#0007 Lex Fridman

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2260 with guest Lex Friedman.

The No Rogan Experience starts 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 Joe 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 just 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 January 23rd interview with Lex Friedman.

So far on YouTube alone, this video has 2.5 million views.

So Marsh, how did Joe introduce Lex in the show notes?

So according to Joe, Lex Friedman is a computer scientist and researcher in the field of artificial intelligence and robotics.

And he's the host of the Lex Friedman podcast.

All right.

And is there anything else we should know about Lex?

Yeah, there is.

There is.

So Lex Friedman, he was a computer scientist at MIT, and he rose to prominence in 2019 when he published a study that suggested that drivers using Tesla's autopilot semi-autonomous features remained fully focused on the road.

And this study was massively praised by Elon Musk, you know, the owner of Tesla and the man most likely to profit from studies on how great his tech is.

Except the problem was other AI experts pointed out that his study wasn't peer-reviewed.

So it hadn't been checked by other experts in the field to see if it was legitimate or not.

Seems important.

Even though his study completely, well, appeared to at least completely contradict what other established peer-reviewed research in that field had found.

And it was later the study removed from MIT's website.

But the whole affair had brought Lex and

his podcast to a degree of prominence, and he's now famous among Elon Musk's followers.

Okay.

And since then, experts in the AI field have distanced themselves from Friedman, accusing him of contributing to, quote, a cacophony of misinformation about AI and also of, quote, abandoning academic rigor in pursuit of fame.

And the thing is, there is a lot of fame to be had.

His podcast has 3.6 million subscribers.

He's interviewed people like Mark Zuckerberg, Mark Andriessen, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and as well as his close personal friends, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

Political affiliations he doesn't make clear during the course of this interview, it's fair to say.

Interesting.

And on January the 5th of this year, he released an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, which received a fairly substantial amount of criticism because he suggested that Zelensky should end the war in Ukraine and forgive Vladimir Putin for invading and occupying his country.

Yeah, and he should also, Zelensky should also tell Putin, my bad.

He should also say that 100%.

So, what else did they talk about?

Well, they talked quite a lot about why Lex was actually right about the whole Ukraine thing, as you might imagine.

That comes up a fair bit.

But there's also chat about Genghis Khan, Pete Hegseth's tattoos, social media criticism, more Genghis Khan, videos of people getting mauled by tigers, the high pain tolerance of ginger people, a bit more about Genghis Khan, Israel versus Gaza, Trump's inauguration, Elon Musk, the moon landing being faked, life elsewhere in the solar system, and even more about Genghis Khan before they top the whole thing off with a live rocket launch.

It reminds me almost of like a Monty Python skit where someone just keeps bringing something up that is totally off the wall.

It feels very much like this because constantly out of nowhere, you will just hear Genghis Khan talk and you're just thinking, why are they, why do they go back to Genghis Khan each second of this?

This is so great.

And we won't really get into it too much in the show.

So it's worth saying, early on, like Lex brings up Genghis Khan and sort of says that he wasn't

a bad guy.

He wasn't marauding.

He gets a bad rep.

And then later, he's like, okay, I shouldn't have defended Genghis Khan.

Here's what I meant.

And he says basically exactly the same thing.

And so he's like, okay, I still don't feel like I've backtracked far enough.

Can I just reiterate?

And then says the same, just defends Genghis Khan again.

So it keeps coming up because he's like, I don't want to seem like I'm defending Genghis Khan, but I am defending Genghis Khan.

And this is the

defending Genghis Khan.

So we want to ask our audience to help us not get a cease and desist order from Bruce Buffer.

As you know, on our main event clip, we have him saying, it's time.

Well, we would like to invite you to be the voice.

of the No Rogan experience.

We would like people to send in their versions of It's Time.

So if you want to record your version, version, you're going to hear it today.

So this will be the last time I use Bruce Buffer's voice on our program.

Sorry, Bruce.

Sorry, Bruce, one more time.

We're going to be, I'll play it today on the main event, which I will play in a few seconds.

And when I do, you can listen to it and hear what it sounds like.

And then send in your version to no RoganPod.

That's K-N-O-W-R-O-G-A-N-P-O-D at gmail.com.

And we'll be changing up the voice of the main event segment as we get new versions of it.

So as you send them in, we'll be plopping new ones in.

Hopefully we can have a new one every week, but who knows?

I'd like to get a nice bank of those put together.

I'm going to be reaching out to some of our podcast friends to see if they can play along too, but we'd love to have your voice on the show.

So please send it to us.

Yeah, absolutely.

And let us know who you are in your email.

And we'll give you a shout out in the show as well for using your It's Time on That Show.

Before we get to our main event, we wanted to say thanks to our Area 51 all-access pass patrons.

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

And this week we'll touch on a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories, and Joe will be confirming all his biases through motivated reasoning.

All right, now it's time for our main event.

Well, before we get started, really quickly, I just want to mention like much of some of this podcast is just two guys bullshitting about politics.

And I don't think that there's anything really that you can dig into with just political opinions.

I, in fact, I do and have done for over a dozen years, a political podcast show.

And it's two guys who try to be informed about the news, try to be informed about politics, and try to give you their take on what's happening in the world.

And this is, I think, it's not really different.

I don't think that they're, in my opinion, I don't think they're doing a rigorous enough job to be as informed as they should be, especially considering the eyes of the audience they're speaking to.

But for some of this podcast, there's not a lot to talk about with certain parts of their political ideology.

Yeah, we're not here to try and correct or disagree with Joe Rorgan's political opinions or his guests' political opinions.

We may well completely disagree with those, but that's not the point of this.

What we're trying to do is point out the part in the conversation where they are making statements of fact or inferences from the facts, inferences from the logic that we think are

unclear to the point of being actively misleading, where we think they are obscuring some truth, whether on purpose or whether that's just where they get their truth from, and we think it's not really representing the best version of the facts and might end up misleading people.

That's what we're here to do.

So, when if Rogan expresses some politics we disagree with, we're not here to pick him up on that.

So, we're going to start out with our very first piece.

This is Lex Friedman talking about his interview with Vladimir Zelensky.

I should say that I interviewed

Vladimir Zelensky, and I will be traveling to Russia to interview Vladimir Putin.

And

I'm aware of the risks.

I accept the risks.

And the goal, the mission is to just push for peace, to do my small part in pushing for peace.

And that's what I was trying to do in this conversation.

And it required just a huge amount of preparation.

Yeah.

And I think here, this is a really good scene set for what the main part of the conversation we want to pick up.

Because Lex here seems to genuinely think that the conversation he's having where he can sit down with Zelensky is going to be the thing that ends the war.

He's going to podcast the the way to peace.

And like, he can do that.

He can sit down with Zelensky.

He says he's going to do that and sit down with Putin.

But I genuinely think he's being honest when he thinks that this is the way that he will bring about peace.

But I think he overestimates the potential impact of his conversation and his podcast.

Yeah.

I also want to point out to you the

just the framing of this.

Keep this in mind as we work our way through.

He's saying, I want to push for peace.

And he mentions both people, Vladimir Selensky and Vladimir Putin.

Let's put this in a different context and not have it it as a war, not have it as two nations, not have it as a nation versus another nation.

Let's talk about two people.

So, someone's just standing there and some random guy runs up and starts attacking them.

Who exactly in that scenario should you appeal to de-escalate that combat?

One is being attacked and defending themselves, one is attacking the other one.

So, I just want to say it's already starting on an uneven ground that he's giving sort of an equilibrium to.

Yeah, and as we'll find out,

Joe is very receptive to the idea that Russia is not the sole aggressor here and that they are not the ones responsible for bringing this war to Ukraine.

So this is Lex explaining the three times that Vladimir Zelensky could have actually achieved a sort of peace negotiations.

For people who don't know, maybe I'll lay out where there was opportunities for peace.

So since the beginning of the war, February 24th, 2022, I think there was three moments to make peace.

From the perspective of Ukraine, you want to make peace from strength.

So when you're in a position of strength.

The first time to make peace was March and April of 2022

when the Ukrainian forces were able to successfully defend the north, defend Kiev.

There's this huge optimism, this belief that we could push back this gigantic Russian military.

That's a place for leverage and the confidence both of the U.S.

funding, the European militaries, and the Ukrainian military that we can win this.

This is when you make peace,

when there is a perception and a reality of strength.

The second time was in the fall of 2022 when there was a successful counteroffensive by the Ukrainian forces that recaptured Kharkiv and Kherson, which is the south and the east of Ukraine.

And there was this real sense that we could

that the Ukrainian forces can defeat the Russian forces.

Huge optimism.

A lot of pressure from the U.S.

to make peace then.

And so the third time to make peace,

after all of that, the Russian military regrouped and has been

capturing land gradually.

And so the third time to make peace is now.

Yeah, so this is Lex laying out the ways in which Ukraine could have sought peace in this war.

It's worth pointing out, we've done a very minor edit there just to cut out some stuff.

That wasn't him listing his three times.

He went off on a bit of a tangent.

We've cut that out.

But what you'll notice in these three different occasions in which Ukraine could have stopped this war, there is nothing in here about Russia making peace by stopping the invasion of Ukraine, by withdrawing from Ukraine.

None of the blame here, none of the responsibility for the war, none of the responsibility for the peace is on Russia.

This is all the things that Ukraine can do to make peace, and none of them include

Russia getting out of Ukraine.

Yeah.

And there's no mention of the regions that Russia annexed in 2014, right?

So we talk about this idea that

he can pull for peace at these certain times because there was a pushback by his military, but that pushback by his military never entered those two regions that Russia had annexed in 2014.

It almost feels like that stuff's off the table.

What we need to do is push for peace now and just allow Russia to sort of have what it has.

Yeah, I mean, he even opens, that's a really great point, because he opens and says, since the beginning of this war in February 2022, well, the war didn't begin in February 2022.

This later stage of further invasion did, but Russia's been violating, as you say, Ukraine's borders for over a decade.

And they got away with it in the eyes of the world.

Because in 2014, March 2014, when they invaded the Crimea and the Donbass, and they were involved in that invasion, the UN Security Council put out a resolution to reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine's sovereignty, independence, unity, and territorial integrity.

That was the response of the UN.

13 council members of the UN Security Council voted in favor of that resolution.

China abstained, but the resolution failed because Russia got to veto it.

So the response from the international world was even that meek response of a resolution was vetoed because the aggressors there, Russia, were able to

tank the entire thing.

So you could argue that what was really happening in 2014 was Russia was testing what the international response to an invasion of Ukraine would be.

And the response was a couple of resolutions that either failed or were just symbolic and held no weight at all.

And in some cases, some countries and even some different parts of countries, several regions of regional councils in Italy actively approved of the invasion.

They annexed the Donbass that year and they've occupied it ever since.

And that is, in a big part, the start of what we were seeing here.

It didn't start in 2022, but Lex is completely overlooking all of that.

Yeah.

And he says that the first opportunity was when they defended Kyiv.

And there was these massive troop movements throughout the eastern part of the country.

If you look at a map at the time when he's talking, there's huge parts of the country that are either in Russia control or there's Russian troops that are in them right now.

So, what exactly are you negotiating?

They took over large parts of your land.

Do you think they're just going to give it up because you defended one place?

That doesn't make any sense to me.

It sounds like you're saying, okay, they at least saved Kiev so they can have that and part of the country where Russia isn't.

Then Russia can have the rest of it.

Yeah, absolutely.

At that point, the only peace that Ukraine could have possibly had on offer was a piece to let Russia have what they'd already taken.

And then, even if you did that, even if you thought that was a good idea to just allow your borders to be invaded in that way and to allow your territory to be taken over by aggression and force in that way, even if you thought that was the peace you were after, that peace would be dependent on you taking Russia's word for it that they wouldn't invade again.

So no invaded country would have accepted that, especially not, as we say, after Russia had invaded and occupied Crimea and the Donbass for most a decade.

So they took Crimea and the Donbass.

Then they went further.

If you'd have said, well, we've got Kiev, we'll stay here.

Do you really think Russia weren't coming back?

There's no leader that would do that he mentions again as well opportunity two so that was his first opportunity for peace the second opportunity for peace is when ukraine managed to drive russia back and they did the ukraine managed to uh take i think 500 settlements does lex lex is suggesting here then that because ukraine were pushed had pushed russia back and had retaken 500 settlements um does he really think that would have been enough for russia to quit that russia were like well we've got all of this but we've been pulled back a little bit by a counterattack did he think that russia would just leave at that point because if so he has to i think he's got a fundamentally naive understanding of what Putin's intentions and motivations are.

Putin is a strong man leader, and to do that, you have to project strength.

I'm not endorsing that.

I'm saying that is his tactic.

So if he's gone all in on invading his neighbor and he's taken large parts of it, but he's been driven back a little bit, is he meant to just stop and go home at that point and be a strong man at home on that or just stay where he is?

It's not going to happen.

And again, even if it did, are Ukraine just meant to accept that while Russia still occupies large areas, that they will just accept Putin's word that he won't try again and push further.

It's just completely naive here.

Yeah, and they say the other time to make peace is now, and I just super disagree with this.

They were invaded.

Would we be cool if some, if like Mexico or Canada were just invaded the United States and we were writing off Texas and New York?

Of course we wouldn't.

We would want justice.

We would want, you know, we would want what the Ukrainian people want.

They want their country back.

They want parts of their country back that were taken.

They want people who are in their country that are invading to be out of it.

We would say the same thing if someone, you know, if there, if there happened to be an invasion from Mexico and there was a group of people that were occupying Joe's studio, he would want it back.

He just can't put himself in that position.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the other thing we have to bear in mind here as well is that Lex is overlooking some pretty significant elements of this war, conveniently overlooking them, because he actually, he even criticizes Zelensky for not being willing to accept this, for wanting justice rather than wanting peace.

But what Lex isn't pointing out is he's whitewashing many of Russia's actions.

Like, Russia has committed war crimes during this war.

There are mass graves that have been found.

For example, the Izium mass graves.

If you just go to Wikipedia, for example, but there's plenty of other places.

On the 15th of September 2022, several mass graves, including one site containing at least 440 bodies, were found in the woods near the Ukrainian city of Izium.

after it was recaptured by Ukrainian forces during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Those graves contain bodies of people who were killed by Russian forces, and the government believes over a thousand civilian residents there were killed during the battle for and subsequent Russian occupation of Izium.

So that is a war crime, mass graves.

They're overlooking, Lex is overlooking the times that Russia has tortured people.

Again, we have a quote here.

As Ukrainian forces entered two towns of Balaklia and Izium, they found numerous places where Russian occupation forces held Ukrainian civilians prisoner with evidence of torture and executions.

Is a leader meant to just say, well, I'm going to overlook all of that.

I'm going to forgive, Lex even asked Zelensky to forgive Putin for this.

The Buka massacre.

After Russian forces left the area of Buka after a month of occupation on the 1st to the 3rd of April, photos and videos emerged showing hundreds of people killed, lying in the streets or in mass graves.

And the event triggered an international response and was widely covered by journalists.

This is a massacre and a war crime.

So these are the things that Lex is overlooking in order for him to say, well, the issue here is that Zelensky is too pushed, too motivated to go for justice when he should accept peace.

I don't think anybody would accept peace, making peace with somebody who has committed war crimes in the last three years against his own civilians.

Next clip is talking about Vladimir Putin.

And

Putin is willing and able to just wait and to let the war continue for months and for years.

And meanwhile, people are dying every single day.

Thousands of people.

That should tell you exactly who's in control, right?

This should tell you,

because if Putin, if Putin can just wait, that also means that he could just stop the war.

There's no danger whatsoever for Putin to wait.

If there's no risk, then he'll just continue to wait.

So there's no real danger for him.

That tells you who's actually in control and who controls the levers of peace.

And he's talking the wrong guy.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the thing is, I can understand why you would talk to Zelensky about this, because Making these points to Putin probably wouldn't help.

If you said to Putin, I think you should stop.

I think you should go for peace.

I I don't think Vladimir Putin is going to listen to Lex Friedman.

So you could argue that if you really wanted to bring peace to this region, one way to do that is to talk to one of the leaders who may be actually willing to listen, who may be willing to put,

who's losing so many of his civilians, maybe they would listen.

But the problem is to do it that way, Lex is painting this like this is an even issue.

Like both sides are causing this war.

That isn't what's happening.

If Lex wants to be really intellectually honest here and not be naive, he can be saying Zelensky, I think you should stop this war, but he should be saying he should be aware that what he's asking Zelensky to do is stand down and be invaded so that more people don't die.

This isn't about Zelensky perpetuating the war and keeping the war going.

Putin is attacking and Friedman is asking Zelensky to stop defending.

From the things that you've just read, there's no guarantee that will stop the killing.

Absolutely.

That yielding to Putin will stop the killing is not a guarantee.

All right.

Now we're going to talk about why Russia invaded.

And it's a war that's so confusing over here, especially to the uninitiated, for the people that are just like kind of reading the newspaper and getting

sort of a cursory understanding of what happened.

Russia invaded.

Why?

You know, what did they do?

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

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

when the wall came down in Berlin.

the agreement that NATO would not push forth and move closer to Russia, which they violated over and over and over again.

I love that he calls looking, like sort of following the news on this a cursory understanding.

Joe isn't in like security briefings.

Joe doesn't get more information than we do.

Joe just has all the same information.

So the idea that he has some sort of that he has something better or Lex has something better, I don't believe you.

I don't believe that that's the case.

This is something that these people try to sell you all the time, that mainstream media isn't where you get your news.

Well, where do you get your news from then?

There's nobody else out there.

You're not getting security briefings.

You have to get them from people who have boots on the ground, who are journalists, who are in that place and who are letting people know what's happening.

So, the idea that he's saying, oh, it's a cursory understanding, that's the only understanding that we have as normal citizens.

Yeah, well, you say that you could get your news from people boots on the ground, journalists.

There are other sources from which you could get your news on this, Cecil.

Because

let me know about him.

Let me know about him, Marsh.

So, I thought this was interesting for Joe because Joe isn't, this isn't just Joe reflecting back what Lex is saying.

Joe is bringing these things up that you need to get into why the war started.

And what he said was you've got the...

the US-backed coup in 2014 and you've got to think about the NATO agreement where they agreed not to push forth and move close to Russia and then violated that.

And those things both sounded unusual to me.

Those weren't things that I was aware of.

They also sounded a lot like Russian talking points, which is a problem when your expert that you bring on is also apparently whitewashing Russia's role in the war.

So I looked into this.

So let's look at this first thing, the idea that the us-backed coup in 2014 there was uh an uprising in ukraine in 2014 when the uh the people rose up in that kind of area but to be clear the source of the claim that that was a us-backed coup rather than uprising from within the the um the country the source of that claim is an article in a german newspaper called the zeit and that article was written by vladimir putin That, I believe, is the source that Joe is here.

Now, not directly, but there is a direct quote here.

And you can see this from Al Jazeera, for example.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has said the 2014 popular uprising that saw former Ukrainian President Viktor Yankovich forced from office was the result of a coup orchestrated by the United States and supported by Washington's European allies, and he appealed for greater cooperation on the continent.

Okay, hold on, hold on, Marsh.

Are you saying Vladimir Putin is not being honest here?

Are you saying he's biased?

I'd say he's a little biased in this conversation.

And he's very welcome to put his view out there, and everybody is welcome to read that view, but we should certainly consider what like biases he might have now obviously i'm not saying that joe went off and read a newspaper article written by vladimir putin in a german newspaper because of course that didn't happen what i'm saying is this was something that i think he was told by a guest that he accepted wholesale because we've already seen in the few episodes we've done so far we've seen this happen we've seen mark andrierson come on the show and say you can be debanked for your political opinions which is not true.

That is a lie.

And then a few episodes later, Joe is bringing that forth.

He's just accepted that whole cloth and he regurgitated it in the Mark Zuckerberg interview.

So I figured he'd probably done the same thing here.

So I had a little bit of dig through Joe's archives.

And I want to play you this clip from episode 2237 with Mike Benz from December 3rd, 2024.

The 2014 coup in Ukraine was U.S.

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

so that right there is joe learning that the that the uh uprising in 2014 in ukraine was a coup by the us government that is russian propaganda being fed from his guest who got it from somewhere got it from somewhere i don't think his guest i'm not going to say his guest absolutely was uh was reading vladimir putin's paper articles but this is how these messages get laundered up and now we have joe rogan bringing into this conversation something that was originated as russian propaganda by putin himself and we hear that happening we hear it just a month and a half ago, he was told this, and now he's the one bringing it up.

This is why we think it's really important to hold Joe to account because he will say, I don't know very much, and he'll say, I've got a cursory glance.

But in this conversation here, he's not saying, I don't know very much about this.

He's saying everyone else doesn't know much about this, but I've got some special knowledge that I've been told that gives me deeper insight.

And that deeper insight is Russian propaganda.

It's not the only one.

He said about NATO, you know, they violated a promise to not push towards Russia.

Again, this is Russian propaganda.

NATO has had to respond to this specifically.

Russia has argued that NATO has been expanding since 1990 in a breach of its promise to not allow new members.

And as NATO says, the myth that there was ever a promise by Western leaders not to allow new members to join has been circulating for many years and is actively used in disinformation campaigns by the Kremlin since the start of the Russian war against Ukraine.

In the initial stages of discussions about German reunification, U.S.

Secretary of State James Baker and his West German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, did float float the idea

of a NATO non-expansion.

They floated that idea with each other and with Soviet leaders, but diplomatic negotiations quickly moved on and the idea was dropped.

NATO's founding treaty signed in 1949 by the 12 original members and by every country that's joined since includes a clear provision that opens NATO's door to any other European state in a position to further the principles of this treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area.

This has never changed.

No treaty signed by NATO allies and Russia ever included provisions that NATO can't take on new members.

So again, Joe is bringing up, actively bringing up Russian propaganda here in order to

say that Zelensky is the one at fault in Ukraine's war.

Well, speaking of NATO,

it might actually be NATO's fault.

Okay, she might be wrong about all that.

She might be wrong.

This is a long one, isn't it?

Okay.

I believe the U.S.

actually gave not enough money to Ukraine.

They should have given more money, hit really hard, and then make peace.

This is the point.

A month or two after the start of the war, you can learn the same kind of lesson with Iraq and Afghanistan.

There's no reason those

invasions, those military operations.

There's no other way.

There's no other way than just give money.

Give money and hit hard.

There's no other way.

What about

it?

Avoid it.

Yeah, what about have NATO back out?

Well, a lot of this is about diplomatic rhetoric.

And yes, NATO was consistently talking shit to Putin.

And that's not, like, a lot of this is about diplomacy.

Right.

And you can't just,

you can't just pressure with words.

I mean, for some people, it seems almost silly that you need to show respect to world leaders.

But there needs to be shown real respect.

Putin has laid out the interests of

the Russian Federation.

He said he's been very clear about what the interests are.

They want their security to be respected.

They want their nation to be respected.

He's very clear.

And simply, at the negotiation table, he just needs to be respected.

Like, his perspective needs to be understood and heard.

You can't just say, Putin is evil, bad guy, authoritarian, hates freedom.

We need to destroy him.

This kind of this whole vibe and energy, you come, this idealistic sense that you bring to the table.

You have to respect leaders.

You have to respect Xi Jinping.

You have to respect Putin when you're at the negotiation table.

Not when you're on Twitter and X or talking shit or historians or activists.

Fine.

You can criticize as much as you want, as vicious as you want.

You can mock.

Artists can mock as much as they want.

Comedians doesn't matter.

When you're a world leader and you come to the table, you have to show respect.

You have to treat other world leaders, as funny as this to say, the way you want to be treated with respect.

That's not funny at all.

Yeah, it makes sense.

If you want to get things done.

If you want to get things done.

And more importantly, if you want in this war for the death to end.

So again, these are just Russian talking points.

That the reason for Putin, for Russia invading Ukraine, actually is because NATO have been aggressive towards him.

He's standing up to NATO.

He's defending his territory from expansion of the West.

These are directly Russian talking points.

But the idea here that Putin, above all else, he has to feel respected or he'll attack and invade his neighbors.

This isn't a question of whether a lack of respect is the issue here.

This is still a question.

This is still a point that him attacking and invading his neighbors is the problem.

It doesn't matter how he's not doing that because he's been dissed on Twitter.

And the other thing I'd point out here is Friedman's saying, look, you can say, you can say what you like on Twitter, you can say what you like in sketches, you can say what you like in comedy and things, but when you're at the negotiation table, you need to be respected.

You don't know what was said at the negotiation table.

You only know the things that were said in other places.

You weren't at those tables.

So you have literally zero idea that whether the thing you're saying needed to happen.

You don't know that it was or wasn't happening.

You weren't in those rooms.

you can only view from afar from the very places you say it's totally fine to be disrespectful so this is such a uh a simplistic and uh again naive view of how international diplomacy works i dare say it's a podcaster's view of how international diplomacy works it absolutely is everything is a conversation conversations can solve everything if we just get enough white guys around a microphone we can set the world to right is basically the the the world view he's putting forward here that's our slogan here at the no rogan experience it is absolutely

You know, they keep on saying Putin needs to be respected.

Putin needs to be respected.

Come on, he's forcing a sovereign nation to only have foreign relations that he approves of, and he isn't respecting that nation.

So why do we have to somehow give him this sort of deference?

It's like, no, he's doing a lot of wrong things.

He's doing a lot of bad things.

He's, you know, his army is committing atrocities, like you say.

He invaded someone else.

He's very, he's very much a jealous boyfriend and doesn't want other people to talk to other people that he doesn't want him to talk to.

Why Why are we giving him a level of respect?

I think these guys very much mix up the difference between fear and respect quite a bit throughout this entire piece.

His argument is: don't piss off the bully.

That's his argument, but he's painting it as something way more, um, way more educated and advanced and you know, political theory than that.

But it's like if you piss off the bully, the bully's going to hit you and it's your fault for pissing him off.

That's not how we deal with bullies.

That's not how any of this works.

Now, we're talking more about Zelensky and how he should be open to peace.

One of the things I kept pushing in an almost childlike way with Zelensky is getting him to open himself up for peace because he kept shutting it down.

He kept mocking Putin.

He kept criticizing Putin, which is okay.

It's okay to sort of criticize and say that there's war crimes, that there's real

vicious violence and destruction happening.

But along that, there has to be a door open of respect, of I'm willing to come to the table to negotiate and respect the other nation's interests.

As opposed to saying, I'm only going to talk to the United States.

You have to be open to negotiate.

Because

unfortunately, this is the motherfucker of peace.

You have to compromise.

You have to sit across the table as a world leader with a person you might fucking hate.

Because

unlike Putin, I should say, Zelensky goes to the front.

He talks to the soldiers.

He sees the dead bodies.

He talks to the civilians, the mothers that lost their children, the wives that lost their husband, right?

This person who was an empath, who's an emotional being, he's wearing all that in his mind.

Like there's a real pain there.

Like he's tortured, tormented by this.

If you're a leader, you have to put all that aside and you have to sit and save your nation by compromising.

That's it.

Yeah.

He's saying you should negotiate with the terrorists.

It's what he's saying.

The important thing to do is to give in to some of their demands and they won't want more.

But of course they will want more.

What we're doing through all of this, he just gives Putin a complete pass in all of this.

It's Zelensky's fault for mocking Putin.

He's criticizing Putin.

You know, it's okay to criticize and say there's war crimes, but you also have to be respectful.

Respectful of the person who's committing war crimes against your country is what he's arguing here.

And he's saying Ukraine should respect Russia's interests, but Russia's interests are in invading and occupying Ukraine.

There's no version of the world where Ukraine should respect that because what you're doing then is you're just allowing your territorial

sovereignty to be completely taken taken away by acts of aggression this is not how international politics works no country operates this way no country should yeah the agency of compromise is only zelensky right like that's the only person who has the agency to compromise and you're like no they both have the ability to compromise in fact one would argue that putin is the one who should be compromising the most there i i think no matter what Zelensky is going to lose, right?

You know, like even if, even if they get all the troops out of there, they're still going to have to agree to things that they didn't want to do anyway because there was some sort of aggression.

There's going to have to be a compromise and it's going to be on Zelensky's part.

But he seems to think that it's all Zelensky all the time.

And you're like, no, the compromise needs to be that Putin needs to leave, needs to remove his annexation from those places.

And then they can talk about, okay, what's our next steps for how you guys are going to react?

We'd prefer it if you didn't join NATO or whatever it is that he's looking for them to stop doing.

And then there can be some sort of treaty that can be based on that.

But instead, what we have now is an invading force in another country.

And the other person's like, well, man, you should stop getting invaded so hard.

I think this is all on you.

This is like saying you've been mugged and the way forward is to compromise with your mugger so he gets to keep some of your money.

That's the only fair thing to do in that situation.

That is not the fair thing in that situation.

You got to throw rock, paper, scissors, see who gets the 20.

All right.

Next one is, this is talking about how Zelensky, because, you know, it's tough as a podcaster.

to go over to Ukraine and have to sit down with somebody and they're switching languages a lot and that's tough on a podcaster so let's hear how tough it is.

As part of the reason I wanted to talk to President Zelensky in Russian, which I speak fluently, and he speaks fluently, it's his primary language.

For people who seem to misunderstand this on the internet, he spoke Russian his whole life.

That's his main language.

He speaks it with his wife, with his whole staff, with all of this.

This is his language.

It's just that now the Ukrainian language has become a symbol of independence.

So they're fighting for their independence, for their sovereignty.

I understand it, but you know,

so he spoke with you in Ukrainian?

He kept going back and forth.

But yeah, most of the powerful things were said in Ukrainian.

So I'm listening to an interpreter through a shitty headset.

The interpreter's not, forgive me to the interpreter, but it's not very good.

He's delayed.

There's noise.

God, but wouldn't it make more sense if he spoke to you in a language that you understand?

Shouldn't a president of a nation at war who's making a point of Ukrainian independence from Russia make it easier on a podcaster, Marsh?

Shouldn't he?

Why are his priorities?

His priorities are about

podcasts.

He's not thinking about the content.

The content should lead.

Now, of course, and the thing is, as well, just to point out, he does say as well, he kept going back and forth between Russian and Ukrainian.

I assume.

I've not seen the interview, but I assume it's Russian and Ukrainian.

I don't think it's being conducted in English.

I think it's definitely not in English because later in this interview, he talks about how

they had a translation service dub, essentially.

So this is, he's going back and forth between Russian and Ukrainian.

So it's not even like he wouldn't speak any.

He just was switching to the language of his country and switching away from the language of the invaders of his country.

Like the fact that Lex can't understand that the priorities of the Ukrainian leader are probably to the independence and the symbolic and the public-facing nature of showing unity and strength, not just in terms of aggression and power, but in terms of culture and in terms of

the things that unify Ukrainians right now.

Those take precedent over whether Lex Friedman gets a decent podcast interview in the language that he wants.

So if it needs a translator, suck it up.

That's not the priority.

But no, but of course, to Lex, the podcast is taking precedence here.

That's the most important thing.

And the president of a country defending itself in a war should bend to his convenience.

Can you lean a little into the mic?

Vladimir, you're a little away from the mic.

I'd love it.

I'd love the idea of him trying to put a similar stipulation on Vladimir Putin.

I mean, obviously, he's going to speak Russian to Putin if he does actually get down to sit down with Putin because he speaks Russian.

But imagine saying, well, Putin, I know you must know some English, so let's do this conversation in English.

Let's see how that applies with Vladimir Putin.

Even worse, make him do it in Ukrainian.

Make him do it in Ukraine.

Apples, the apples here.

That's what you're basically saying is, would you ask, would you ask Vladimir Putin to do his interview in Ukrainian?

If you knew that he spoke Ukrainian fluent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You wouldn't do that.

Absolutely not.

Okay.

Next up is talking about martial law.

There is censorship in Ukraine now.

All of those ideas cannot be, all of those things cannot be fixed until the war is ended.

The reason there is censorship now in Ukraine is because

it's a war.

The ideas of democracy in part have to be suspended during a war to effectively fight that war.

This is the whole idea of martial law.

The United States has this.

You don't fuck around.

You have to win the war.

When your land is invaded, you have to every uh everybody has to be focused on this.

The problem is it's a slippery slope.

When all all the media channels are being controlled and

the president and everybody is so invested in quote-unquote winning the war, then where are the critical voices that say we need peace?

They're coming from the outside, but you need that.

Yeah.

So, I mean, first of all, he's even pointing out that, you know, you don't fuck around when you're trying to win the war.

So maybe you don't switch to languages that are convenient to the podcasters.

Maybe you do, you know, stay, do everything you can in order to win the war.

But he is right that the voices saying, stop fighting back against Russia, aren't coming from within Ukraine because they are fighting against invading forces in Ukraine.

But notice that he's not actually talking about anyone calling for peace from Russia here.

They're the aggressors here.

Like, as we say, the war ends tomorrow if Putin decides it.

But Lex is petitioning Zelensky to stand down.

And he's right that no one inside, he's not speaking to people.

He's not hearing from people inside Ukraine saying, we need to stop fighting.

But he doesn't interpret that as saying, that's because Ukrainians don't want to stop fighting and give up their territory.

He interprets that as, well, they must be out there, but it's government censorship.

That's a thing.

It's just the government censoring those voices.

The people who agree with me, the fact that I'm not hearing anybody agree with me is proof that my side is being censored, and not that nobody who's in the know is agreeing with me, that there's no one inside of Ukraine who thinks that he's right on this.

He takes that as a sign that he must be even more right that the government is censoring it, and not that those voices just aren't there, Lex.

You're on your own.

Yeah, no, and those voices might exist outside of Ukraine.

Like he suggests,

but they might also be coming from the Kremlin.

Yeah.

And if you're the Kremlin and you're trying to see that, maybe the kind of thing you do is you publish articles in foreign newspapers about how actually, you know, the issues are here are that the U.S.

got involved in a coup.

And maybe you see other narratives about NATO being expansive.

And you end up getting that filtering up to the largest podcast in the world, in the English-speaking world.

I mean, maybe those are the kind of things that you do if you're trying to fight that propaganda war.

And people who are...

who see themselves as questioners of authority, who see themselves as people who would stand up to the men should maybe ask questions when their their narratives completely align with the aggressor in an invasive war.

Next bit is talking about patriotism.

He singularly believes in the idea of Ukraine as a sovereign nation and he's willing to die for that idea.

That is his strength and that is also his weakness when it's time to make peace.

Yeah, so the issue here is that Zelensky, he's weak because he's willing to die for the independence and sovereignty of his nation.

To me, I didn't think that was traditionally seen as a weakness.

Certainly not in the space that Rogan and his fans are in.

Like, do Joe Rogan's fans think it would be weak for someone to be willing to die to ensure the liberty of America?

Because he sure has had a lot of veterans on the show who would take an issue with that idea.

But when it's Ukraine and it's Zelinsky, well, it's a weakness for not standing down and just accepting the invasion because that's what

Lex the podcaster thinks should happen.

Yeah, depicting a guy whose weakness is that he wants uncompromising freedom for his people is certainly a take.

That is definitely true.

Feels like something you would say in an interview.

Like, my biggest weakness is that I want sovereignty as a nation too much.

I want it too much.

Yeah, if anything, I love freedom too much.

I'm too committed to freedom.

I'm a perfectionist in that way.

All right.

Paid propaganda.

And we do cut a tiny piece of this out because Joe kind of moves away from this discussion a little bit to talk about a very specific case that doesn't have anything to do with politics.

I should say, like, privately, after I did a conversation with Zelensky, every single person that knows the situation well, knows me personally, has written to me, and it's all been really positive.

Like, really positive.

Almost like in the desert wanting water positive.

Because there's a lot of voices that are afraid to speak, that want peace.

Sure.

But online, and this is something we talked about offline a little bit, there's just like these like swarms of people that are like...

Not even necessarily people.

I don't want to sort of go too far in that territory assuming that anybody who criticized me is a bot.

No, no.

But there is...

I'm not saying that.

But there's an enormous element of that that's real.

Whether it's bots or whether it's hired people, paid propagandists,

the conversation is not a pure conversation between people expressing their ideas.

There's a lot of propaganda online, and it's very confusing to try to discern what the percentage is.

Ideally, what we would want with social media is different people, informed and uninformed, but at least expressing their ideas on things and exchanging information back and forth and talking.

It's not the whole story, though.

There's a lot of other players involved that are not real.

There's AI for sure.

There's definitely large language models that are involved in this back and forth with automation.

And

they look out for certain code words and

these accounts attack certain ideas.

So it's hard to know what the actual will of the people is.

Yeah, so what we ideally want is uninformed people sharing their views.

That's the ideal situation here for Joe.

The informed people, but also the non-informed people expressing their ideas.

I want to seize on that just for a second because it seems like he's giving those two things equal weight.

And I do agree that uninformed people should be in a place where they can get informed, but it seems like the way he frames that, it feels like he's saying those two things have the same weight.

And I'm like, no, they don't.

They 100% don't.

Yeah, it's an exchange of ideas between the informed and uninformed.

And Joe thinks that should be a bi-directional exchange, that the uninformed should be sending things to the informed as well.

You know, it's this kind of doubting the expertise.

But what Joe's doing here is setting up a framework for writing off any criticism that Lex received, as well as just being inauthentic accounts.

So you can't actually trust that any criticism you did get.

Because Lex is saying, well, the people I know, the people who like me, the people who agree with me, got in touch to say, you're right.

I like you.

I agree with you.

But he got a lot of criticism from people who weren't his friends and family.

And so rather than accept that maybe I should internalize that criticism and bear in mind that maybe

there's other ways to think about this that aren't wholly reflective of the best views of this international conflict.

Instead, Lex is saying, well, actually, this is because people are silenced who agree with me.

And Joe is saying, they're not even people who are disagreeing with you.

They may be bots.

They're large language models.

And the thing is, there are companies and and countries who do weaponize vast amounts of fake accounts online to push their narrative.

One of the biggest perpetrators of that is Russia.

And

they will be spreading the kind of things that Lex is saying and that Joe has internalized.

So yeah, there are bots in this, but we know for a fact that the Internet Research Agency in Russia is one of the biggest clearinghouses for propaganda on issues like this.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

This is exactly the tactics that Russian troll farms used.

And we've seen this used over at this point it's nearing a decade that we've seen them weaponized online yeah and so is he suggesting here that in the midst of fighting an inv against an invading force Ukraine is also hiring fake accounts to troll Lex Friedman or is it more likely that people who know more about the conflict than Lex does are criticizing Friedman stance that it's Zelensky who has to stand who has to stand down and accept the invasion they're criticizing that as being not very well informed and so the criticisms he's getting are actually legitimate from people who know what they're talking about.

No, it's Ukraine is spending all their cash, all their time hiring fake accounts to just troll this one podcaster.

I want to say too, he levels this in a way and he says, you know, he sort of interrupts Lex when Lex says, I don't want to say that all the people who criticize me are bots.

And then Joe goes on to this big long thing about how we don't know who's saying what online, et cetera.

But one thing

I don't think that they mention, and I'm not saying that they don't know about it, but bots can also agree with you.

Bots can also be a voice that gets you to believe something, not through attacking, but reinforces bad beliefs that you have that makes you think you're in the right.

So

understand that it goes two ways.

They make it seem like it's framed around criticism only.

And that's not how, that's not how, completely how propaganda works.

Yeah, absolutely.

But that's a really interesting point because the bots that you are more likely to spot spot are the ones that disagree with you.

Because that makes you go, well, hang on, that can't be right.

Let's look into this.

I wonder how many of, well, Nosimus joke because he says he doesn't read the comments on Twitter.

But if you look under Elon Musk's posts, the first things you will see will be a flood of bots that completely agree and amplify and share.

And people are way less likely to recognize that those are inauthentic accounts because they agree with them, because they're pumping up your ego and making you feel good about yourself.

But that's just as dangerous as propaganda that disagrees with you and causes division.

We're going to finish this segment out with a discussion about critics.

Yeah, I mean, and you and I are, and also in a particular, you know, doing a podcast, and we're also very different human beings.

I would say your psychological, your psychological fortitude is

pretty strong.

And I'm more, I wear my heart on my sleeve, maybe a little bit more.

And whenever I, like, shit gets to me.

And,

you know, when you try to put compassion out there in the world

in the way I did, especially with this conversation with Zelensky, the attacks, like.

You just have to recognize who the kind of people that are doing that are.

Yeah.

You know, those are just really weak people.

Really weak, psychologically damaged, mentally ill people that are probably medicated.

So to push back, I think some of them are actually...

good, sophisticated people.

They're just acting not their best selves.

Like, I've seen this.

There's people that are like, I know them personally, and online they just like the worst shit comes out of them yeah

because they're mentally ill and they're but then all of us are a bit mentally ill yeah but we're all a little mentally ill like no one is enlightened that I've met yeah I've never met one person who's perfect

there's so much here I like the way so Lex is saying and I understand you know you wear your heart on your sleeve you can be a sensitive soul I get that I can be all the sensitive too I totally no criticism there but he says shit gets to him and it's like that's totally understandable but when it gets to you what that should do is cause introspection is to like, hang on, am I right about this?

If we get criticized for something we say in the show, it's happened already.

We both feel shit about it.

But then we're like, ah, we feel shit because they're right.

And now we need to look into it and put out a correction.

That isn't happening with Lex.

What he's doing is just feeling the emotions of it and then letting himself be ruled by those emotions, just being that it gets blinkered by those emotions.

But it never crosses his mind that the criticisms are legitimate.

Even when Joe is saying, well, these people, you know, they're weak, they're mentally ill, or like anyone who criticizes you is weak and mentally ill.

Lex is pushing back on that and saying, no, they're not, because he knows some specific people who he knows are real people have criticized him.

But he can't say this real person might just know more about this or have a better take on this than me.

It's they're doing that, they're disagreeing because they're not being their best person.

All this shit is coming out.

So they're a real person, but they're not acting well when they criticize someone.

So I think that's really important.

Lex just doesn't allow for criticism.

And Joe is saying, well, no one's enlightened.

It's like, you don't have to be perfectly enlightened.

No one has to be perfect to criticize someone they just have to have a point and a point a good point coming from the worst source is still a good point if it so that's why we should always be reflective and listen to criticism and not write it all off as weak and shit and uh and people not being their best selves i took this as sort of joe telling his own story here where joe is sort of pumping himself up and making himself look like somebody is like oh i'm just a rugged tough guy i don't you know i just weathered the slings and arrows of this massive wave of online criticism that i never read you know it just feels like he keeps on feeding into this persona that he's created.

That's what it sounds like to me.

To be perfectly frank, I don't believe Joe that he doesn't read any of the comments or he doesn't see any of the comments or he doesn't get any feedback on the show that he doesn't listen to.

I don't believe you.

I don't believe you just set a product into the world and you don't consider or think about how that product is doing.

I actually don't think that that is something that he's doing.

I think he just tells people he doesn't do that because he doesn't.

He figures if he says that, then they won't ever leave bad comments because they feel it's futile.

Yeah, maybe.

I think you're right that he will be reading some feedback.

But I think the thing is the volume of traffic on his show, he's not reading the comments there.

I think Joe will engage with feedback.

And I think when he's putting out that view of his mentality, I think you're absolutely right.

But that feedback, that negative feedback isn't coming in the comments.

It's coming in the newspapers.

The newspapers.

You know, when Spotify spent hundreds of millions of pounds on his show, he becomes a international story every time there is something completely misleading on his show.

And that's the criticism that he's shrugging off the slings and arrows of.

It's not the

day-to-day comments of people saying this is wrong.

Whereas Lex is getting the more individual comments kind of thing.

You're right.

You're right.

But I will point out that Joe, in this very episode,

he admits to reading the comments by saying, like, for a week, I was known as the guy who believes in dragons.

So

he knows what people are saying about him.

It's not that

he's completely disconnected from that sort of thing.

He knows what people are saying about him.

He just doesn't care what they're saying about him.

And he doesn't have what you suggest, which is the introspection to be like, am I wrong about this?

Maybe not.

And that mindset, if that is his mindset, it leads you to just ignore anything you dislike.

And that is a perfect way to ensure that you carry on being wrong.

And that's why we shouldn't just accept the things that we hear on this show.

It's why it is genuinely important to push back because this is so influential.

But Joe is telling you, if I am wrong, I never want to hear about it and I never want to change my mind.

And that is a problem when he's then bringing up literal Russian propaganda that he heard a month and a half ago as a justification for the attack and the invasion of Ukraine.

And in our in our segment that we're going to do for patrons, there's a piece of this where Joe is talking about very specifically how he handles dealing with people with other ideas and trying to learn new ideas.

And all of that is just smoke.

Like I've never seen him do any of that stuff.

And we'll talk about it

on the patron side, but this to me tells me that he doesn't believe any of that stuff.

He's just saying it because it sounds good.

Now, normally we would lead you into a skeptical toolbox where we would teach you about perhaps a fallacious argument that you could put into your toolbox and carry along.

But today, there were two segments on this show that we had to cover because they were egregious.

So we're skipping the skeptical toolbox and introducing a new segment called the undercard.

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

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

So, this is not actually a fallacy.

This is talking, but it does contain a lot of fallacies, which we may or may not point out.

Yeah, it does.

I really want to include this example, even though it's a conversation that's probably been played out quite a few times, and people will be well aware of it and think so far.

This is about Pete Hegseth, and in particular, his tattoo.

But the reason I wanted us to include this is because, as you'll hear, Joe brings up a clip that he saw of a Piers Morgan Shaw, where there is a debate about Pete Heggs' tattoo.

And he brings this up as an illustration of how the liberal woman who was on there, I didn't catch her name, how she's completely owned.

He says she's clowned on this.

Everybody just completely schools her and proves how wrong she is.

And we hear that clip, and I think two interesting, a couple of interesting things happened, which we'll go through.

One is,

I don't hear this clip the way Joe is hearing this clip.

Yeah, I don't either.

And two is Joe has completely forgotten that she brings up something that stops Joe dead in his tracks, and

he has to deal with it.

And the way that he deals with something that challenges his worldview, I think is really, really instructive for when we think about the things that come up that don't challenge his worldview.

So let's start with the very introduction of Pete Hegseth, who is now our current Secretary of Defense in the United States because he was confirmed last week.

We're talking about a tattoo on his chest and on his arm.

Like I'm watching the Pete Hegseth,

the confirmation hearings.

And

these ignorant people are going after his tattoo, not even knowing what the tattoo is, and trying to pretend that it's some sort of radical, hateful tattoo when it's just an ancient Christian tattoo.

It's so strange.

I mean, that tattoo's in churches.

That symbol's in churches.

That symbol's been around for a long fucking time.

It's just a Christian tattoo.

And I was watching the Pierce Morgan show, and Pierce Morgan had Michael Knowles and these

two super wacky and Dave Rubin and two super wacky leftist people that didn't know what the tattoo was and they were criticizing it and Pierce Morgan kept having what is the tattoo?

What is it?

Tell me what it is.

And the guy would be like, go on.

You're not answering the question.

Go back to it.

What is it?

Well, let's look it up.

He's like, no, no, no, no, don't look it up.

I want you to tell me if you're saying it's offensive.

And so then the woman chimes in, and Michael Knowles just clowns her, just absolutely knows the history of the tattoo, including, like, you know, she's talking about it before

it existed before Islam, you know, and she's criticizing what it is.

And he's like, do you understand that Islam didn't exist when this tattoo, when this symbol existed?

Like, it's not an anti-Muslim symbol because there was no Muslims when this symbol was created.

Like, this is bonkers.

And they are all in, digging their heels in, pretending, just trying to win this conversation.

Marsh, Pete Hagseth's tattoo, is it just a Christian tattoo?

So, the interesting thing is, as it happens, I also have a friend who's a relevant expert here.

I can't promise I'm going to do this every episode, but it seems to keep happening.

So, a guy named Dr.

Matt Lauder is a I know important people too, Marsh.

I'm just letting you know.

I'm sure we'll find that out at some point.

None of their relevant expertise has come up on the show yet.

So, yeah, my friend, Dr.

Matt Lauder, is a senior lecturer in art history and theory, and he's director of American Studies at the University of Essex.

And he's an expert on Jerusalem pilgrim tattoos, which is the tattoo that Hexeth has.

It's amazing.

So I asked him about the cross that Pete Hegseth has tattooed on his chest.

You've seen the cross.

It's like a very large cross with like four crosses in the kind of corners.

Yeah.

And he told me, this is from Dr.

Lauder.

The Jerusalem cross design itself as a tattoo goes back to the 1570s, at least.

It's a symbol of the Franciscans who ruled the city and serves also as a visual symbol of proselytization of Christianity throughout the world, which made it a good symbol for commemorating a pilgrimage.

It's also been used, as in the example of William Lithgow in 1612, for example, to reify political concepts of Jerusalem itself, and its use as such is very politically charged.

It signifies a particular relationship to how power was understood over the city and the faith.

He says we should be skeptical that there is a straightforward relationship between tattoos and their meanings, because it's not necessarily the case that anyone with that tattoo is a fascist.

In fact, it can be quite the opposite.

However, no one who got this symbol in the 17th century got it anywhere near as big as Hegseth's tattoo.

In Jerusalem, you're looking at a 20-minute job.

It's a very short, small thing to symbolize that you've been on a pilgrimage.

Hegseth's is hours and hours and hours of tattooing.

So that is already a statement.

And secondly, the design specifically as his version of this tattoo, Dr.

Lauder says, is visually very evocative of far more direct white power symbols.

And he also told New Lines magazine, the crusading obsession combined with tattoos is a modern phenomenon, and that this more weaponized Christian tattooing culture is something he's only been seeing in the past decade or so.

So, this is a trend that's been happening that experts have been able to spot of people using these symbols, combining them with the iconography or the visual style of more overt white power symbols, and then getting them tattooed very large on their body in order to symbolize not just their Christianity, but also arguably, in my interpretation, it could be seen as a dog whistle to people who recognize the style.

So, you can say, this is just Christian, but if you know what you're looking for, it's also something else.

You know, Joe is saying, people are saying here, well, this, this can't be anti-Muslim.

It can't be anything like that because it existed before Muslims.

That's a dumb argument.

But symbols can be reclaimed for other purposes.

They can be reused and reinterpreted.

It could be a really old symbol that's now become attached to a more modern movement.

That is literally what the swastika was.

Nobody could argue with a straight face that

the swastika isn't anti-Semitic because it was originally Buddhist and invented before they knew Jews existed.

We know what that symbol means now.

It's just been reused in that way.

Great point, Marsh.

Also, you know what bothers me about this whole conversation is they're essentializing his entire argument, their entire argument against Hagseth into the tattoo.

Yeah.

Right.

So the one thing is the tattoo.

The reason why they're wrong about all the other things they talk about and all the accusations that they make against Hag Seth is because they don't know this tattoo.

Well, that has no relevance on the other things that they're talking about.

Also, there's been, you know, reports and people have reported that he's chanted kill all Muslims.

Now, Hag has denied that, but they said that while he was drunk in an event, he chanted kill all Muslims.

He's a deeply unqualified individual in many other ways that don't have anything to do with white power and white nationalism and Christian nationalism.

He has issues with alcohol.

He hasn't run an organization that even close to as big as the Defense Department.

Financial mismanagement of the charity that he ran as well.

Yeah.

He also cheated on his wife.

He had to pay like an NDA for somebody else who he allegedly sexually assaulted.

Like there's a lot of reasons why you don't want this guy as your department, the Secretary of Defense.

They're just focusing exclusively on the tattoo and they're using that as a lever to say, this is the reason they're wrong.

And look, maybe they might missay something about the tattoo.

They might even missay, and we will point out they do misspeak about something later on about Hexeth.

But in my opinion, it doesn't change my opinion of Hexeth because the thing they misspeak about doesn't change the outcome.

Yeah.

And it's this sort of idea of shifting standards of evidence in that when you disagree with me, every word you have to say has to be absolutely perfect.

Otherwise, I will find a way to dismiss it.

Whereas, as we will see, when you are motivated to support someone, you will go a long way to

try to write off anything that looks bad.

And we will see Joe do that in just a moment.

So, now Joe has gone to Jamie to ask him to pull up the tape of this particular conversation.

So, we're going to be listening to Joe listening to Pierce Morgan.

Michael, the tattoo in question, the tattoo in question is called a Jerusalem cross.

This is a medieval Christian symbol, goes back a long time.

In fact, at Jimmy Carter's funeral, there was a Jerusalem cross on the floor of the cathedral, and on the program for the funeral, there's one other tattoo that some have suggested could be extremist.

It's the phrase Deus Volt, which is a medieval Christian slogan, a long traditional slogan that refers to God's will and goes back a long way.

These are very traditional, very mainstream Christian symbols that not only are not extreme in any way, but which even the people who want to accuse him of extremism couldn't possibly name.

That is pathetic.

I also want to point out too,

really quickly before we jump into this, that the Deus Volt thing, he's lying.

He's lying about Deus Volt.

Yeah.

So he says, you know, this is a medieval Christian slogan that goes back a long way.

And it does go back a long way.

It goes back all the way to the Crusades, which is where Christians went out to convert or kill Muslims.

That is specifically, you know, when they when they're given these kind of quotes, that's what they're talking about.

This This is these quotes that we're on about here.

And that is a quote that Pete Hegseth has chosen to get tattooed on his arm, not in the medieval ages.

So even if you said that slogan, oh, it's just an old slogan that people liked at the time, sure, maybe at the time people didn't realize it was bad or it was associated with things that we now consider to be wrong, but we consider the Crusades to be wrong.

So to get that

tattoo on your arm within the last 50 years, suggests that you don't think that what was happening there was wrong.

For example, right, there might be people out there who've got old tattoos of like the Miramax logo, you know, Harvey Weinstein's Brushing Company.

They might have a tattoo on the leg because they really love Mirror Max films.

They love Quentin Tarofi, you know, films like that.

That's fine for back then because you just love those films.

But if you got that tattoo after you knew he was a rapist, we're allowed to judge you.

Yeah.

And Hexeth got that Crusades tattoo after we all knew how bad the Crusades were.

So we should judge him for it.

I'm reminded too, because they're talking about this tattoo and they're saying, oh, it can't be this, you know, this, it can't have ties to white supremacy.

It does.

It actually does.

It very much does.

And we'll get into it a little bit as we as we move forward.

But,

you know, when they say this, I'm reminded of the game Among Us, where sometimes once in a while, you're playing that game and someone will come up and they will not be, not be the actual monster, but you space them because you're being careful.

You're like, I don't know, man, you were in the same room.

We're just going to have to space you.

And then you space them.

Same thing should go for, I don't know, the Department of Defense if the guy happens to maybe be a white supremacist.

Maybe what you need to do is just err on the side of caution sometimes and say, you know what?

Even if you're not a white supremacist, even if this was just a wholesome, great idea for a tattoo that just you were just inspired from a pilgrimage, it doesn't matter.

It's still linked to things that make us raise an eyebrow at you.

You are asking for a job.

You know what?

You just go on, get to, you continue on your life.

You continue being rich and you continue being influential on Fox and Friends weekend.

Instead, you don't get to be the Department of Defense guy because we don't want to take that risk.

Maybe we don't want you as part, as running an entire defense department for the largest military in the world.

Okay, so this is the clip that Marsh was talking about where we have very different perspectives from Joe Rogan.

This is more from Pierce Morgan.

Again, you talked about NDAs.

I am bound by an NDA, Fox News.

If I were not bound by an NDA and Fox News wanted to release me from that NDA, I could tell you about my time with Pete Hexeth.

Unfortunately, that's not possible.

But I will say that the reason that there are so many people who anonymously came forward at Fox News is that because they're also bound by confidentiality provisions, which one-third of all American workers need to sign on their first day of work.

And if they were to go public, they could get sued.

The reason this accuser is not heard from is because, according to the New Yorker, she tried desperately to meet with Joni Ernst on the committee, and Joni Earns turned her down.

So the reason that she has not been able to come out publicly is because she has an NDA, and even privately, she could not meet meet with a senator on this committee who's also a rape survivor to share her story because that rape survivor did not want to hear from a woman who was going to put her potentially in a position to vote against Pete Hekseth.

Pete Heckseth has written himself while at Princeton saying that women who are passed out, if you have sex with them while they're unconscious, that's not really rape, right?

Now, the American military

is horrendous.

I don't know.

It doesn't sound true, but yeah.

Yeah, it's hard to say, but scoot ahead to where they just just start discussing the tattoo.

Yeah, so I thought this was remarkable to watch because Joe has got Jamie brought this up as an evidence for how this, as he put it, wacky leftist is completely clowned by Michael Knowles, who knows so much else.

And he saw this clip, Joe saw this clip and has clearly either just seen the tattoo bit or not seen the whole thing.

But I think this clip is hugely more damning for Pete's Hegseth than anything about that tattoo.

We're talking about how she's got NDAs about

Hegset's behavior, so she can't tell you the things he's done, but they warranted an NDA.

We're talking about other people who are sexual abuse survivors who have NDAs who are being silenced.

And then we're saying that he has publicly supported the idea that having sex with a woman who's passed out isn't rape.

That's totally fine.

These are massive, massive issues.

And you can hear that and you can see it in Joel's face because as he's listening to this, he stops dead in his drags.

And I think he realizes this isn't a good look.

This isn't a good look for the person he's defending at all.

And I thought this was fascinating because he will work really, really hard in a moment to excuse all of this.

yeah and he and he very much it makes jamie move ahead when it when it's a bunch it's a it's a deluge of information that makes pete hagseth look unqualified or a bad choice he immediately wants jamie to scrub that that uh timeline forward yeah

yeah it's very much kind of like oh stop showing all this rape stuff jamie just get to the bit where we can laugh at the woman that's what he's doing here it is marsh it's so wrong all right now we're going to talk about uh defending the crusades again this is more from the pierce morgan show and as for the cross that you talked about yes Deus Volt, which is the cross that he has, and the slogan that he has.

Well, Deus Volt is a cross.

It is an old Christian cross.

The phrase, excuse me, the phrase.

The phrase, however, was uttered by Crusaders as they were slaughtering Jews and Muslims during the Second Crusade specifically.

So it's not just a random cross.

It's not just a random phrase.

It isn't true.

The phrase

the phrase was uttered after the Council of Clermont when Pope Urban II declared the Crusade.

And it was actually probably Dieu le Voule, but it's been rendered in Latin as Deus Volta.

It has nothing to do with slaughtering

slaughtering Muslims because the Muslims had invaded Europe, not the other way around.

Oh my God,

are you really saying that the reason the Crusade, which was sent to the Holy Land, to liberate the Holy Land, from whom?

From Jews and Muslims?

And that should be the phrase that you have.

I'll tell you why the crusade began because the Eastern Emperor asked for help from the Western Pope because the Seljuk Turks were slaughtering Christians in the Holy Land because those lands were christian before the uh muslims invaded in the seventh century so that's why no no no those good to know michael's mother

those lands i'm sorry those those lands those those lands no no no keep going became those lands became christian after the first crusade okay so let's make the lands were christian

centuries

i couldn't islam didn't exist before the seventh century what are you talking about so this was the clip that joe was saying this wacky leftist woman is saying all these things and she gets completely clowned and shows herself to be an idiot compared to this guy.

I don't hear what Joe is saying there.

This is not how Joe described that clip at all.

He just can't hear that this is not what he thinks it is.

He's heard this and he's saved that in his brain as an example of wacky leftist.

And it is just not that at all.

And what Michael Knowles is doing here, he's either misinformed about what the Crusades were or he's lying about what the Crusades and the intent of the Crusades were.

But we aren't at this point trying to figure out what the intent of the Crusades were.

It's very well established that this was very much kind of an attack on, you know, this was spreading the word of God through sword and spear.

This was very much a like religious war kind of thing.

But Joe just believes him and thinks he's doing a great job.

And we have to ask why.

And partly, I think it's because he's arguing with somebody that is on the political, on the opposite side of the political spectrum to where Joe finds himself, even if he won't admit where he finds himself.

And it's because we have a woman here who's expressing an opinion and Joe has already said, you know, we haven't played this clip, but while she's waiting to speak, you hear Joe keep saying, oh, woman hasn't spoken yet.

She's got a uterus.

She's got a vagina.

She should speak now.

So he doesn't want to hear from her.

He's already boxed her into illegitimate participant in this conversation.

And so anything she says here, he's going to write off.

I just want to point out debate is such a shitty way to get information.

It's such a terrible way because you can hear how calm that person on the right is.

You can hear how calm he is.

And it just because he used that, he sort of has that calmness about him, people automatically think he's correct that he's saying the correct information but he's not saying the correct information it's you know he's he's one he's saying it's used in a council that sort of seems to supersede the idea that it's not being used by white supremacist groups today and it is there's a there's a a piece i found from wikipedia here that i want to read it is it has been used by perpetrators of right-wing terrorism daves volt now we're talking about daves volt not the cross itself yeah

it's been used by perpetrators of the right of right-wing terror terrorism It was repeatedly used by the perpetrator of the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting.

And it was one of the tattoos on the body of the perpetrator of the 2023 Allen, Texas outlet mall shooting.

Deus Vault was also among the slogans and symbols used during the violent far-right.

riot in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

So this has been adopted by online people to sort of use it as a way to be anti-Muslim.

And so they're using it in this sense.

And Pete Hegseth has this tattooed on his body.

So the white supremacist groups that hate Muslims are using this as a symbol on their online hate speech places.

And they're using it in actual physical attacks on places and in riots.

And Pete Hegseth has it on his body.

And it still, even still, is a red herring.

It still is a red herring comparing him, you know, because this guy brings it out and says, well, that's not when the Crusades happened.

And that's not what the Crusades are about.

That's all a red herring.

Who cares about any of that stuff?

We need to talk about what, why he has it on his body and what it reflects today.

Yeah, absolutely.

His argument is it doesn't matter that it's on the arms of terrorists because it was first uttered by

after the Council of Claremont went by Pope Urban II.

Well, maybe its first utterant wasn't its last utterance.

Maybe we should look at subsequent utterances.

Yeah.

Maybe pay attention to those.

Yeah.

So now this clip is them reading about what Hagseth had done while he was in college.

Published the column saying sex with unconscious women isn't rape.

Jesus.

Imagine not just thinking that, but publishing it.

What did he actually say?

Well, rape in quotes.

Intercourse.

Bemusing yet mandatory orientation program revolved entirely around whether in an instance of sexual intercourse constituted rape.

The actual instance portrayed in the skit was in fact a skit.

In fact, not a clear case of rape, at least not in my home state.

So this is Hexis saying this.

In short, though intercourse was not consented to, there was no duress because the girl drank herself into unconsciousness.

Both criteria must be satisfied for rape.

Unfortunately, the panelists never cited any legal definition of rape.

Yet the panel, all females in the session I attended, claimed that rape it was.

Huh.

What year was this?

So are they talking about, this is what's confusing.

Are they talking, it says a skit, and then it says they're talking about a legal definition of rape?

Has the legal definition changed over the years?

Like, when was this?

Is he talking about a legal definition or is he talking about his own opinion?

Right?

There's a giant difference between the two of them, right?

Especially if you're taking something out of context.

You don't know if he elaborated.

Article for his college newspaper stating that having sex with unconscious women isn't rape because the criteria for rape isn't met.

So this is in his college newspaper.

So how old is he?

Is he like 50?

How old is Pete Hegseth?

Yeah, he's up there, right?

Which is really weird to think that 44 college would have been around 2000.

Well, yeah.

What I think is really interesting here is here how many different ways Joe is trying to justify Hegseth saying this.

So he said, Oh, it was a skit as if a skit wouldn't matter him saying it.

And they said, Oh, wait, no, this was it Hegseth?

Oh, it was Hegseth.

So, if it's not reporting on someone else, what year was this?

So, maybe it's been so long ago that it didn't matter.

Oh, he's talking about legal definitions.

Has the legal definition changed?

In which case, maybe he's talking about that.

No, the legal definition hasn't changed because it's, and he says, is it definition or opinion?

So we've got another one there.

What about the context?

Is there context?

Oh, the context is he published an article in a school newspaper about this.

It must just be so old because he's really old.

So everything's changed since then.

What year was this?

2000, very recent then.

So like he's working so hard to find any attempt to like hand wave away any criticism.

And he can't just say, it is bad that Pete Hexeth held these views.

Even if he doesn't hold them now, it's bad that he held those views then.

It would be very easy to just accept that and to move on if you were being intellectually honest.

But because this is something that Joe agrees with, someone rather that he agrees with, he works as hard as he can to defend him at all costs.

Now, the question is, can you imagine this quote from someone Joe didn't like?

And how many of these steps is Joe Rogan going to go through to defend that person?

It's a great point.

That's a really great point.

What he's doing here is, you know, we weren't going to talk about a lot about logical fallacies, but I will hear this is called begging the question.

So he has a conclusion that he wants to start with.

And the conclusion is: Pete couldn't have meant that rape was okay.

And then he tries to find as much evidence as he can to make sure that that conclusion is the thing that he shows, that he finally comes up with at the end.

And what he's going to do is he's going to shoot down any evidence that disagrees with that conclusion.

And so he's begging the question here.

Yeah.

Next, we're moving on.

This is the last clip in

our undercard segment.

And this is where we actually find out that

the person who is on Pierce Morgan's show, by the way, her name is Julie Roginski, and she is a Democratic political strategist.

She misspoke and she said that this is something that...

Pete wrote and he did not actually write it, but we want clarification on this.

And this is where they find clarification.

Is he saying this from his personal perspective or is he saying it from a legal perspective?

I don't know what else was in the text.

You know, I'm trying to be as charitable as possible.

Because if more was in the, like, that's a reprehensible act.

That's like, did he say anything like that?

Or was it just specifically talking about the legal definition?

Because he said in his state, right?

Because to be clear, he did not write it himself.

He published it.

Oh.

That's what this is.

In short, Hagseth did not publish a public.

He did not, or did publish such a column while he held the role of public.

He did not write it himself.

He did not write it.

It was written by someone else.

Okay.

So he just published someone's opinions.

Okay, that's very different.

That's very different.

That's very, very, very different.

She said he said that.

That's not what he said at all.

See, that right there.

I'm just so exhausted.

That's exhausting.

Both, like, over the thing about that.

That's Trump with both sides.

But that right there is crazy because my opinion of him shifted briefly.

So the thing is, right, Pate didn't write this, and she could have been clear about saying that.

I suspect she didn't know that.

I suspect she's read that somewhere, and she's repeated that.

And either the place she's read it has said he wrote it, or she's conflated that in her head, just as we see Joe do all the time.

So, like, these are mistakes that can be made.

They should be called out.

But to be clear, I mean, I'm a publisher of a magazine.

I published a skeptic magazine.

If I publish an article saying it's not rape if the victim is passed out, I'd expect people to think that was an opinion that I thought was okay and well enough to be published.

This doesn't absolve you at all.

He didn't publish this with a big black bar around it saying, here's a terrible opinion I completely disagree with, and here's all the reasons I think it's wrong.

When you are the proprietor, when you're the publisher of any kind of magazine newspaper, the things that go out are on you to some degree.

And if you publish something that is actively defending sex crimes, it is reasonable for someone to think that you would defend sex crimes.

Yeah.

This is something Joe would say, though, because it feels like he's defending misinformation by saying it's just a podcast, right?

That sort of feels the same.

It feels in the same realm to me.

It doesn't matter what you put out into the world.

It doesn't matter that you're the purveyor of that information.

All it matters is who actually said it.

And I just totally disagree with that.

I think you're absolutely right.

There's ethics.

People who publish things are, they have to have a code of ethics in which they publish those things.

That is a necessary thing to have.

And to say that it's not his fault is ridiculous.

In fact, like you suggest, he's just as responsible as the person who wrote it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, if this was something that was, say, defamatory, he would be held as responsible as the writer for having published it.

The publication itself would be getting sued over this.

So, like, there is a recognition when you are publishing something.

And okay, it's a college newspaper.

He's not publishing the Washington Post.

But nevertheless, the point is that he is the bar at which the decision is made as to what does and doesn't go in.

And he's made that editorial decision if he's published it.

And that is still on him.

And I'm the last person

All right, Marsh, what was something good that happened?

So we didn't cover it too much here because there was so much to get to.

But as we mentioned at the very, very top, Lex kept coming back to Genghis Khan conversation.

Genghis Khan, amazing.

Oddly enough, like funnily enough, for where we went with this conversation, he kept defending Genghis Khan against accusations of rape is what he was doing again and again and again.

And he kept coming back.

And he does that like several times in the first half an hour.

And then later on, very late on the conversation, he brings it back up.

And it's clearly been something that's playing on his mind.

And it's clearly something that he's like, I really wish I hadn't done that.

Can I talk about this again?

And he comes back up and says, I didn't express it well.

And he tries to do it again.

And genuinely, I think it's really good that he came back to that to be like, I said some stuff there that I don't think I, that I don't want to have said, that I don't, that isn't reflective.

Can I please talk about that again?

It's good that he does that.

It's good that Joe's allows him to do that.

But Joe not only allows him to do that, it's sort of sweet the way he even helps him out once he starts.

Like Joe is actively lending his friend a hand to get out of the little hole that he dug on that particular bit.

That is genuinely sweet.

It's genuinely good interviewing.

And the way Lex thanks him for that.

I actually thought that was genuinely positive.

That is a really good thing.

I wish that standard was all the way through, but

I've got to salute it when I see it there.

I also want to talk about at the end of this podcast, they are sort of with bated breath, waiting for the launch of a rocket into space.

They want to watch it and they're saying, we're going to end the show with that.

So let's see how long it's going to take us to get there.

And they're paying attention to it and they have the little countdown timer and they're all really excited and then when it goes off they clap and they're like fuck yeah and they're all excited i am that guy i am 100 that guy when i see those things go off i know there's a lot of nerds out there who are exactly like me that as soon as they see that that thing go off they're like cheering and like yeah that's awesome that we shot a rocket into space and then it came back down we caught that thing that's amazing and i am 100 with them and i totally felt the exact same excitement while I was watching that part of the podcast.

That's something I will take time out of my day to watch.

And I know a lot of other people will do.

And so I just love it.

I cheer.

I'm 100% with them on that.

All right.

So that's it for this week.

Remember, you can access more than a half an hour of bonus content each week, and you pay as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com/slash no Rogan.

And you can hear more of me

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You can hear me on Skeptic to the K every Thursday.

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