Joe Rogan | Modern Struggle is Fighting Media Addiction w/Naval Ravikat

I wonder where this is going. I really do. I wonder because this is, it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with, whether you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter or whatever you're doing, this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding on the most part from... I think it's actually a great thing overall. Yeah. I do as well. Any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time. So for example, if a totalitarian dictator were to come to power and someone was beating up, had fascists beating up on old women, that would get broadcast out instantly. There would be an instant outrage, human cry rallying. So in that sense, it helps bring attention to the plight of anybody. But right now we're going through the phase where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with that. So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out. Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged. Of course. And so you have to learn how, first of all, society just has to get over this idea of outrage. Like to me, like, outrage people are the... People get easily outraged at the stupidest people on social media. Those are the people I block instantly. It's just kind of very low level thinking, right? These are the foot soldiers in the mob. Only society just has to get over it. They have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context. These are doctored video clips. These are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something. Eventually there'll also be anti-mob tactics. Like, for example, if I go to someone's Twitter feed and all it is, is full of political ranting, raving, conspiracy theories, do I want to work with this person? Do I want to associate with this person? Do I want to be friends with this person? Their mind is just cluttered with junk. Now, I don't necessarily blame them. I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news 24-7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you're well-meaning, even if you're sound of mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane. This goes back to Clockwork Orange, where he has his eyes opened up and he's forced to watch the news. But I think that's what's happening right now, because these are addictive, right? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized. You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats, literally best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed. And I think this is the modern struggle, right? The modern struggle. So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle. You had your tribe of friends and family. You had your religion. You had your country. You had your loyalty, your nationality. At least you had meaning and support, but now you would struggle against other tribes. Modern life, we're so free, everything's become atomized. We stand alone. You live in your apartment alone. You live in your house alone. Your parents don't live nearby. Your friends don't live nearby. You don't have any tribal meaning. You don't believe in religion anymore. You don't believe in country anymore. It's fine. You got a lot of freedom. It's fantastic. But now, when they come to attack you, you're alone and you can't resist. So how do they attack you? It's all well-meaning. I don't fault capitalism. I love capitalism. But look at how it happens. Social media, they've massaged all the mechanisms to addict you, like a skinner's pigeon or a rat who's just going to click, click, click, click, click, click, can't put the phone down. Food, they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it. They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating. Drugs, right? They've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them. They've grown them in such a way that you get addicted. You can't put them down. Porn, right? If you're a young male, you wander on the internet, it'll like sap away your libido and you're not going out in real life society anymore because you've got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you. Video games, another way to addict people. So you have this, you have entire large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone. So the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place, drawing your own boundaries. And there's no one there to help you. Ooh, that's terrifying. I mean, it is. It's a new road that needs to be navigated by young people that are, there's no map. There's no guidebook on how to handle this. Our generation is the transition generation. I think our kids will know how to handle it better because they'll grow. But I hope, I hope. I hope too, because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common. I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who, he made a video, it turns out it wasn't even him that made the video, at least that's not what he said, but it was a video where he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking and made it look like she was drunk. And then a bunch of people retweeted it and like, oh my God, look, she's drunk. And so one of the online publications, some website tracked him down and doxed him. And it turned out he's just a day laborer who is an African American Trump fan and thought it would be funny to do that. And it turns out that he didn't even, at least according to him, he actually just put it up on his Facebook page. What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website. For what? Because he made something funny that made people seem drunk. There's a million of those about me. I mean, you could find them. I think Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of these other social media platforms are committing slow motion suicide through these kinds of activities. That was a stunning one though, that they would give up this guy who's a laborer because he made a parody video or he made someone look foolish with editing. Well, you now have basically the media views it as their job to go after individuals they don't like. Yeah, I use media with air quotes in that regard. Because I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done or anything responsible. But the media is getting more and more desperate, right? Because what happened was before the internet, you could have two local newspapers in every town and you could have two local news stations, TV stations in every town. And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24-7 broadcast. And then the internet came along. That was the final nail on the coffin. Because what the internet did was it said, actually, if there's a fact that's news, you can distribute that immediately. It can go on Twitter. It can go on Facebook. It gets reprinted and googled news a thousand times. You go on Google News. You're like, okay, what's the piece of news? Good source and 3,000 other articles. Too many, right? So news has become commoditized. So the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment. And so now they've become a variation between cheerleaders, shock troops, enforcers, talking heads. So these are now propaganda machines signaling for their tribes. It's a right wing one. There's a left wing one, right? There's the alt-right. There's a control left. Two of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes. So basically when you see one of these news organizations doxxing an individual, that's like a tank running over a soldier. That's what's going on. It's just war. And so there's no such thing anymore as a neutral media commentator. The illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost. There's no longer one guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's going to listen to. It's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other. How does this play out? Have you thought about it? Yeah, a little bit. So what the internet does, a lot of this is internet driven, what the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything, one taxi dispatcher, one e-commerce store, one search engine, one social media site for friends and family, one for business, et cetera. So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for everything and it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals. What it gets rid of is the medium-sized ones in the middle. So for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood studios. What's all going to be Netflix? You had 10 large e-commerce players from Walmart to Costco to Kmart and whatever. No, it's just going to be Amazon and a ton of small individual brands. So that's the world that we're headed towards, one hegemon and millions of individuals. So where it ends up long-term is media will be a few gigantic outlets. It could be the New York Times, it could be Facebook, a few like that. And there's going to be just a really long tail of millions of independent people. So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not, is Assange a journalist or not? Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that we're headed towards. I do think that extreme power, the most powerful people in the world today, and this is not well known, but the most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram because they're controlling the spread of information. They're literally rewriting people's brains. They're programming the culture and they're doing it very subtly. Like Google, I believe that one of their execs got up in front of Congress and the Congressman asked him, do you manipulate search results? And he said, no, we do not manipulate search results. Really? That's your job. That is literally all Google does. Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly. And the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden, very complex, but influences the hearts and minds of everybody, including all the voters. Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said, we're publishers, whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down, give us a court order. Otherwise we don't touch it. It's like the phone company. If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they've taken on liability. So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin, slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left. And now they have no more friends. They have no allies. Traditionally, the libertarian leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't. So my guess is as soon as Congress, and this day is coming if not already here, it might have even been here today actually, because this saw something related in the news. The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking and they have the power to pick so they will be controlled by the government. In what way? How do you think they're going to be controlled? Do you think they're going to have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech? No, no. Unfortunately, it's headed in the opposite direction. I wish it was freedom of speech. Much more likely they're going to be, in the short to medium term, they're going to be hauled in for hearings. They're going to be pressured massively, do this, don't do that. My concern about that is the hearings that I saw with Zuckerberg, those people were completely incompetent. They didn't seem to understand. They don't. They don't. But they're just applying pressure. They're just trying to scare him so he'll do what they want. What do they want him to do? They want him to basically suppress the other side. So if you're a right wing, you want to suppress the left wing. If you're a left wing, you want to suppress the right wing. And if you just see where these companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley, all the sensors, and that's really what they are. There are sensors working inside these companies. They're called by different names, obviously. It's double speak. You call it the Department of Defense, when it's the Department of War. So in this case, the Department of Safety and Trust, when it relates to the Department of Censorship. The sensors are inside Silicon Valley, so it's going to reflect Silicon Valley's politics. Which is extremely progressive left wing. And if you're not that, you really have no place. Try being a conservative, an open conservative at Google. Good luck. Now you get lynched. It's crazy. I don't think that there was ever a thing like that that was so influential and so politically, ideologically one sided. Yeah, there's a little saying on the internet. I think it's called conquest law, that any organization that's not explicitly left, right wing, eventually becomes left wing. And I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true. It's a fascinating battle that's going on right now. I mean, it really is. And conservatives, as far as social media is concerned, they're just getting chopped off at the hams, left and right. Yeah. What'll eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech, the organism metastasizes. Then it has to start turning towards other means. If you're unlucky, it goes towards violence. If you're lucky, they find other outlets. I think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things. And that will take the place of Twitter or Facebook or whatever. That's right. But it's going to take 10 years, 20 years. It's not overnight. Well, you know, Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now. But it was so interesting to have Jack Dorsey and to talk to him about where it's going, where he thinks it's going, and his own principles, which he believes that it's a fundamental right. He believes that freedom of speech is something that we all should have and that these platforms should essentially be like utilities, like the electric company. Jack is correct. And he has the right vision. It's just he's in an organization where the other individuals in the organization feel differently. Very differently. So the organization itself can get hijacked.