Joe Rogan Rants About the Current State of Politics

Do you see a way in which this political epic comes to an end? The only hope that I have is through reasonable dialogue becoming an accepted and appreciated thing, a celebrated thing. And that this is possible that people can realize that there's some stupidity to this team mentality that we have. This right versus left, which is almost all a good percentage of it, is these assumed identities, right? These predetermined patterns that get adopted in order to, as we first started talking about this, in order to establish yourself as someone who's in a group. You get accepted by this group. And you see it left and right. I mean, I don't want to name any names, but there's a bunch of people that do it blatantly. You see them, and I've even seen them switch teams. And I don't buy their rationalizations when it comes to ideology. What I think is what they're doing is they're switching teams because they realize there's an in on this team. Right. And they can just say, this is the problem with the team I used to be on, those fucking losers. And they're really Benedict Arnold, right? And they probably have as much of an affinity to the ideas of one side as they do the other side. They just go all in on one side to get acceptance from the group. Right. And I think that's why people change their opinion that much over two years or something like that. Or, you know, it's like they just decide this group makes more sense now. And I've been attacked by people on the left. So I'm going to go to the right or vice versa. And usually what it is is, I mean, even when they say they've been attacked like, oh, you fucking baby, there's 300 million people just in this country alone. If you put something out there publicly and a thousand people attack you, don't act like you're being persecuted. Okay. You have an idea. You've launched that idea out into the zeitgeist and people took a big shit on it. You know, whether it's people on the right or people on the left, you got to be able to argue your point one way or the other and not just immediately jump ship when someone who shares ideas with you decides that your idea sucks and maybe they're wrong and maybe you're right. But you got to argue that through. But this idea of these partisan patterns that people just seem to automatically fall into, they're so detrimental to dialogue. They're so detrimental to us under really understanding each other and really having some sort of a sense of community, right? This is a giant community of 300 million people. That's what it's supposed to be. And this idea that it's this group is trying to fuck it up and they're trying to turn us all Muslims and this one wants everybody to be gay and this one wants everybody to fucking have free food and this, and this is nonsense. This is nonsense. We need better understanding and you know, the word better education gets tossed around a lot, but it also means better social understanding, better social education, like an appreciation of who we are and why we think the way we think and calling out weasels on both sides of the pattern, like calling out weasels on the right that are pandering that are just trying to like get up, you know, repeating a lot of these like accepted beliefs because they know that they can hit this frequency and a lot of people sing along or the same thing that people are doing on the left. They're doing it on both sides. I think most reasonable people have a collection of ideas that they share from both the right and the left and most reasonable people are reasonably compassionate. And I think that's one of the things that we're missing. Some a reasonable sense of not just ethics, but an appreciation for each other, for all of us as a group. And that I think if we can celebrate reasonable conversations and celebrate an understanding of other people's perspectives, like be able to just look at how you're looking at things and have empathy. Okay, let me see where you're coming from with this. Okay, let me put myself in your shoes. Instead of just immediately like fuck you, you cuck and fuck you, you this and instead of thinking about it that way, if we just tried to just everybody exercise a little bit more, so we're a little bit more calm and come at this from a rational place and try to like realize like, we're going to try to- Does this require exclusion? I've been experimenting with a very dangerous idea, which is I keep hearing about chief inclusion officers. And I thought about, I think from Ecclesiastes to every season, there's a purpose under heaven. So if there's inclusion, there also has to be exclusion. And deplatforming or unplatforming somebody is an act of exclusion. And very often it's very interesting that the people who are for inclusion are very focused on the need for deplatforming, which is an act of exclusion. So should we have chief exclusion officers that both monitor who is being excluded, including somebody like James DeMoor at Google? Is it ethical to exclude him? Or are there certain voices that need to not be at some tables in order for something to make progress? Because if you always have the voice that's the most extreme that doesn't accept the game, then it's very hard to move forward within the game if you're constantly being reminded. So we have this- Right. We have a series of situations in which it seems like some perspective that very few people hold terrorizes majorities or a group of people who sort of can more or less get along with each other and keeps pushing us into this very divided landscape. And I was just curious, you know, in terms of our group of people that we talk and hang out with in common, where you see the high leverage is. We've just finished the midterm. We've got this 2020 election. It looks to me like Hillary is kind of eyeing whether she wants to get back in the game. This Trump thing has completely, you know, it's like the dress. Is it black and blue or white and gold? For like, could be eight years. Right. Yeah. And I just- Have you thought about how this ends? Well, I would never be so presumptuous to think that I have any idea how this ends. I've proposed various scenarios to myself and I don't like any of them. I don't like where it's going because what I worry about, and this is also again hypocritical, that because I think it probably should burn down and be rebuilt from the ruins. We're not going to get such a clean thing again. It's not going to be clean. I know. No, this isn't very clean either though. Honestly, it's that guy one. It's not clean. I mean, if this is, he loves Putin, you know, this ain't clean. You know, the whole thing is weird. It's the bankers having the amount of influence they have, the fact that there's two lobbyists. What's the number? Two lobbyists to every member of Congress or two lobbyists to every senator? From the pharmaceutical industry, by the way, the number of people that have influence over the way our laws are shaped. It's so fucking bananas right now, right? So off the rails. Is that what it is? 12. 12? I didn't type in specifically, but there's 23 registered lobbyists for every member. No, I think from the pharmaceutical industry they were saying. I think it's two for every member of Congress in the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah, the question that you started out with, like de-platforming people, I think we're impatient and I think we really want to make sure that this vetting of ideas happens quickly because we see the answer. We see the solution. We see that this is incorrect and we see these people that think the world is flat or idiots and we think that these people that think this and think that, we think they're all wrong and so we want to stop them from talking. But that doesn't work. It just works for now. It oftentimes feeds those ideas. And it also, you have to question, like, why are you so sure? Why are you so sure that you're correct? You don't just want your side to be heard exclusively. You want to silence these other people's ability to participate in this argument, even if they're totally wrong. I think that's dangerous because I think that the way to fight off ideas that aren't good is to introduce ideas that are good. And you're going to have a bunch of people that agree with the ideas that are bad. But I think that that's a part of this whole figuring things out. You need to have bad ideas floating around there to appreciate good ideas. If all the ideas are good, like what do we do get it out against? It's not bad to have these bad ideas broadcast. It's bad to not have someone say, hey, these are bad ideas. We need to see the pitfalls of racism. We need to see the pitfalls of crime. We need to see the pitfalls of corruption. We need to see it in action. I think it's like stock market swindling. I think in a lot of ways it's important. We need to understand that this is a pattern that people fall into continually over and over again when they have control over the money, when they have control over the money, when they move the numbers. What do I do this? How about if I tell you that this is going to go down and then you invest some money and I put some money in your bank and we work together. Let's make some money. This is what people do, right? If they just fucking do it over and over and over again. Should you punish them? Yes, absolutely. But I think it's kind of important to see some fucked up behavior just because we're not done. We're still in some sort of emotional and psychological and even physical evolution. We're in the middle of this thing. I think that bad ideas facilitate comprehension. These really shitty ideas that a lot of people have, what they do is they facilitate a comprehension of why we think dumb shit. Sometimes you don't know why people think dumb shit until you see someone over and over again that thinks dumb shit. You get to see that whether it's Alex Jones or whether it's Phil in the blank. What guy do you want deplatformed? Yes, but I don't ... Okay, so here's my thing. I want a lot of our leading experts deplatformed. Okay. Well, you're going deep. You're going to spray paint a fucking big A on Tucker Carlson's driveway, aren't you? What do you mean? Well, if I think about who the great danger is, is it Alex Jones who veers towards tinfoil hat land with some frequency? Or is it the people who were selling weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a response to 9-11? Let's assume that you're a reasonable person on immigration. You neither think that borders should be open nor closed. Then you start hearing professors say, the great thing about immigration is that it has absolutely no costs and all of them are better than all of our people because they're highly trained, they're highly motivated, they're young. You're thinking like, okay, what kind of thing has all benefits and no costs? You're not even entering into a rational description. And now we're hearing all these trade deals that got negotiated. Yeah, that kind of wasn't true. All those things that we were telling you that if you questioned these things, you were a backward protectionist and you were stuck in the old world and you couldn't embrace the new. Yeah, that was all bullshit. What I think is we have a crisis in expertise. Institutional expertise is at an all-time low. Nobody really trusts any of our institutions to be an authoritative source of ground truth. It's not to say that everything that the institutions say is wrong or everything the experts say is wrong far from it. It's just that there are almost no experts or institutions that aren't willing to distort facts in order to pursue institutional goals. That's a giant issue, right? Right. And so I don't actually want to deplatform these people, but I do have the very strong sense. When Elon came on your show and Peter Thiel, my friend and boss came on Dave Rubin's show, I thought that was quite a moment where this alternate network of distribution, which is not under centralized control, started to be seen as comparably powerful and important. And I think some of the noises that Tucker Carlson just made to Dave Rubin about, well, hey, you're doing this out of your garage and you have the freedom to do anything. I'm beholden to the structure in which I live. We're at a very interesting place with respect to what is this thing, this alternate distribution network for ideas that's unpoliced by the institutions. And I think I've been convinced in the last two days that I need – this is advice that I got from you at the beginning. You said you need to start a podcast. I think I need to start a podcast. I think you need to start a podcast. Just keep going on about the hop thing until people figure it out. No, not just about the hop thing. But we have to return to some kind of stable sanity that I'm positive that the institutions can't return us to because the institutional interests really have to do with the fact that certain kinds of growth on which they're predicated, their existence is predicated, have evaporated. So all of these institutions are extremely vulnerable to corruption at the moment. And the real revolution as I'm seeing it is that high agency individuals are out-competing traditional institutional structures in terms of mindshare. And some of those high agency individuals are irresponsible. You know, they're like myelotypes that are kind of trying to light things up. And some of them are extremely responsible. And some of them will do a few irresponsible things but will self-correct. And this new world that is being born is a huge check on the institutions. But it's still largely separate. Like am I right that you don't do a lot of network television? I don't do any. Yeah. Anymore, but I used to. I mean, that's how I became famous in the first place. Right. You know? But yeah, I don't do it anymore. But it's also because there's nothing fun out there like this. Like there's no place for this. Right. Other than this. That's the only place you could do this. But isn't it interesting to you that we still have not, like Jordan had to be dealt with by the mainstream because the book was too big. His effect was too large. I think his effect on the internet is bigger than the book. Yeah. I think the YouTube videos and the debates that he has, the one that I was telling you, the recent one, the interview with GQ. So interesting. It's really good. The woman's very smart, but she gets trounced. And it's because he's been in the trenches with this stuff for a long time. I mean, he's fighting a very strange fight of dialogue and of interpretation and of discussion. And the freedom of intellectual sovereignty. You know, there's a lot of people that want you to think a very certain way and use certain words and say certain things. And it doesn't matter whether or not you are in fact racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever. There's a weird battle of control going on. That it's at the heart of it as much as it is a battle of inclusion and diversity and strengthening our overall progressive mindset. There's a little bit of that too. But there's also an undeniable game that's being played. And people want to win. There's scores that are being scored. There's points on the board. They're throwing in new agents. They have teams going at it. Whenever Jordan goes on one of these conversations, these video interviews, and there's a feminist and Jordan Peterson, there's a fucking game going on. We're watching a soccer match. We're watching a wrestling match. This is jiu-jitsu. They're playing intellectual jiu-jitsu. And Jordan's really good at tapping people. He's really good at it. And they're getting pissed. They keep sending in new chicks. They send in that Kathy Newman lady. She's like, so what you're saying is that didn't work either. She just got devastated. She got rocked. This is what's happening over and over and over again. Because whether you appreciate what he's saying or not, he has some facts that are undeniable. He has some positions that are based on a rich understanding of history and of Marxism and of communism and of a lot of the problems with people with compelled thoughts. If you're compelling people to behave a certain way, compelling people to talk a certain way, and we're not talking about compelling people to not commit crimes or violence. We're talking about weird things like compelled pronouns. So if I take your analogy, because you brought it up, that he's like doing jiu-jitsu. So in some previous era, and I thought your description of the early days of MMA was fascinating, that we just didn't know what fighting was. So we didn't know who would win or what systems worked. And if you think about the mainstream media is like Aikido. Yes. It's some system that maybe has some validity in some very rarefied context, and it comes into general purpose fighting systems, and it's dismantled very quickly. So now we have this weird situation that we've got this new world of kind of rule-laden, anything-goes discussions more or less, and the mainstream world doesn't want, like the Aikido world doesn't want to acknowledge that this weird UFC type thing is happening. How long does that go on for? It goes on for as long as it takes. This is similar to I think what's happening intellectually, and this is one of the reasons why I don't think you should stop people from expressing these bad ideas. It's one thing for stopping people to say, hey, we need to kill black people. Stopping people to say, we need to kill white people. We need to kill, fill in the blank, whatever the group is. Yeah, that's different. You're clearly stepping outside of the realm of civilization and into war and violence, and we could all collectively decide, and we should all collectively decide, we should have ethics together, like whether it's right or left or in the middle, we should all decide, hey, you can't do that, because what you're doing is you're calling for violence against someone who's not committing any violence. Can I pause you right there? Yes. Because I think there's a really interesting point. Okay. Let's assume that we know that that behavior needs to be down-regulated in some way. You can try to silence the person where we just physically duct-tape them so they can't say anything. Right. We put them in jail, we don't give them access to the media, et cetera, et cetera. Or we can shame them, or we can kind of take them aside. At what layer of this sort of communication stack? It's a very good question. Because I think one of the things that we haven't done is to positively say, we agree with you that the speech is offensive and it is potentially dangerous, but we think it should be down-regulated differently than the deplatforming option. Well, the deplatforming option, the real issue is there's only a few different avenues for these people to express themselves publicly. Okay. Right? And the argument that's really strange is, should these be regulated like a utility, or should they be thought of as private businesses, get to decide what's on their channel, essentially? It's almost like a private NBC that everyone can broadcast on. What if it's none of the above? What if the problem is we're trying to pretend, is it like a dinner party? Is it the public square? Is it a utility? And it's none of these things. I think these ideas, what I was discussing, that there's a reason why good ideas and bad ideas should go to war. It's the same reason why, even though I kind of knew that most kung fu was bullshit before the UFC, I want those guys to get in there and try. Oh, you got some death touch? Hey, come on in. I want to introduce you to a guy. His name's Kane Velasquez, and you're going to try your death touch, and he's just going to wrestle you to the ground and beat your fucking brains in, okay? But that's not going to happen because you know death touch. Good luck, and you let him duke it out. And that is the battlefield of ideas, but it is a little. No, no, no. But when you deplatform people, that's when it's not happening. I agree with you.