Joe Rogan Experience #1640 — Josh Rogin Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day of my watches and I review the watches and the ramen That's a beautiful watch. a version of a recreation of it and uh he took off his Omega once he got into space and he put on his No, that's an automatic watch. Oh. And that's obviously not as prestigious of a watch, but now it's amongst watch freaks

2:35 I don't know if that guy was foolish or No one's ever combined reviewing ramen restaurants and reviewing watches together and then pairing them appropriately in most cases. Living my best life in, like, an apartment the size of this table. and communities were brought together. It's amazing, right? Yeah, I've only been there once for the UFC, but I really enjoyed it.

4:27 And so I'd never been to a Slipknot concert before, so we just went. Yeah. That's one way to look at it. that they have brought from their ancient times that they totally forgot why. They have no idea And what that taught them is that they need to rely on each other on this island, which is basically 90 percent mountains. the consensus is we all better wear masks and nobody should get Corona. So, you know,

7:29 Do you remember Pride? Exactly. And it was the envy of the martial arts world At the time, America was not like that. But in Japan, it was already huge. They're just very, you know, particular about the way that they interact He's like, well, I don't care. So they super appreciate that. That's how you started, as a journalist. you study a problem country like Russia or Iran or something like that, there's industry for that.

10:39 Like there was no graduate school coming, which just wasn't going to happen. It's like their New York Times. Wow. It's a little bit smaller than this one. Martha Raddatz from ABC, she's coming out of the bullpen, you know, two minutes before the thing Traditionally, I should have, out of respect, given the very famous senior producers the seats that they sit in.

12:49 But suffice to say, at that moment, I was just like, no, I'm not moving. than it was yesterday and he's like just he's just like the master of this stuff not that i'm not rumsfeld talking about japan and it was a front page article in seven million Japanese newspapers that I couldn't read. And he stopped me in the hallway and I didn't even think he knew my in until one time I didn't ask anything and he stopped

14:35 That is a mindfuck story I can't even get into right at this moment. It's like young journalists these days get thrown onto the heap, right? But I had something that these people didn't have, which is I was trained by these top, top, top Japanese journalists who taught me the things that they never teach, which are like how to source, how to dig, you know, how to pour through documents, how to use data, how to understand budgets, how to understand how these agencies work on the inside.

16:06 and I also have a side gig at CNN I was there for a year Did you consider learning the language in terms of like how to write and read? you know, not sober. And then, you know, basically my, your options limit. Right. Um, no, but I mean, And sometimes that step leads you to a good place. But it kind of is. But it is advice in the sense that, like, if someone, like, identifies with you, like,

18:11 You had passion and drive, and it does apply to everything. But I'm not – I'm cool with that. It's a thing that you enjoy doing. How caffeinated are you right now? it's good stuff in a squabble maybe because we share The true story. In 1999 Oh I'll never forget I only played it once Mike Barbiglia? that takes you to your seat He was a very smart guy, as you know.

21:34 So it was like, you know, all the living color guys. like endless you know perform like that with them and allison who was the host she became the owner and uh you know and so i kept in touch Blue meaning dirty. Yeah, but that's what blue stands for. No, but you did it in a sense of, he would say, depressing shit. Can we get back on track with this story?

23:45 And he would do all these corporate gigs for these Silicon Valley companies. trying to do comedy over like stripper music That's all well and good. I just tagged them. he says are you Josh Rogan right And they're all like, did that just happen? want to cover joe lieberman's black you know whatever this is a much better story so they like at that telling lies about me in public and then he like just the story changes every time he's like oj

27:51 They're like, you better steer clear of him. I'm sorry, Dan. Okay, and now I had to get that off the chest. like have you ever seen the show insomniac yes Yes. That's his life. I used to drink with Dave Vitello at the Big Hunt. It's not just that. He showed up. And I'm telling you, man, it made me think like, God, why isn't this guy more famous? So good.

30:57 Like, Black cap, Brian Regan does, like, still does Red Rocks. He always started with the same joke. and silly she was there a lot there was a guy Real good guy. I probably shouldn't tell this Demanded like 25 grand And go get like Cash is a weird thing to want. Offset Designer bag Yeah Is that the- I imagine so. Yeah. Anyway, that's the improv. I take that back.

34:26 There's a lot we could talk about. He was so adamant But we were saying- Is there a question? He doesn't know. in the book, and I think I lay out a bunch of evidence to support this argument, but you be But to talk about the origin story, we sort of have to first go back and understand how the story got so fucked up. Around March or April is where everybody started to get onto teams.

38:08 you could blame China for a number of things in the pandemic, for hiding the science, for hiding Okay. So talking about the coronavirus origin was considered very impolite. And now add to that the shit. Like we have a CDC. They have a CDC. There's this in Wuhan. You're telling me that this outbreak happened next to these labs. through something called the ACE2 receptor

40:51 I was already writing the book, by the way. And so then I found out there were these cables where these U.S. diplomats had gone to this very lab, the Wuhan Institute for Virology, two years before And these cable writers, these diplomats were like, hey, we got a problem here. And I heard about them, and I'm like, I got to get these cables. And that, in a sense, was the beginning.

42:27 the pandemic if the lab or at least predicted that this could be something that could happen And, you know, he was sparking something that he couldn't control. And this is the craziest part of this is that, you know, You've got the American scientists, the European scientists, the Chinese scientists going to every cave in Yunnan and this and that, finding all the most dangerous viruses, bringing them back to the lab and then playing around with them.

44:34 So that's that's one thing. But the the the the the theory is that in doing all of these experiments to make these viruses more virulent, more dangerous, this mess. But the problem was once that theory was floated, the scientists who were involved in investigate all the theories. Let's investigate the natural spillover theory, which is basically that because Trump's a liar. And because he was using racist terms, like I won't repeat, but like

47:22 Who do you think they hired to do the investigation? Yeah, I know Jamie. So they hired the best friends of the lab to investigate the lab. really well. Let me do the investigation. You know, their legacy, this entire project of $200 billion, $200 million rather, to dig up viruses all over the world would be kaput. It would have to necessarily be stopped, this whole industry.

49:27 We don't have to argue about Trump anymore, hopefully, ever again. virologist, he says, I took a look at this virus, and I concluded that it's so powerful that it must have been evolved in a lab setting. is the most important person in the world of gain of function research there is. Just broke some news on your show right now. The details are a little sketchy.

51:27 clowns, right? So at the end, you could get stuff done if you just knew how to work the system. That was a military-funded program, but we can get to that in a second. Here's my question. That's not what I'm saying. and bringing them back to these labs. which I'm sure he believed. But the reason that there's no debate about this is because the NIH and NIAID structure is such that everyone gets funded by them.

54:39 really dangerous. ass he's not some joe schmo virologist he was the head of the cdc he's seen all of the secret up. Nobody cares what you tweeted in March 2020. Let's just have a rational conversation about what but they don't have any credibility with the mainstream media. then great. I will leave the ticker tape to look into the labs because they have a clear conflict of interest and they fucked it up already.

57:32 That's fair. Yes. So there's two things. There's argument and there's evidence. Now, I would say to that, SARS spilled over naturally where the bats are. And then what Peter Desik will say on TV, who says all the time, is that, oh, well, Right. news stories because they've been writing that for a year and they never thought about it really for They found some people who had it.

1:00:14 Well, what is the argument when they talk about the natural spillover theory? That's not what I'm saying. Okay? If it wasn't the market and it wasn't the lab, well, maybe the virus was on the box of frozen food that came from Norway. Because it doesn't pass the laugh test. enough, right? They don't need to find the source. They just need to make sure we don't find the

1:03:04 which would only lead you to searching every frozen food package that ever came into Wuhan in the last two years, words the Chinese government wants us to believe so again they're trying to avoid They're doing vaccine diplomacy on a broad scale. OK, the big reveal of the lab accident theory is that it implicates us, that it points the finger back at us because it points because we're the ones who sponsored that research.

1:05:33 And scientific cooperation was held up as the bastion of that, because if you can't OK, that's what it is. OK. And they have factions and they kill each other and they hate each other. It happens all the time. a four-foot wall twice. Twice? who's got another party guy standing over his shoulder of course it's what they would do. And for the people who saw how they understood how the CCP operates, of course, it's what they would do.

1:08:44 science, they still won't give us the data that they have to this day. And the clear eyes are that they covered up the origin, they covered up the science, He was just getting attacked all the time. And you know what? Thank you. It's a forensic question. getting worse because, I mean, we're a year and a half into this thing and we don't know shit. We went to the lab.

1:11:22 There was an intelligence gap. He was in the know. The intelligence people, who also didn't like some of them anyway, who didn't like the Trump people, leaked there was no evidence to fuck with the Trump people, Because there is no evidence- There's no evidence either way. by them to reset the narrative or somebody in the intelligence community to reach a bunch

1:13:13 He didn't say go prove the lab theory. And then we took some of it and we shifted it back to Russia. that was going on in this network of labs But then something happens, and then Pottinger goes and he's like, hey, what do we have on these labs? Huge intelligence – massive intelligence failure that in any sane world, you would have a commission, you know, like a 9-11 style commission would be like, how did this happen?

1:15:13 A year later, zero Democrats are interested in this. What are you going to do? and because of many other people blurting it all out because There's no plan for it. Guess what the... Guess what the plan is and to times it by six. which didn't predict and preempt, That's the plan. need for an understanding before we increase this research sixfold? And here's the other thing. Even if it didn't cause

1:18:22 No, that's different. to build them again. So we should probably Now, again, just as a curious human being, I'm like, oh, why would he do that? And this is why I think this is still right. were like oh no this is all conspiracy. So we get obsessed with that. And then, of course, for the mainstream media, if you're wrong, mistakes have been made. I'm not a perfect journalist, but I'm trying to get it right.

1:22:08 And people have source bias. This double, triple, quadruple, Oh, the Global Virome Project. viruses that we can. We found a really bad one, that's great. But does it include treatments this time? But that was never done in Wuhan. Right. So that's like a government investment in a new technology that it worked. community by people who think that this research and whether or not it led to therapeutics,

1:25:33 It happened a thousand miles away next to the lab. is the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic that we're all in. That's the one we need to figure out. He was doing it in a lab that was cited in 2018 for safety violations. In many, many labs all over Like, the rioters came. Oh, okay. if she hadn't switched jobs very recently. And, you know, that shit is scary. And. You know, my wife could have been in that building that day if she hadn't switched jobs very recently.

1:27:59 they pushed through a lot of shit. Now, of course, for understandable reasons, So the Biden team the Biden people are being fair, you know, because they don't want to take a stance because they're theory data, silence. Robert Redfield, I remember when Robert Redfield was like, hey, You know what I mean? Because I just wrote a fucking book about it.

1:30:26 It's not a conspiracy. Yes. They made mistakes. issue to stoke anti-asian hate, which is, I think, a fact, The first time Yang Jiechi, the state counselor of China, met with Tony Blinken, he criticized him about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. Now, that, in a sense, is a very clumsy kind of propaganda. And by the way, if you don't download it, we're going to ding your social credit score, you know?

1:34:12 research. He's like a brilliant it was yeah one tweet and they punished the entire industry the all there's the big scandal in in in What did you call him? What did you say, though, after that? You said CCP no. Delete that. I never said kid eating. No, what did you say, though, after that? What? Chinese Communist Party line. You may and beg for forgiveness and promise never to do it again.

1:36:36 and any politician who wanted to be tough on China, right? They're not a foreign policy organization. And then they paid their penance or whatever it was and tried to maintain their relationships in China and tried to move on. But my point is that that's how the CCP operates. They will That's what it is? and with Silicon Valley tech companies Right, but there's certain things they do,

1:39:02 Well, I think it's probably already not going to be aired In other words, you know, while we want, we would money off of that. They didn't want to stop airing the NBA games. They had to do that because the Like, are we allowed to ask? There, it's like if the government says there's a boycott, there's a boycott. But we're not sophisticated enough in our discussion of China or in our government response to China to actually make that happen.

1:42:20 Yeah. This is a fairly recent discussion that we're having about China. Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is a, I get this a lot because, you know, there's a group of China But like, first of all, how's that going? You know what I mean? thought this much about China, and I'm trying to engage them honestly. You know what I mean? I'm You know, because in America, our institutions guard their independence fiercely and rightly, you know, and so they're not trying to get the FBI to help them.

1:46:32 because you're you're stepping out there in sort of in violation of both ideologies well you know Give me that mug. All right, now we're talking. Nobody cares about me. There are more and more people. Three types. Okay. So one is just money, so much money. I'm talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of donations. It's baked into its DNA. And no one ever kept track of it.

1:50:04 And somehow they find their way onto American campuses in all sorts of crazy ways. that. And this this Chinese influence operation that was targeted at UT Austin at the LBJ school As part of the reporting for the book. And they come up to me and they're like, Mr. Rogan, why do you want to study at the Confucius Institute? You put them anywhere. Like the Russian guy with the belt up to here and the white patent leather loafers who's like,

1:52:47 Absolutely. It's true. But, yeah, no, I was calling my wife. picked up the phone instead of my wife. I thought that— They found out that I was actually talking to a cyber infrastructure security agency territory but there was this one Russian guy I used to hang out with all the time And he's like, my buddy, Andre. What's the difference between Russian cigarettes?

1:55:13 Paul Mall is the one that does. Thanks again to my- We're already drinking. They put these fucking weird wrappers on them, but you get underneath it, you get the real thing. This experience is rewarding enough. Got it? But it's also, I just love the fact that they're from 1773. Thank you. Yes. Oh, yeah, academia. I know you don't. And believe me, what are they going to find about me?

1:58:09 of money off of it, but because that's a key way of, you know, having our societies not fall into And then they have these student associations Okay. The last time I went to China was 2016. that we profess to believe in. Not that we've done a great job of it. Trump, this got framed as a US-China Cold War. But the honest way to talk about it is an and then, oh, don't say bad about China, you're a cold warrior.

2:01:30 there they're they're not just they're not liberal in the sense of like what we But I think it's really dangerous, and I think it opens us up to more manipulation. it's we need to figure out who's right. There's a lot of people that – when you see people saying that, oh, if you are in favor of the Second Amendment, you're in favor in a liberal gang, you're in a conservative gang.

2:05:00 There's a lot of people that don't have the time to do that. this. But inside their own institutions, there's these echo chambers. And these echo chambers, right? The colleges, their incentives are not to get sued. So they have to create all these crazy Trump. That messes with their minds, right? I'm criticizing the CCP, but I'm not a conservative.

2:07:22 you get double the scoops and double the credibility. If you work for an organization – remember all those conservative newspapers that are like uh organizations like oh trump's terrible trump's like pottinger the guy i told you about and other people are like hey trump listen this is bad we president to the American president directly. And two days later, Trump is saying, oh, yeah,

2:09:44 But I don't know. I don't know enough about American universities and how to solve that, Probably the biggest, that's the biggest, that's an issue. They don't know where they're going. now keep in mind your Muslims is what they're targeting specifically though no so in this I the camp. Before you even knew there was something called a concentration camp in Xinjiang, you know

2:12:55 And there were a lot of people like, wait a minute, this is pretty fucked up. incidents here and i'm not saying we treated we treated Muslims well after 9-11. But let's just deal with this for one second. And, you know, now there's a ton of just like really horrendous, pernicious genocide denialism. book is what I interviewed a bunch of survivors. OK, because whatever statistic you have and

2:14:43 what I decided to do is interview a bunch of the survivors. And their stories are true. They're not lying. Okay. And their scars are part of convincing the East Germans that they had a better life waiting for them if they could just throw off the dictatorship. Anyway, skip ahead 50 years. The 26 journalists, Americans, mostly Their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and uncles disappeared.

2:16:24 Three hours But then that was only the beginning of her nightmare because then she got let out of Her credit was fucked. fucked up you know for the simple crime of pressing click on the VPN once that's a capricious form of Now you're picking cotton or sewing together Nikes. i there was another woman uh who i interviewed who said when she was finally let out of the camp

2:18:41 and mass force abortion Okay. aware of these atrocities, they don't want to be complicit in them. And we turned back that boat the learning, they still won't care. It deserves some explanation. At the same time, it's kind of a word that we can't live without for some reason, because when we see it, it's so clear and it's so stark that we have to call it out.

2:21:42 That's one part of the problem. but this is like the bleeding edge. Now we're getting to the bleeding edge because we're They want to build a constituency inside of our society such that, you know, the u.s. government sanctioning that company points where we say, OK, well, maybe the company that builds the cameras that sit at the top Yeah. for endless defense budgets.

2:26:04 But that's not the point of the China competition. It's an economic, ideological, But that doesn't get us want my pension being used to build concentration camps. That's just me. So that's what I'm going to try to argue against and try to affect change in if I can. So far, it's not going very well. It's not. I still don't know. No company that does manufacturing in China is immune from the pressures.

2:28:52 So it gets to your decoupling question, okay, if you're insistent on doing this bad behavior, we're going to act accordingly and It means we don't have to have everything here, Now you don't have to make that argument. All of that. We could make partnerships with the Taiwanese companies. So just as far as we've gotten in this time, it's way farther than I've ever gotten in

2:31:39 Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. But it kind of all muddled along. Budgets got done. Everybody was kind of equally Not everything, just some of it. Okay. They fucked it up and they broke it. How did they break it? He was determined to do that. And it was just such a disaster policy and bureaucracy wise that it had no chance of That was a crazy one because

2:35:03 I think there's there's definitely some risk there. We don't know how much uh but probably not the number one issue in U.S. China We're not doing that. each other and canceled each other out. They nullified their own and both of them lost. you can't, hey, you know, African country, South American country, you better not do Huawei. And would you like to have your dictatorship absolved of any war crimes in the UN?

2:37:24 example of sort of and then, of course, Trump changes mind about it are offering us. So it's a great example of sort of, And so now it's just like a mess For them, it's all connected. engineering and they're very very skilled engineers and uh oh so all these people get their phones Of course, they all lose a bunch of money. They work with, in Hong Kong.

2:39:27 to beat up Hong Kong protesters? We're attacking different tentacles of the problem. And there's no acknowledgement of it nor solution. And their own ecosystem, I'm sure, is way more porous and susceptible to... yeah. So again, two ideas in our head at the same time. no going back. You can't untangle yourself from that. They would, in many cases, prefer to

2:42:38 And the Trump administration, in a way, was a chance for those people to have their voices heard. It backfired, right, because the Indians are now more anti-CCP than they ever were. I don't see a way where they don't have some pretty significant influence on us, even more so than what they have now over the next decade or two. then we've got to bring those guys down right now.

2:45:00 that's actually the worst thing. And I argue, and many people like me argue, that the best way to world where they can have their country. to limit its ambitions such that we can all live together and avoid the hot war. But ignoring the In other words, they compromise us and are so powerful that we can't stand up to them, That's when Daryl Morey tweets something, everybody who believes in the enlightenment and individual liberty and the path of human dignity has a responsibility to say, no, fuck you.

2:47:58 of places where we don't. You know, that's that's fine. We should encourage interactions and we should keep encouraging you know our shared essential oneness you know like there's there's something just true like six weeks it wasn't banned in china and there were thousands of people from mainland china They might think about it differently than us.

2:49:34 and we were having this crazy community of people who were coming together, Oh, Jesus. And Clubhouse didn't do shit it's a false exclusivity it was early on I thought it was really productive. That's how I found out about you. Anyway, another reason to drink. How long was it? It dates back to Descartes and Spinoza and Thomas Paine and Republican or Democrat or American even. It doesn't even matter because this is a universal

2:53:38 profitable and the power that they've amassed is unprecedented. In terms of the ability to control what's kind of a capitalist society, I don't know. Chaos Under Heaven, alright