#0009 Bret Weinstein

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2269 Nice with Brett Weinstein.

The No Rogan Experience starts right now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a 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 whose interviews and opinions influence millions.

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

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

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

I'm Cecil Cicarello and I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

And today we're going to be covering Joe's February 6th interview with Brett Weinstein.

How did Joe introduce Brett in the show notes?

So according to Joe, Dr.

Brett Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, podcaster, and author.

He co-wrote A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life with his wife, Dr.

Heather Haying, who is also a biologist.

And they both host the podcast, The Dark Horse Podcast.

Okay, so that's the show notes, but is there anything else that we should know about Brett?

I think so.

There's some background, I think.

So Brett Weinstein used to teach biology at Evergreen State College until in 2017, he objected to an anti-racism protest, essentially, because for decades at Evergreen, ethnic minority students would voluntarily observe a day of absence every year in order to highlight the contributions they make to campus life.

But 2017, there was a lot going on with race issues in the world.

So at that point, someone suggested that how about that year?

What if it was white students who chose to voluntarily be absent for the day instead?

And in response, Weinstein emailed the entire campus email list of all faculty and students to object to this proposal, calling the suggested voluntary absence, quote, a show of force and an act of oppression.

That went down about as well as you could expect.

In the end, Weinstein resigned from the school and even tried to sue the school for $3.8 million in damages.

Wow.

And he was eventually awarded $250,000, which I imagine is like several years of salary for a professor at the school, something like that.

The whole affair obviously propelled him into the international spotlight.

He was one of the founding members of the intellectual dark web.

That's what led to the launch of his Dark Horse podcast, where he essentially spent the entirety of the pandemic claiming that ivermectin cures COVID, which it doesn't, and that the vaccines are dangerous, which they aren't, and that it is absolutely proven that COVID leaked from a lab, which it isn't.

Okay.

Well, what else did they talk about in this show?

Well, they spent a lot of time on this show on the stories that are coming out from Elon Musk's dismantling of USAID, which we'll obviously focus on for the majority of this show.

But as well as that, they also touched on the free market, Trump's Avengers, UFOs, there's a hint of chemtrails, there's a bit about rainbows, there's porn, there's sex, there's universal basic income.

And also Brett explains that he was actually right about ivermectin, and he was actually right about vaccines, and he was actually right about COVID, and that he also has a discovery that will revolutionize our modern understanding of evolution.

Wow.

Okay.

All right.

Well, that sounds like a lot.

But before we get to our main event, we want to say thanks to our area 51 all access past patrons, Laura Williams, Joseph Haynes, Eleven 11 Gruthius, Chunkhat in Chicago, Am I a Robot?

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They subscribed at patreon.com slash no Rogan and you can too.

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

This week, we're going to play a clip where Joe complains that people with no discernible skills can get famous.

It's really crazy.

You should check that out.

And you can do that at patreon.com/slash no rogan.

But for now, our main event.

Huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast.

That was David Plank from the Board in 60 Seconds YouTube channel.

It's a board game channel.

So check it out.

He is announcing our main event this week.

Remember that you too can be on the show by sending a recording of you giving us your best rendition of it's time.

Just send that to no roganpod at gmail.

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Absolutely.

And so the main event this week concerns USAID, which was one of the first targets for Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

Musk and his team have released an absolute slew of allegations of financial mismanagement, outright fraud, all leveled at USAID, which have made headlines all around the world.

But before we get into all of those, Cecil, I'm British.

I don't know your various American acronyms and initialisms.

So how about you give me a little background on what USAID actually is?

All right.

We're going to have to dust freedom off your bookshelf here, Marsh.

We're going to have to talk a little bit about USAID.

So USAID stands for United States Agency for for International Development.

And this agency was created during the Cold War by President Kennedy.

And this is from an AP article, quote, he wanted a more efficient way to counter Soviet influence abroad through foreign assistance, end quote.

So now.

We are all well aware of the Cold War, but after the Cold War, there was, we still sort of have these other superpower frenemies.

USSR is gone, but we have other people.

We still use this program to combat Russia and China, gaining more influence with other nations.

Here's another quote from that same AP article, quote, China has its own belt and road foreign aid program worldwide operating in many countries that the U.S.

also wants as partners.

I'll link to that, to that article in the show notes.

You can check out all the things that USAID does.

Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense because like foreign aid is a kind of soft power.

You do nice things for a developing nation and in return, they see you in a more positive light.

And then, you know, maybe you're more likely to get that deal for those mineral resources.

Or maybe the best and the brightest talent from that nation sees your country as a good place to come and apply their skills.

Or maybe you stop people from falling into the kind of ideas and ideologies that your country opposes.

Because it's often cheaper to stop someone becoming radicalized than to deal with the fallout of an attack.

And it's always cheaper to prevent a war than to fight one.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that foreign aid shouldn't be fairly scrutinized.

Absolutely.

It should be put in the microscope because waste is obviously going to be definitely possible.

Well, and today we're going to be focusing on the expenditures of USAID.

And that amount of spending is about $40 billion a year.

And that's a lot.

And it sounds like a lot, but it's small in comparison to our $6 plus trillion dollar budget here in the United States.

USAID, it's less than 1% of our budget.

And it helps a lot of charities around the world.

And we're going to get into exactly what they help.

Yeah, absolutely.

But foreign aid, that's something that people often misunderstand.

So what did the American people think about foreign aid before these latest headlines?

Here's a quote, and this is from another AP article.

Quote, about six in 10 U.S.

adults said the U.S.

government was spending too much on foreign aid.

Asked about specific costs, roughly seven in 10 United States adults said the U.S.

government was putting too much money toward assistance to other countries.

About nine in 10 Republicans and about 55% of Democrats agreed that the country was overspending on foreign foreign aid.

At the time, about six in 10 adults said the government was spending too little on domestic issues that included education, healthcare, infrastructure, Social Security, Medicare.

Polling has shown that the United States adults tend to overestimate the share of the federal budget that's spent on foreign aid.

Americans say spending on foreign aid makes up about 31% of the budget, but it's closer to about 1% or less of the budget.

Right, that makes sense.

And obviously, if you think that foreign aid is 31% of your federal spending, then yeah, you're right to think that is way too much money you should be spending.

That is a huge, huge amount.

1% of people actually knew how much it really was, maybe they'd have a different view.

And maybe this sort of speaks to what's been happening with who's been framing this foreign aid conversation.

Yeah.

One thing that I noticed when I was researching for this show was just how many of the news headlines from news outlets around the world were echoing the revelations from Musk and his team, and specifically where some of those news headlines were.

Like the Moscow Times, for example, ran a report demanding that the full list of US aid-funded projects should be made available to Russia in the wake of this scandal.

And that kind of feels relevant because foreign aid is typically the kind of thing that a country's enemies dislike precisely because it's a soft power.

You know, Russia would rather lessen American influence around the world so they can have the influence themselves.

And it is really hard not to see Musk's zeal for this endeavor of dismantling US as at least influenced a little bit in part by the regular meetings that he was revealed to be having with Vladimir Putin over the last two years, as reported in multiple media outlets, as Musk hasn't ever actually denied.

And we can put links to that in the show notes.

We should probably have that in mind while we're thinking about exactly what this money is going to and what it's not going to.

Yeah, absolutely.

All right.

Well, let's get started.

We're going to play our first clip now.

And this clip is talking about USAID.

It's Joe basically talking about USAID and how much of a racket it is.

It's great.

And it's so interesting.

I was listening to a left-wing podcast today.

I like to mix it up.

I listened to all kinds of different stuff.

And it was like I was listening to a different world.

They weren't even talking about all of this corruption and all this obvious buying of influence.

Instead, they were talking about aid overseas and now people are going to starve.

It's mind-boggling.

And there's also, I have to say, I'm just, I'm upset at the general pattern of a failure to recognize how right those of us who hypothesized that there was a racket that had overtaken our entire governance structure.

We turn out to be absolutely right about this, and no one's going to mention it.

That's mind-blowing.

It's very strange that the media is ignoring it, especially the left-wing media.

It's just too big of a win for the right, and so they're just ignoring it.

And then they're just highlighting the good things that USA did, which I'm sure it probably did, probably had to do some good things to at least justify its existence.

As a cover story, I'm not even sure.

Maybe it doesn't change anything.

Obviously, this was a mechanism used to funnel money to all sorts of things that we didn't vote on, that don't make sense in light of our constitutional structure.

And I'm, you know, I obviously have concerns like everybody else about where this train takes us, but seeing that structure broken up is a huge relief.

I think it's really interesting.

This is literally a minute into the conversation.

They come right out of the gates, hot onto this conversation.

And we've got Joel within a minute saying it's that the left-wing podcast he was listening to wasn't even talking about this.

I'd love to know what left-wing podcast that was, first of all.

He doesn't name it.

That's a massive shame.

I don't think it's this sure.

I can't imagine it's this short.

I'd love to know what the left-wing podcast actually was.

But the thing is, it's not a perfect system.

But if the people you disagree with aren't even talking about the thing that you think is the biggest scandal ever, it's generally worth considering why that might be, because either they are trying to bury the story or you are wrong.

And either of those are possibilities.

You need to be open to both of those options.

Yes.

And we're always going to blind ourselves, first of all, to the idea that we're wrong.

So it's worth interrogating that first before you accept that the entire left-wing media, the entire media you disagree with, is burying the thing that you think is the most important thing ever.

So I want to get into what they fund because I think it's important to talk about sort of what they're funding.

Because the way Joe is passing this off is if this is money that's wasted, this is trash money.

This is money that we're throwing away.

This is money that's really just there to help left-wing ideals and woke policies, et cetera, et cetera.

So I'm going to talk about some of these things.

Here's some things they fund.

The UN World Food Program to Assist Hungry People in South America, Partnership for the Conservation of the Amazon Biodiversity, Financing Cocaine Production Alternatives such as Coffee and Cacao,

the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which has been credited with saving more than 25 million lives largely in Africa.

Yeah.

And if I could just come in for a moment there.

Those last two, I think, are really interesting to understand how they affect America.

So financing cocaine production alternatives, so financing coffee and cacao is a way of stemming the flow of cocaine and drugs into America, which is one of the things that is fueling the crisis at the border.

If you listen to the people who are experts in those areas, so like you can either spend a lot of money repelling people and trying to prevent drug traffickers from entering the country, or you can spend that money disincentivizing the people who are growing the drugs in the first place because they don't have to do that.

They're not ideologically trying to grow drugs.

They just want to make stuff that'll keep them feeding their family.

They can do that with coffee instead of cocaine.

And then that last one, the AIDS relief in Africa, it's worth pointing out.

This is a quote from Sky News in the UK.

The health ministry in Uganda has announced its intention to shut all dedicated HIV, AIDS and and tuberculosis TB clinics in the country.

Standalone pharmacies supplying antiretroviral drugs will also be closed.

These facilities provide HIV treatments and preventative therapies to millions of people in Uganda.

This is in a direct result of the

defunding through USAID.

That includes an estimated 1.5 million Ugandans currently living with the virus.

An official said that the closure of the clinics was a necessary response as the country grapples with the loss of funding from USAID.

Flavia Kiomakakama from the National Forum of People Living with HIV AIDS Networks, Uganda said, quote, we're going to see patients dropping out their treatment plans, drug resistance will increase, and we will see more violence in hospital as people with HIV get attacked.

That's the downstream effect of taking that funding away.

That's what we're dealing with here when we're talking about the money that was being spent.

I'm going to continue on with some more of this list.

There's a halting USAID could also have a dire impact on the humanitarian situation in eastern Congo, where American aid funds access to food, water, and electricity, basic care for 4.6 million people displaced by years of conflict.

There is a maternal health and child and malaria response and HIV in Ghana that they fund.

Civil war turns Sudan, which is grippling with cholera, malaria, and measles.

The aid freeze means that 600,000 people will be at risk of catching and spreading those diseases.

It counters Russian influence in Georgia and Armenia.

It helps fund hospitals in war-ravaged Syria.

It supports marginalized communities from the Balkans to Uganda.

It works on helping secure rights, democracy, and media in Myanmar, landmine removal in Cambodia, and wartime help in Ukraine.

Yeah, so all in all, things that USAID was doing to justify its existence as a cover story, according to Brett Weinstein.

That's the shiny change that they were showing in your face while they were picking our pockets, Marsh.

That's what they were doing.

And the thing is about this is like, I don't believe believe in the idea of American exceptionalism.

Why would I?

I'm not American.

But surely these are the things that are meant to be American exceptionalism, the thing that you can export to the world to help the world when it comes to disease and things like that.

And Joe mentions, you know, the left-wing podcast wasn't talking about how he said the USAID was buying influence.

It was talking about how people were going to starve.

When you see the list of projects that it funds, it's really hard to argue that these aren't good things.

And people might say, okay, I'm American.

Maybe these don't directly benefit me in the U.S.

But you've got to look at the long game because having less HIV in the world means less chance of an HIV outbreak in the US from somebody who flies here and then suddenly you've got to deal with HIV in the US.

We've already seen fairly recently that you can't keep diseases

localized to specific countries.

They tend to spread.

Slippery little bastards, those diseases, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So apart from Myanmar, well, you can say, well, why do I care about the people of Myanmar?

Well, specifically, it shows American strength in the face of China who want Myanmar.

So you can show America standing up to China and that's supposed to be like American superiority there.

Hospital in Syria, that's going to stop the advances of ISIS there.

Helping Ukraine shows the strength, shows American strength in the face of Russia.

People like to praise folk like Elon Musk and Donald Trump and saying they're playing four-dimensional chess.

Well, these are moves.

Closing this kind of aid, stopping these kind of projects, shows a fundamental inability to think strategically, at least to think strategically in America's best interest.

If you've got other interests, then perhaps if those interests are personal, if those interests are your own business, then perhaps, but it's in America's best interest to keep those things going.

It's also really, really telling here that Brett's response is to be upset that people fail to recognize how right he was in saying that the government had been taken over by a racket.

That's his main thing.

I'm outraged that nobody said you were right all along.

And I'm also, I'm fascinated that Brett is really worried about USA doing what he thinks, you know, is stuff that you didn't, you in America, you didn't vote on.

It doesn't make sense in light of your constitutional structure because those stories have specifically come out of an

unelected bureaucrat, billionaire, going into agencies and departments that were set up and funded by the constitutionally appointed government and tearing them apart.

So if your constitution is the thing that Brett is most worried about and most concerned about, why isn't he worried about the way that it's been trampled on by Elon Musk and his team at the moment?

Let's play this next clip.

Now, this is, they're sort of shifting focus a little bit to talk about the southern border.

You know, USAID is, of course, riddled through whatever international madness it is that caused us to open our southern border and facilitate an invasion through the Darien Gap.

So, you know, seeing that structure laid bare is,

it almost feels like it can't be real.

Like it can't have been this close to the surface, and yet here we are.

The language there, I think, is fascinating.

An invasion through the Darien Gap.

For me, that feels more divorced from reality and more a sign of being inculcated in certain media bubbles that Joe was just describing other people being inculcated into.

Like, this isn't a reasoned take on thing.

This isn't a balanced, I've seen it from all sides.

This is, I'm buying into a very specific narrative here.

And I think we should be concerned for that.

Also,

this is bringing up the point you just made in the previous segment.

Many of these programs were put in place to slow people coming here or to reintegrate them when we send them back.

So

these are programs and funds that are used in this process.

Joe was just talking about this in a previous program where he was saying, we really need to try to make sure that the lives of people where they live are better so that they don't try to travel here and carry their whole family here to try to get a better life, make sure their life is better here.

Joe literally said that on a previous program.

So what he, what this is what that money was for.

So if you're complaining about that, you're also complaining about something you were just on the other side of in a previous program.

You're not even consistent with your own thoughts.

Yeah, Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

And another good rule of thumb, it's not a perfect rule, but it's a useful kind of rubric along the way is if something feels like it, quote, almost like it can't be real, it's worth exploring whether it is real or isn't real.

You know, whether you're just being told what you want to believe.

And I think that's what we're seeing here, unfortunately.

Yeah.

All right.

So this is a really interesting point that shows the scale that we talked about earlier.

We talked about when we first started the show, we talked about the scale in which Americans think how much of our money is being spent on this.

Listen to this conversation about the debt.

Well, we were always wondering, like, why is our debt so high?

Why is the national debt so high?

Like, why is our deficit so insane?

Well, this is it.

I mean,

how about the one where they paid $236 billion

for chargers?

Do you know that they were trying to set up chargers?

You mean car chargers?

And they only built a couple of

$40 billion for electric car ports.

Eight ports have been built.

You know how crazy that is?

$40 billion

for car ports.

But I have to say, as much as this is shocking, I wasn't surprised.

I thought that effectively our entire system had been turned into a racket and that we were basically being fed a cover story from it.

And it's weird to now have the evidence of this.

There you go.

Shocking but not surprising.

Cecil, the U.S.

national debt was $36 trillion as of November 2024.

Is that due primarily to wastage in USAID?

Well,

just to give you an idea of how much money goes into USIID, I said it was a $40 billion a year department.

Social Security is

a $1.3 trillion a year department.

Medicare is $839 billion.

Medicaid, $616 billion.

And the defense budget has $805 billion as its budget.

Yeah.

And USAID is $40 billion.

$40 billion.

At $40 billion a year, it would take USAID 900 years to accumulate the US debt.

So it is probably not USAID that's doing it.

I mean, America isn't 900 years old for one thing.

Some of us live in countries that are over 900 years old, but you know.

Anyway, but the other thing is, this clip is also a very big sign that Joe and his team haven't done even the very basic fact-checking or even basic research about what they're so outrage by, because they're saying that

USAID spent $40 billion on electric car charges, but the budget of USAID is $40 billion.

So unless they're talking, okay, they get $40 billion a year, but unless USAID is just car charges and nothing else, these numbers can't possibly add up.

And Joe should stop and look further into it, but he doesn't because it's aligned to what he wants to be true.

But this leads us to our next clip.

A few moments later, Jamie pops in with a fact check on that very specific charger story.

So let's play that piece.

They said that they haven't actually, according to this, they haven't actually spent all that money yet.

What do they do with it?

They've spent some of it to make some of those things, but it's just, it hasn't been allocated yet.

It's a long article going through all the spending that's been done.

It's on factcheck.org.

Factcheck.org.

Who runs that?

Some of the chargers have been made.

Some of them are on the way to be making.

They've built 61 at 15 stations since mid-August or through mid-August.

14,900 more are currently in some stage of development.

But that's where it goes into where they are, what they have to be done, and who's getting the money from them has to be done through a long process from each state.

Yeah.

The question is, how can we get a proper accounting, as you point out?

Who the hell is fact-checked?

Well, that's the problem with fact-checking organizations.

That should really be illegal.

Like, I think if you're a fact-checking organization, we should have stringent rules on what influence is being peddled.

Like, who is paying for these fact-checkers?

Who's behind the scenes?

What is the determinant?

It should be very transparent.

How did you determine whether or not this was true or false?

You know, because there are a lot of things that get said.

Like, I don't know if you saw this, but Elizabeth Warren got confronted, and it's on Twitter this morning.

She got confronted about the amount of money that she's received from pharmaceutical drug companies.

She said she's never received any money from pharmaceutical drug companies and never received any monies from any PACs.

And then, of course, underneath it, community notes strikes again.

And, of course, she received millions.

Yeah.

She's a fucking liar.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Well, and it's an arms race.

How can Pharma cloak the money that it's giving so that there's plausible deniability at the point that Elizabeth Warren is confronted or Bernie Sanders?

Bernie Sanders was hilarious.

Only $1.5 billion.

Only 1.5 billion out of 200 million.

Only 1.5.

So I think this is really interesting because this starts off as Jamie pulling up something that completely undermines the outrage that Joe had.

And his first instinct is, well, we'll go after the people who are reporting this and question them.

And his second instinct is to move on to something completely different.

He never actually addresses the fact.

So let's correct the record.

Let's address the fact here.

USAID has a budget of $40 billion.

They can't have spent $40 billion on car charges.

But also, USAID doesn't build things in America.

That's That's not the over, like it's USAID, like overseas kind of aid stuff.

He's talking in this case about the Department of Transport, which spent the money on the car charges.

It was $7.5 billion and not $40 billion, as Joe has said, or the $236 billion he started out with before he crazy.

It's really going down.

It's a bad auction.

I mean,

and they built way more than the eight charges.

So he said it was 40.

So Joe started this charger story at, let's be charitable, $40 billion spent by USAID to build eight charges.

And the real story is $7.5 billion allocated, but not fully spent

by a different department to build 15,000 charges, 61 of which are already complete and the rest are in progress because it takes time to build them.

But even when Jamie pulls an explanation that makes it really clear that they're wrong, they don't pause and question if their information or their understanding is bad.

They stop to question the thing that disagrees with them to find out why that must be not telling the truth.

I have to clip that piece too where he says fact checking should be illegal because that's kind of amazing.

But

there's, if you go to factcheck.org, you can literally see who funds it and who runs it.

It's all on their about page.

It lists everything.

You can just look at it.

And in fact, you can see it from the page that they pull up.

There's a way to actually click and follow that stuff.

There's an article.

And in the article itself, when he says, well, how do they know this stuff?

In the article itself, it's literally just a list of links that show over and over again why this particular piece of information that has been disseminated through Twitter and through uncredited sources is incorrect.

And here are the citations in the article itself.

It's written like a blog post.

So, you know, you'll see a hyperlink over a word, but that is a link that you can follow to find out whether or not the thing you're reading is true.

And you can fact check factchcheck.org by following those things.

I'm going to leave a link to that very specific thing that they called up in the show notes.

But genuinely, all you have to do is just read it.

Just read it.

And you could see that it is, it is sourced and it is, it, you can follow those sources and then decide whether or not you want to believe those sources or not.

But you didn't even bother to do that step.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, what Brett says here is the problem with fact checking is how do we, like, the question is, how can we get proper accounting?

And the answer is go to their website and look and it will tell you all of the proper accounting.

Like transparency is there if you look for it.

If you don't look for it, transparency isn't what you were looking for all along.

What you were looking for was to find things you disagreed with.

And Joe moves on to, well, okay, well, Elizabeth Warren talked about transparency.

She said she didn't take money from pharmaceutical companies, and yet she got pinged by community nodes pointing out that she receives millions and that she's a liar and all this kind of stuff.

And again, Joe is citing Twitter gotchas here.

He's talking about a post that claimed that Bernie Sanders is the largest, the single largest recipient of pharmaceutical money in the Senate, which itself wasn't true.

He wasn't anywhere near the largest.

There were plenty who were far larger.

And it also claimed that Warren took millions from pharma companies.

The source on all of this is a very useful website called Open Secrets, which does document political contributions.

It monitors all of that, which is great.

It's transparent.

But what the source here, what the tweet that Joe's referencing doesn't mention is that neither Warren nor Sanders got the money from political action committees or in donations from the pharmaceutical companies.

The donations that are tracked by Open Secrets that say they're coming from pharma companies are small donations from low-ranking employees.

So, if you ran the phones for a pharma company, if you sat at the reception desk for a pharma company and answered the phones and you give $10 to Warren's campaign, you just got counted as a donation from Big Pharma.

But those are very different things.

And it's absolutely fine that we should be tracking those donations and understanding where they're coming from.

But that's very, very different from saying that Elizabeth Warren took millions and millions of dollars from Big Pharma or that Bernie Sanders was the largest single recipient when he wasn't and they weren't coming from the pharmaceutical company themselves.

All right, next clip is talking about what we were mentioning earlier where the USAID is in fact funding leftism.

Well, it makes sense now that we're seeing these numbers because, okay, this was what was funding the infrastructure.

Now we get it.

Because it wasn't otherwise, it's organic.

This is the will of the people.

This is how people are moving.

It's not.

It wasn't that at all.

This was all organic.

And it was really about control and money.

It had nothing to do with helping people, making people better, giving aid to foreign countries.

That's all a cloak and dagger bullshit show.

The reality was it's about money.

Yeah, it's well, well,

it's always about power and limited resources.

And this was a new game taking place at a level that was hard to believe, and therefore many of us couldn't see it.

I dislike when they talk about money.

How does he think USIAID money goes into their pockets?

That's how he seems to be presenting this.

It's like, how does he think even political donations work if that's the case?

They don't enrich the candidate.

And that's sort of what we feel.

What it feels like when they say these things is they feel like they're saying they're getting money.

But in the case before,

it's their campaign is getting money so that they can get re-elected.

It's not like Elizabeth Warren is driving a brand new car that's provided for this money that she got from a

political action committee.

And the same thing with USAID.

If these people who are in our government are using it, they're not seeing this money come back to them in some way.

But it almost feels like the way he's talking about it, that's what he's trying to intimate when he's talking about it.

Yeah, he absolutely is.

And I know that Elon Musk has actually come out recently.

I think it was in the interview he gave in the Oval Office, stood behind Trump's desk, while Trump was sitting at the desk, where he talked about how a particular employee of one of these departments found herself very rich.

And is it just that she's a great investor?

If not, we should take investment tips from her.

Otherwise, the money she's scrolling away.

So they are actually alleging here, without strong evidence at all, that there is literal financial embezzlement going on.

Yeah, that's right.

And

unless people go to prison for this, that isn't true because embezzlement is a crime that we absolutely, everyone should be up in arms about.

But that doesn't look to be what's actually happening here.

I will retract that if it turns out that this person did embezzle a lot of money.

By all means, we will.

What I think they're talking about here in particular is the allegation that USAID was funneling money to left-wing organizations in the US in order to build a fake left-wing movement designed to oppose Trump.

And part of that has been the allegation that Political, the website, the journalism website, was funded by USAID, specifically Specifically, that USAID gave Politico $8 million.

And Politico has been very critical of the things that Trump has said.

That allegation that USAID was funding Politico is an allegation that was repeated by Trump on the social media company that he personally runs and profits from.

It's worth pointing out.

He said, quote, looks like billions of dollars have been stolen at USAID and other agencies, much of it going to the fake news media as a payoff for creating good stories about the Democrats.

What I am going to point out is that everything he just said isn't true.

USAID didn't give Political $8 million.

They did give Political $44,000, but that wasn't a donation or a payoff for good coverage.

It was a subscription to Political's information tracking and analyzing tools.

Like the very sophisticated tools that keep abreast of like the latest data that's out there, they sell those wire service type things

as a service that you can sign on to.

And USAID had bought subscriptions to several of those in order to keep abreast of things, data and information that was very relevant to them.

It's a bit like accusing USAID of funding the Associated Press because they had a subscription to the Newswire or accusing them of funding Microsoft because they had a subscription to Office 365.

Okay, next piece is about Medicaid.

Chamath said that it's going to be like I ran Contra on steroids.

That's what he said.

He said, when you get to the bottom of all this, it's going to be insane.

Because they haven't even got to the Medicaid yet.

They haven't even got to the medical stuff.

There's so much they haven't even tapped into where they think the real motherload of fraud is.

Yes.

And I must say that there's also another aspect to this which we have to be careful about, which is that the

justifiable anger at discovering what it is that we've been dragged into as a nation is going to make it hard to see where the limits ought to be in terms of upending this stuff.

In other words, at the moment, I'm cheering for the wrecking ball.

Right.

Break this stuff up never again.

I'm just so happy that our United States government is going after the real criminals, the people who have to be on Medicare and Medicaid.

Finally, finally, the United States is doing the right thing by going after elderly people who need Medicare and Medicaid.

Yeah, and what interests me there is, I wonder what Joe Rogan's fans think of this.

Because I don't know Medicare, Medicaid.

I say I'm British, I don't know the American system.

I imagine quite a lot of people across the country are on those systems.

I imagine a lot of those people listen to Rogan.

And I wonder how many of them are hearing when he's saying that the fraud in that system is in the system that's providing them with the drugs that keep them alive, with the

medical machines, the various kind of prescriptions, the things that people need to survive.

That is what's been gone after.

And I think what they're trying to paint is, well, you'd have even more access to that if there wasn't such fraud in the system.

That's the impression they're trying to get.

I don't know that that's the reality of what they're going to look at in the numbers.

But I think what's really what they're going to find in the numbers, rather.

I think what's really interesting as well to look at here is that they are assuming that the real, you know, the mother lords of fraud, their first targets for where all the fraud is, will be overseas development, foreign aid, and then medical care for Americans.

That's their primary targets for where they're going to look first.

At no point have they suggested that their project will examine, for example, the tax cuts, the tax cuts for the rich and whether those are a source of government waste.

Right.

Yeah.

Trump's tax cuts during his first term, he gave away $1.5 trillion, and most of that went to the mega wealthy.

As a result of his first term, the richest 400 billionaires in the U.S.

paid an affected tax rate of 23%,

while at the same time, the bottom half of American households paid a rate of 24.2%.

So the billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the people who are at the lower end of the income scale, who might also be the ones on Medicare and Medicaid.

They paid more money than people like Elon Musk.

Trump has promised to extend that in office.

And so far, he's been

fulfilling the promises he's been making when they're those kind of promises.

Elon's team isn't looking at that as a source of government inefficiency.

So it's really important to ask, who is this work from Elon benefiting?

And what stones isn't he turning over?

Where is he scrutinizing and where isn't he looking and who benefits from that?

I think these are important questions to ask if we want transparency about this whole project.

At least Brett, though, does urge a note of caution.

He says you have to make sure that you're not pulling in, you're not sort of pulled into cheering the destruction of things that are actually beneficial.

So yeah, I think that's a very reasonable bit of caution.

Although I don't know that he's got the same list of essentials that we would have.

And I think when he's talking about that, I don't think he's thinking of the same things that we would say.

Well, let's find out what Brett does urge some caution on.

You know, sometimes when I see like a list of preposterous scientific projects that have gotten big grants,

I read it and I think I...

Some of they all sound preposterous, but I don't know.

Some of these things are likely to have had a good explanation and it just is not apparent in the soundbite.

And some of them are every bit as preposterous as they seem.

And so I can't look at a map like that and say what I would expect if the system was healthy.

So I'm cautious about it.

I don't think the system was healthy.

I think the system was a racket from one end to the other.

And I've been saying that we've been living in the era of malignant governance where there's basically no element of this you couldn't turn off and make us better.

But I will just say, I was talking to a friend of mine who runs an Alaska Native Corporation, which I don't know if we've talked about Alaska Native Corporations before.

But this is a corporation.

It competes for federal contracts.

It has some advantages in the competition for federal contracts, and all of the profits go to Alaska Native.

And it is finding itself in a very difficult-to-navigate battle because of all of the successes of Doge.

So the Alaska Native Corporation is utilizing something called the 8A program.

Well, the 8A program is now under attack by some large corporations, federal contractors who do not like competition from things like Alaska Native Corporation, and it is being portrayed as if it was based on race, which it isn't.

Anybody can use it.

It's not a race-based program.

But because people are in a mood to dismantle all of this left-wing solution-making corruption,

these megacorporations are finding it easy to target the AA program, and they are persuading members of Congress that it doesn't belong.

And this is going to be a tragic loss if this program, which works well, is dismantled in the fervor to go after all of the stuff that should never have been.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So first of all, I think it's really interesting that Brett is saying here, there's no element of this whole system you can't turn off and not get better.

And then he comes up with a thing that he thinks is working really well.

So he must be arguing that this eight-year program should be turned off.

But he's saying, you know, and I do agree with him.

At the start, he says, like, you can paint something in the worst possible way if your goal is to demonize it.

And he says, you know, I don't know whether some of these things are actually as bad as this made out or whether if you knew more about it, they would look all right.

And yeah, unless people dig into the details, they'll never know what the real story was.

You're not going to know.

It's really important.

That's why it's really, really important that we don't just trust whatever gets tweeted out by the Department of Government Efficiency or Big Bowls or whatever he's called who works for Elon Musk or whatever gets thrown up in all caps on Truth Social.

We need to see the details before we know what to think.

We can't just believe what we're told about it or given a soundbite.

And we're going to go through a lot of sound bites in the toolbox section to show what these projects actually are.

But Brett's main point is actually

that he happens to have personal knowledge of a program that he thinks is good and useful, presumably one that you can't just turn off and make everything better.

But the quote, success of Doge is putting that program that he thinks is really useful under threat.

Now, firstly, he doesn't consider for a moment whether

that is a real sign of the success of Doge, that a thing that's working really well might stop and harm people.

That might not be a sign of success, Brett.

That might be a sign of the other thing.

But also, he can't then extrapolate out to wonder, well, what about the other things out there that I don't know about, that other people know about?

Yeah.

If I knew the details of those, would those be the same?

Does every program out there need its own Brett before Joe and his circle will consider it valuable or not?

That's a really great point, Marsh.

You know, like it needs its own little lobbyist to see whether or not this is a good program or this is a bad program.

And it, it definitely, like, Joe feels like sort of an attack dog through a lot of this, but he slows down here when Brett slows him down because he wants to explain to him, no, here's a program that might be gaining something from this particular bit of money and we shouldn't be so excited to tear all of government down.

And I think you're absolutely right.

If somebody was there, maybe.

I want to talk just for a second.

I want to pause for a second and just

I want to make a plea to people who listen to Joe Rogan and the audience that he garners and just say.

Brett is not bringing a level of expertise to the table with his previous experience or his understanding or his studies.

Brett is an evolutionary biologist.

I have no problem with Joe Rogan having a conversation with his buddy, Brett Weinstein, who he's had some sort of relationship with over the years and talking about this very subject.

But

I want to pause to everybody who's listening and just wait and think about what do they bring that's different and that is useful to this conversation.

Now, they can be having a conversation that is informed and not be experts on the subject i'm not saying that that's not possible but what i am saying is if they're not bringing you sources and if they like later on we're just going to see they're just reading tweets they found Consider the source on which you're getting.

This isn't some ProPublica reporter that he found that has done some internal investigative work on this.

This isn't someone from a department that was recently fired or someone, even one of the people that Elon's working with.

It's none of those people.

It's not somebody who studies soft power at a university even.

This is an evolutionary biologist he's talking to.

So take that for what it's worth and recognize that often Joe does not speak to experts in their field about the things that he is complaining about.

Yeah, absolutely.

And look, we're not going to pretend that we're experts in those things.

We've had to do a lot of reading to understand this.

And we are trying.

I'm trying to put forward the limits of my knowledge as I'm saying this.

And we're also trying to cite the sources on where we're getting these things.

So you aren't just taking our word for it.

We're trying to be as fair as possible, both to Joe and Brett, but also to the things that are being brought up, the stories that are being brought up, and what the reality is.

So go away and check what we're saying is what we're trying to tell you to do.

It isn't what Joe and Brett are trying to tell you to do.

All right.

So now this is when Brett actually defends the program he was discussing.

But its connection to the 8A program now has the good that it does in jeopardy.

And I don't know how many stories there are like that, but we need to be be careful that our excitement about watching all of this nonsense torn apart doesn't cause us to tear apart things that actually are functioning well and don't suffer from the defects of the DEI madness.

It sort of feels to me here that Brett is inadvertently saying, look, it's fine for them to come first for the others, and I didn't need to speak up as long as they never come for me.

The thing that I care about is the thing that, as long as they never come for that, it's totally fine.

But what he doesn't consider is, what if all of the rhetoric about DEI madness, which was woke madness before that, and it was political correctness gone mad before that?

What if all of that is just a smokescreen to stop people defending beneficial programs that they're not personally connected to?

If they can't be, if they, if those programs can be misrepresented in a way that won't be challenged.

Brett likes this program.

Someone could point out that this program is all about specific Alaskan people and paint it as racist and write the whole thing off.

And Brett is defending that because he has personal knowledge.

He doesn't have personal knowledge of all these other things, but he doesn't pause to think, well, what if I'm just being misled on those things?

What if they have some merit that I'm not aware of?

It's always so important to just get outside yourself and to get outside the things that you know.

And I think these human connections that he's made with people that are involved, once that suddenly makes it personal to him.

I think in the abstract, it's easy to cut, it's easy to criticize, it's easy to do all these things.

But the moment it becomes personal to you, that's when you take a step back.

And I think that it's important to constantly try to remind these people: you need to try to think about these actual people that are involved in this.

Because if you did, you might change your mind and think very it's very similar to the program that you're trying to defend.

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Wow.

So that's the tool bag?

And something just fell out of the tool bag?

Okay, Okay, so for the toolbox section this week, we're doing gish gallop.

Marsh, what would that be?

What is that logical fallacy?

So a gish gallop is when you throw out so many facts and statements and claims and pieces of information that your opponent does not have time to go through everything and debunk it all.

So you throw out 10 pieces of information, the opponent has to spend 10 times as long explaining each one of them.

And if they miss one, well, that just makes it look like you were right.

And of course, your opponent isn't going to get that amount of time.

So when it comes back to you to say something else, well, you can throw out another 10.

And then you just flood the entire conversation with all of these claims.

And it's impossible to counter all of them.

It was actually coined by Eugenie Scott, who was a science educator who worked in countering creationism.

And it was specifically about a creationist called Dwayne Gish, who would have this tactic during his...

I didn't even realize that.

Yeah.

I didn't even realize that.

It was Gish was the name of the person.

How?

What a clever thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

And so Dwayne Gish would throw out all these problems with evolution when he was debating a biologist.

And a biologist would not have a chance to explain how each one of those things he was saying was wrong in a way that took a while to explain.

And it was impossible to get through all of them.

My favorite thing I ever saw about Dwayne Gish actually was somebody.

was once debating him.

I forget the person who debated him and realized that he had this tactic, but he also used the same rhetoric every time.

So he actually went and watched Dwayne give this lecture several times before.

And then in the debate, he asked that he would go first.

And instead of making any points in favor of evolution, he said, well, Dwayne is going to start by telling you this and it's wrong for this reason.

Then he's going to move on to this and it's wrong for this reason.

And Dwayne only had the same speech and got off and did exactly those points.

So you can counter a Gish Gallup if you know in advance.

But after the fact, it's really hard to know how to counter every single point that's being said.

He did the M ⁇ M thing in 8-mile.

He did.

Yeah.

Tell them something they don't know about me.

And then he dropped the mic and he walked away.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

I want to read this part.

This is from Rational Wiki, and I think this is also an important piece to the Gish Gallop.

Although it, quote, although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping to the next, a refutation of the same gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort.

The tedium inherent in untangling the Gish Gallop typically allows for very little creative license or vivid rhetoric, which in turn risks boring the audience or readers, thus thus loosening the refuter's grip on the crowd.

So it's a debate tactic.

So even if, even if someone were in the studio with Joe and Joe were doing this sort of stream and reading this thing off, the stopping would be a boring part for many of the people who are listening.

Do we just call our show boring, though?

Hold on a second.

Okay, let's just get to the first clip before we think about that too much.

This is talking about the U.S.

AIDS spending.

Now, this is Joe reading directly from a tweet.

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

And this is off the Jesse Water Show.

U.S.AID, $20 million for Iraqi Sesame Street, $2 million for Moroccan pottery classes, $11 million to tell Vietnam to stop burning trash, $27 million to give gift bags to illegals.

$27 million.

$330 million to help Afghanis grow crops.

Crops.

I wonder what those crops are.

What's their biggest crop, Brett?

It's going to be the poppy seeds for bagels.

I'm going to be

$300 million.

Oh, $200 million

on an unused Afghani dam.

$250 million on an unused Afghani road.

Okay, so strap in because we're going to go through this.

That was the Gish Gallup.

Now let's untangle it.

The first thing to be absolutely clear on here is that Joe Source on all of this is a Twitter account called Kanakoa the Great.

Someone whose bio reads, quote, my course explains exactly how x's algorithms work how to create viral content and how to grow and monetize your x account that's joe's source he's got a link kanaka the great has a link to how to hack x in order to make as much money as possible i wonder if part of that course is share gish gallops that will go viral and be spread on the like most listened to podcast in the world i imagine he's made some money from this wow but kanakawa is just referencing a clip from fox news from jesse watershaw and that clip has a white house spokesperson who holds up a single a4 sheet with bullet points of each of these talking points and more.

So this is just bullet points of these summaries of every little bit of it.

All right, so let's start at the top.

$20 million

for Iraqi Sesame Street.

Now, this is a program.

that was a 2021 grant to Sesame Street Workshop, the company that makes Sesame Street and international versions of the children's educational show.

USAID had funded Sesame Street Workshop productions in several countries.

The grant helped fund an Arab-language version of Sesame Street.

An archived webpage describing the grant said that it aimed to bring stability to Iraqi children after years of conflict in the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria and to promote inclusion, mutual respect, and understanding across ethnic, religious, and sectarian groups.

End quote.

Yeah, absolutely.

So this is money to try and encourage cooperation across religious and sectarian groups.

This is to stop people being radicalized into ISIS.

It is much cheaper to stop someone becoming an ISIS member and having therefore, you know, stop them going into ISIS and therefore they'll have a much more fulfilling life and become a better, more rounded person, but also someone that you don't then have to monitor and then worry will attack another regime somewhere.

So this is defense ahead of times through soft power.

What about those $2 million pottery classes?

It's quite hard to find anything about that other than people ridiculing it based on these tweets, essentially.

But I did find something which said the initial goals of the project that this is referring to were to improve Morocco's business climate and to work on ways to use water sustainably for agricultural growth and to strengthen workforce development.

A key part of the project included training Moroccans to create pottery to sell domestically as well as internationally.

And from what I read, the program didn't seem like that big a success.

And we can absolutely criticize it for those reasons.

Sure.

You tried to do something and it didn't work and it wasn't very good.

That's reasonable.

But But if we're going to criticize it, we should acknowledge it isn't just teaching Morocco how to do pottery, which they've been doing for a long time.

It was to try and encourage them to have a sustainable source of income and therefore work their way through things like climate change-related issues, where their other sources of income, their other source of employment might be water heavy, might use a large amount of water and not be very good for the climate.

So that's kind of what's going on there.

What about the next one was a million dollars to tell Vietnam to stop burning burning trash.

Again, this is put forward in a very dismissive way to tell Vietnam, like all it took was to say to Vietnam to stop burning trash.

But being burning rubbish is actually a major pollutant in Vietnam, especially burning things like plastics.

So when they go to recycle plastics, like recycling plastics is very difficult.

And so in many places, they will burn them instead.

You might wonder, well, what's that got to do with America?

Why is that America's problem?

Well, where do you think the trash is coming from?

Where do you think that rubbish is coming from?

American companies ship their trash to Vietnam, sometimes under the guise of recycling, like recycling plastics.

Oh, put your plastic recycling in this thing.

We'll send it off to Asia to be recycled.

But recycling plastics is massively labor-intensive and complex and doesn't always work very well.

And so sometimes when that American rubbish gets to Vietnam, it just gets burnt.

which contaminates the water, it contaminates crops, it contaminates the air, it causes major health issues.

So USAID funded projects to discourage that burning.

And if you think about the history a little bit here, the USA kind of has some cleaning up to do of its image in Vietnam, especially when it comes to toxic chemicals that destroy the environment over there.

So maybe this is another soft power thing.

You don't want Vietnam

re-associating America with the toxic chemicals that are burning down their environments, as has happened during the Vietnam War.

The next one is pretty insulting.

This is what he says: there's $27 million

for gift bags for illegals.

Now, the gift bags themselves are actually backpacks that were given out that are providing food, transportation, school supplies, and finding work to help migrants reintegrate into their homes and country.

So it wasn't just a backpack with that stuff in it.

It was a backpack that gave them some things that they could then use in school.

And this is when we send them home, right?

So we've, they've come here.

We've decided, no, you need to go back to your country of origin.

We've brought, they've somehow gotten there and we've given them something to help them stay there instead of turning around and coming back and maybe trying to enter illegally or something like that.

We've done something to try to help improve their life in some way.

Again, like Joe was arguing a show ago that maybe is something we should do.

It's not just like the way it's portrayed is like gift bags for illegals sounds like a Christmas present you're giving them with like a little box of chocolates and like a cookie cutter in it or something.

Like it's ridiculous and it's and it's demeaning and it's showing that they're not even bothering to look into it.

And it's also trying to paint this as absurd, which it isn't.

And now let's look at the Afghanistan spendings there.

There's the $330 million to help grow crops in Afghanistan.

Joe points out that this is opium.

It's all about opium.

Like the, this is USAID funding like a drugs program that they will profit from.

It's literally the opposite of that.

It's literally to help them grow crops other than poppies to make it sustainable for other crops to be better to be be grown so you don't have as much cheap drugs floating and flooding the market and causing the downstream issues in places like America.

So it's literally to stop, for example, the opium crisis or things like that to try and cut that off at the supply by giving people an alternative sustainable

living crop in Afghanistan.

And then we can come to the unused Afghanistan roads and dams.

They don't name the specific dam in the tweet.

Kanakova the Great doesn't go into detail on which specific dam they're talking about.

But I did see that the Kajaki Dam powerhouse in Afghanistan provided power, electricity.

It was a hydroelectric dam that provided electricity to a large number of homes until it became a bombing target of the U.S.

Air Force during the attack on Afghanistan in October 2001, at which point it was destroyed and stopped doing that.

So funding from USAID and World Bank and several other donors was used to rehabilitate that dam and bring it back online.

I don't know for certain if that's the dam that the tweet was referencing because they don't mention, but it's worth pointing out that when it comes to Afghanistan, like Afghan infrastructure, there's a pretty good reason why America might be involved in paying to rebuild it, because it was quite a lot of American bombs that destroyed it during the war on terror.

And again, this isn't to question the war on terror.

We can have that conversation separately.

But if somebody was absolutely committed to that war, this isn't to question your commitment to that war, but it's pointing out, even pragmatically, that if your war did involve blowing up these key infrastructure points, if you pay to rebuild the power supply that you blew up, maybe you stop some of the kids who grew up without power from hating you and joining ISIS.

So you cut off the next ISIS fighter at the start.

This is really basic hearts and minds kind of stuff.

And the thing is, Joe can understand that when he sits down to talk to veterans, we've seen it.

He's had those conversations.

He understands it.

But here, when it's just a line in a tweet, he doesn't make that connection at all.

I want to interject real quick, Marsh.

You would be able to find all the information about this particular grant if the USAID website was not completely scrubbed from the internet.

If you go now to go try to find out any of this stuff, you have to go to archive.org in order to find the stuff that was in the past.

You can't find or navigate that site because it's literally blank right now.

So let me say that if this stuff was so egregious and so easy to spot the fraud, why not leave that website up so anybody can just dig around in it and find out all this fraud that's so obvious that Milan Musk is finding?

why take the entire website down so no one can check on it?

Yeah, absolutely.

If this is a project all about transparency, why are they now hiding this information from you to check it?

I also want to say too, just really quickly, that this is a perfect thing and a perfect list for people who don't like government spending.

These are all.

framed in the most obvious and in the most ridiculous ways possible to make them sound absurd so that when you hear it, it's a great talking point.

It makes a great tweet.

And but once you open it up, and this is exactly what we're talking about with the Gish Gallup, right?

This is exactly what a Gish Gallup is.

If I can say a quick barb that you then have to fact check and your fact check is boring, then I won that argument.

And that's what this is.

That's, you need to pay attention to how they're framing all these things.

The more absurd they make them sound, do some digging in them because that's the most important thing.

I think they're trying to hide things things by making it sound silly and making the American people immediately reject it without ever doing any kind of research whatsoever.

Yeah, absolutely.

This is clickba rather than journalism, is what this is.

This isn't information.

This is just headlines.

And Brett has already

warns in this show not to just trust this kind of stuff.

But then it aligns with what he thinks, so he just trusts it.

Next piece is about a very common boogeyman for right-wing people, George Soros.

They gave $27 million to the George Soros prosecutor fund.

So our own government is funding this left-wing lunatic who is hiring the most insane prosecutors who are letting people out of jail who commit violent crimes.

So when I initially tried to find a source for any of this, the only thing that I could find online initially were clips of this show, which really does show how much Joe skews the reporting and the conversation.

When we were first researching this, anytime you Googled about the 27 million to George Soros, you just came in a circular motion back to Joe here.

So, the only thing I initially had was: if you think George Soros is this incredibly wealthy billionaire who's pouring loads of money into all these different projects, do you think George Soros would care about receiving $27 million?

Is that the scale that you think George Soros is funding things?

So, this just doesn't ring true even initially.

And so, we had to dig a little bit deeper.

Yeah, I couldn't find a link either, but I did find that George Soros does actually,

he does donate to, as Joe suggests,

some liberal groups that donate to prosecutors across the country.

And I'm going to read a quote from the New York Times here, quote, in reality, Mr.

Soros donated to a liberal group that endorses progressive prosecutors and supports efforts to overhaul the criminal justice system, end quote.

And look,

we can argue whether or not we think that it's a good thing that George Soros is following his values, because I think we can all look at the criminal justice system in the United States and say there's problems with it.

Some people may find different problems than i might find but there are problems with our criminal justice system i think george soros probably thinks very similar to i do that the criminal justice system is weighted against black people in the united states it it uh it constantly punishes them more and harsher for criminal offenses that white people don't get punished for in this to the same degree.

So it's it's perhaps he is giving money in those races very specifically to try to see if he can tip the scales in some way so that it's a little more balanced.

So there could be arguments that we can have about whether or not we think George Soros, his influence is overpowering here.

But let's not pretend and let's make sure we bring into the conversation, if we're talking about that, about something that just happened recently in the last election with Elon Musk spending $290 million in the last presidential election.

If the the boogeyman here is billionaires donating to influence politics in the United States.

Let's not neglect Elon Musk from this conversation.

I'm totally down with removing billionaire money from the United States electoral system if you are.

The problem is, is you're only picking, you're cherry-picking the ones that you don't want to donate and you're not paying attention to the ones that are and are donating

just by my numbers, it's 10 times as much in a single election to a single candidate not that spread across the country.

Yeah, absolutely.

And also also bearing in mind that the source of all of these apparent revelations that just unravel when you start investigating them is Elon Musk.

So Elon Musk gave that amount of money to a campaign in this election, and now he's the one in the government taking apart these departments.

It feels like he got value for money.

It feels like he bought his way into something pretty powerful.

And I agree, there just shouldn't be this amount of money in politics.

I don't care if that money is on my side of the fence or someone else's side of the fence.

It just shouldn't be there.

But actually, as it turned out, since the show went out, Joe actually revisited this talking point again on episode 2271, in which Jamie actually pulls up a tweet from Steady Drumbeat on Twitter, which explains that Joe is summarizing.

This whole conversation incorrectly and we revisit this $27 million to George Soros.

So

Joe is summarizing research put out and statements put out by a guy called Mike Benz.

Mike Benz found that USAID gave $27 million in grants to something called the Tides Foundation, and that the Tides Foundation also backs the Fair and Just Prosecution Group, which Soros is involved with financing.

So that is the link that Joe is summarizing when he says $27 million to George Soros.

Now, Benz implies, and Joe seems to accept as a direct relationship, that therefore USAID gave

$27 million to George Soros as FJP using Tides as a middleman.

But the thing to bear in mind is Tides is a much larger organization, that is an organization that specializes in handling large amounts of grant money and then allocating it to various different causes.

USAID gave TIDE the money to go to something called the Civil Society Innovation Initiative and then use Tide to handle all the admin of all of that.

So USAID doesn't have to get involved in the form filling and the various kind of box ticking stuff.

They say, here's the grant money.

You admin this grant to this end goal.

They did all of that in 2016.

So the USAID money didn't go to the FJP.

It went to Civil Society Innovation Initiative in 2016.

That's the

$24.6 million of the $27 million.

It didn't go to FJP because FJP, George Soros' group, didn't exist in 2016 when this money was donated.

It came to exist in 2017.

The Civil Society Innovation Initiative gives money to non-profits abroad to fight disease, monitor human rights abuses and promote digital security.

So they aren't involved with hiring prosecutors in the US, these left-wing lunatic prosecutors who let violent criminals go free, as Joe puts it.

I don't think Joe was obscuring all of this deliberately.

He just wasn't incentivized to look into it at all.

It agreed with what he thought, and therefore he repeated it.

And when this came up on the show, he actually finds every way he can to try and avoid accepting that he was just plain wrong here, which is weird because he's told us in multiple shows now how keen he is to admit when he's wrong, how important it is to say, I fucked up.

Where is that here?

So this is clearly what we're seeing here.

So I want to give credit to Steady Drum Beat on Twitter for doing all this work to uncover all of that.

Hats off to the Redditor, PM MeYourFave Hike, for drawing attention to this update on Jules Later Show.

We're still treating this entire episode like as if it were one large gish gallop.

So, this next piece is another fact check, and this is about the Kamala Harris interview.

Bernie Sanders making a post about how Donald Trump is trying to silence independent media was the wildest fucking gaslighting I think I've ever seen from a politician.

Independent media, you mean fucking CBS?

You mean CBS that edited that Kamala Harris interview to make it look like she had a really good point.

Just point out, I think what he's referring to here is how Trump has done things like banned the press credentials of the Associated Press, removed some of the more mainstream newspapers and media outlets from the White House press pool and replaced them with people like OAN who are very kind of loyal to him.

That's the stuff that Sanders was criticizing.

But George's counter is that CBS edited Kamala Harris's interview to make it look like she had a really good point.

So the claim here is what that's circulated quite far.

I think Trump has has even tried to bring a legal case about this, is that Kamala did an interview with CBS where they

edited her to make her look better.

And it's based on there being there was an ad for the interview that went out where they ask her a question and she answered it.

But then when you watch the actual main show, they ask her that question and her answer is something different.

So they're saying, oh, well, they've edited it to make her look smarter.

This isn't gaslighting though.

This is just normal interview editing.

And in fact, they even released the full transcript of the entire interview, which they wouldn't normally do because this is just normal interview editing.

And they did it to show that they've just highlighted different sentences from the same short answer.

It's not like she hesitated or rambled or has been edited together in different kind of ways.

They've just kind of like highlighted the bit in one ad that they thought worked well and then another bit on the main show.

This isn't something that Kamala Harris has demanded.

It's not something that they've colluded with her.

This is something entirely normal.

And also...

It's really worth pointing out, it's something that Trump has taken advantage of his whole career.

All politicians will have done so.

All politicians will be edited in interviews to seem like they're out to

make their answers more succinct and things.

But if you see interviews where Trump isn't being edited, he is significantly less clear and less understandable as the ones in which he's edited.

So this is entirely normal.

It's not about gaslighting in order to promote Kamala Harris.

This is just a false talking point.

All right.

So the next bit here is him talking about Obama.

You know, Obama passed that law in, was it 2012 that allowed the government to use propaganda on its own citizens?

That law?

I'm trying to remember.

This is not the NDAA 2012?

No, no.

NDAA is that's the Authorization Act.

This is a.

That's indefinite detention.

Yeah, that's indefinite detention.

This is different.

This is the use of propaganda.

So they authorize the use of propaganda on American citizens.

So the CIA, instead of turning its propaganda wing on the whole world, they are allowed to use it under the guise, of course, of national defense and national security.

Sometimes they need to bullshit us.

Well, that is, in fact, exactly what we have discovered.

And why it was so hard to convince people of this before the evidence for it emerged, I don't know.

But all you needed to realize was that some rogue element had decided that it had the right to engage in the same kind of regime change bullshit domestically that it was already feeling entitled to engage in globally.

So on this one, I think actually Brett calls out what Joe's referring to here, because it seems to me, having looked into this, that Joe is likely referencing a claim that was, that Obama signed a law in 2012 allowing government propaganda to be used in the U.S.

and quote, making it perfectly legal for the media to purposely lie to the American people.

That's a quote from a post that was circulating on Facebook a little while ago.

And that post was talking about the National Defense Authorization Act.

So the NDAA, which...

sounds like what Brett is talking about there.

Now,

as best I can tell, that is the post that Joe appears to be referencing.

If so, it's worth pointing out that the thing that Obama signed in 2012 didn't make propaganda legal to use on American people at all.

What it did do was lift some of the restrictions that existed on domestic dissemination of government-funded media.

And that was so like Americans who wanted to access media produced by the U.S.

Agency for Global Media, things like Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, they could get access to that material upon request.

Previously, stuff that was created by that media organization and broadcast internationally wasn't available to the U.S.

public, but this law meant that you can actually, upon request, see it.

It's not about being subjected to propaganda because you have to request it.

You have to ask in advance.

So ironically, given the subject of today's show being all about transparency, Joe here is complaining that Obama made it legal for you to ask to see what your tax money has been paying for all this time.

All right.

We're going to finish this section out with

a little piece about Joe talking about

coming out of the closet if you're gay.

It's almost like kind of like being in the closet.

Like even though there's no reason to be in the closet in 2025, there's a lot of people that are still in the closet.

And I think part of the reason why they're in the closet is because they were in the closet 20 years ago and they've been lying forever and they don't want to come out.

So that's just a person with social consequences.

And so I wanted to end the show with this clip because it clearly shows that Joe does not understand that it isn't safe for everyone to come out the closet.

He just doesn't know that because he lives in a bubble.

He's lived in a bubble in California, then he's moved to a bubble of his own creation in Austin, where he's not going to see the hardships that people go through when they're in the closet, where they live in places that aren't tolerant to LGBT people.

In fact, he's not tolerant to LGBT people because of the constant rhetoric of his show being so aggressively anti-trans people as soon as that conversation ever comes up.

But what I think is interesting is he clearly seems to think it should be totally fine.

He seems to be on board with you should be fine to be out of the the closet.

You shouldn't be oppressed for it.

You shouldn't be attacked for it.

You should be safe to do that.

Well, Joe, what about the countries around the world where it isn't safe to be gay, where you have to stay in the closet for your own protection?

Maybe a powerful country with a really powerful culture should help support those people in coming out and making it safe for them.

Maybe they should set up some sort of government department to spend a very small percentage of their

national budget on encouraging people to be like, encouraging regimes to look at LGBT rights and make it safe for people to come out of the closet.

Cause Joe clearly thinks people shouldn't have to stay in the closet.

This is what the USAID was doing with all the things that he's written off as being woke.

And let's tie this back to immigration.

Because one of the things that you can do is you can come to the United States and you can apply for what they call asylum.

Now, asylum is

you trying to tell the United States that your life is in danger where you live.

And one of the reasons your life could be in danger is you might live in a country where being gay might be a death sentence.

It might be something that

would make you not only ostracized, but might actually threaten your safety as a human being.

So you leave your country and you come here.

Well, if you're so upset about people leaving their country and coming here and you want to try to fix these things, this is a perfect opportunity for us to do that sort of work.

We've been talking about that throughout the entire show.

Joe seems to be on board with that.

This is something that I just think he's overlooking.

Look, this is a, this is if you do create different types of programs that normalize gay people and normalize trans people and normalize people with, that identify differently than other people in other countries, you suddenly have an opportunity for those people to live and thrive in the country that they're born in rather than having to flee because they're afraid of who they are.

And so, you know, you know, you're either funding it on one end or you're funding it on the other.

And I think Joe definitely hates when they come here.

He clearly doesn't like when people come here.

So there is an opportunity for us to do it on the front end.

Let's front load it.

And it's, like you suggest, a lot cheaper if you do it that way too.

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

Trust me.

Hey, Marsh, something good about this episode.

So

there is a point during this episode, which we don't cover in this, or maybe even not even the gloves off segment,

where they get to discussing the value of education and how education works, how schooling works.

And they do describe how schooling, people aren't incentivized to explore and they should be more incentivized to explore and the value of a teacher that can inspire you.

Joe talks at length at one point about how he struggled to concentrate at school and how he

wasn't kind of very good at staying focused, but how he had some teachers that inspired him.

And I think that's a pretty good description of how schooling should run, how it should reach out, how it should challenge kids and also support kids.

So I think they both seem to get that.

So I'm going to pick that as my good thing this week.

Okay.

What have you got, Cecil?

Come on, we have to find something.

I guess I'll tag on to yours because I could not, Marsh, you know, last week you were kind of struggling to find something.

This was me in this episode.

It just felt like another intellectual dark web conversation.

It felt like something that we've kind of heard a lot of before.

It felt like a ton of misinformation that was just found bare, like with the barest glance at a Twitter feed.

And it just felt so sometimes I listen to these episodes and I feel so just beaten down by them.

And just like, it feels like such a Feels like such a hill to climb to listen to more episodes and to fact check this stuff when Joe doesn't even take the, even just a second to think about what he's saying to these millions of people he's speaking to.

Is this still your something good?

This is still my something good.

I just, I want, I don't want to lie.

I don't want to say that there's something good in it because I could not find anything.

I just couldn't.

But we are trying at least.

The point is we're going to try every episode to find something.

I'm trying.

Like I just, I just, I couldn't find anything this week.

So maybe next week I'll say two things.

All right.

That's the 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 patreon.com no rogan.

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

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