putin pinky saw he wouldn't invade Ukraine if Ukraine weren't in NATO.

Neville Chamberlain famously came back to Britain with a piece of paper signed by Adolf Hitler from the Munich Agreement in 1938, declaring it signaled peace for our time

because Hitler had said he wouldn't carry on expanding and push for war.

Yeah, it turns out Hitler wasn't telling the truth.

Although I don't know Dave's views on Hitler, we're going to cover that in the future.

Are you kidding me?

He may well have been.

He may well have been.

And again, I think Murray's making a good point on the CIA in that he says Dave is willing to rest on the word of the CIA when it supports his careers.

But if the CIA said something he disagreed with, would Dave be bringing up the CIA as a credible and reliable source?

I'm not sure.

And then finally, this idea of don't help Ukraine, or it will give Putin the excuse that he's looking for to hurt them.

That isn't an argument for standing by and letting Ukraine get hurt without your help.

This is like an abuser saying that he wouldn't have hit you if you hadn't have called for help.

The fact that he hit you is proof that you will write to call for help and Ukraine will write to seek help given what has subsequently happened.

Okay, now we're going to shift a little bit to talk about what maybe Putin was thinking.

He doesn't very plausibly have the opportunity to do that.

He invaded Ukraine because he wanted to annex the whole country, because he was trying to pretend that the whole place had been run by Nazis.

Well, I mean, okay, the whole place wasn't run by Nazis.

There's certainly Nazis.

This is what he told the Russian people.

Oh, he also brought it when he was.

You can lie an awful lot when you're a dictator and you have the ability not just to run all of the media, but to kill your political opponents.

I mean, you can do an awful lot.

Sure.

Okay.

I, again,

I think like Dave is hand-waving some of this stuff away, but I think these are real potent points by Murray.

Yeah, I think so.

What he's saying, what Murray's saying here is completely true.

It's also the first time I've heard anyone on Rogan's show make this point at all, let alone make it as plainly as this.

But notice that when

Murray points out, well, Putin said he was invading because of all the Nazis, because Ukraine was being run by Nazis.

Dave chips in to say, well, there certainly were some Nazis there.

So this is a line spread by Putin.

He was telling the Russian people that he was going to Ukraine specifically to denazify Ukraine and that Ukraine was a neo-Nazi regime under Zelensky.

That isn't true.

So is it true that there were some Nazis there?

Well, okay, yes, that was true.

Here was a thing from the BBC.

In Ukraine's last parliamentary election in 2019, support for far-right candidates was 2%,

which is far lower than in many other European countries.

There have been far-right groups in Ukraine.

The most high-profile is the Azov regiment, elements of which have expressed support for Nazi ideology.

So is that 2% of far-right voters and the presence of the Azov regiment proof that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi regime?

Well, no more than the existence of the KKK in America is proof that America is and always has been a neo-Nazi regime.

So, we're really shifting

the gallpost here on what counts as being filled with Nazis.

And Dave is trying to justify accepting Putin's line on this, whereas Murray is rightly pointing out that even Putin isn't accepting Putin's line on this.

That is just a way of arguing his case

to justify justify his actions that he wanted to take.

That's a really great observation.

Now we're going to, again, talk more about the sort of motivation on why Putin invaded.

Again, that's not why Putin invaded.

He invaded because the thing he's dreamt of since the falling down of the Soviet Union is

we know a lot from what he's said and what he's done since the fall of the Soviet Union and his statements, certainly very early on in his presence.

But if he does have a red line and you violate that red line, is that because he's following his dreams or it's because

his dream is, as he's said many times, is the reconstitution of the Soviet Union's territory.

Joe is being incredibly disingenuous here to pick up on the use of the word dream so closely.

It's pretty clear that Murray isn't really talking about

the vision board that Putin has had since he was a little boy on his Kremlin walls or

the fantasies that play through his mind while he's asleep.

That is not what he means by Putin dreams of reconstitution of the Soviet Union.

Yeah, that's definitely being a little pedantic there when he's when he's leaning into that.

Also, it's so interesting to hear at least this person who's who who Joe brought on, this Dave Smith, who is sort of a self-proclaimed libertarian.

And Joe has some pretty deep libertarian sort of roots in him, to see them fold like a house of cards when a red line happens to intersect with a country's sovereignty.

They fold immediately.

Instead of personal freedom or freedom to sort of have your own path in the world, no, none of that.

Sorry, your red line,

your red line interfered with how I think your sovereignty should work.

So I'm allowed to invade you.

It's a silly, bad argument.

And I'm so surprised.

I'm not surprised.

Let me take that back.

I just think like hiding behind the idea that you're a libertarian and that having such what would be seriously anti-libertarian views is a little suspect.

Yeah, I think so.

And for the avoidance of doubt, again, it's pretty clear that Putin wants to rebuild and retake the former Soviet Union.

That is pretty much obvious from what Putin has said and what the action he's been taking since he's been in power.

That Joe seems to not know or not believe this is either an act of willful ignorance or it's a sign that his knowledge of Putin is essentially less than zero.

Despite having talked about Putin an awful lot, including having talked with people who've met Putin, he seems to have no real understanding of who the person is.

And yet he's still happy to talk about it extensively on this show.

Marsh, the conversation shifts here.

How does it shift?

This is a complete switcheroo.

This is where the mid-to-midway turning point happens.

Douglas and Dave pee into a fountain and they come out with each other's positions, but with slightly different nouns involved, different countries involved.

It is night and day.

It's so interesting to hear.

It really is very interesting.

We're going to start talking.

This is now we're shifting to Gaza.

And so now we're going to talk about the Hamas tragedy.

The reason why Hamas were in power, as you know, much, much against the interests of the Israelis, was that they were voted into power after the Israelis withdrew from Gaza in 05.

Condoles Rais and

other American states folk insisted that the Palestinians should have elections straight after the Israeli withdrawal.

They had elections,

perhaps unwisely, and Hamaz won and then didn't have another election again and ruled the Gaza for 18 years until they finally got the great fruit of their labors on the 7th of October 2023 and

went around southern Israel massacring everyone they could, including young people at a dance party, and then caused in turn the destruction of the place that they were meant to be governing.

The whole thing is a great tragedy and all of it is at the feet of Hamas.

So I think this is just as one-sided as Murray was accusing Joe and Dave of being on Ukraine, that this, all of this is at the feet of Hamas.

Every bit of this is the great fruits of their labors.

What's happened?

It resulted in the destruction.

Notice that there's no actor involved in the destruction.

They did all of this and it caused in turn the destruction.

Like this is a necessary consequence, an inevitability.

October 7th and the killing of so many civilians was an awful act.

I've got no issue saying that at all.

Of course it was.

But to say that it was all the fruits of Hamas's labor is to completely omit Israel's role in Palestine.

and things like the illegal settlements and forcing people out of their homes and the over-policing of Palestinians, the two-tier justice system that's there.

There are a lot of things that have been going on in that region for a long time that Douglas Murray is completely whitewashing over.

None of that excuses the attack, but what Murray is doing is to excuse all of the rest of it because of the attack.

All of that other stuff is completely excused.

When one group kills 1,200 people in response to the other group kills over 50,000, and then they lay siege to an entire region, you can't say that every single bit of that is the fault of the first group.

There are other options.

And I'm going to point out that I am far from an expert on the subject of Israel and Palestine.

I'm really not at all.

Friends of mine are much more, much more across things than I am.

But what I'll will do is I'll put in the show notes an article that was written for the skeptic by an Israeli friend, which does add some context to how even Israelis can object to the Israeli occupation of Palestine and to the illegal settlements.

And this is a perspective that Douglas Murray doesn't seem to acknowledge is possible.

Amidst his evocations of how Israelis must be feeling through all of this and how the inevitability of once you elected Hamas 18 years ago, that it inevitably led to exactly what we're seeing now.

He's just completely eliding over how other people in the region actually feel.

Okay, so now we're going to hear a very short clip of Dave responding to this.

You know, when you accuse me of using the quotes that kind of, you know, back up what I believe, I think it's very convenient here to remove all responsibility from the Israelis.

And Dave is suddenly now right on this point.

Dave has suddenly found his shooting boots and he's on the right track now.

Murray's calling him out when Dave talks about how Russia provoked the war.

But when it comes to what happened in the 18 months since October the 7th, 2023, Murray explicitly states that Israel have no responsibility for any part of what's happened subsequently.

And Dave is calling him out on his removal of that responsibility in any way from the Israelis.

So now Douglas is going to talk about...

This is a pretty famous clip that leaked out from this episode.

This is Douglas talking about...

um whether or not dave has actually been to gaza

when were you last there at all i've never been you've never been.

Well, am I not allowed to talk about it now?

I've never been to.

Have you ever been to Nazi Germany?

Are you allowed to have feelings about them?

You can't time travel, but you can't.

But you can travel.

Okay, but so what?

So what's the point?

No, okay.

I find that.

Lots of people have been there and agree with me, and lots of people have been there and agree with you.

Yeah, but if you're gonna spend a year and a half talking about a place, you should at least do the courtesy of visiting it.

All right.

I just think this is a non-argument.

You don't feel okay.

No, I think it's a non-argument.

But if you're an ex-Will you have to go and touch the ground to the point of view.

No, I think you have to see.

I think it's a good idea to see stuff, particularly if you spend a career talking about something.

Yes.

i i have a journalistic rule of trying never to talk about a country even in parsing unless i've at least been there okay it's sort of normal in it's a normal thing to do you're talking about hang on you're talking about crossing points and not only have you never been to a crossing point in either egypt or in israel but you've never even been to the region okay again i think this is a non-argument no no no it's not a non-argument yeah it is it's not a non-argument if you're insisting that you're an expert of some kind or not claiming you're an expert but still talking about it about the provisions going into gaza or not if you've never seen any of this going on that seems like such an unhinged response i mean just because you were escorted around in gaza curated places by the idf doesn't mean you saw gaza in its raw form you got a you you got a tour from the people who were attacking the place you get a tour from a palestinian right get a tour from someone else go talk to the other side instead you're getting a tour from someone who's letting you go in there and see what they want you to see yeah exactly i mean can you know that north korea is a dictatorship if you've never been there well i guess not i guess none of us should be against kim jong-un i've never been to syria either so i guess i can't really be against the isis um it's impossible for me to be remotely critical of the taliban regime because i've never had a trip over there right so until i do some sort of uh uh dictatorship uh tour uh go down to my my travel agent because you can't time travel but you can travel.

You can just pop along to your travel agent and get yourself a trip to ISIS territory in order to be able to criticize them.

The question is, does Douglas Murray have this stance for people who agree with him?

For the people who say that Israel haven't done anything wrong in Gaza, that they've got no responsibility, that's all the fault of electing Hamas, does he hold this standard for them too?

They can't say that until they've been there.

What about the people who agree with him that Putin is the aggressor in Ukraine?

Do they not have to not talk about that until they've been to Ukraine?

Are the people who are allowed to talk about these conflicts limited to half a dozen people who've had the privilege of being in a position to be sent to a war zone and safely report from there?

Or is this rule about having to visit, is it only reserved for the people he disagrees with or when he's put on the spot in the middle of an argument?

And you can hear in Douglas Murray's voice, he's under more pressure in this bit of the conversation than he was when he was talking about Russia and Ukraine.

So his arguments are much more defensive and far less reasonably sound and reasonably based.

Now we're going to talk a little bit about concentration camps.

I imagine you've read all the people who say that Gaza was a concentration camp, and you probably think that too.

Am I right?

I mean, again, literally a concentration camp.

It shares a lot of similarities, I would think.

Well, as I say, you can't time traveling.

To the Middle East and actually visit it.

Okay, the World Bank said in 1996 for the one million of the blockade.

It doesn't mean anything.

This is a non-argument.

Yes, I'm saying the World Bank did their own analysis of this, and they said that it was a 40% drop.

Hold on.

You've got to stop interrupting and let him finish.

The World Bank said that 40% drop in the GDP of one year due to the blockade.

And there's been a blockade from 2007 on.

So are you saying that this hasn't had an economic effect?

Is that the argument?

No, of course it'll have an economic effect.

So you're saying you have to be on the ground and do an audit of the blockade in order to be able to comment?

I think you should at least know what it is, what the territory is, what the situation is in the region.

Yes, absolutely.

And the only way to do that that is to be there in person.

I think that's the best way.

It's not the only way, but it's the best way, for sure.

So at the start there, Murray's saying, I imagine you've read the people who say it's like a concentration camp.

Is that right?

And Dave responses, it has a lot of similarities.

So Murray is seeding him into this point here.

Later, in a clip we don't have, Murray's going to argue that it can't be a literal concentration camp because there's lots of babies being born there and there weren't many babies born in Auschwitz, which is an incredibly facile point, but it's also one that Orni lands because he first first seeded the term concentration camp.

Dave didn't bring that up.

Dave doesn't even agree that he thinks it is a concentration camp.

He says it has some similarities.

And then Douglas jumps on this later and tries to hit him with it.

I missed that when I first caught this because

there is a back and forth about the concentration camp.

And then I thought that that part where he's talking about they're having the babies part, I thought was a really odd thing to throw in.

But I think maybe it's something that he had already sort of planned because he made Dave admit that that he thinks it's kind of like a concentration camp.

It's a rhetorical trick he played on him then.

Yeah, it completely is.

And Dave didn't even say, yes, it is a concentration camp.

He said, he said it has some similarities.

That gives him the space to say, well, there are massive walled gates and people aren't allowed out there and people are kept in conditions that are sub for the area.

Those would be very fair criticisms

for Palestine.

And okay, Murray might well have a point that Dave wouldn't usually trust, might not normally trust the World Bank as a kind of conspiratorial libertarian.

But his point of instead, why don't you do your own analysis is an obscenely ridiculous standard to set.

So, why doesn't comedian Dave Smith do his own analysis of the

relative GDP of Palestine across a period of years?

So, how Dave Smith should just pop along and start doing GDP analyses of year-on-year in Palestine.

It's obviously a ludicrous standard that he's setting.

So, he's very clearly being incredibly defensive in this bit.

And I wouldn't disagree that there is something to be said for seeing things in person.

I'm a big advocate of that in the other work that I do.

Actually, go and turn up to seeing things in person and see what it is you're criticizing.

But on what basis is that the best way?

Murray said it's the best way to see that.

Now, you don't get to wander freely around Gaza, even as a British journalist, especially since October the 7th.

As you say, you're going to have an accompanying guard from the IDF.

Access is going to be very, is meted out very carefully and very heavily controlled.

So is a guided tour of an area done by a government that's keen to show you the best version of things definitely the most effective way to get an accurate view of what's going on?

Or let's put it another way, would Murray accept that a tour of Crimea and the Donbass, facilitated and accompanied by Russian soldiers, would be the best way to see what's happening in the region?

I think not.

I think sometimes the view from the ground lacks perspective.

And that's why you don't see, you don't view everything from the ground.

You can take a step back and see the bigger picture.

Right.

This is the last clip in our main event.

This is talking about elections.

And the same is possible with Hamaz.

Will they be replaced by some other group?

Again, then we get to one of the crucial decision points for the Palestinian people.

Is it inevitable that they constantly have to elect people who want to annihilate their neighbors?

Or will there ever be a generation that can find a way to live in peace with their neighbors?

I agree.

Most people don't like being bombed.

In fact, nobody does.

But if the people of the Palestinians in Gaza can find it within themselves to realize the thing they asked for in the elections is the thing that has destroyed the area they live in, and like that brave young man two weeks ago in Gaza who rose up against Hamaz and was identified by the people who remain in Hamaz and was tortured and then his body thrown onto his parents' doorstep in the Gaza.

The parents started a, well, the family, the clan started a bit of a war against Hamaz.

But

that's how Hamaz treats Palestinian dissidents.

But if there were more people like that young man, and of course, as we all know, the history of totalitarian and terrorist groups running societies is they're very successful and they stay in power because they're willing to torture and use violence and much more.

That it's a horrible thing you have to contend with.

He keeps bringing up these elections in Gaza.

Now, these elections,

he even says, happened 18 years ago.

And so this is the reason he thinks that innocent people can die because a majority of people 18 years ago made

an election choice.

And now those people stayed in power.

They haven't had elections since then.

And there's not even a majority of people who voted for them who could even be alive anymore, right?

Those people aren't even alive anymore.

They've had, like, they even talked about the population boom there would have pushed out all the people who have voted for them well over half.

So a majority of the people are.

That's not the only effect on the population of the area.

There's significant effects on the population of the area.

There's like a lot of death that happens there, too.

So you add that in.

There's no way that the majority of people there voted Hamas in, but they are supposed to eternally suffer because they did this one thing back then.

And it's not even the majority of people now.

That's a really bad reason for the people who are there to suffer.

And,

you know, perhaps we're seeing how

Hamas treats Gazans should.

Maybe make you understand that innocent people that are dying are not to blame and are being held held hostage, not just by one faction, but by two different factions.

And the damage that the civilian population, the damage to that very specific civilian population benefits both of these groups.

Hamas keeps the population angry, and that lets them wage war against Israel.

And the Israeli government,

if it has a group of angry Gazans, it permits them to continue this sort of eternal

total war that they've been playing out.

So we have two groups of politicians that are very happy that there's an angry group of Gazans there and they are manipulating this group of people.

And so maybe that's how we should be looking at it instead of how Douglas is looking at it as if they need to be condemned because they made a vote 18 years ago.

Yeah,

I think it's a very good point.

I think the other thing is there's a point in there that Douglas says, you know, about this vote.

Will it be inevitable that they want to annihilate their neighbors or will there ever be a generation that can find a way to live in peace with their neighbors?

And here we come back to this sense of one-sided responsibility, that it's only on the responsibility of the Palestinians to find a way to live in peace with the Israelis.

And this completely whitewashes over things like the illegal settlements, the people being forced out of their homes, and the way that, as I say, Palestine has been

had this two-tier policing and been over-policed, and the blockade, and all the stuff that's been going on there.

Arguably,

that isn't on Palestinians to try and find a way to live in peace.

It's finding a way to live peacefully within the confines that's been imposed upon them.

If there has to be peace in that region, it has to come from both parties.

But Douglas is completely aliding over any responsibility Israel might have to stop illegally creating settlements in Palestinian territory, for example.

All right, we're going to take a quick break and then we're going to get 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 now for our undercard.

This is what I think a lot of people heard on this show and the clips that were let out from this show was this sort of pushback between Joe and

Joe and Dave and Doug.

So those people, they're two sort of factions and there's a lot of pushback.

Douglas Murray gives a lot of pushback to Joe about who he's bringing in, how he's platforming people.

And so we're going to talk about a lot of that in this undercard section and we're going to start because they bring up very early on the war in Ukraine and Gaza.

Can I ask you something?

Yes, sir.

Since the war in Israel began and since the war in Ukraine began, you've had quite a lot of people who are very against both in different ways.

Yes.

Do you think you've had enough people on who are supportive of either war?

I don't know that word enough, if that's a good word.

Let's say enough people who are on the side of Israel instead of wild critics.

Well, I've had a few.

I mean, I believe God Sat is on the side of Israel.

For sure.

Jordan is on the side of Israel.

You had Mike Baker, Coleman Hughes.

Yeah.

Coleman did it for like 20 minutes.

It wasn't why he was here.

No.

I mean,

none of them is why they're here.

You know?

It's a good question.

Do you think you've tilted one way?

Me personally?

No, no, no, just with the guests.

The guests?

Yeah, probably more tilted towards the idea that perhaps the way they've done it is barbaric.

But why do you think that is?

Just out of interest.

Interest in your selection of guests because you're like the world's number one podcast.

It's interesting to hear somebody actually call Joe out on this.

Also interesting that they immediately focus on Israel Israel and Gaza when they're talking about, oh, we've kind of had a balanced group of people, but they never list any pro-Ukrainian guests at all that he lets talk for three straight hours.

There's none of that.

It's all like, well, we've kind of had some fair and balanced approaches to Gaza where we've had a couple people who were pro-Israel, but never anything for Ukraine.

And, you know, this might actually be a problem with.

this sort of show.

It's a three-hour show platforming someone, giving them a chance to speak their ideas with little or no pushback for three straight hours.

You know, you have a blank check to talk about whatever you want.

Maybe a Piers Morgan style show, which is something that they're sort of making fun of a little bit in the beginning, this, which is why I bring up Piers Morgan at all.

A Piers Morgan type show where there's contention, where there's two people.

Maybe that's a better way to hash something like this out on there.

I don't know what the answer is, but certainly giving people who have been fed either Russian disinformation and don't care or do care because they might be getting paid to do it is a bad call to have somebody have a blank check for three straight hours.

Yeah, it really is, especially when the

heuristic for Joe is to look for the

sensational argument, the narrative that is kind of counter to the mainstream.

When that's already his filter, that's already the way he looks for,

that he accepts things as being interesting, that is a recipe recipe for platforming extreme ideas and those extreme ideas are going to lead more in one direction than another and that's why they don't even bring up the fact that he's had nobody who will put forward the ukrainian position on things um so yeah this is uh a real issue with joe's political joe's show in general and i thought it was really interesting for douglas murray especially given douglas murray's background not being he's not the uh uh progressive liberal lefty kind of figure and for him to come a minute into this show swinging for joe's guest booking policy, I think is really interesting.

Yeah.

I also want to point out, too, that it's that

all the times that they're pushing for someone else to come on, understand they're not asking for Bernie Sanders to come on and talk.

They are talking what Murray is saying is, I would like another right-wing ideologue who matches closer with my values to come on your show, not one of these more fringe versions of what you have on your show.

So understand that they're not asking for a debate between left left and right side policies.

They're talking about don't have such fringe people on.

I think that's the main idea.

What do you think?

I just want to get on a side here real quick, Marsh.

The reason why this show was booked, why he booked Dave Smith and Douglas Murray at the same time, and this is maybe Cecil's conspiracy, but hear me out just for a second.

Okay.

Okay.

Do you think that maybe Joe didn't want to have this fight on his own and he knew he was going to have a fight?

So he invited someone on because he saw this book read the back cover knew it was going to be pro-Israel so he invited somebody on who was anti-Israel who could have the same stance he would so he wouldn't have to fight the battle Yeah, I think you might be onto something, although not in as kind of

even doesn't even have to be as cynical or conspiratorial for this.

I mean, Douglas Murray's there to promote this new book.

Even at the very end of the interview, he pulls a move that is a very clear pull the rip cord, I'm done now, I need to go, where he just changes the subject onto what supplements Joel's taken.

And it's very much a kind of like, anyway, we're done here and I'm off.

So Douglas Murray's on a promotional tour for this book.

He's off to Washington afterwards.

So clearly he's here to talk about this.

I think Joe sees that this is what the conversation is going to be about and calls up the buddy of his who talks about this stuff the most, who he thinks has is the most informed.

And I think it's that kind of thing.

So I think it is that he doesn't feel like he is capable of putting forward his side of the argument as coherently, but he's also just going to his address book of, of, oh, yeah, whenever we talk about that, it's always Dave.

He's always always, yeah, yeah.

Three weeks ago, two weeks ago, Dave was talking about this on the very show.

So I'll get Dave back because he talks about this stuff a lot.

He's really knowledgeable.

He'll be able to go tour to tour.

I suspect that's what it, that's what it is.

Okay, so the next clip is talking about someone we covered on this show, Ian Carroll.

Yeah, it's not, I don't, I don't think about it that way.

I just think I'd like to talk to this person.

But can I just

if you're going to interview historians of the conflict or historians in general,

why would you get somebody like Ian Carroll or yeah, but Ian Carroll, I didn't bring him on for that purpose.

I brought him on because I want to find out like how does one get involved in the whole conspiracy theory business?

Because his whole thing is just conspiracies.

Sure.

You know?

But do you have any,

I mean, there's been a tilt in the conversation, in both conversations in the last couple of years, and it's largely to do with people who have appointed themselves experts who are not experts.

You mean like Ian?

I don't think he appoints himself an expert in anything.

So just pick up really quickly, he says, you know, I don't think about it in that kind of way.

I don't book my guest number.

I just think

I'd like to speak to this person.

And the question that you'll never ask himself is, but why do you want to speak to that person?

What is it about that person that makes them someone you want to speak to?

Sometimes that's because they're a Hollywood actor or a politician that you happen to like.

But other times they're an incredibly fringe figure from the internet, Ian Carroll, Suzanne Humphreys, even Kai Dickens.

Okay, she had a massive podcast, but her views are pretty fringe.

What is it about those people whose views come across your

vision?

And then you think, Joe, yeah, I want to speak to that person.

What is it about them that makes you want to speak to them?

That's the question he never asks himself, but it's maybe the most important question for why his show is affected for misinformation.

And it's true that Ian might not think of himself as an expert, but some of that is just to dodge criticism on a large platform.

Yeah, just asking, being the just asking questions guy, can you can also just ask really bad questions that lead people to anti-semitism.

That's also something that can happen.

So, you know,

I think a lot of times people will dodge this by saying, Oh, I'm just a comedian.

And Joe uses this as an excuse all the time.

That's not an excuse for having, if you have a large platform like this, you also have to have some sort of ethical responsibility to your listener.

Yeah, quality control.

Yeah, for sure.

And Ian might not see himself as an expert, but clearly from what we've seen, some of Joe's fans do see Ian as an expert.

And the reason they see him as an expert is because he was on Joe Rogan talking about this stuff.

Yeah.

And Joe platforms other people who are experts.

And so it's hard to, it muddies the line between expertise and non-expertise.

All right.

Now we're going to talk about big topics.

But that is also your shtick now, isn't it?

Well, what do you mean by that's my shtick?

Well, you're not a geopolitics guy in general, are you?

I don't even know exactly what you're asking.

I'm saying you've decided, being a comedian, you've decided now to become somebody who talks about Israel.

I think you're incorrect.

I don't think it's a decision.

I just think you have long-form conversations to multiple of them.

It's a huge event that's in the news, so it comes up.

I don't think that's it.

I think if you're on the outside, you'd say, oh, look, they're trying to get attention by talking about this very polarizing issue publicly.

That's a good idea.

So you do get attention from that.

If you'd spent the last year speaking about Myanmar, you would not be on my lips.

Yeah, but he does talk about Yemen constantly.

He talks about a lot of things that aren't in the news.

Well, I tend to talk about the conflicts that my government is directly involved in, which I think is reasonable to me.

But I don't quite get like, what's all the appeal to authority stuff?

I mean, you have to be an expert or whatever.

No, I think authority matters.

I think authority matters.

And I think that if you just throw a lot of shit out there and then say, I'm not interested in the alternative views on this, and particularly when it's a counter-narrative that is wildly off.

And when you get people,

look, I just feel, we should get it out straight away.

I feel you've opened the door to quite a lot of people who've now got a big platform who have been throwing out counter historical stuff of a very dangerous kind.

I don't have a lot to say about this clip other than just letting this clip stand on its own.

I think, yeah, I think that absolutely that last bit of that clip is very, very true.

I'm, you know, I'm now, I'm also worried that Douglas Murray is one of these people too, by the way.

So it's not that I think Douglas Murray is let off the hook by making this point, but I also think that just because he made this point doesn't mean that it's wrong.

And he might also be one of those people.

Yeah.

So even if Douglas, if even Douglas Murray can see how far you've gone, Joe Rogan, maybe you should be rowing back significantly.

Okay, now we're going to talk.

This next bit is about contrary views.

And the problem is, is that because you, I mean, your own platform has come about because you're a very successful comedian and much more, and you do ask questions and you are interested.

But there are a lot of people who have come along, partly, I think, because they've come on this show, who have come along and they've decided, I can play this double game.

On the one hand, I'm going to push really edgy and frankly, sometimes horrific opinions.

And then if you say that's wrong, they say, I'm a comedian.

But wait a minute.

What do I know?

How can you pretend I'm just a comedian?

I'm just throwing stuff out.

What horrific opinions that's wrong?

Are you talking about specifically?

I don't know.

We covered 18 shows.

I was going to say, there's a a lot in there, man.

I mean, Joe's not seeing it, but look at the Ian Carroll show and how he's getting deep into Pizza Git.

Look at Suzanne Humphreys, who's saying, don't take vaccines because smallpox is a dawdle to treat and polio is actually not that bad.

And Alton Measles is good for you.

These are horrific opinions because they will lead people to get hurt or they'll lead them into these deep rabbit holes that they might not be able to get back out of safely.

Look at these casual conversations, decrying COVID vaccines, talking about how Fauci should be imprisoned,

puppeting literal Russian talking points.

Like, let's not pretend that you don't, frankly, have horrifying views sometimes, Joe.

You do.

He just doesn't see they're horrifying because he doesn't know where they've become unanchored from reality.

Now we're going to listen to a clip about Overreach.

This is the shtick of these guys.

They've decided it's edgy and funny.

And I think this is very, very interesting and also very dangerous because we live in

an era now that the right has got some mojo back in America.

We saw years of crazy left overreach where they tried to make us all say the craziest things.

And completely predictably, there are now figures on the right playing with really dark and ugly stuff on their side.

I agree.

And they are mainstreaming.

I don't think I think it's partly being mainstreamed by the two people I just described.

And both of you have kept speaking to these people.

And you don't get on the historians who know about this.

And that's just alarming to me.

Well, can I just say, because I kind of do agree with part of what you said there.

Like, I do think it is true that almost as a reaction to like the woke insanity that we've seen on the left, and I think literally, I think nobody's been a more effective critic of that than you.

I do think there has kind of been a right-wing reaction that has embraced racialism and

is dangerous and not a good panel.

And now they're flirting with Holocaust denial and

dissolving hippie blame.

I think you're wrong to include Darryl.

So I don't think this is an accident.

I think it's true that it's happening is that any reaction to

left-wing politics, there is this right-wing reaction.

But this, the right,

it's not an accident.

The right-wing reaction and the framing of wokeness gone crazy is actually specifically to give space for the rise of the

reactionary reaction.

You're absolutely right.

Yeah.

Like if you look for any example of the crazy, woke, leftist overreach, what you'll almost always find is a relatively minor story in a relatively limited setting that was amplified and slightly distorted and blown up completely out of proportion by a right-wing newsphere determined to sell a narrative of woke ideology gone too far.

Douglas Murray is the associate editor of the Spectator magazine, which is just as guilty of this as Fox News and OAN and libs of TikTok and all of this right-wing poetry that exists to distort and amplify the distorted versions of these relatively minor stories.

Joe Rogan is also part of that, not because he's doing it deliberately, but because he's picking this stuff up.

He's interested in it because it comes across his peripheral vision and he picks that up and it's the thing that he amplifies.

It's the thing he platforms on his show.

Look at when he talked about kids identifying as cats and how they needed litter boxes in the classrooms.

That spread around international news.

It was taken as a sign that woke ideology is crazy and it wasn't true.

And people would have kicked back against that and become more reactionary in a right-wing direction as a result.

So to to paraphrase Douglas Murray here, we should ask, first of all, what are you doing?

And secondly, why?

Those are important questions to be asking of this particular project.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

You know, they're seeing that this rhetoric sort of helps spread this.

It's turned itself, it's sort of spun itself up.

into what they were preaching to now being more hateful, embracing more.

They were,

you have to understand that some of this rhetoric was racist, but now it's become more racist and they want to separate themselves from it.

They want to be like a certain level of racism is okay.

But once we start denying Hitler or denying that Hitler was someone that was bad, absolving him or going into Holocaust denial, that's a step too far.

But I am certainly okay to say that Britain is becoming a non-white, horrible place because I disagree that the white people that have always been in power are going to continue to be in power.

And so, you know, know, you're playing with these toys.

And when they get out of control, then you're, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

And it's like, well, maybe think about what seeds you're planting.

Yeah, exactly.

And you're absolutely right that it's about these things kind of going too far.

It's one step too far.

They step into Holocaust denial and that's too far.

And that's it's a valid criticism that that's too far.

But the question that Douglas Murray needs to be asking himself and the people around him is, what does he think is stopping the people from taking that step once you've given them a push?

Once you've set the momentum up, what does he think is going to stop people ending in that position?

Because the slide is there for a reason, this slide into further and further radicalized positions.

And if you're playing with the starting point of that, you should know what the end point is.

All right.

So now they're going to talk a little bit about the red pill.

You know, Michael Malice had that great line.

He goes, when you take the red pill, you're supposed to take one and not swallow the whole bottle.

And I think there's like this dynamic.

What happens is, and of course, people know the red pill is the analogy from the Matrix.

The idea that you wake up to realizing that so much of the stuff you believed was bullshit, propaganda, and it's all lies.

And this is a real danger when the establishment and the institutions are all caught with their pants down having sold a bunch of very consequential policies based on lies.

And then once people realize that, they go, well, what else have they been lying to me about?

And then they almost want to look into every single thing and go, yeah, I think the whole thing was lies.

Now, I agree with you.

There's danger in that.

And I think that there are some things that then people jump to conclusions that are totally wrong.

But I guess I tend to look at that and go, well, then maybe the people with power, not random podcasters, but like the people with real power, should do a better job of not lying through their fucking teeth about everything.

Well, maybe you have power.

Maybe you have power, both of you.

We live in an era where podcasters have a lot of power.

If you go on a podcast with Jake Shields, and Jake Shields goes onto another podcast and says he doesn't think six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what do you think's happening there?

That's an exercise of power.

So Dave's argument here is effectively why are you making me do all these awful things like you've lied to me and now i'm ending up in this position and it's your fault because you lied to me first so now why wouldn't i go this far but you can be lied to about some things but it doesn't mean you have to go to holocaust denial these are the same arguments being used by flat earthers in fact well they lied to us about the shape of the earth so what else are they hiding you know step step step and you're in holocaust denial so like the idea that you're being lied to doesn't mean that you are free then to end up in any belief position and then blame it on the person who lied to you about something.

Yeah, and Joe uses this too.

Joe will do this when, when he gets like, for instance, one of the reasons why I think Joe might have really turned farther right is because of his vaccine misinformation.

And that was picked up in the news and he was sort of smacked down for it.

This is my hypothesis.

As we listen to the shows, we'll see if that rings true.

But we certainly see

a farther right turn after COVID.

And when what Joe used that was like as a shield to prevent anyone from like seeing that he was wrong about vaccines, he doubled down and then said that these people are lying about something.

And, you know, in this case, he's.

horribly wrong about everything that he had to say.

And so many of Joe's podcasts have this sort of weird undertone of this sort of mysterious they.

There is a mysterious they that pops up.

It's the medical establishment.

It's USAID.

It's universities.

It's It's big archaeology.

His podcast does not exist without a they.

It only exists

in an ecosystem where he has someone.

And in this case, this is a perfect example of Dave.

sort of explaining who that is, those people who have been lying to us.

And there isn't a mysterious they out there.

And Dave can apply that to anybody.

In this case, he's applying it to governments that are talking about wars, but it can be applied to anything.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I would like him to explain what else he thinks he's been lied to.

He's talking about all these lies that have been told.

I'd love to know what lies he's talking about, because it feels to me like he's not just talking about, for example, Iraq and WMDs, which was a provable lie.

It feels like he's talking about things that you and I wouldn't agree were lies.

Yes.

Wouldn't agree were wrong.

But again, this is going back to some of Murray's credit here.

He's right to pull Dave up and say podcasters have power.

They do.

They have this huge reach.

Joe's show helps, for example, set the permission structure for changes in legislation.

When people want to try and lobby governments to change their legislation, they come on Joe's show and they tell lies about what that legislation and regulation means.

And lo and behold, those lies get heard at a very high level.

Murray's also right that the show gets used as a platform to get people, give people an entry into extreme ideas.

That somebody comes on the Rogan show and seems like a perfectly reasonable guy and then goes on someone else's show and talks about how the Holocaust didn't kill 6 million Jews.

And he's more likely to have a following into that second place because he was on this first place.

It's one of the reasons I'm really, I was really interested and keen to start looking at Rogan, because I think he can act without meaning to, without being deliberate, as this gateway, this portal that will be used by some more extreme, people with more extreme positions to access a massive audience and direct them towards what they, their fringe ideas.

We saw that with Suzanne Humphreys.

Nobody was following her on YouTube.

Nobody was listening to her on Twitter until Joe picked her out of obscurity obscurity and broadcast that to millions of people.

And speaking of fringe ideas, that's the next clip.

Well, I mean, okay, I think there's a little bit of a contradiction here.

You're saying now that these are fringe views, but then you're also saying that these are enormously powerful views.

No, no, no.

There's no contradiction.

Let me clear it off.

You think there is.

I think there are very fringe views that have become mainstreamed on the right.

But then aren't they not fringe by definition?

Sure, you can play an epistemological game.

No, I'm just, no, I'm just saying what's behind.

But you do understand the concept, don't you?

That fringe ideas become mainstreamed.

Okay, right.

Sure.

So that's it.

Okay.

I'm not exactly sure.

So you're saying that what Joe shouldn't have Darrell Cooper on?

I'm saying that that

there will have that if you mainstream very, very fringe views, which are easily able to be debunked,

if you mainstream them, at some point that view that was so fringe will be what eager, very

disconnected, unhappy people are going to start playing with too.

Yeah, he's absolutely right.

When you sainwash or you launder these extreme ideas, you're going to lead people into even more extreme ideas.

You've shifted the Overton window,

the window of acceptable ideas now includes this more extreme thing.

So more people are going to believe it and they're going to believe even more things that are further extreme than that.

But when we talk about fringe views, what about fringe views like London is a foreign country due to white Britons being a minority in 23 of the 33 boroughs?

I would argue that's hinting at a fringe view.

It's hinting, for example, at the fringe view that you have to be a white Briton to be a Briton at all, and that anybody who isn't white is foreign.

These are very specific and going to leave people in a certain direction.

In 2018, Douglas Murray filmed a video for

Prager U entitled The Suicide of Europe.

And in that video, he condemned the mass movement of peoples into Europe from the Middle East, North Africa, and East Asia.

And he criticized European multiculturalism.

And a senior editor at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism accused the video of being filled with anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center claimed the video was a dog whistle to the extreme right.

So Douglas should know a little bit about platforming and sharing extreme views and how those can be picked up by disconnected people who then end up in even more

extreme positions.

It almost feels like Douglas Murray is particularly affronted that people didn't get off the slippery slope when he wanted them to.

You know, he put them on the slippery slope, but he had an off-ramp and they missed that off-ramp entirely.

And that's what he's bothered by.

They slid right past it.

Just slid right.

And then, and Joe, I think, is in the same boat, right?

They want to make a mess and then claim that they didn't do it, right?

That, and I think that we're seeing that with a lot of different people in the United States right now.

There's a lot of people that are oligarchs, the senators, all those people that were worried about what Trump might do.

They ignored all that.

And now we're seeing Trump reject court decisions and sort of go all rogue.

And they empowered him, they supported him.

And now that he's off the leash, they want to say that they've never been part of it.

Oh, we're not part of it.

And even Joe is starting to walk back some of his claims.

Joe is starting to talk about how he's worried about how this administration

is reacting to no due process for people who are immigrating.

So that is true, but I would be interested to see what he continues to say because we have seen Joe offer a scant bit of criticism for some of the things Trump has done in one show, but then a show or two later, that criticism is entirely gone.

So whether this becomes a consistent thing would be interesting.

Yeah, see if it takes.

See if it takes.

But I am, but even still, if you see a tiny bit of it, that's different than what we've seen so far in the shows that we've watched where it's been nothing but

uh you know a trump is a madman he's amazing i love him he's the best thing that's ever happened that's the things i mean those are things joe has said that seems like a departure so if that departure stays even better Yeah, and we're going to have to cover the Trump show, aren't we?

That's what we're going to have to do.

That's what we're doing next.

We're doing next.

The Trump show, aren't we?

Let's do it next.

Yeah, I think that's what we're going to do next.

All right.

Now we're going to move on to

expertise.

It's a bit weird to be simultaneously saying, I'm not an expert on a conflict and talking about it everywhere.

I don't think so.

Not really.

I mean, I don't know.

I don't think like,

I don't see how you need to talk about these things.

Which things?

All these things that we're talking about.

Some of them, yeah.

Are you an expert?

I am on some, yes.

On somebody, some that you're not an expert on.

You'll notice that.

So what should you do?

What should you do if those subjects get breached?

Well, I think that you educate yourself as much as you can.

Shouldn't you say, I'm not an expert, and then give your opinion if you're in the middle of a conversation?

As I say, I think that it's a weird move to say, I'm not an expert on this, but I'm going to talk about it non-stop.

I think that is correct.

Listen, I will certainly concede that I am weird.

So I'm not disagreeing with you.

It's weird that I'm as obsessed with all this stuff as I am.

I mean, like, okay, I'm a weird guy.

I do, I tell jokes at nightclubs and then get obsessed with politics and monetary policy.

And like, okay, fine.

But I just like fundamentally disagree with this idea that, which I really do think is quite anti-democratic in spirit and quite

elitist, that there's an expert class.

They can have opinions on all of these things.

It's weird for any regular person who's just read about it.

Not my view.

Not my view.

So don't continually talk about things where you're not an expert.

Don't go, don't, don't share your opinions if they're not expert opinions.

Don't do that.

I'm going to give you a quote here.

The science of climate change is deeply contested.

Most scientists agree there are variations going on, but they disagree on exactly what the causes are.

And most importantly, there is almost no agreement on how to address them.

That was Douglas Murray in the Daily Mail in October 2019, one of the many things he's written about climate change, a subject on which he is not an expert, yet he is very happy to continue talking about.

So this idea of expertise, I think he's right that you should value expertise, but it isn't something he's living by.

He makes his living by writing articles about things that he is not an expert about, not an expert on.

Yeah, and I also think it's funny too to hear Joe sort of defend this because what he's trying to defend and what he is sort of defending

in a sort of offhanded way is his podcast format, right?

He's saying, well, what am I supposed to do in the moment?

I've just got to, because I don't want dead air.

So what I'll have to do is say, I don't know anything about it, but then give you my opinion because it would make for a terrible podcast if he stopped or if the podcast conversation just ended or if he had to throw out have people in his

show and then have to throw that tape out because it wasn't usable.

So everything to Joe is how will this be podcasted?

It's not, it's not like how you have a normal conversation with with people.

All right.

So now we're moving on.

It's talking about Joe's intentions.

It's certainly never my intention when I talk to someone to try to get more views.

It sounds crazy, but I'm only talking to people that I'm interested in talking to.

And in Daryl's case, it's because I've been a listener of his podcast for years.

That's it.

This is like genuinely how I perceive things.

That's why you're here.

I'm genuinely interested in your views as well.

even though you completely disagree with him.

So I believe this as well.

I don't believe Joe is doing it for the clicks.

I believe it's entirely honest that he wants to have these conversations because he's interested in them.

But the fact that Joe listens to his podcast is specifically how that eye-catching thing works.

He talks about that, oh, people aren't having these opinions just to be eye-catching and get attention.

They are, but you are the eyes that got caught, Joe.

You're not the one who's trying to do the eye-catching.

You are the attention that got caught.

Daryl Cooper, who we're going to come to, you are part of his audience.

He's got these extreme views.

You were attracted attracted to them.

You're a regular listener to his podcast.

And now you're hooked.

And then you had him on your show and amplified into a larger audience.

That is how this attention economy is actually working.

It's just that you're not the one who's having the intent to have eye-catching ideas here, Joe.

I want to point people to the last bit of that, where Joe is talking and he says, he says, well, I genuinely am interested in your views.

Even though you completely disagree with this guy over here, I want you to take your attention to my podcast and how I bring people on and turn it to someone who you disagree with over here and not to me.

He very sort of Aikido moves him from himself to someone else.

He's like, Well, don't you disagree with this guy?

This guy over here?

Isn't he why?

Isn't this the person I brought on to fight with me with?

So then he's able to get himself out of the spotlight.

All right, last piece in our undercard.

This is talking about responsibility for your public ideas.

I think you don't realize that actually

people like me who have a voice and write and much more do think about that all the time.

It's a profound concern and responsibility.

I agree with that.

Right, right.

And don't think I don't worry all the time and make sure I intervene.

into the debate very carefully at times when I think some people have picked up something that I've been saying and are going to go wrong with it.

That scares the hell out of me.

And I do it regularly.

And I do it.

So I have to.

Yeah, listen.

Okay, so that's a point of agreement, too.

But you don't stop believing in that policy for it, and you won't stop believing that.

But you do say on occasion, I mean, most obvious one on that.

If there is something where something really

fetid happens, something really terrible, and there's a bunch of people that decide to

riot or commit violence or something.

I know that I have to, as a duty, say, absolutely, this is to be condemned.

If it is people trying to pretend that all Muslims this or all that, absolutely, I intervene to stop that.

But I think that this is one of the responsibilities that comes with putting out ideas in the public square.

And I think that none of us are blame-free, but all of us have some kind of responsibility to know that what we put out there is very carefully watched, very carefully followed.

and that we have to tread well.

And look, it's not all Muslims.

It's just the ones I don't don't want in my country.

That's the Muslims I want you to dislike.

I don't want you to dislike every Muslim out there.

I just want you to very specifically dislike the Muslims that are closest to you in your country right now.

Yeah, just the ones you can see.

Yeah.

What do you think is going to happen when you bring something like that, an idea like that, out into the open, out into the public?

I have a political podcast that I do that is separate from this show, that is

with a friend of mine that I've been doing for years.

I have no fear whatsoever that something I say would cause someone to be violent or to commit some act of atrocity.

They would have to twist what I say into a pretzel in order to actually do something like that, that it would be so divorced from me, I shouldn't feel any responsibility to it.

And the reason why is because I'm not telling people hateful, awful things that can spin them out of control.

The reason why these guys have to once in a while go over to the pressure cooker they made and press the steam out button is because they have created what he calls a fetid group of people who are now spinning this stuff up and getting more and more hatred involved.

And they're gonna go out and do something harmful.

So he has to go over and relieve some of that pressure once in a while that he's the one who started.

So don't let him lie to you that somehow he's responsible for his public ideas.

He's planting seeds and now he's going out there and saying, well, it wasn't me.

I'm sorry, it wasn't me.

I wasn't the one who did it.

And

I would never condone that type of behavior.

All right, we're going to take another short break and then we're going to jump into our toolbox section.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag and something just fell out of the tool bag.

So here we are in our one clip toolbox, Marsh.

We wanted to do this.

You saw this as a perfect example of what they call a two-quo-kwe

logical fallacy.

So what is two-quo-quwe?

And then we'll play the clip.

Yeah, so two-quo-quwe is sometimes known as the appeal to hypocrisy, which is to say that, well, you're making this point, but you do this too.

And therefore, that point isn't valid.

It's essentially sort of saying that you can't really be committed to this idea because you're just as guilty of it.

But the problem is, if what they're pointing out, if the central point is a really good point, it is in no way negated by the fact that someone else is just as guilty of it.

If it's a bad thing, it's a bad thing, regardless of how many people are doing it.

All right, so let's play that clip.

But the Iranian revolutionary government in Tehran has literally been colonizing the region.

I have this rule about, I took it from Vasily Grossman, the great Soviet Jewish writer, who had this great line about, tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I'll tell you what you're guilty of.

This absolutely runs as well with the accusations against the Jewish state in the region.

The Iranian revolutionary government is constantly accusing the Israelis of colonialism, of expansionism.

It is the Iranian revolutionary government that has been colonizing Iraq, colonizing Yemen, colonizing and destroying Lebanon and colonizing Syria.

So is the making these colonizations, these illegal settlements by Israel, is it a bad thing?

Well, it can't be because Iran, who are the ones leading this criticism, are doing it as well.

But Iran is only accusing Israel of expansionism because that's actually what Iran of doing.

That doesn't actually defend Israel from accusations of expansionism in any way.

And the number of colonies that Iran might have in Lebanon and Syria doesn't change in any way whether or not Israel has illegal settlements.

So let's talk about the illegal settlements.

And it does have illegal settlements.

In fact, Iran aren't even, and I'll put a link in the show notes to a list of Israeli settlements, but there are lots of illegal settlements.

And he brings up Iran specifically, but Iran aren't the only country in the world to have accused Israel of illegal settlements.

So why is he picking Iran out?

Well, because he can say that Iran are also doing that.

But the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 of 2016 states that Israel's settlement activity constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and has no legal validity.

It demands that Israel stop such activity and fulfills its obligations as an occupying power under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

In 2004, an advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice also found that Israel's settlements were illegal under international law.

The court's findings were based on the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the UN Security Council resolutions that condemned the establishment of settlements and attempts by Israel to alter the demographics of the territories under its control.

And in 2009, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband called Israeli settlements illegal.

In 2012, William Hague, the British Foreign Secretary at the time, stated all Israeli settlements were illegal under international law.

And that's a very short list of people who have called out the illegality of Israeli settlements.

And okay, you can say some of those people were British and Britain has been guilty of colonial expansion in the past, but that doesn't negate the fact that these settlements are illegal, regardless of who's saying it.

They are illegal.

And what he's also doing, which I think is interesting, is he says, you know,

tell me what you think the Jews are doing.

And it's say what you think, what you're actually doing, rather.

And that holds not just for the Jews, but for the Israeli state.

This idea of conflating what the Jews are doing and what what the state of Israel are doing, that in itself is an anti-Semitic trope.

That Jews don't speak for the state of Israel.

Not all Jewish people are responsible for what's happening in Israel.

Not even all Jewish people in Israel are responsible for the actions of the Israeli state.

But to conflate the two is in itself an anti-Semitic trope.

And I want to point out another possible two-quo quay that we avoided this entire episode.

And that's if we would have said at any point that Douglas is doing the same things in one section that he's doing in another and therefore he's false, that would have been a two quo quay for the entire episode because Douglas in this episode

displays a great deal of hypocrisy, right?

In the beginning of the episode, he's talking about Putin in a certain way and then switches completely when he's talking about Gaza.

And if someone were to see this episode or listen to this episode and say, well, we can't take anything Douglas is saying as true because he is a hypocrite in this episode.

That is a two-quo-quay fallacy.

He is not saying things that are false.

He is being a hypocrite, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the points he's making should be invalidated because of his hypocrisy.

Yeah, absolutely.

He's right in one area.

He's wrong in another area.

And those two things stand alone.

He's the one who has to deal with putting those two sets of thoughts together in his brain.

I'm

All right, Marsh.

What was good about this one?

So I actually think that Douglas does a very good job in the undercard there of highlighting to Joe how dangerous it is to allow guests on the show with extremely fringe views that Joe then broadcasts to a massive audience without any context as to why that those views are wrong.

I think that Douglas

did that on Joe's show was incredibly strong, incredibly powerful, was great to to see.

Maybe it will have actually had an effect on Joe's audience.

So yeah, fair play to him to go in there and do that.

Also,

to Joe's credit, there's a couple of times where Douglas is talking about whether there's a blockade in Palestine and whether that's true or not.

And when he's asked about it, he sort of equivocates and goes off in a few different directions.

And Joe just cuts straight through and says, but is there a blockade?

And that's a genuinely good moment from Joe to try and get to the point.

So hats off to Joe for that moment as well.

That was a good point.

Yeah, I agree with your points here.

I think, you know, I don't know that I want to say the word courage, right?

Because courage makes it seem like it's some sort of noble deed or something like that.

But I do think that it takes some level of chutzpah to come on Joe's show, look across at what is essentially the largest podcaster in the world, somebody with a massive platform bigger than any network audience, and tell them that you think they are doing things that are wrong.

And you're also there to sell your book, right?

So, so you're there very specifically for a reason.

They've deigned to have you on to do this book plug.

And instead you come on to tell them how they're misusing their platform.

That takes a little bit of, I, I, I, courage, I feels like the wrong word, but I'm not a wordsmith.

So pick a word that's like courage.

Yeah, there's a bit of guts in that.

It does show these.

You know, chutzpah, whatever it is, there's something there.

Yeah, and it does show the conflict-averse nature of the show that Joe doesn't take too

unkindly to that.

Although patrons in the gloves off section will get to hear what Joe does think about Douglas Murray when Douglas Murray's not in the room.

When Douglas Murray isn't there, we'll hear what Joe has to say.

I think, too, that there is,

you know, one thing that Douglas Murray does touch on throughout is Joe's misuse of expertise and not finding experts.

And I don't know that that's 100% necessary for certain topics that he's covering, but I just wish that there was more

consistency in Joe's guests where there wasn't a bait and switch between what he is considering expertise in a subject, where the person has none or has very far-fringed views.

So, like, no doctor would say the things that Suzanne Humphreys said, right?

But he introduces her as a doctor, and she is a, you know, a doctor who's a kidney doctor who comes on and then talks about vaccines in a way that no one would.

And so, I think the real problem isn't expertise in that sense.

It's masquerading this fringe view from an expert as the main view.

And that doesn't really get touched at all.

He talks just that tiny little bit when we talk about fringe views, but then that's it.

That's the only time they talk about it.

And I really wish they would have spent more time on it.

But it is something nice to hear someone bring up multiple points about how Joe might be, might owe something more to his audience.

Yeah, that's fair.

All right, that's it for our show this week.

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