She called Tulsi Gabbard an 'Assad toady' with monstrous ideas. The funny part was them looking up the definition of toady (Joe wasn't aware of the meaning of the word), but the more damning part was Bari's defense of that characterization (from memory: she didn't remember any details, but was sure she read it somewhere).

That was almost but not quite as bad as Dave Rubin's appearance, where he explained how building codes are unnecessary as contractors have a vested interest to do a good job due to Yelp reviews...

Rogan invites on plenty of people with whom he's not ideologically aligned and they have civil, intelligent discussions...

While I personally find the podcasts oftentimes entertaining, there's generally a lot of fluff and rarely any hard-hitting debate.

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZCBRHOg3PQ

Sure, there are such episodes; I can think of another one off-hand, and if I took time, probably a couple more. But remember, the JRE podcast is currently at episode 1506, and most of them aren't like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpurFfcSNfU

She called Tulsi Gabbard, an active Army National Guard major, an "Assad toadie" then had difficulty recalling what exactly a "toadie" is.

Lex Fridman, Brian Cox, and Sean Carroll had--in my opinion--super interesting and engaging episodes.

That being said, there are currently over 1500 episodes, so there are definitely a good number of fluff episodes in the mix as well.

Edit: Just thought of a couple more who I found quite interesting. Paul Stamets and Michael Pollen both discussed in their respective episodes research they both participated in, which made them continuous episodes with a fascinating topic.

I disagree and believe some of his interviews with Sean Carroll would've been much improved if he had stopped Carroll every time Carroll had gone on for 4 minutes without saying a single thing he understood and asked Carroll to simplify.