Chris Williamson

The episode opens with a gift: a copy of Albert Goldman's book on Lenny Bruce, described as a favorite, with an inscription inside addressed to Yoko Ono, "who knows well what the jazz life entails." The conversation frames the inscription as Goldman's way of working his way into the Yoko Ono and John Lennon camp, after which, as one participant puts it, "he goes and writes a book that blows them up." Goldman's Lennon book, published after Lennon's death, is described as exploding a lot of what was going on in Lennon's personal life, "whether it was true or not."

The hosts' first theme is how strange it is to publish damaging claims about someone who can no longer respond. They raise uncertain memories of domestic-violence accusations against Lennon, admit they don't know who made them, and call the whole furor "just a mess." One participant suggests that hypocrisy would not be shocking given "human contradiction," and compares it to male feminists who turn out to be sexual predators. Another says they have "a really hard time believing" the claims about Lennon, while conceding, "But I've been fooled before, right?"

Someone then reads out a summary of the book's allegations. In it, Goldman portrayed Lennon as having numerous sexual relationships outside his marriages, including the well-known relationship with May Pang, further affairs framed as habitual cheating, and claimed sexual encounters with men, including an alleged relationship with Beatles manager Brian Epstein. The summary also lists more serious allegations involving male prostitutes in Thailand and other conduct Goldman characterizes as sexual predation. The hosts ask the obvious sourcing question: how would anyone get information about male prostitutes in Thailand, and "how do you know?"

The summary also covers how the book was received. Yoko Ono and McCartney publicly condemned it at publication, and contemporary reporting noted claims of factual errors, contradictions, unattributed assertions, and material allegedly based on dubious sources or quotations used out of context. The hosts treat this as typical rather than exceptional: "Look, that is not uncommon."

To support that point they tell an anecdote from an earlier podcast appearance by Bill Murray. Murray is said to have read Bob Woodward's book Wired, about their friend John Belushi, and to have stopped after about five pages because it was "so fake." Murray's objection, as retold here, was that the book portrayed Belushi as constantly on hardcore drugs and "losing his mind," when in Murray's experience he was "a lightweight" who "would get drunk off a couple drinks." The retelling quotes Murray as saying "this is not my friend." This is secondhand testimony from a friend and is not checked against anything else in this part of the conversation.

From these examples the hosts draw a general argument about posthumous accusations. Everyone is grieving and the subject cannot answer, so a writer can publish sensational claims, face at most a possible lawsuit, and still make "an extraordinary amount of money." Sensational claims also sell better than mundane ones. A book about Lennon's meditation and LSD use would not sell, they say, but lurid sexual allegations would. They also argue that the dead are defended less forcefully than the living, because no one defends them "with the same level of vitriol or vehementness."

So the defense is always going to be flimsy in comparison to the accusation, because the accusation feels like it's got more substance to it.

The reasoning is that both the accusation and the defense end up as hearsay once the subject is dead. The accusation still looks like "original research" and so carries more weight, even when the reader has no way of checking it. The point is put this way: "You didn't go to Thailand. You didn't speak to the prostitutes."

The Woodward link takes the conversation to Watergate. One participant retells a story they heard from Tucker on an earlier podcast. In this version Woodward was "an intelligence agent," Watergate was his first assignment, and Nixon was removed because he "knew who killed Jack Kennedy." The claims escalate quickly: the people involved in Watergate "were all FBI," and "They set him up." This retelling is offered as remembered hearsay, and the speaker's own reaction is "holy shit, this is fucking crazy."

The early retelling has inconsistencies that the later clip corrects. In the first version, Vice President Spiro Agnew was removed on corruption charges and "Lyndon Johnson" was put in. The clip played afterward names Gerald Ford as the replacement and gives tax evasion as the reason Agnew was sent away. The participants also tell themselves to check the claims: "See if you can find the clip of Tucker talking about it."

Challenged on why Nixon didn't blow the whistle after leaving office, the conversation offers several answers. One is intimidation. Since "they killed JFK," Nixon "knew they could" get him, and he "would have been a dead man, 100%." Another is credibility: no one would have believed a disgraced ex-president, and it "would have sounded like sour grapes." The last is that there was no channel for him. There was no internet, the New York Times was not going to print it, and no late-night show would book him. Even if one had, he would have needed "about 90 minutes to explain it all." The hosts note that podcasts, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube would have given him a way to tell the story.

The account also makes a specific claim about Nixon's guilt: "he didn't organize Watergate. He covered it up." In this version people brought him news of the recording equipment, he told them not to tell on those involved, and "That's what got him." One participant says they read up on the story online afterward to check whether it was accurate. No source is named in this section.

Nixon is not presented as a hero. The hosts call him "a very right wing product of his time." They say his views on minorities would be considered disgraceful today, and they list problems around the Vietnam War and civil rights. They also note that he passed the Controlled Substances Act, "which is the reason why all psychedelic drugs to this day are Schedule 1," and conclude "Nixon was a fucking problem." Their objection is to how he was removed. It is "scary shit," they say, because "no one got arrested, no one got indicted, no one even got criticized."

The conversation then plays the requested clip, introduced as Tucker's account. It starts with a discussion of the New York Times and government phone tapping. The speaker calls the paper "a conduit for the lies of government" and says they once wrote for it as a freelancer. They grant that "there are a lot of really smart people there" but say those people are "tools of power." In their view, journalists should not act as tools of power even if they agree with the government's agenda.

the job of the media the press is to keep power in check.

The clip compares the press to a seatbelt that keeps "things don't go too far," and says the press is instead "acting as a willing handmaiden." Asked when that changed, the speaker points to Nixon. The case made in the clip rests on a series of claims. Woodward had been a naval intelligence officer working in the Nixon White House. About a year later he was a brand-new reporter at the Washington Post with no journalism background. He was then made lead on the biggest story in the paper's history, and his main Watergate source was "the number two guy at the FBI." The speaker uses their own newspaper experience to argue that "That is not how it works."

The speaker calls the result "a deep state coup" and asks what we would call it "If that happened in Guatemala." They say they accepted the heroic "intrepid reporter" version for decades before deciding that Woodward was "a tool of power, secret power, which is the most threatening kind."

The clip goes on to the succession. It claims Gerald Ford had sat on the Warren Commission and became vice president because Carl Albert, the Democratic Speaker of the House, said Congress would confirm only him after Agnew was removed for tax evasion. It also claims the Warren Commission did not want to interview Jack Ruby, which the speaker treats as proof the commission was "fake." On the break-in, the speaker says "I think it was six of them or seven of them, all but one was a CIA employee," and invites listeners to "look it up on Google." The number is given with uncertainty, and the clip offers no documentation of its own.

Popularity is central to the argument. The clip says Nixon won the 1972 election with more votes than any president in American history and calls votes "the only way we can really measure popularity." Two years later, it says, he was "undone by a naval intel officer the number two guy at the FBI and a bunch of CIA employees."

After the clip, the hosts return to Bill Murray. When they showed him this material, his reaction was reportedly "Holy shit." They add that Murray, when he was young, took part in a satirical project with Hunter S. Thompson in which he pretended to support Nixon and told people "Nixon needs a second chance." They mention this as an irony in hindsight and do not suggest Murray actually wanted Nixon as president.

The JFK claims grow more sweeping as the section closes. The hosts say "they" shot Kennedy in public, killed the alleged assassin, and "dosed up with acid" another man to make him crazy. None of this is sourced in the segment, and it is presented as conclusions the hosts have reached.

The hosts then broaden the point to history in general. How many accepted historical narratives, they ask, "are bullshit?" One participant moves past the old saying about victors.

History can be written by the person who's got a pen.

The argument is that when few people could publish, a few writers shaped the record. Today the problem has flipped. The world has gone "from a scarcity of information to such an abundance" that people cannot work out what is going on and give up on believing anything. A flood of false information, they say, dilutes the information that matters, until it "gets watered down, then it goes away."

The goal, I think, of the velocity of the information is not to convince people of any one narrative. It's to make them completely nihilistic about the belief in any narrative.

The hosts connect that nihilism to political passivity. People who feel hopeless and "checked out" become "pliable" and will not mount "an agentic, sovereign uprising." They are unsure how deliberate this is. One participant says the cynicism is not a byproduct but "a plan." Later, the same idea is put more carefully: "it's not even like they engineered it." On this view the pattern emerged on its own, and existing powers took advantage of social media as a more effective tool than anything before it, because hardly anyone pays attention to CNN anymore.

The discussion breaks for a DraftKings sponsor read. The ad promotes the sportsbook app as available in all 50 states and offers new customers using code Rogan $150 in rewards for a $5 spend within 14 days, with gambling-help numbers and state-specific terms and restrictions.

The hosts give concrete examples of invented stories, such as headlines claiming Justin Timberlake was arrested for murder or "Hallie Berry kills five." One participant says they recognize particular accounts as repeat sources of fabrications. They are asked how a country committed to free speech should respond.

The first answer is that many of these posters are not real people, and their pages show them in places such as Pakistan. X's feature showing where an account is based is acknowledged, using the example of a U.S. politics commenter whose page says Myanmar. The hosts doubt it works against sophisticated operators. They describe how an operation could register a corporation in Idaho, route its bills there, and connect through a VPN. One participant argues: "if fucking AI can get out of a sandbox and get on the internet," then hiding a location should be easy.

It's the Wild West with robots.

The hosts call it "Westworld" and guess that many accounts posting fake stories are either hired people or AI scripts that post at intervals throughout the day. One participant points out an irony. Around 2023, when Elon took over, people worried there was no town square. Now, they say, the feeling is "fucking take it back."

The main proposal concerns money rather than censorship. As described here, X is moving to stop paying for fake content and pay only for original content. The hosts think this matters because much of the fake content is financially motivated. Their example is a company in Thailand with around 50 workers that earns money from millions of clicks on AI videos and made-up stories. The motive is described as partly "muddying the narrative" and partly "just financial."

I think if you align the incentives for most people, shit gets fixed.

The other side of the discussion points out the limits of that fix. Removing payment does not stop a well-funded actor. A state could run "100,000 AI scripts running 100,000 accounts" and shift public opinion without any profit motive, so the platform still has to be able to tell what is AI. One participant adds that social pressure is another kind of incentive. Attacks on people who disagree make them back down. They mention "I don't know what a woman is either" as a narrative that spread this way and say the incentive works as "a disincentive" because people do not want to be attacked.

The discussion of social pressure leads to a broader claim: "So few people have original thoughts." A small number of original thinkers, the claim goes, direct "two different armies of NPCs." One participant lists several "unfortunate realities," including that intelligence varies widely by birth, like noses, ears, or athletic ability. They compare it to coaching, where some athletes will never reach the Olympics and others have natural gifts. The speaker includes themselves, saying they feel their "brain sucks" when talking to someone very smart.

The hosts use this to dismiss the "Learn to code" slogan, arguing that some people are "barely figuring out how to get through a day." The line "I can't teach my dog how to type" is used to illustrate the point.

That's just the reality of genetic variability.