#0010 Tucker Carlson

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On this episode, we're delving into the back catalogue to cover the Joe Rogan Experience number 2138 with guest Tucker Carlson.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

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

Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet.

His interviews and opinions influence millions of people.

He's regularly criticized for those views, often by people who've never actually listened to Rogan.

So we listen and where needed, we try to correct the record.

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

I'm Michael Marshall.

I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello.

And today we're covering an episode that Joe recorded last year.

It's his April 19th, 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson.

As of today, the episode has been seen 16.8 million times on YouTube alone.

So Cecil, how did Joe introduce Tucker in the show notes?

He said, Tucker Carlson is the host of the Tucker Carlson podcast and the leading voice in American politics.

I didn't think that was true.

After spending nearly 30 years in cable news as a host at Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN, he is reshaping the media landscape in his newly founded online media company, Tucker Carlson Network, dedicated to telling the truth.

Dedicated to telling the truth.

Dedicated to telling the truth.

Lofty goals.

Lofty goals indeed.

Is there anything else we should know about Tucker Carlson?

I wonder if that's trademarked.

Here are some interesting things.

Tucker Carlson has been a political provocateur for over two decades.

He initially was a neocon writer for a conservative magazine, and then he went on CNN as part of Crossfire, and while there greatly contributed to the death of discourse, he started working.

for Fox News in 2009 and he co-founded the Daily Caller, wrote three books, one of which is called Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites.

Tucker was eventually fired from Fox in 2023 for undisclosed reasons.

It happened about a year before this particular interview was recorded.

It could be that he was a COVID denier.

That's a possibility.

He also used slurs multiple times on air, or he was named in the Dominion voting machine defamation suit where Fox settled for $787.5 million for lying about the 2020 election.

So it could have been any of those things or another thing.

Any one of those things.

Or something else.

We don't even know, right?

It could be something something else no way we don't know so what did they talk about well so they start talking about aliens then alex jones as a prophet the struggle between good and evil how aliens are probably not aliens lying is evil darwinism is false saunas are hard tucker carlson got hacked by the nsa he didn't homelessness is a business Russia has a right to tell other countries who they can ally with, that Alexandria Casio-Cortez is really, really stupid, and that the color purple is a very strange first date movie.

Okay, quite an eclectic bag there then.

But for the main event this week, we're going to actually take a look at a few of the times that Tucker completely distorts the facts to fit his narrative.

But before we get to that, we want to say a quick thank you to our Area 51 all-access past patrons.

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All of our patrons get early access to episodes and a special patron-only bonus segment every single week.

This week we'll talk about Saunas, we'll talk about Harvey Weinstein, we'll talk about North Korea, and we'll also talk about how definitely completely secular Tucker used to be.

You can check that out at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan.

I wanted to jump in here real quick, Marsh, before we get into the main event.

And I wanted to just mention that our show now

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Yeah, but if it, but if you do spot something like that, do let us know because I have another show where I go through those dodgy kind of products and I'd love to go through someone who wasted money advertising on his show.

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But now it's time for our main event.

It's time.

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So we're going to get started with this Tucker Carlson discussion.

This, like we suggest, was last year.

So some things that we play today, you're going to want to keep in mind the context of when this was being played.

This is well before the election, clearly, and things like that.

So try to keep that in mind as we work our way through.

So we're going to start out very, very simply with talking about the Amish because that's where you start all conversations that happen on technology is with the Amish.

I don't know, is your average Amish teenager happier than your average conventional American teenager on Instagram?

And of course the answer is, oh, yeah.

Well, they certainly have less instances of autism, which is really fascinating.

It's very, very

less autism?

Yeah, there's almost none.

Well, I'm not surprised.

It's extremely rare.

Why do we think that is?

I wonder.

I really did.

I can think of a couple.

It's That's funny.

I don't want to go Bobby Kennedy.

But that's the problem, right?

If you go Bobby Kennedy, they'll come for you.

But the question is, why?

And I don't know the answer, but.

How is that not in the debate?

How is that not in the conversation?

Well, it's not only not in the conversation, you're punished for having the conversation.

And so, like, we are dancing around anti-vax conspiracy theories, right?

Why be on the defensive?

It's like you sure are.

My goodness.

Yeah, they absolutely are.

Can we just say that that's because they're not diagnosed?

Like,

they don't have doctors who diagnose them for these things.

So they're not being checked for it.

So that's why there's lower rates.

Yeah, yeah.

It seems like there's lower rates of autism within the Amish community, but that's because you've got here, you've cherry-picked a population which specifically eschews modern medicine and avoids seeing a doctor.

And then you're shocked that you don't have an accurate diagnosis here.

It's like there's still Amish people who are autistic.

It's just they're not seeing a doctor who's diagnosing them.

I also think it's interesting, just again, we'll see what Tucker will do this constantly throughout this conversation.

But he's saying, he raises the question, you know, are Amish teenagers happier than the conventional American teenager on Instagram?

And he says, and of course, the answer is yes, certainly.

Well, is that of course?

Is there an of course there?

You haven't given any evidence of that.

You just stated what you have to say.

And we will come back to that time and time again.

But he smuggled a little one in there.

Yeah, he did.

He did.

He slipped one past the goalie there.

I also love it when people are on the biggest podcast the, what, at the time in the world.

He just got knocked off the top, but he had been for many, many years, four or five years, the biggest podcast in the world.

He's got the largest megaphone and he keeps on talking about, oh, you know, they're going to come for us.

Oh, you know, you get punished for saying this.

How on earth did either of these guys get punished for promoting misinformation about this and other things?

They've never been punished for that.

No, there's absolutely no accountability here.

There's no consequence to what they're saying.

Even that they say, oh, you can't go Bobby Kennedy because they'll come for you the way they did Bobby Kennedy.

I mean, looking at the world now, it's pretty clear that that was not a legitimate fear.

Like Bobby Kennedy, their guy that they're saying is about to be sort of pilloried if you mimic him in any way, he's now in charge of your health, Cecil.

He's in charge of your country's health.

Thanks for pointing that out, Marsh.

Super happy about that.

I want to talk to you really quickly because there's a fallacy here called correlation without causation.

And if you look up measles cases, they were high in 1965, but so were marriage rates.

And if you look at the graph, they both go down at the same rate.

So they essentially go down to where now marriage rates are low and so are measles cases.

And you could put a graph next to each other and be like, wow, those two things are happening at the same time and they presume to be true.

I don't presume what he is saying to be true.

But, you know, like, let's presume that the things you're saying are true.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're connected.

So it's just a bad way to think.

Sometimes two random facts can be true at the same time and have nothing to do with each other.

Yeah, absolutely.

And bear in mind that they picked up vaccines as the thing that Amish people aren't doing, but there's a lot of other stuff that Amish people aren't doing, and they're not picking up on that.

There's a lot of things that Amish people eschew from the modern world, but it's weird that they've decided to focus on vaccines.

And I think we'll actually stay on vaccines because they've got more to say about that.

Oh, okay.

Well, let me play that next clip.

If you purport to represent science and you're mad about a question, and you're ignoring data.

Yeah, but even within the absence of data,

science is a process.

Yes.

It's not a result.

It's a way of doing things.

And at the core of science is asking questions, including unlikely questions.

That's what science is.

And if you don't allow that, then

you may be doing something, but what you're not doing is science.

We can say that conclusively.

So for people to wrap themselves in the mantle of science and attack you for asking a question,

you know, they're frauds.

And I don't know how they have the moral high ground in this.

I don't think they do, but I think it's the same kind of mindset that allows people to create the nuclear bomb.

Because you say, listen,

we're not even saying that vaccines cause autism, but

let's say this.

If you're looking at all the data of all the things that cause autism and you see that the vaccine schedule ramps up considerably and then you have autism, which seems to at least be more diagnosed than ever before, people will instantly say, we stopped polio, we stopped smallpox, vaccines have saved millions of lives.

And they're probably right.

We dropped that bomb to keep Germany from dropping that bomb.

We need nuclear weapons so that other people don't have nuclear weapons.

We do a thing that maybe has some negative effects, but is overall good.

And I think you can kind of apply that sort of logic and reasoning as a human being to very messy issues.

I want to jump in to mention something that he talks about very early on when he says, you're not allowed to ask the question.

And you are allowed to ask any question you want.

But when it comes back peer-reviewed as false, you don't get to keep asking the same question and saying it with the backing of science.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like you should eventually stop asking questions that have already been answered comprehensively.

What they're doing is something that the science writer Jonathan Jarry recently described as the square one fallacy.

The idea that you have to be constantly starting back at square one and question the fundamentals at every time, even if they're incredibly well established.

I'd also like to point out, like, it will sound pretty weird to the listeners that Joe brings in the atomic bomb.

They had, in Joe's defense, they had talked about the A-bomb a little bit before then, so it was in his mind.

It's not out of nowhere.

It's not out of nowhere.

It's totally out of nowhere.

But it's a terrible analogy for vaccines because he's saying, well, we dropped the A-bomb so Germany wouldn't.

So he's sort of saying, well, therefore, we'll vaccinate because measles will vaccinate first.

Like, what is his point here?

What analogy is he possibly drawing here?

This does not possibly work.

So when he talks about, you know, applying that sort of logic and reason, he's not very good at drawing analogies that make any kind of coherent sense.

And also, this is a straw, man.

He's saying that when someone brings up this idea of vaccines may cause vaccine injury, other people will argue their point by saying vaccines save lives.

And that may happen on occasion.

But often, what I hear when someone says vaccines cause vaccine injury, they say, yeah, but there's not a lot of data that shows that that's a widespread phenomenon.

It's a very, very rare phenomenon.

And we sometimes take, you know, very, very, very slight risks for our benefit, like getting in a car, right?

Like we all get in a car every day.

We all assume that there's going to be a tiny, tiny risk that we're going to get into an accident.

Actually, there's probably a way bigger risk of getting into an accident in a car than there is getting a vaccine injury, but we do it every day.

And so like this idea that he's saying that there's a straw man out there that they will completely bring up something else to try to combat this isn't true.

All the evidence that I've seen when people argue about this is they just say, I don't believe what you're saying.

And then they also add to that, let's throw some more things onto the fire, which are vaccines do save a lot of lives.

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, I think I have seen people

counter the what about the vaccine injury with the

protective effect that vaccines have.

But I think that isn't to, as you say, it's not to kind of throw away the idea of vaccine injury, but to try and put it into context.

It's really important to understand risk in context.

And if the chances of being vaccine injured are one in tens of millions and the chances of catching measles and having some serious consequences as a result or polio, polio, which

was incredibly damaging, the chance if you catch that is much higher and the chance of you being severely hurt by having measles and having like lifelong complications for your immune system is far higher than the chance of having any negative repercussions to the MMR.

And I think that's what we, what's the important thing is to be able to put things into that kind of context.

And context is the thing that often gets missing in this conversation, specifically this conversation between Tucker and Joe.

Sometimes that feels like the context from Tucker is deliberately obscured.

And we'll kind of come to

versions of that.

But the last thing

a point I'll make on the vaccines here is Again, Joe is saying when you see the vaccine schedule ramps up and then you have autism, which seems to be diagnosed more than ever, this, as you say, is just another correlation, but not a causation, because the rates of autism also correlate around the time that babies start walking.

Babies typically start walking between the ages of 14 months and 18 months.

You get vaccinated around the same time.

You might be diagnosed with autism at 18 months.

But nobody is suggesting that walking causes autism because we just understand that walking is part of the natural development of a child.

And it's just that development is how you also spot that a child is autistic.

It's quite hard to tell that a baby's autistic.

It's much easier once you start to show other kind of social cues and communicative cues.

Now they're going to shift their conversation to talk a little bit about abortion.

I think people do that too, by the way.

People do that with abortion, right?

Sure.

They do that with abortion.

A woman has a right to choose.

Reproductive freedom.

They say all these things.

And then you say, okay, what if the baby is near term?

What if it's six months old?

What if it's seven months old?

And people don't want to have that conversation.

A woman has the right to choose.

You're a fascist.

Stay out of women's business.

Does a woman have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her?

Well, this is where it gets weird.

It's like, when is it a life?

But it is one of those things that to me is a human problem.

Whereas humans have these very messy interactions with some things that don't line up with their ideology.

And there's an ideology of science worship.

There's an ideology of authoritarian worship.

The bodies of science have bestowed the truth.

If you ignore it, you're a science denier.

Most abortions happen within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

That's 93% of abortions happen within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Any that happen late are because of a larger larger issue.

And I think when they start to talk that nobody, neither of these guys is talking about a 12-week abortion.

They're both talking about a six-month abortion.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And again, it's that idea of looking at the minority of cases and then using that to kind of dismiss the majority of cases.

Your one in 10 million chance of becoming vaccine injured or even higher, even smaller than that, the chances of you having an abortion in those later terms.

At least the argument that Joe is making making is a coherent argument.

I think it's not a well-founded argument, but it is an argument that I think is genuine.

He's not being disingenuous.

But listen to Tucker Carlson's contribution to that conversation.

And I think this is Tucker trying to distort facts and put you forward an argument that isn't

as honest.

Because what he says, he frames it as saying, in this conversation about abortion, he frames it as saying, do women have a right to kill you if you annoy her or inconvenience her?

Now, this may seem like it's a complete non-secular red herring,

not related.

What he's trying to do is trying to compare a fetus to a fully grown human being.

So, you know, the idea that you could be killed in that kind of way is similar.

And those two things are not in any way equivalent, especially as you say, at 12 weeks, where you are a small clump of cells.

You're not a person who, in Tucker's case, got fired from Fox News.

You know, you haven't had a rich and storied back, a rich and storied life so far and a collection of bought ties.

But he's also comparing pregnancy and the having to raise a child, especially a child you didn't want, to inconveniencing you.

So he's being disingenuous on two cases.

And he's trying to say that in a way to frame it as if saying that women have more rights than men, that, oh, women have the right, do women have the right to do these things to you if you inconvenience her, as if women are so protected by the law and by the rights that we have in society.

And that is not the case.

So it's in this very short sentence, this one framing device, he's hitting three different beats of trying to misdirect and trying to manipulate the conversation, I think.

That's a great analysis, Marsh.

I also want to point out, too,

some podcaster and a guy who got fired from Fox News.

don't get a lot of say in a conversation that doesn't have anything to do with them.

They're not owed any explanations by any woman who wants to make this decision.

Any abortion that happens after the first trimester is probably a very hard decision for that family to make.

And it doesn't need people completely outside of that decision process judging it.

And that's what these guys are doing.

They're sitting outside this, this, does, this complete discussion that has nothing to do with them and judging whether or not that is a good thing or a bad thing.

And these are also people who will constantly vote to cut fending for education or child development, or they never want to see universal pre-K, you know, that type of child care that we could have in this country.

You know, it's not even, it wouldn't even be that big of a tax burden to have something like that.

And they don't ever vote for people that are like that.

They vote for people that are pro-life, they say it, that say they're pro-life, but they're really just pro-birth.

They're not, they're not pro-caring for anybody.

They're only pro-the birth.

And so when

people make these claims, and we're going to see this later with homelessness, they're going to make these claims, but they're never doing anything to fix the situation.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

And I think that's the, it's that, that coherent of argument and it's, it's that consistency of of point that I think is important because

we could talk to somebody who was pro-life, and I would personally disagree, I'd come from a different perspective to them.

But if they had a consistent argument that they believe that life is sacred and therefore you can't have abortions, and then when the baby's born, you there needs to be support at every stage to make sure that the baby is well cared for and isn't going hungry and isn't neglected and all these kind of things.

And they were willing to put the money where their mouth is on that point, at least I would respect that they had a coherent point of view at that point.

But when their position is you can't have an abortion, but if you fall pregnant, that's your own fault for engaging in premarital sex or whatever.

And then once the baby's born, it's your responsibility.

This now very clearly becomes not a perspective that is putting the life of the child at the center of it.

It's putting the judgment of the people having the child at the center of it.

And that's kind of the issue, I think, really.

Yeah, this is really just shaming pregnant people for sex.

That's really all it is.

Yeah, absolutely.

Now they bring up a person by the name of Barry Weiss, who was a guest on Joe's show previously that Tucker had seen a clip for.

So that's what they're referring to here in this clip.

You had a moment with Barry Weiss on your show that went everywhere.

I saw a clip of it.

I never saw the show itself, but she was going on about

she was posing as one thing, and then you pressed her.

You're like, well, hold on a second.

What do you mean by that?

You just attacked somebody, and she had no idea what she was talking about.

And it became really clear to me watching, I completely changed my view of Barry Weiss forever.

I was like, oh, she's a fraud, actually.

This person's not honest at all.

Like, she has a very specific agenda.

That's all she cares about.

The rest of the stuff is just

a kind of sleight of hand maneuver.

You're talking about the thing with Tulsi Gabbard?

That's correct.

Yeah, she called her a toady, and she didn't know what that meant.

Well, but she had no idea.

Like, Tulsi Gabbard had straight outside the lines on some Syria or something.

And Barry Weiss was going through the files in her head, like, what does she have to believe?

And she was aware that, you know, Tulsi Gabbard had somehow violated that in a way that no one's willing to say, like, in detail to fully articulate.

What did Tulsi Gabbard do wrong?

No one will tell you.

She's just bad.

And then what that revealed about Barry Weiss is she's completely dishonest.

Like she's a liar, actually.

You can't, by the way, if you attack somebody, particularly personally, and can't explain why you're attacking the person, like that's not acceptable.

You're a dishonest person if you can't explain why.

And I think this is really interesting.

This really does show how Tucker makes his points, because he goes straight to Barry Weiss is a fraud, and he portrays it as that Tulsi Gabbard strayed outside the lines on Syria.

Like it was some very minor, inconsequential thing that any one of us could have done, and now she's being unfairly hounded and attacked.

And to be clear, like Tulsi Gabbard, there are some really serious concerns about her positions on Syria, her positions on Russia, to a point where even the intelligence services were warning that she could be in serious risk of being compromised.

So like there are concerns that go far, far above she strayed outside of the lines.

But Tucker's goal here is to minimize any genuine criticism of Tulsi Gabbard into something incredibly small and therefore paint anybody who criticized her as not just wrong and not just overreacting, but a liar and a fraud, and therefore some we have to write off and not listen to at all.

Yeah, she met with the dictator of Syria

who has, yeah, who has been accused of genocide.

Like, this is a guy who's not a, this is not somebody who you just meet with just to have a chit chat with.

This is somebody who most people and most, most countries around the world think is a genocidal ruler.

And you don't just go out of your way to meet with that person.

Here's another example.

This is from another article.

This is from an independent article I'll put in the show notes.

Here's a quote: In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a U.S.

Congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border, as part of her duties for the Foreign Affairs Committee, had questions for them.

How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you and not ISIS?

She asked, according to her translator, who had a conversation with her and the girls.

Like, this is a person who's, you know, apologizing for a dictator in some ways.

She's having conversations and often reciting essentially what is a Russian position on many different foreign policy issues that are coming up for America.

So if somebody says something bad about her and says, I don't like her, or I don't think that she's, you know, she seems like a toady for Russia, that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

And just because you verbally bullied a lady on your show doesn't mean she's wrong.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And that's why it's so important for Tucker that he can't get into the substance of what Tulsi Garbard has done or been accused of or any criticisms that have ever actually been leveled at her.

He wasn't even going to bring up that it was about Syria.

He was going to just stay at the very vague levels of Barry Barry Weiss was, he said, going through the files in her head to figure out, to remember what she had to believe, as if we just all given this prescribed list of opinions that none of us question, and only Tucker and a small number of the people are willing to question it.

You know, this idea that Tulsi Kabbat has somehow violated, this is what Tucker said, Tulsi Kabbad somehow violated that in a way that no one's willing to say.

Plenty of people are willing to say, plenty of people have said, and they've said it to Tucker.

So either Tucker has forgotten that that happened or he is trying to make it seem like he doesn't know that

those things happened.

And if we ask why, well, maybe we should be wondering why is Tucker so invested in being protecting of somebody who is spreading pro-ASAD messages and in particular, pro-Russia messages.

Okay, they shift their conversation to someone that Tucker recently interviewed.

So this is another person who is also doing some work.

It seems, at least

they got charged with it, doing some propaganda work for Russia.

I just interviewed a guy who is a black nationalist socialist.

Okay, so I'm obviously not much of a black nationalist.

I don't know if you're aware of that, but I'm not.

And I'm not a socialist either.

But this guy is facing prison time under the Biden DOJ because he said things they don't like about foreign policy.

And I just interviewed the guy for an hour and it was like, I'm, because on principle, you should be able to say what you think.

Period.

What is this gentleman's name?

He was actually a, it turns out I like loved him.

Oh, and I'm embarrassed.

I can't, he's he's a member of a pretty small black nationalist, socialist group.

It's like the revolutionary black nationalists or something like that.

They're out of out of southwest Florida.

And he's literally facing prison for repeating Russian disinformation.

He's not even accused of doing anything.

He's accused of saying things the Biden DOJ doesn't like.

What were these things that he said?

Repeating Russian propaganda.

About

the invasion of Ukraine.

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

Missiles on their border from a hostile power is a threat, and the Biden administration accelerated that.

And in response, Putin invaded eastern Ukraine.

Now, you can disagree with that, but that's hardly a crackpot view, by the way.

I think that's actually true.

But even if you don't agree that it's true, that's not, you don't have to be a paid propagandist from the Kremlin to say that.

Right.

I have said it.

I'm not a paid propagandist.

Is this a gentleman?

That's him right there.

Four Americans from a Malika organization work with Russian intelligence to spread propaganda fits.

Okay.

It's literally Russian propaganda, what they're talking about.

This is Russian propaganda.

Also, you know, they bring up that old, you know, NATO 1991 thing.

If you want a country you don't control to do something you want them to do, there's other ways you can do that without actually invading them.

There's plenty of ways to do it.

Now, I'm not going to say the United States doesn't take invasion off the off the table because they sometimes don't.

But I definitely think there's a lot of nations in the world that we convince to do things either through the soft power things we talked about last week or in other ways to not actually just send your troops there to invade them.

And that feels like a last resort type of thing.

And they're not talking about any of those things.

They're immediately like, oh, of course they're justified.

They should be able to send troops wherever they want if somebody doesn't do exactly as they wish.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, and I think again, like with the Barry Weiss situation, Tucker is being incredibly vague about what's being actually accused here.

He won't even, he doesn't even bring up the name of the person he spoke to.

Now, maybe it is perfectly reasonable that Tucker sat down for an hour with a guy he really liked and can't remember his name at all.

We forget things all the time.

Let's be charitable there.

That's true.

But Jord does ask some follow-up questions that I think Tucker wasn't expecting to

have to answer.

Because what Tucker is saying, he even says, quote, this guy, he's not even accused of doing anything.

He's accused of saying things that Biden's Department of Justice doesn't like.

That is Tucker's framing.

According to prosecutors, the group, quote, carried out a number of actions in the US between 2015 and 2022 on behalf of the Russian government and received money and support from Alexander Ionov, the president of the Moscow-based group Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia.

Mr.

Ionov used the APSB, Uhuru movement, and Black Hammer to promote Russian views on politics, the Ukraine war, and other issues.

That's from the BBC.

Now, Tucker, having sat down with this person, he could say

the person is innocent.

He could say he didn't do and the group did not do what they were accused of.

But Tucker claims instead here, they're not even accused of doing anything.

That is a lie.

They are accused of doing something.

Like, he says he interviewed the guy for an hour.

So either what the guy was actually accused of didn't come up in the hour-long conversation or any of the research ahead of, do you want to interview this guy who's being potentially sent to prison?

Or it did, and Tucker is lying about what he was accused of and hoping that joe and his audience buy it and joe starts to buy it here he does ask some questions ask what was he accused of what we was what was he doing but ultimately joe doesn't question whether this guy was actually doing anything wrong at all marsh i totally agree that they're they're obfuscating the reason why and he keeps saying over and over and i think we've heard this a bunch we heard this with mark andreessen too this reminds me of mark andreessen where he's they're being debanked because of their political opinions was what he said and in this case it's tucker saying they're being prosecuted for their political opinions because they're saying things against the government.

Everybody keeps on trying to frame what was our previous presidency as if you said something against the government, you got prosecuted or you had something bad that happened.

They wielded some sort of power,

whether it's a banking institution, they force a banking institution to punish you or they punish you themselves.

They keep saying this over and over and over again.

But every time you and I look into this, it's never that.

It's never that they just said something bad or something that the government that's in control doesn't agree with.

They've also, I don't know, been collecting money from that group or they've visited multiple times.

You know, there's,

this is something that they were able to prove in court.

So like, let's not presume that these people are 100% innocent of the crimes that they're, that they're suggesting they commit.

Yeah, absolutely.

And again, the court case took place in December.

This is April.

So this is before they ever went to court.

But Tucker isn't saying they're innocent of what they're accused of.

He's saying they're not accused of anything.

That is why this is a distortion of the facts.

And that's because if you go on there with the agenda of trying to whitewash what's happening here.

I think you'd know that if you frame things in a way that is aligned with the biases that Joe has towards free expression should fly at all times, he will accept it and won't offer any kind of counter-arguments or investigation or kind of follow-up or anything like that and tucker makes it really clear that i just think he says he's just a stray shooting guy he's saying that i just think you have to be able to say what you think and you know he seems to think that but only for the people who agree with him on key subjects like for example the innocence of russia in the conflict with ukraine joe's like one of these uh these guards of a door in a fairy tale that you can easily get past if you just use the words free speech.

If you say that, he'll immediately, oh yeah, go right in.

You've said the secret words.

You've said exactly what we need to hear.

And then I will 100% not question what you have to say.

And I think really smart people who've watched him in the past, they just see this and they say, oh, he's so easy to manipulate.

Look at how Mark Zuckerberg twisted everything he had to say to talk about free speech.

Mark Andreessen did the same thing.

Tucker Carlson here, most of what he's talking about is framed around whether or not we should have free expression, and it doesn't have anything to do with those things.

But Joe isn't critical enough to realize that those things are just ways to slip one past the goalie on him and use his microphone.

Yeah, absolutely.

And

you could even turn this on its head if you were to frame it around a different one of Joe's values, if you framed it around America winning.

America winning comes up quite often.

We just want America to win.

If you frame this around America winning geopolitically, then suddenly Joe, I think, would be able to understand that winning would mean besting Russia and he would be critical of he could be critical of Russia in those situations or even sovereignty of the border.

He talks a lot about the importance of having a secure border.

If you framed this conversation around the security of Ukraine's border, then maybe he'd be less willing to accept that border being violated all the time by Russian expansion.

So if you've just found a different one of his buttons to hit, you could completely, I think, redirect the conversation.

And I think smart people know that when they go on his show.

He's going to continue on here about Russia.

Well,

but nothing happens.

So that's the thing.

So I'm reading this.

Someone sent it to me, and I'm like, okay, clearly there's a crime here.

Like they were found with, I don't know, mortar shells, or they were, I mean, usually the government makes up, they put kitty porn on your computer, at least to discredit you.

There's no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy establishment of the United States disagrees with.

Okay, that's not a crime by definition.

And this guy is facing life in prison.

And it looks to me, because no one, because Barry Weiss has not defended him,

I think this guy is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison.

And I'm like, this is crazy.

The rest of his life in prison?

Yes.

Okay, hold it.

This is the thing.

I think he's 83.

Yes, how do you say his name?

Yeshitella?

Yeshitella and three other U.S.

citizens, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nivelle, and Augustus C.

Romaine Jr., are charged with conspiracy to defraud U.S.

Hess.

Oh, okay.

Defraud the United States.

Hess, Yeshitella, and Nivelle are also charged with impersonating agents of a foreign government.

Okay, they say to defraud the United States.

So defraud suggests theft of something of value, right?

By defraud you, I steal your money.

There's no allegation of that at all.

And I actually read the charges.

There's no, the only allegation is they said things that the U.S.

government, the Biden administration, doesn't like.

That's it.

And because they're unpopular and they have views that are considered quote shrint fringe, you know, like crazy black nationalists, nobody wants to defend them.

And my only point is not that I'm like such a principled person.

This also, this seems very obvious to me.

You can't allow that.

You absolutely cannot allow that if you believe in the First Amendment and the freedom of free people to say what they think.

So they're just ignoring the fact that these people received funding from the Russian government in an election.

Yeah, and also that they were accused of pretending to be foreign officials as well, which, you know, you can be done for what you're saying, what you should be allowed to speak freely.

Well, yeah, but not if what you're saying is I'm an agent of a foreign government.

That kind of free speech doesn't get covered.

And again, this isn't what they were found found guilty of, but it's what they've been accused of.

And so to pretend that they're not accused of anything, and Tucker is trying to frame this as that you have to be found with illegal munitions for you to have committed a crime.

But other crimes are available.

There are other crimes possible out there.

He's even repeating this.

He says, quote, there is no underlying crime other than they said something that the foreign policy of the establishment of the United States disagrees with.

And I actually read the charges and the only allegation is that they said things that the Biden administration doesn't like.

Those things are demonstrably a lie.

They were charged with things.

Yeah.

Also, he's trying to manipulate how we understand the word defraud in a way here.

He's saying that defraud means you have to take money.

You have to steal money from the government in order for it to be a case of fraud.

But Cornell Law School, here's how they define it.

Quote, to defraud broadly means to trick or deceive someone at the expense of another for personal gain, end quote.

And I'll leave a link in the show notes.

You can read it yourself.

So there's plenty of ways to talk about the idea of defrauding someone, even in the law.

It doesn't necessarily mean that you're trying to steal money from someone, specifically the United States government.

You could defraud the United States government and get that money from Russia.

You're trying to trick the United States.

Yeah, absolutely.

But even Joe is able to find that there's more to this story than Tucker is willing to pretend.

All right, so we're going to continue this clip.

So with this app, this implication is they're saying that they were recruited by the FSB.

So it says prosecutors said Ionov operated an entity called the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia that was used to carry out its U.S.

influence efforts overseen by the Russian intelligence service known as FSB.

They recruited U.S.-based organizations to help sway elections, make it appear there was a strong support in the U.S.

for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and backed efforts such as the 2015 United Nations petition to decry the genocide of African people in the U.S.

according to the indictment.

Yeah, so recruited by the FSB is a much stronger accusation than said stuff the government doesn't like.

But even then, while Joe has read that, he doesn't actually pick up on that and he starts getting caught up on the genocide bit.

But he had at least enough wherewithal to ask the questions that got this amount of information further out.

And at the very end of that clip, there is a very bit, a tiny bit of Tucker laughing.

And Tucker's laughing because he's trying to convince Joe that this is absurd, that what they're doing is doing something absurd to these people.

It's a joke.

It's laughable, according to Tucker.

And also, Tucker said that this guy is facing the rest of his life in prison.

And then we find out, well, partly that's because he's 83.

So, you know, any amount of prison time could be the rest of your life.

That's just kind of what happens when you're in your 80s.

But to understand what actually happened in this case, in December 2024, he got a three-year suspended sentence and he got 300 hours of community service.

So he got no jail time under the Biden administration.

Next up, we're going to talk about,

this this is where Joe finds another website, and we're going to talk about what he's reading here after he gets done reading it.

Yeah, they are not,

at least when I interviewed him, they had not been charged with taking money from Russia.

So it says they've been accused of us, they've accused us of taking money from Russia.

Yeshitella said yesterday at a news conference on July 29th, we've never taken any money from the Russian government, but I'm not saying that because I'm morally opposed to taking money from the Russians or anyone else who wants to support the struggles for black people.

Don't tell us that we can't have friends that you don't like.

He accused the

U.S.

government of seeking to use the APSP as a pawn in its proxy war with Russia.

The unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co-conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a Russian boogeyman in the public consciousness.

The escalating military aggression by the U.S.

against Russia and China is already being accompanied by increasing repression and an attempt to criminalize left-wing opposition to the unpopular war.

So to be clear here, this is the evidence that Jamie has brought up.

This is Jamie, pull that up real quick, that Jamie's brought up to explain what is happening here.

And Joe's reading this out, and he's accepting that this is now a fact check.

This is an understandable view of what's really happening.

And we can see now what these people really did.

But to be clear, what they're reading from is a website called, it's WSWS, which stands for World Socialist Website.

That is the name of the website that they're reading here.

That is the position that's been put forward.

It is not widely regarded as being a reliable source.

It's regarded as being far too pro-Putin, for example.

It's regarded as being compromised by Russian propaganda lines.

And it definitely, something called the World Socialist website, definitely wouldn't be a source that Joe would normally accept if it didn't agree with what Tucker was trying to put forward.

about these guys and make sense of the conversation that Joe is having.

This is the problem sometimes when Joe is doing, when Jamie does a fact check for Joe or when Joe does the fact check, is they will find a website that seems to support what they want to be true, and they don't care what that website is, even if it's the World Socialist Web site, which is the name of their site.

If you want to understand this story a little bit, just listen to what he had to say.

Listen to the words that Joe read off a website.

Here, I'm going to quote again: quote, the unsubstantiated allegation that opponents of the war are co-conspirators with a foreign power are intended to bolster the phantom of a Russian boogeyman in the public consciousness.

I want you to hear that and realize that sounds a lot more like an opinion piece than it does sound like somebody who's actually reporting on news.

Someone who's, this is someone who's inserting their opinion about why things are being said and how they're being said and how people are interpreting them.

Pay attention to that when you're, when you're reading a website, that's not a news website.

That's an editorial website.

And he's reading an editorial page and treating it like it's fact.

Yeah.

And pay attention, not just when you're reading it in a newspaper, but when you're hearing it from Tucker Carlson, because he smuggles those kinds of things into his speech all the time.

Every time he's making a point, he smuggles his own editorialization and his own opinions in as if they are just part of the regular news that he's telling you.

So they shift their conversation here.

They're talking about credit cards.

They are propaganda instruments designed to cloak the truth from the rest of us.

In fact, there's agreement, not disagreement at the center of power.

They all agree on the things that matter, and those are the economy and foreign policy, because that's where the money is.

There's no effort to say rein in the credit card companies, which if you really cared about the country, you'd say, but people are really suffering.

They don't have enough money to live.

Kids can't, not only not buy houses, they can't afford rent.

And why is that?

And one of the main reasons is because they're paying like close to 20% interest on their credit cards.

And, okay, we just imagine that in a free market, that's a good thing.

Tell me why that's a good thing.

Who benefits from that?

Why are we for that?

Again, I'm not for that.

I think the credit card companies are villains and they send credit cards to kids at school and get them hooked on this.

I think it's totally wrong.

And if you said that in the U.S.

Congress, people look at you like you had three heads, like, what?

They just don't care because they all agree that our current economic system and our current foreign policy assumptions are good.

So that's not a two-party system.

That's a one-party system.

And it doesn't serve the interest of the country.

See, this, I think, is an absolutely perfect example of the way in which Tucker will distort facts and shape narratives to make you feel a certain way and and therefore believe him because he's explaining things that are genuine issues.

Nobody thinks that you should be pushing credit cards on kids or that people should be paying 20% interest and be absolutely drowning in credit card debt.

Those are all very reasonable positions, but he's painting those reasonable positions as being something that the entirety of Congress is against.

And therefore, there isn't a two-party system.

It's a one-party system.

And it's only reasonable.

men like Tucker Carlson stand against them.

Now, I don't doubt that there are lots of members of Congress who would look at you like you're crazy if you talked about cracking down on credit card fees.

I imagine there's some out there who would believe that.

I don't even doubt that

there are members of Congress that Tucker knows.

I imagine Tucker's been in conversations with some of these people who are not against credit card debt.

I can't imagine that Tucker hangs out with many Democrats, though.

So I can't imagine the conversations he's having where people look at him like he's got three heads are Democratic congressmen doing that.

At best, he's extrapolating from what the politicians that he personally knows think to say what the entirety Congress, entirety of Congress thinks.

And at worst, he's just lying and manipulating you here.

And it took me, Marsh, it took me 45 seconds to find a bipartisan bill by Bernie Sanders and Josh Holly for to cap credit card interest rates at 10%.

And it was on Fox News.

So yeah, this isn't hard to find.

It's not like, you know, when you make a statement and a straw man statement at that, that nobody cares about this in Congress, you're literally lying to people.

There are, this is a bipartisan bill.

This isn't just choosing one side.

I also found another link that I'll put in the show notes that talks about how Senate Democrats are taking aim at credit card fees.

There's a lot of people that don't like what credit cards are doing, but this is a total misrepresentation of someone else's views.

And it's, it's, it's like super easy to explain other people's views, but to him, this is easy for him to distort their views to get his point across.

Yeah.

And his point is you can't trust the parties.

You can't trust the government as it is.

Therefore, you need to be looking outside at outsiders and the kind of people he wants to push you towards.

Okay, so now we're going to talk again about Russia and why the invasion of Ukraine happened.

No, I really think what they said was what I have said and a lot of people have said, which is there was a reason for this invasion.

I personally think the invasion was a bad idea.

It didn't help anybody.

I'm against war.

I'm sad the war's ongoing.

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

It's really simple.

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

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

What?

No other NATO members were clamoring for Ukraine.

It didn't even qualify for NATO membership.

Why would you say that?

When Putin's got troops massed on the Ukrainian border, you send your vice president to the Munich Security Conference with the world watching and say this that no one even really wants.

Why would you do that?

To provoke war?

Obviously, what's the other reason?

And it was scripted.

Like, Kamala Harris is not freeballing stuff.

Like, she's saying what she's told to say, obviously.

It's not her area.

She doesn't know anything about this stuff.

She was told to say that.

But why?

To provoke a war, obviously.

So that was my read.

I said that on Fox News.

Not a lot of people liked it, but it just seemed obvious to me.

I'm not making excuses for Putin.

Please.

You didn't convince me.

You didn't convince me with that line.

You didn't convince me at all when you're nervously laughing at the end of that line.

I'm sorry, man.

How is that not making excuse for Putin?

He is saying that the U.S.

provoked Russia into war, but he's also saying they did it deliberately, that the U.S.

deliberately made provocative statements in order to provoke Russia into war and Russia had no choice.

That is making excuses for Putin.

There's no two ways about it.

And obviously, he's distorting a lot of facts here.

He's saying that nobody wanted Ukraine to be in NATO.

NATO.

Well, for one thing, Ukraine applied to join NATO in 2008.

And in the Bucharest Summit Declaration in April 2008, NATO said, NATO welcomes Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership into NATO.

We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.

That would be a very weird statement to make if none of the membership countries in NATO wanted that to happen because NATO just represents the views of its membership countries.

Ukraine only really deviated from that plan to try and join NATO when Viktor Yanukovych came into power in 2010, Yanukovych being a Putin ally who turned his back on those plans.

That in turn led to the protests and his removal from office in 2014.

So Ukraine absolutely wanted to join NATO.

Mostly the people who didn't want Ukraine to join NATO were Russia, who aren't in NATO, but they have got influence, and then their close allies like Hungary and Tucker Carlson, basically the close Russian ally.

Ukraine would have been admitted a decade ago were it not for the fact that I think there were seven members who were said to be unsure about it.

And one of those was the US.

It's not like every member of NATO were enthusiastically trying to get Ukraine in.

There were some reservations.

Germany, Belgium, Spain, Slovenia, and US were amongst them.

But there was also a lot of positivity from other members about Ukraine joining NATO.

I wanted to find, because he,

first off, he cannot stop insulting Kamala Harris throughout this entire piece.

He's insulting Kamala Harris, her intelligence, what she knows, how she's completely out of her depth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, I wanted to find where he said basically that she went over there and invited them into NATO and said we wanted them as part of NATO, especially after what you're saying, Marsh, that the United States was not one of those countries that suggested they were one of the countries that said, hey, maybe we shouldn't.

I want to read to you, and I'm going to put a link to the actual transcript in the show notes, but I'm going to read to you what she said.

She said, let me start by saying that I appreciate and admire President Zelensky's desire to join NATO.

And one of the founding principles of NATO is that each country must have the ability to determine their own future in terms of both their form of government and, in this case, whether they are to be desired to be a member of NATO.

And I'll put it in context because it's obvious.

It's also the point that therefore no other country can tell anyone whether they should or should not join NATO.

That should be their independent choice.

This is the point of sovereignty.

So I respect President Zelensky's desire to be a member of NATO.

NATO is a membership.

It's about nations coming together as a group and making decisions.

No one country can say, I want to be, and therefore I will be.

And no one country can say, you cannot be.

And that is the heart of the very issue which were presented with the terms of the Russia aggression or stated aggression towards Ukraine.

So he's absolutely lying and misrepresenting.

She is very careful with her words here.

She's not saying, I want you to be part.

She's like, it's a process.

You know, we respect that you want to be part of this.

This is a really nice rejection letter.

That's what it sounds like to me.

It sounds like when you apply to a college and they're like, man, you're going to have a great career somewhere else.

That's what it sounds like to me.

It sounds like a politician threading the needle of an incredibly, intensely tricky situation.

And yet the way that Tucker tells it is that this was the poor Kamala Harris who had no idea what she was saying, was sent in there to provoke Russia into a war with an aggressive statement.

That is not true.

Tucker is lying here.

Next bit here is about homelessness, and they spend a little bit of time on this.

So we're going to do two full clips on this.

You're getting rich from the homeless, actually.

Yeah.

And is there anything more disgusting than that?

It's some junkie who's who's dying in misery outside the convention center in San Francisco, and you're making money on that?

They're essentially using those people as a battery to expand the power of government.

Yeah, and their own personal advantage.

Yeah, they're expanding government.

They're making more government employees.

Now there's tons of people that are working on the homelessness problem, air quotes.

And, you know, they probably all have blue hair and they talk nonsense.

And nothing's getting done and no one's being punished for it.

But when they did that study where they said that they had no data, like, how are you?

What?

You can't say whether or not it's doing anything?

Well, how'd you spend $24 billion?

But why are they not treated as like the most reprehensible people in our society?

I think there's too many things to think about.

There's too many things to think about.

They're talking here about how disgusting it is to exploit the homeless while they are exploiting the homeless for political talking points.

They're not trying to help the homeless here.

They are just using them as a porn.

They're also presenting this Californian scheme that spent 24 billion as if the scheme tried to find evidence of effectiveness, but couldn't find any.

Now, in reality, the results of an audit into this scheme found that insufficient work had been done to keep track of the outcomes.

For the avoidance of doubt, that's bad.

If you're spending 24 billion pounds worth of taxpayer money, especially at that scale, you have a duty to ensure that you're making sure that that spend and that work is being done effectively.

But you weren't doing enough to keep track of the data.

isn't quite the same thing that Joe's painting here.

Joe is painting the picture of people not doing anything with the money and then being able to justify it.

And that is not what's happened.

There's another clip where they continue on talking about homelessness.

What's crazy to me, just having spent most of my life in Washington, is how close this is to the lawmakers physically.

So the U.S.

Capitol sits across from something called Union Station, which is a really beautiful train station, right on Capitol Hill.

And so to get into the Capitol, when there's a massive homeless city there, people dying of drug ODs right there.

And so to get to work every day, lawmakers have to like step over the bodies of fellow Americans dying, like dying, living outdoors, shitting in the bushes, addicted to drugs, which is hell.

Okay.

And they have to ignore that on their way to creating utopia in some foreign country.

And you're like, does it ever occur to you that that's disgusting?

That your primary duty is to the drug addict, your fellow American, you're doing nothing, and you're telling me how we're going to make Eastern Europe into, you know, this brave new world.

I don't know.

I just can't get past that.

I think I'm not super sensitive or aware or anything.

I'm not super anything, really.

I'm pretty ordinary, but I think I would notice.

I was like, walking into a vote in Ukraine aid, I'd be like, shit, there are like five junkies on this fair.

Like, maybe we should do something for them.

Yeah.

How many politicians out there want to help fix things that would maybe contribute to less homelessness?

And how many politicians want universal health care?

How many politicians want universal mental health care in the United States or universal basic income or universal housing?

I guarantee you one side wants that more than the other side.

And I don't think that either of these guys are voting for that side when it comes time to pull your ballot in the, in October or November.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And what we have here is a massive false dichotomy.

You know, the lawmakers are not making a binary choice of end homelessness or give aid to Ukraine.

And because in reality, the people opposing aid in Ukraine are the same ones, as you say, opposing spending money to help house the unhoused.

But this is just another instance of Tucker finding anything he can in order to undermine the fight against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At this point, he's willing to exploit the suffering of homeless people in order to try and say, well, maybe we shouldn't be sending money to Ukraine.

And you have to start asking the question, why is Tucker so invested in turning every talking point into, we need to stop helping Ukraine and we need to accept what Russia has got to say.

We should be asking that question.

Tucker's a big fan of asking questions.

How about we ask that that question?

Seems like an important one.

But I think this is one of the things that bothers me about using, like you suggested earlier, you said they're using the homeless for a pawn.

And here's what this is.

The right will constantly talk about this thing called virtue signaling.

They say you're virtue signaling.

You're using this group to sort of talk about how virtuous you are.

But they are right now doing exactly this.

They're using the homeless as a pawn in a conversation to make the other side look evil and corrupt, but they would never ever vote for a candidate who had the homeless as a priority.

People who are trying to fix systemic problems that try to curtail or slow down homelessness are not going to be somebody who they pull the punch for.

They're not going to do that.

Instead, what they want to do is they want to bring this up to cast aspersions on that other group, but never ever talk about the solutions to that problem.

So when you hear them do this, this is what virtue signaling is.

They will accuse everyone else of it, but this is exactly what it is.

This is going to be fun, Marsh, where a little bit of Alex Jones gets introduced.

Well, and he's also channeling some stuff.

You can't call 9-11 in detail because you're super informed.

Before the fact.

He called it.

He literally called it in the summer of 2001.

He said, planes will fly into the World Trade Centers and they will blame a man called Osama bin Laden.

We know that he said that because he said it on tape multiple times.

And then he said, call the White House and tell them this.

Now, let's just, that's all we know about Alex Jones.

Let's just say that's the fact set.

How'd that happen?

Right.

How did he do that?

No, he's channeling something.

That's super, yeah, of course.

Yeah.

There's like no other, I mean, tell me how he did it otherwise.

I've asked him about it.

How did you do that?

At length, he had dinner in my barn recently.

We're talking about this.

How did you do that?

I don't know.

It just came to me.

And that's real.

That is real.

The supernatural is real.

I'm not saying that everything that Alex Jones says is a prophecy from God.

It's not.

But that was prophetic.

And if it wasn't, tell me how it wasn't.

In

July of 2000, like I lived in Washington in July of 2001.

You know, my dad worked in the government.

Like, I was as well informed as anybody could be about what was going on in the government.

I've always been interested in what's happening in other countries.

I was aware of Osama bin Laden.

I knew about the Taliban.

I knew, you know, more than most people.

There's not one person who was saying, not one person in Washington, D.C.

was saying, you know, at some point soon, they may fly airplanes into the world trade centers and blame Osama bin Laden.

Like, that just wasn't a thing.

So if you said that multiple times on camera, there's a reason.

And everyone, I've said this to 50 people, what I just said to you, and they all look at me like,

that's stupid.

Tell me how it's stupid.

Like, tell me how he did that.

Okay.

Well, I mean, first of all, he absolutely did not, quote, call 9-11, 9-11 in detail before the fact.

He didn't do that.

That is not what actually happened at all.

I want to say I found an article that facts checks this.

And the consolation prize I can offer Tucker here, Marsh, is that Jones did predict in the summer before 9-11 that the United States would conduct a false flag terror attack that might occur.

And this might even happen at the World Change Center in New York.

But I think we can all agree it wasn't a false flag attack that actually happened.

Yeah, that is what he said.

I actually went back and found the clip from

July 25th, 2001, of what Alex Jones actually said that day.

And first of all, He didn't say planes would fly into the buildings.

He did not say that.

He certainly didn't say it, quote, multiple times on tape.

That is not true at all.

He said the government may blow up an airliner, and then he was talking about

like with the World Trade Center, but he's not talking about crashing a plane into the World Trade Center.

Those two things are apart.

So when Tucker Carlson is saying, that's what we know about Alex Jones, let's just say that's the fact set.

That is not the fact set.

That is not true.

He's trying to embed a more impressive, fake version of Jones' prediction into this conversation.

If he was to get called on the details, maybe he'd drop back to what Jones actually said, if he can remember it.

But if he doesn't get called out, this version will be the truth that we are discussing for the rest of this conversation, even though it is not true at all.

This is a fake version of what Jones actually said.

Yeah, it's not prophetic to say that Osama bin Laden might attack the World Trade Center.

Al-Qaeda did it in 93.

Yeah, exactly.

Almost 10 years earlier.

Bin Laden was also an internationally known terrorist at the time.

And we know that partly because tucker carlson himself even says here i already knew about bin laden and the taliban so like he was already well enough known that tucker carlson knew he was a threat but the month before jones's prediction the conspiracy theorist bill cooper also predicted that bin laden would be blamed for an attack against the us so alex jones who's basically spent a lot of his time at that point being a tribute act to bill cooper just listened to what bill cooper said and said it like a month later it's also it's not prophetic at all for alex jones to call this a false flag operation or call anything a false flag operation, because that's what he does all the time.

That is what he calls everything at all times.

That's why he got sued for one and a half billion dollars because he calls things a false flag operation in order to get status and attention and shock value.

In here as well, you can see how Tucker is burying this stuff in his language, making it sort of carrying his ideas through in ways that are just sort of like smuggled in.

He says, that was prophetic.

And if it wasn't, tell me how it wasn't.

That's what Tucker says.

But he doesn't want you to do that.

He wants you to just believe him and not challenge him or correct him.

You know, he said, he said, I've seen this.

He said, I've said this again and again.

He said, I've said this to 50 people.

I don't doubt he said it to 50 people.

He brings this up all the time as evidence of Alex having the power of prophecy.

But all that means is he's never actually looked into what Alex Jones said in July 2001, despite ample opportunities to do so.

So therefore, we can conclude that Tucker Carlson is either a sloppy journalist whose word can't be trusted, or we can say he has looked into it and is still actively lying, in which case he's a liar whose word can't be trusted.

At this point, because he said this so often, those have to be the only two options.

He's had every opportunity to check this and hasn't done that, or he has done that and he's lying.

So those are the only two options.

Both those options have the same outcome, which is we don't believe a word he's saying.

So it doesn't matter which of those is true.

We don't need to know which is true.

We know we shouldn't believe him.

But this is how that Alex Jones was right meme spreads.

It spreads based on people never questioning what he actually said and just taking Alex's word for it, which is a tricky thing to do because Alex is a proven liar.

He's been proven multiple times to be a liar.

Why are you taking his word for it?

If you go back and check the tape, rather just rely on your memory or even his memory, you'll see that what he said isn't remarkable at all.

And this even happens in this episode.

We had to cut it out because it's so long.

It's too long, yeah.

But Joe remembers something else that Alex predicted, and he says, Alex predicted it exactly like it is now.

And he finds a video, and he gets Jamie to play it.

And while he's finding the video, he's talking up how amazingly accurate this prediction from Alex Jones is, how prophetic it is.

And then Jamie plays the video, and it's a five-minute unhinged rant about how Joe Rogan is an alien.

Alex is saying, Joe is an alien.

We're all aliens.

There are vampire conspiracies and interdimensional essence suckers.

And there's 12 dimensions, and the elites are living forever.

And dark matter means we're all in a dream with inside of a computer program.

That is the clip that Joe remembered as Alex prophesizing things, quote, exactly like it is today.

That's not what it's like today.

So we're going to end the main segment here talking about, because he brings up an interesting conspiracy theory that Tucker believes about Richard Nixon.

I mean, if you look what happened to Richard Nixon, which I, of course, did not understand at all, Richard Nixon was taken out by the FBI and CIA, and

with the help of Bob Woodward, who was a Washington Post reporter, who had been a naval intelligence officer working in the White House, working in the Nixon White House.

And then he shows up like a year later, and he's this brand new reporter.

He'd never been a journalist at all.

He's a naval intel officer, the famous Bob Woodward we all revere.

And he's at the Washington Post.

And somehow he gets the biggest story in the history of the Washington Post.

He's the lead guy in that story.

Well, I worked in a newspaper.

I've been in the news business my whole life.

That is not how it works.

You don't take a kid like his first day from a totally unrelated business and put him on the biggest story.

But he was.

He was that guy.

And who is his main source for Waterdeal?

Oh, the number two guy at the FBI.

Oh, so you have the naval intelligence officer working with the FBI official to destroy the president.

Okay, so that's a deep state coup.

What else?

How would you describe that?

If that happened in Guatemala, what would you say?

And yet the way it was framed and the way that I accepted for decades was, oh, this intrepid reporter fought power.

No, no, no.

This intrepid reporter, Bob Woodward, was a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind, to bounce the single most popular president in American history, Richard Nixon, from office before the end of his term and replace him with who?

Oh, Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission.

Now, how did Gerald Ford get to be Richard Nixon's vice president?

Well, because Carl Albert, the Democrat Speaker of the House, told him you must choose him.

We will only confirm him when they sent the actual elected vice president away for tax evasion, Spiro Agnew of Maryland.

So you have a complete setup, like an absolute.

Gerald Ford, the only unelected president in American history, actually sat on the Warren Commission.

Something else that I accepted at face value until I looked at it, I was like, that's completely insane.

You didn't want to interview Jack Ruby in your investigation of the assassination?

Okay, you're fake.

Yeah, he was on the Warren Commission.

This should be studied, genuinely studied for how many different

logical fallacies pop up in here.

It's insane.

But I'm going to leave a link in the show notes to a history.com article that talks about Watergate.

And, you know, don't believe his push pin with yarn ideas here about what happened during Watergate.

He's connecting things that have nothing to do with each other and pointing to them and saying, this means this, this means this.

Don't listen to him.

Go find out about Watergate on your own.

It's a very complicated thing.

What happened?

We don't have time to get into the like unpacking the entirety of Watergate for you, but genuinely, all it takes is a quick perusing of a few different historical pieces on this and you'll see he's completely wrong.

Yeah, although I think this is really interesting from Tucker because all the other things we've covered, I think, and it's hard to know what's in anybody's mind, but it certainly feels like Tucker is trying to distort and manipulate facts in order to make you believe something.

And I think he seems like he's doing it in a relatively cynical way.

Whereas I think in the whole conversation, this is one of the few times I actually believe that Tucker believes this.

This feels authentic to what Tucker actually does.

I could be being naive there.

It does feel that.

But he is still, even in doing that, he's framing this in incredibly manipulative ways.

For example, he says, you know, you've got Bob Woodward coming on.

He says, you don't give a kid a big story on his first day.

Well, when he says that, it makes you think that Wood was like an apprentice fresh out of school or something.

He was 29 in 1972 when he got the Watergate story.

He'd already been at the Washington Post a year by that point.

So he wasn't on his first day.

He had his feet on the table.

He'd been a journalist for a year.

And prior to that, he was a naval intelligence officer, which is an arguably related skill set in terms of finding and figuring out the truth and trying to understand things.

So like, it's not like he was this completely green out of school

trainee journalist.

And also, Tucker doesn't mention that the Woodward and Bernstein partnership included Karl Bernstein, who was an experienced journalist who'd been at the post for six years before he covered Watergate.

But because he didn't have a military background, his story doesn't fit into Tucker's narrative of it being a deep state coup.

So he's still manipulating the facts.

Even if he believes this, he's still manipulating it.

But it seems like his story is that this coup was organized for the benefit of Gerald Ford, who sat on the Warren Commission, which was investigating the death of JFK, the assassination of JFK.

And he says that was fake.

And he actually goes on to imply that Nixon was taken out by this coup because he knew, because Nixon knew why they killed JFK.

So they had to silence Nixon by framing Nixon for Watergate, a thing he definitely, definitely did.

He 100% did.

100% did.

And the irony to all of this, I think, is that Watergate really genuinely is a story of unchecked government power and corruption.

And this should be precisely the kind of thing that Joe and Tucker are completely against.

They should care about it and they should say we should never have anything like this again.

But instead, they're trying to undermine the narrative of Watergate here.

All right, well, let's move on to our toolbox section this week.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the tool bag?

Okay, so throughout this whole conversation, Tucker is frequently employing, I think, two logical fallacies in tandem

all the way throughout.

First of all, the first one is that he is constantly begging the question.

Okay, now begging the question is a slightly misunderstood fallacy because people think it means begging for a question to be asked, sort of like setting up a situation where you can't avoid this question arising.

That's not what begging the question means.

Begging the question is actually essentially smuggling your conclusion into your premise so that to accept it,

to argue or to talk about your premise, they will have to accept your conclusion along the way.

And as an illustration of that, here's an example from early on in the conversation, like five minutes in when they're talking about UFOs.

I mean, here's what we do know is that there's enough going on in the skies, but not just the skies, underwater, that

the U.S.

military has been forced to respond to it, to like move aircraft from one place to another because there are too many of these objects in the sky.

That's actually happening.

Chris Mellon just wrote a long piece about it.

So it's real.

The government is not controlling it.

In fact, it's forcing the government DOD to respond.

And we know that there is a real effort and has been underway for a long time to keep the public from knowing about it.

But that's all known.

That's established.

I don't think any rational person would deny that.

The question is, like, what is it?

Actually, I mean, now is sort of the thing you have to ask, like, what is this?

So this, I think, is a really good illustration because he's getting you to the point where what you're talking about is the question, which is, what is it?

But along the way, he tells us, well, this is real.

He didn't offer us any evidence that the UFO phenomenon is real.

He just said it's real, therefore it must be.

That's not the bit we're supposed to be questioning.

He also says, it's established.

All right.

Where is it established?

How is it established?

Well, he says, it's just known, isn't it?

It's all known.

In fact, it's so established that, quote, no rational person would deny it.

Do you want to deny it?

Well, that means that you can't be rational because the premise we've set up is that you can't even be rational if you're denying it.

All of that is to get to the, so now, given all of that, we need to ask what it is.

But at no point does he offer us any evidence or reason to believe him.

He just sounds really sure of it and then tells us that the question is something else.

So we have to just accept everything he said along the way.

And so he does this a lot.

He does this constantly.

We've heard it in the other clips so far, but once you hear it, you can't stop hearing Tucker doing it.

But it's not the only thing he does because when he's not just begging the question, he's often offering us non-secateurs, which are arguments that sound like they're proving something and they may well be, but they're not proving the thing in question.

They're proving something else.

And there's a great illustration of this, again, from the UFO conversation.

He's talking about aliens.

See if you can hear it.

So, no, it's not American technology.

Well, or Russian or Chinese.

It predates

all of that.

Well, some of it does, right?

Like, for sure, the Kenneth Arnold sightings, that was really early on.

It was like the early 1950s.

He was seeing these flying saucers, these discs that were moving over mountains.

Well, right.

I mean, the prophet Ezekiel writes about it in the first chapter, Wheels in the Sky.

Yeah, that's a crazy one.

Boy, when you read it.

Well, it is crazy.

If you read it, it's like, oh, wow.

And not just, you know, the Hebrew scriptures, like, it's all over every

Vedic text.

Of course.

So these are spiritual phenomenon.

There's no evidence they're from another planet.

I mean, I think that's the op.

That's the lie that they're from Mars.

Look, space, the atmosphere is really well monitored, right?

Both for military defense reasons, but also because, like, it would be nice to know when asteroids are coming.

And there's no evidence, there's never been any evidence that there are lots of these objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else, some other planet.

There's no evidence of that at all.

So they're from here, and they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are.

And it's pretty clear to me that they're spiritual entities, whatever that means, are supernatural, which is to say supernatural means above the natural, above the observable nature.

And

they don't behave according to the laws of science.

as as measured by people, you know, and

they've been here for a long time.

And there's a ton of evidence that they're under the ocean and under the ground.

So like with that fact set, what do you conclude?

With that fact set, what do you conclude?

I heard it that time, Marsh.

I heard it that time.

But you know, how do we know that this is all spiritual?

Well, there's no evidence they're from Mars.

And we'd know if they were from space because there's stuff out there monitoring it.

Okay, that's true.

You've done a fairly good job of explaining why they're not from Mars, but that says nothing about how they're therefore spiritual in nature.

He says, but if they're spiritual and I believe they are, whatever that means, well, you're the one who's believing it.

You should know what it means if you're expecting us to believe it.

But he's begging the question.

He says, so that means they're from here and they've been here for thousands of years.

Well, there's no proof you've offered that.

There's no proof that even the they is one single thing and not a series of different things.

You've given us nothing other than what you believe.

But it's pretty clear for him, he says.

And after all, with that fact set that he's laid out and the ton of evidence he says is there, but he's not elaborating on, what are we going to conclude other than exactly what Tucker wants us to?

All right.

So there's another piece here.

Now,

he's going to be be talking about UFOs, but then also talking about other conspiracies.

But anyway, I'd never really thought about UFOs at all, and I'd been in journalism since I was a kid.

So, of course, I'd run into a lot of people who had crazy views on a lot of different topics: UFOs, 9-11, circumcision, you know, like every whack job in the world you run into when you're covering stuff.

Fluoride.

Fluoride, right?

I just brushed with non-fluoride toothpaste this morning.

Me too.

Exactly.

But probably, unlike you, I didn't have any opinions like that.

I was like, Fluoride, come on.

You know, 9-11, shut up.

UFOs, you're fucking crazy.

You know what I mean?

I just like, I had this reflexive, I'm ashamed of it.

I'm not bragging about it.

But it was 2017, and really it was the Trump campaign.

It wasn't that I was like so in love with Trump, though I've always liked Trump because he was hilarious and charming and all that, but I wasn't like a Trumper or anything.

But it was watching that campaign and particularly his claim that they were spying on him.

And I was like, really?

The Intel services and federal law enforcement, FBI, do not spy on presidential campaigns.

Like that's so out of the realm.

That's so crazy.

Like that could never happen because, of course, there's no democracy in a system like that.

And fundamentally, we're a democracy, an imperfect one.

It kind of lumbers along, you know, but like it's not fake.

And then that turned out to be true.

And I knew it was true.

And that just blew my mind.

So I began a process still ongoing of reassessing a lot of other things.

Like, okay, well, if that was not true, what else is not true?

And what else that they told me was a conspiracy theory might actually have some basis in fact.

And

then someone from

a DOD employee reached out to me and said, actually, there's a ton of evidence that this UFO thing is real.

And really?

And so I started doing segments on it when I worked at the TV channel.

And

there was like a lot of mockery, but I was like, I don't care.

I'm just going to do this.

Trump basically turned a conspiracy theory into part of his politics.

And this is just being swallowed directly by Tucker here.

So I just want to mention that before we get into the actual piece about

the actual logical fallacies that he's using.

He's basing it off false information.

You know, Flynn resigned and he wound up pleading to willfully and knowingly making false and fictitious statements to the FBI.

So

let's just not pretend that this is just a completely innocent person that is part of this is part of the government that the United States followed.

quote unquote followed.

They followed somebody because he was doing something wrong.

And then they caught him doing something wrong and then he lied about it.

So let's not pretend that none of this stuff ever happened.

So I just wanted to preface that before you got into the toolbox section, Marsh.

Yeah, absolutely.

The idea that Trump was being spied on by the FBI is not true.

It's a distortion.

But even if that was true, it's still a non-sequitur because he thinks that it's proven that they spied on a presidential campaign.

Therefore, that makes it more plausible that UFOs are real.

But those things aren't remotely related at all.

They're not even of the same order of magnitude of plausibility or likelihood.

Like, is it outside of the realms of possibility that the FBI could keep tabs on a presidential campaign?

Obviously not.

You could find, maybe you could find some justification why you thought it was a good thing to be doing in certain cases, or you could even say, well, it's the deep state overreaching and they shouldn't be doing that, but they're capable of doing it.

Whatever.

We could say it is plausible that it could happen.

But even in a world where there was an evil deepstit who snoops on the emails of presidential candidates and their affiliates, how does that have any bearing on UFOs and alien visitations and how likely those are?

Not at all.

This is just a non sequitur, completely.

So

again, we're going to shift a little bit back to aliens.

Now that he talked a little bit about a different conspiracy theory, now we're going to shift again back to aliens.

And this is him trying to explain a little bit about the motivations behind them.

What information did you get that made you feel like it's dark?

Well, it's so dark.

Well, first of all, the deception is always bad.

Like lying is bad.

And it's bad, not just in a legal sense, in that it can be illegal to lie, but it's bad.

It's like bad for you.

Like it rots you.

Like being a liar makes you a bad person.

When you lie, you are serving evil.

There's a moral quality to it that's inescapable and very obvious.

And only like advanced

civilizations ignore that.

Lying is bad.

And so if you have lying at scale, which we have on this topic, it's inherently bad.

Okay, so that's the first level.

The deeper level is what are, okay, so if they're spiritual beings, which I believe they are, like,

it's a binary.

They're either, you know, if you're on team good or team bad, you can assign any name name to it you want.

But like, what are these things?

Are they good or bad?

And

I think some of them are bad.

And if the U.S.

government knows that, or elements, the people within the U.S.

government know that, then, you know, then they're serving a bad force.

Okay.

So, Marsh, let's do this together.

Let's work our way through this together.

He's saying.

Lying is bad.

Right.

We can probably accept that.

Therefore, lying is serving evil.

He's not proven that at all.

Okay.

All right.

And only advanced civilizations ignore that.

He doesn't explain that at all.

So if you're lying at scale, which he hasn't proven that anyone is, then it's inherently bad.

Yeah.

So breaking all that down, his reasoning is, if I'm right that it's bad, then it's bad.

That's why this is begging the question.

On picking all of that, that's what he's just said.

Let's try it one more time.

Okay.

Let's.

We can carry on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's do it one more time.

On top of that, if they're spiritual, which he has not proven, they're binary good or evil.

He's not proven that either.

And if the United States government knows that, which he hasn't proven that they do, then they're serving a bad force.

Yeah.

So again, if they're bad, then they're bad.

That's what he's got back to here.

And so those are the begging the questions.

And this is an on second, because bear in mind, Joe's question at the start was, what information do you have that makes you think that this is dark?

Why do you think these UFOs are dark spiritual beings?

And his answer is, when you lie, you are serving evil.

Therefore, UFOs must be the devil, essentially.

He's not answering or proving the question, but he's talking, he's walking you away through it as if he's doing that.

All right, here's another piece about it being spiritual.

Well, when you say spiritual, like what makes you draw that conclusion that they're spiritual?

Spiritual may be the wrong word, supernatural.

No, they're beyond nature as we understand it.

Obviously, they are.

I mean, just chart their physical behavior.

It doesn't, you know, it goes outside of what we understand about physics.

No visible means of propulsion, you know, coming at indescribable speed, hitting the ocean, continuing at speeds that are impossible under sea.

I mean, in other words, if I take a nine-millimeter router, 762 by 39 and shoot you at 50 yards underwater in a swimming pool, and it's even more intense in salt water because it's denser, you could catch the bullet if it even makes it to you, right?

So if you have a craft, any object underwater that's traveling at 500 knots as measured by sonar, right there, you're challenging our understanding of physics.

Like, what is that?

How can that be?

So

they've tracked that?

They've tracked things going 500 knots under the sea.

Yeah, really.

Yeah, much faster than any object can actually go under under sea.

Oh, for sure.

Oh, yeah.

There's a lot of stuff going on underwater and a lot.

And there's video of these things coming out of the sky into the water and also emerging from the water.

Right.

Yeah.

I just want you to know that Brett Weinstein told us those are projections.

So that's true.

I mean not real vehicles at all.

They're not even real.

I also, what he's quoting here, what I was able to find is that an admiral told a one America news network that this happened.

So I'll link in the show notes.

But yeah,

they're saying that they're moving at hundreds of miles per hour underwater, but it's not that they're clocking them.

It's just that an admiral said that that's what they're doing.

Yeah, absolutely.

But all this is a complete non sequitur because at the start, Joe asked him to define what you mean by spiritual.

And his answer is to pull out a load of attributes that don't seem natural.

Well, he hasn't proven, first of all, that any of those attributes are accurate, but also in no way is he explaining why something supernatural is therefore spiritual.

These are things that aren't related at all, but it works because Joe gets distracted by it and forgets that he asked a very specific question about these things being spiritual.

All right, last piece.

This is another piece of begging the question non-sequitur.

And he's talking about how these things can't be good.

To what end?

So there are two possible explanations, obvious explanations.

The first is the one you often hear, which is this is so heavy that if the public were to know about it, it would be just disruptive.

It would be too scary.

Like you don't want to scare people for no good reason.

There's nothing we can do about it.

And you also don't want to suggest that, you know, the U.S.

military isn't capable of protecting the country, the homeland.

And it does suggest that.

If you can't control these objects in your airspace, and that's known, they can't, that's known, okay?

Then that's just a limit to the power of the U.S.

military.

And you don't want to tell people that because then they like won't believe that they're safe.

I get it.

But then there's a deeper level, which is like, okay, what's your relationship with these things?

What is the U.S.

government's relationship with these things?

And there's evidence that there is a relationship and that it's longstanding.

And that raises like a lot of questions about intent.

And

it's like, what is that?

And I just personally decided,

you know, and people have been hurt by these things.

You know, that's a fact.

That's a fact.

It's a knowable fact.

It's a provable fact.

And killed.

And I'm not saying millions of people have been killed by whatever these things are, but people have been killed.

And it's known because it's working its way through the courts out of the VA.

So

I don't know.

An object that is by definition supernatural.

It's above the laws of nature as we understand them.

And that has resulted in the deaths of people.

We don't spend enough time thinking about what that adds up to.

Not good, actually.

Not good.

Stop saying it's a fact.

Jeez, he says it so many times.

You're not convincing me.

It's a fact when you say it's a fact.

Yeah, he smuggles them in all the time.

And his point is, you know, he says specifically, if you can't control these objects in your airspace and that's known that they can't, that's known, then it's, that just shows there is a limit to the power of U.S.

military.

That is begging the question.

You are saying that you can't control him.

You're saying that these are things that can't be controlled.

You're putting that in your premise.

But what about where the UFO was a misidentified plane?

That wasn't beyond control.

It was fully under control.

What about where it was a balloon?

Yeah, you can't control it, but not because it's a massive threat, just because it moves around in the wind a bit.

And then throughout all of this, he concludes all of this by wrapping up his two unproven assertions.

He says, you know, an object that is by definition supernatural is above the laws of nature as we understand them, and that has resulted in the deaths of people.

He hasn't proven that this is resulting in the deaths of people at all.

I looked into it.

I couldn't find any evidence of it.

And he goes on to say, and we don't spend enough time thinking about what that adds up to.

Like, not good, actually, not good.

He's not said that we don't spend enough time thinking about it either.

And all of this is he hasn't even proven that it's a thing.

But now he's just putting in this assumption that we should be thinking about how evil this thing is.

We should be first figuring out, are these things even true?

Are these things even happening?

And he's offered us no evidence that they are.

It's really interesting to see him do this rhetorical one-two punch.

And he does it a lot throughout this entire episode.

These are just instances that we found, but there's probably many instances of this where he's doing this rhetorical one-two punch.

And it keeps you on your back foot because you're constantly listening and you're like, wait, is that a fact?

Hold on, he said that's a fact.

Is that a fact?

And so you're stumbling, waiting for him to finish up this sentence.

And it sounds like what he's saying, the premises would follow.

But when you pay attention to exactly what he's talking about, you're absolutely right, Marsh.

He is doing a rhetorical technique to try to trick you.

Yeah.

And he's done it for years now.

If you look back at any of his segments on Fox that would go viral of him speaking directly to the audience and telling them what to think, it's constantly layered with these kind of parenthetical clauses or these parenthetical premises that are in no way proven, but he's expecting you to just accept because you need to get to the bit at the end where he's going to ask you a question about something unrelated.

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

Trust me.

Okay, Marsh, what did you think about this particular episode?

Did you find anything good in it?

So I did find something good.

And it wasn't too hard to find something good here because there's a point at which Tucker is talking, first of all, about AI.

Then he says about if it's going to be a threat to people, if AI is going to be a threat, it's going to be bad for humanity, if it's going to sort of rise up and take over our jobs and be terrible for humanity, then we should just strangle AI in its crib and blow up the data centers.

I was like, yeah, that's probably true.

I mean, if your working assumption is that eventually AI is going to get to a point where it's incredibly detrimental to humanity, then that is a reasonable step to take.

Now, obviously, we might disagree as to how likely that situation is, but that is quite a serious position to put out.

And even if people said, well, the chances of it getting to that kind of level of threat to us are...

10%, 1%, 12%, we can debate how worthwhile it is to take that risk.

I think that's very reasonable.

And then he goes on to say that the American right, the right wing of the American politics spectrum, are wrong to keep defending the dropping of nuclear bombs on civilians in Japan because it killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of civilians.

I think Tuka's absolutely right.

You should not be defending the dropping of bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I also liked that both of them seem to call out

that really stupid idea that we have that you're a flip-flopper if you change your mind.

And I think, you know, if you're presented new evidence and you change your mind, that is not you being inconsistent.

That is you actually being consistent.

That's actually you looking at data and saying, you know what, I changed my mind.

And we have this weird thing.

I don't know if you guys have that in the UK, but in the United States, we call it flip-flopping.

And we talk about it all the time when it comes to politics where, oh, these guys are flip-floppers.

Look at this guy.

He's a flip-flopper.

Before he wasn't for universal health care.

And now, look, he's for universal health care.

You can change your mind based on data.

And I hate that that's how we've decided to frame our politics in this country.

It's so simplistic and silly.

And they both call it out.

And kudos to them.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

I mean, over here, here, we typically call it U-turning to a point where Margaret Thatcher made it a point of pride that she never made a U-turn.

She said on stage or anything like U-turn if you want to, but the lady's not for turning.

It's okay.

So you can't change your mind based on getting new evidence then.

That is another reason to dislike Margaret Thatcher.

I've got a long list.

That's horrifying.

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

Remember, you can access more than a half hour of bonus content every week for as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at norogan.com, or you can go to patreon.com/slash slash no rogan.

Meanwhile, you can hear more of me at cognitive dissonance and citation needed and more from Marsh at skeptics with a K.

We'll be back next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

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