Tulsi Gabbard on the Joe Rogan Experience #1295, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Gabbard, speaking in May 2019, stated the United States was spending $4 billion every month on the war in Afghanistan. Department of Defense accounting shows Afghanistan-specific war obligations of $36.0 billion in fiscal year 2018 and $38.5 billion in fiscal year 2019, equivalent to roughly $3.0-3.2 billion per month for those years. A Congressional Research Service brief published in April 2019, about three weeks before this episode aired, found that total DOD war-related obligations, mostly tied to Afghanistan operations, averaged $47 billion annually over the prior three fiscal years, or about $3.9 billion per month, a figure much closer to Gabbard's number. Official monthly estimates for this period therefore range from roughly $3 billion to just under $4 billion depending on whether narrower Afghanistan-only obligations or broader war-related overseas contingency operations spending is used. Gabbard's $4 billion figure sits at the high end of that range and is presented as a precise, unsourced number rather than an approximation, so the claim is in the right ballpark but somewhat overstated and imprecisely sourced.

What the evidence shows: Gabbard claimed Amazon paid no federal income tax for a third consecutive year and received a tax credit over $125 million the prior year. Public reporting based on Amazon's SEC filings shows the company paid $0 in U.S. federal income tax on more than $11 billion in pre-tax profit in 2018 and reported a federal tax rebate of $129 million that year, figures close to the amount Gabbard cited. However, 2018 was only the second consecutive year of $0 federal tax, not the third: 2017 was the first year Amazon paid no federal income tax, following a 2011-2016 period in which it paid federal income tax annually (about $944 million total on $8.2 billion of pre-tax income, an 11.4 percent effective rate). The dollar figure and the fact of no federal tax liability are well-supported, but the "third year in a row" framing overstates the length of the streak by one year.

What the evidence shows: Buffett first made this claim in a 2007 interview and repeated it in his 2011 New York Times op-ed, stating his combined federal income and payroll tax rate was 17.4 percent versus an average of 36 percent for the other people in his office, a figure his secretary, Debbie Bosanek, publicly confirmed applied to her. PolitiFact examined the specific claim and rated it True, citing Buffett's 2015 effective federal income tax rate of about 15.9 percent on $11.6 million of adjusted gross income, compared with roughly 19.6 percent in combined payroll and income taxes for workers earning $100,000-$200,000. FactCheck.org's analysis found the comparison factually accurate but noted it combines income and payroll taxes, and that Buffett's low rate stems from most of his income coming from long-term capital gains and dividends (taxed at 15-20 percent) rather than wages, which face marginal rates up to 39.6 percent plus payroll taxes largely avoided by investment income. Both outlets characterized Buffett's situation as a real but atypical case: only a small share of very high earners pay a lower effective rate than middle-income households, so the anecdote illustrates a genuine feature of how capital gains are taxed rather than a universal rule about the wealthy. The core one-line claim as stated by Rogan is accurate as far as it goes, though it compresses a more technical, category-specific tax comparison into a simple secretary-vs-billionaire framing.

What the evidence shows: A widely publicized 2014 study (Bachhuber et al., JAMA Internal Medicine) found that, from 1999 to 2010, states with medical cannabis laws had a 24.8% lower mean annual opioid analgesic overdose mortality rate than states without such laws. However, a 2019 replication and extension by Shover et al. (Stanford, published in PNAS) using data through 2017 found the association reversed direction, becoming a 22.7% increase in opioid overdose mortality in medical-cannabis states. The same study found no statistically significant association between adult-use (recreational) cannabis laws and opioid overdose mortality. The authors concluded the original correlation was likely spurious rather than causal, noting medical cannabis users represent only a small fraction of the population, insufficient to plausibly drive state-level mortality trends. Current evidence therefore does not support a direct, durable correlation between cannabis legalization and reduced opioid deaths; the relationship that gave rise to the claim has not held up with more years of data.