Tim Kennedy on the Joe Rogan Experience #2055, fact-checked

What the evidence shows: Kennedy said Iran funds Hamas to the tune of $70 million per year. The most commonly cited government estimate is higher: the U.S. State Department's 2021 Country Reports on Terrorism, as summarized by the Council on Foreign Relations, put Iranian funding at roughly $100 million annually, distributed among Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other Iran-backed Palestinian militant groups, not to Hamas alone. Estimates of Iranian support to Hamas vary across years and sources, with some analyses citing lower or higher figures depending on the time period and whether they isolate Hamas from other recipient groups, but $70 million is below the figure most frequently cited in recent State Department-derived reporting. The claim is not fabricated in direction, Iran is indeed a major funder of Hamas, but the specific $70 million figure understates the commonly cited $100 million/year estimate and conflates it with what is actually a broader multi-group total.

What the evidence shows: No official IDF report or Israeli government statistic states that 80% of all October 7 kibbutz victims were tortured before death. FactCheck.org reported that Rabbi Israel Weiss, Israel's former army chief rabbi and one of the officials overseeing identification of the dead, said many bodies showed signs of torture and rape, but that the military personnel overseeing the identification process did not present any forensic evidence, such as photos or medical records, to support that characterization. That reporting does not include or corroborate a specific 80% figure, and no verified IDF-sourced statistic quantifying an 80% torture rate among kibbutz victims has been identified. The claim as stated, attributing a specific 80% figure to an official IDF report, is unsupported by available evidence.

What the evidence shows: The commonly cited figure traces to a small 2000 study (Sramek et al., European Journal of Applied Physiology) in which young men immersed for one hour in 14C water showed plasma dopamine rise by about 250% and plasma noradrenaline rise by about 530%, alongside a 350% increase in metabolic rate and modest increases in heart rate and blood pressure. Kennedy's "200%" is in the right range for that single acute-exposure finding, though it understates the study's own figure (250%) and omits the much larger noradrenaline increase, as well as the fact that the effect was measured after prolonged immersion in very cold (14C) water rather than the shorter cold-plunge protocols typical of consumer use. A 2025 review of cold-water therapy research (Kunutsor, Lehoczki, Laukkanen, GeroScience) cites this same 250% dopamine figure as one data point supporting possible mood and alertness benefits of cold exposure, but the review is upfront that evidence for cold-water immersion's psychological effects remains limited, drawn largely from small acute studies rather than large controlled trials establishing lasting mood or behavioral effects. No peer-reviewed source located compares this dopamine rise to MDMA or supports the claim that it reliably makes people "nicer" to others; those framings are not supported by the cited physiology research.

What the evidence shows: False. Rogan says Wikipedia deleted all of Andrew Huberman's peer-reviewed papers. The live English Wikipedia article on Huberman still carries a 'Selected publications' section listing peer-reviewed papers with PMIDs (for example a 2016 Nature Neuroscience paper and a 2023 Cell Reports Medicine paper), so his publications were not wholesale removed. Wikipedia biographies routinely trim bibliography sections over time, which is distinct from a targeted deletion, and nothing supports a coordinated purge tied to any RFK Jr. remark.