Censorship: A Short-Term Solution That Creates a Long-Term Problem | Joe Rogan and Bill Ottman

The argument on the other side is when people are distributing, and I'm going to use the big air quotes, hate speech. That's when it gets slippery to me because who's to decide what's hate speech and what's not hate speech? I mean, I've seen people make some ridiculous fucking statements about all sorts of people that are inaccurate, and they do that in order to categorize them and pigeonhole them in an easily definable and dismissible characterization. You know, you just decide, hey, that Bill Ottman guy, that guy's a this. Oh, he's a radical that, and he believes in this, so fuck him. And they're like, okay, fuck him, sweep him away, and then cancel culture comes in, like, we're going to cancel Bill Ottman. We're not listening to him anymore. You know, he lied to us about his source or whatever the fuck you're doing. Have you heard of Darryl Davis? No, I have not. Unless I forgot. Darryl Davis is your boy. He's my boy? He, he, you'll, you'll, I haven't met him, but he's my boy. I want him to be my boy. So he is a black man who befriended hundreds of members of the KKK, and he got them all to leave. He got them to leave the KK? All of 200 members left after he was like, yeah, I'm just going to talk to you. Really? Would you ever see the W. Kamau Bells show when he visited with those white supremacists? Not that specific one. No, it's really good because he's such a nice guy. He's so, like, easy to get along with that they were like, sort of, they let their guard down around him. And, you know, you get to see these people kind of confused that they like this guy, you know? That's why I think initiating human contact via the social networks, like, that's really important. But to play devil's advocate, it's one of the worst ways for people to express themselves in a way where you consider other human beings' experiences and feelings and the way they're going to receive what you're saying because there's no social cues. You're not interacting with them. You're not looking at them in the eyes. It's one of the weirder forms of communication between human beings and one that I would argue we have not really necessarily successfully navigated it yet. I agree. I was actually saying that I think we should use social media more to get people to get together in real life. Do you know who Megan Phelps is? No. She was with the Westboro Baptist Church, you know, the famous one that protests those soldiers' funerals and, you know, anything gay. And they're like ruthlessly, viciously fundamental Christians. You know, they do a lot of protesting at funerals and do a lot of stuff to try to get – she was with them for the longest time and then got on Twitter and through communicating on Twitter. And when you meet her, you would never believe it in a million years that she was ever this fundamentalist and that she was ever some mean person sending hateful messages to people because their son was gay or whatever it was. Now she's completely cured of it. She has no contact with the church anymore. She's married. She has a kid. She's completely outside of it. She does podcasts now and gives TED talks and speaks about radicalization and about how she was kind of indoctrinated and grew up in this family. And her grandfather, Fred Phelps, was this, you know, it's like – it's a fucking mean guy, like a really mean – he's the God hates fags guy. You know, they would have those signs that they would hold up at soldiers' funerals. I mean, it's like really inflammatory stuff. But through Twitter, through her communicating with people on Twitter, specifically her now husband, like he cured her, like just with rational discourse and communication and she was open to it. Yeah, people will change. Yeah, they will change. And so that's why banning them – I mean, I saw in a recent podcast, you've been talking about redemption. Yeah. So – but I'm curious, what do you – do you think people – what is – how does that look like? Well, Tim, look, in the case of like Megan Phelps, that's a real thing, right? She really did change. Another example is Christian Piccolini. Do you know who he is? He was a white supremacist KKK-membered guy who's been on Sam Harris's podcast. He's also done some TED talks, who now speaks out against it and talks about how he's indoctrinated and talks about how lost he was and then he was brought into this ideology. There are – there's many people like that all over the world. Majid, Majid Nawaz, another perfect example. He was an Islamist. I mean, he was, you know, trying to form a caliphate, was literally thinking about radical Islamic terrorism as being some sort of a solution. Now he's the opposite. Now he's trying to get people to leave and he's trying to get people to be more reasonable and secular. Did you see what happened to him? Yeah, he got punched in the street. Yeah. Yeah, some guy called him a fucking packie, I guess, and punched him in the head and fucked his head up, and he's got this giant cut on his head from a ring and his face is swollen up. But apparently they have the guy on video and, you know, they think they're going to be able to arrest the guy. But – I've had Majid on the show. He's a super nice guy. The hard thing is that – all right, yes, we see these transformations take place. It makes us feel warm inside. And yes, people can change. But at the same time, what, are people – should people have to go apologize to Twitter? Oh, I'm sorry. Like, can I come back? Right. I mean, that's not – like, sometimes people are going to think completely differently than you and you just have to deal with it. Right. And that should be okay. We shouldn't force people to come in to our way of thinking in order to have discourse. No, that's a good point. That's a very good point. And, like, who is to decide what this path of redemption is and whether or not you've completed it? Right? Who is to decide? Like, maybe you are like a hyper-radical lefty, and maybe Jamie's points of view and yours are just never going to line up. So you're like, fuck him. He's banned for life, which a lot of people have been banned for life. And when you look at some of the infractions they've been banned for, they're like, boy, I don't know about that one. That doesn't really make sense. Almost none of the high-profile banning cases make much sense. No. It's like a short-term solution that's creating a long-term problem. Yeah. That's really what it is. So I just think that we have to talk about it more. I don't know. It's like, why can't we just get everyone to talk about it? Yeah. Like, at the same time. I mean, it's like we're just wasting time here. Well, sort of, but I also think we're figuring it out as we go along with a bunch of different competing ideologies. You know, you have yours, which, like, you look like a hacker on, like, House of Cards. You look like a guy you call in to break into the mainframe server. I'm not that, honestly. I believe you're not. I hang out on GitLab and check out COVID. I cannot. They just say it. I cannot code. Listen, man. I'm not claiming to be a developer. No. I know you're not. These people are another level. They're on another level. Yeah. It is incredible. I understand. Right. Yeah. I get it. Well, that's like if someone says to me, like, oh, you're an MMA fighter. I'm like, I'm definitely not. And they are on another fucking level. Like, there's a different, I know a little martial arts, but just settle the fuck down. Right? Same kind of thing. I think, though, that your ideology is going to be, your point of view and perspective is going to be very different than maybe someone who's like a radical Marxist. You know, it shouldn't need to be a lot of posts on the site, too. Someone who's like an extreme socialist. Someone like AOC. Yeah. You know, someone who thinks that we should give money to people who are unwilling to work. Someone who thinks that we should try to engineer society and tax the top X percent. You know, 70 something percent of their income. There's a lot of those different people. And we have to figure out how to make it so that, well, we have to figure out a way to make it so all the ideas can compete in the marketplace of ideas. Right. All these different ideas can compete. And we can find out which one is better. And we can find out which one is better. Yeah. You don't always find out which one is better, though, right? You find out which one is most popular. I mean, that's what happened with Hitler. Right. You don't really find out what's better. You find out what's got more juice behind it.