Joe Rogan Reflects on Attacks by Mainstream Media

How often do you come across people that will fight you tooth and nail to the death to hold on to those preconceived emotions? A lot, man. That's a real problem. A simple one I came across was even involved with this COVID stuff was trying to talk to people about how the mainstream media has had bad narratives from the get, you know, be it they were given bad information but they fucking doubled down on it all the time or if it's the WHO and they're running interference for China, whatever, right? There's all this manipulation going on around something that is not that is it's not subjective. Viruses aren't subjective. You just can't play this game with that kind of thing. And people would fight me tooth and fucking nail to defend the mainstream media over it. And I go, look, here's example one, two, three, four, five. Look at how they're all fucking wrong. They're fucked up. They're doing this. They're politicizing. They're doing all these different things for different reasons, but none of it is really for your own betterment of understanding and to be safer and healthier. And or even just to say, we still don't know yet because we just don't have the data. And people fight tooth and nail over this shit because there's so many people that use the current media apparatus as their mainstream sensemaking apparatus. And if you tear that away from them, now they have to sit back and go, what do I really know? Right. What is the reality of what I think truth is? What is the metric upon understanding now that you've just shown me that? And of course, even at its best, of course, media is going to be faulty at times because it's just made up of people, right? We're always going to be imperfect. We're always going to make mistakes. But there is no admitting of mistakes anymore. There's no saying I was wrong. We were wrong. There's also a problem with mainstream media, and it's the same problem that we have with the police. You're giving people an inordinate amount of power. And when you give people that amount of power, they don't want to ever let it go. And they don't ever want to say they're wrong. And they don't ever want to admit fault. And they don't ever want to open the door to nuance. Correct. And that's what you see with whether it's CNN or Fox News or any of these motherfuckers. They have this idea that they've been selling you, whether it's this idea about Russia, whether it's the idea about COVID, what's the idea about Trump, what's the idea about Biden. I mean, they're selling you some shit. And it's very, very difficult to get an unbiased perspective on the world. They came after you for no reason. They would write all this kind of completely disingenuous, just narrative-driven bullshit around you, a person who brings people on and has conversations and tries to flourish that idea of the marketplace of ideas, like having conversations and trying to earnestly and sincerely explore things and try to have a better grip on the world and try to better orient themselves towards just knowing and knowledge, in addition to even have a fucking good time about it. Well, it's a competitive thing, too. Of course it is. When someone reaches a point where they're interacting with too many people and they have this potential to really influence things in terms of the political process, in terms of the way people view things, that becomes very dangerous for people that have a different perspective on things or people that are connected to a traditional machine, whether it's newspapers or whether it's... And I have friends in both those things. Sure. I have friends in media and I have friends... People that have apologized for things that other people have written. I'm like, listen, man, this is part of the game. You're not going to rattle me. I'm okay. I get it. You accept... You're not sitting here saying that it's okay, but what you're saying is, I know what the landscape looks like. I know what I expect. I understand humans. I understand why people would attack me and I understand why you even look at very small things that are taken out of context and develop your own perception of me that's inaccurate. I get it. I'm not angry about it. Correct. But I don't want it to be any different. This is what's fucked up. I like the madness of it. I really do. I know what you feel. On a personal level, I can relate to that. Yes. If this world was logical, a person like me wouldn't have no place where someone just comes from doing some live stream on a fucking laptop and then 10 years later has hundreds of millions of downloads. It doesn't make any sense. I don't know. I think you're tapping into something that is universal. I think that when it comes to... I love studying history and religion because those are some of the oldest insights into the way people think and the way people act. Within these frameworks are tons of windows into human thought process and psychology. It's the same as yours. None of it has changed over the oldest religious texts, the oldest historical things we can find, the stories that exist, the myths, all these things. This is the same shit over and over and over again. The first time I ever saw that was reading the Hagakure and seeing that the complaints and the issues, the criticisms that this monk who was a former samurai had of his current era in the 19th century, the same criticisms and problems and the same issues with people's actions, just deriving from the same human places of insecurity and psychological element. It's all the same shit. Nothing has changed. We're not any different than a person in the sixth century in the Roman empire, anything like that, than anybody this era. We're not different people. We have different technology. We have different communication in terms of which language you use, but we don't act differently. We're not driven from different impulses. We're not Rousseau. We're not a blank slate. I don't buy that concept at all because history would look so much radically different, but it fucking doesn't. I've written you so many times, and at times whoever has your old number, who's probably incredibly confused about what the fuck is this guy talking about, but about how I think a person like you is critical towards the interaction of the current paradigm is. You are a necessity because right, wrong, whatever your personal opinion is, is whatever. It's a fact of creating the ability for people to get out here and speak. Nobody ever had Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders in a place to feel more open. I'll say as politicians, they probably were as open as they could be, but they're fucking politicians in this current paradigm of the Western politician. Who knows how legitimately sincere any of those fuckers are, but this has been probably the only place that you could have had someone like that and allowed it to that window into their least politician self. I got to sit here and listen to Andrew Yang talk about UBI and be like, nah, dude, I don't fucking buy it, but I like you. I fucking like you. I like you. It's just a matter of not being so pent up on, oh, god, well, my narrative, my ideology, my fucking, I got to tribalize all this into such a degree that I have to tear down everything else around me so that mine can exist. And that even goes to with this bourbon or anything I do. Like, I don't need to cut other things down from mine to rise to for other people to enjoy it. You don't have to tear apart the mainstream media for yours to exist. Now, mind you, the mainstream media tries to destroy you all the time. But I think it's just players in the media. The media itself is just a pathway for people to express themselves. It's very limited. I would say the media among a lot of things, like there is a good, for a term that I really like, it's called managerial elites. And so most things are big bureaucratic structures that have managers and it's just all managers everywhere. They're all operating into that human resource paradigm that we talked about earlier. And they don't, managers don't usually create anything. And this is not to say that managers aren't an important thing. I think managers are very important. But how many times has anybody worked in a place where they have management that is so divorced from the creative or from the actuality of creating a product or maintain or whatever the job role is. And yet these people are making decisions all the time and bleeding into telling people how to do their job instead of managing people to be able to be best at their job. Well, they're invested in it as well because they have mortgages and they have bills and they want the money to keep rolling in. So their idea is to make sure that whatever this thing that they're doing, whether it's a newspaper or whether it's a television show, they want to make sure that they stay in the most wide mainstream of lanes. It's going to bring in the most money. That's the weird part about media in general is that it's motivated by people that are trying to seek a profit. That's what they're doing. And there's a giant machine behind them. We have two video editors and Jamie. That's the whole deal.