Joe Rogan | The Toxicity of YouTube Political Commentary w/David Pakman

I think there's so much of this, the YouTube political world, the YouTube commentary world where people are so fucking toxic, you know, there's so much negativity, there's so much what they call dunking on people. There's so much dunking. You do a little dunking. Some of it's warranted. It is warranted, yes. But I don't know if it's beneficial. To the people doing the dunking? Yes. Or even to the cause. I think it is temporarily, well, sometimes it's good because it shows, it mocks people's positions and it makes people realize, yeah, that is a ridiculous position. So if you're on the fence or if you're not really quite sure how you feel about things and you see someone get mocked for a ridiculous position, then maybe you've even shared for a little bit. Right. Maybe you haven't explored it deeply and you see someone who has explored it deeply sort of expose all the flaws in this line of thinking. It's good. My thing, I interview a lot of people on the right and a lot of people on the left and I just hate all this conflict that I'd say the unnecessary conflict I think is when you watch television today and you see Antifa fighting with Trump supporters and all this weird conflict. I don't necessarily think that most of it is necessary. Necessary? Well, I think the devil's in the details. So as an example, if you want to bring together, I don't know, people who are on opposite sides of the climate debate, for example. Good luck. Sure. Right. Well, part of that you could argue is if one side just does not accept science, how can you really bring those people together? It doesn't mean you need physical conflict to resolve it. In fact, I completely agree with you. The physical conflict is totally counterproductive. But at a certain point on some issues, I understand why there's like an intractability to the debate where it seems completely impossible to move forward because whichever side you're on, I would argue that I'm on the right side of these issues and others would disagree. When you're far apart in a way that you can't even agree as to like what the starting point facts are about the conversation, how do you even, how do you start? I have some ideas as to how I try to do it, but it's very tough. It is very tough. I just don't think dunking on people always, like constantly shitting on people is necessarily the way to do it. Yeah. And I think it's important to distinguish between just straight up ad hominem's where someone is wrong and bad because I think they're a bad person or they're an idiot or whatever to recognizing when somebody is a participant in bad faith in a conversation to when someone has maybe fallen prey to audience capture or whatever else might be kind of influencing what and how they're doing. I think that those criticisms are legitimate, but you got to stay away from just ad hominem. Yes. Yes, I agree. And I think that it's just so common today. It's also extremely attractive, the YouTube algorithm, as far as comments go, it actually kind of encourages it. And so does Facebook. So does, you know, anytime there's a social media platform that is ad dependent, one of the best ways to get people to engage is to have something they disagree with so they can get angry. Yes, until it becomes no longer brand safe according to whoever's running the platform. Right. I mean, you go back to April 2017, where I woke up and saw that my YouTube channel made 19 cents the previous day. And I text Kyle Kalinsky, and I say, I think there's like a glitch. It says I made 19 cents. And he says, says I made 35 cents or something like that. Something's going on. And it was the beginning of like adpocalypse 1.0. And that was a rough three week period. And so it's, you know, encourage the debate and the battle of ideas, so to speak, and all of this stuff until advertisers get worried. And they say, you know, our ads are showing up on stuff that's a little bit touch and go for us. That's a weird one to me because I, YouTube has always been a secondary thought for me. The first thought was the audio version of the podcast. And in fact, when we were uploading into YouTube at first, I was like, why are we even doing this? I guess, why not? Some people probably want to watch it. And then somewhere along the line, it became at least close to as big as the audio version of it. Maybe even more significant because one of the things that the YouTube version has is the comment section, which is often a fucking dumpster fire. But it at least there is some sort of like a community engagement aspect of it that doesn't really exist in iTunes. Like in iTunes, it's sort of it's in a vacuum, right? Sure. But when the adpocalypse thing happened, I was like, hmm, what is going on here? Like it wasn't, it wasn't my primary focus. So it wasn't terrifying. But people that only did YouTube and people that relied on that for their living, I mean, it's a huge blow. It was huge. And at the time I'm trying to think back, I think maybe like around 30% of my entire shows revenue was coming from YouTube at the time. So it was not everything, but it was still significant, right? I mean, I have staff and overhead and all of that stuff. So just overnight, 30% going away is huge. And that's why I've tried to move to the model of telling my audience, you can skip all of this stuff, you know, even some of these other, you know, super chats and all of this other stuff. Like we run a membership program on my website, I control 100% of it. So it's not a Patreon deal or anything? We're on Patreon, but it's not big for us. The way I think about it is as long as, I mean, listen, yeah, there's, you know, marijuana companies that are having trouble even processing payments. But assuming like Stripe and PayPal don't say you can't even accept payments anymore, David Pakman, right? I control the entire process on my website. So when people pay their six bucks, all but 2.9% gets to me. And when Adpocalypse happened, I saw it as a maybe blessing in disguise and that I could now explain to the audience, here's the problem with these algorithms. Here's the problem when it goes from, I am fighting white supremacist content to an algorithm can't distinguish between that and white supremacist content. That's bad for me. Yeah. Right. When I interview Richard Spencer, I obviously don't agree with Richard Spencer. But can an algorithm figure out that there's a difference between an interview I do with Richard Spencer and white nationalist propaganda? I don't know, but we can kind of get around all of that if you just go directly to me. And that's why my focus has been growing, those direct members. Did you interview Richard Spencer? Yeah. Did you get shit for that? Yes. Yeah. That's a weird one, right? You know, I'm sure you're aware that, what is it called? The Dayton Society? There was a woman who made a bunch of connections, like Joe Rogan knows David Pakman and Joe Rogan also knows Alex Jones. Alex Jones must be friends with David Pakman. Like the map. Yeah. It's like one of those minds, you know, and it was really weird. It's like guilt by association. I saw a couple of them. There was like an initial one, which maybe you're thinking of, then there was a map of like the YouTube sphere specifically, left, middle and right or something like that. Yeah. I mean, I think that everyone's like a part of a grand conspiracy to help each other out and push right ideology, even though, you know, a lot of people that were labeled as right or aren't right. Like who? Like me. Oh. I'm not right at all. My sense is your politics are pretty left on most stuff. Although I don't, I mean, I don't know you personally beyond just seeing your shows. But maybe the critique is based on, because I think that those maps were based on what is the YouTube algorithm suggesting. And so that may not be in line with your personal politics. Right. It's just maybe what we're talking about, like if you're interested in conflict, if you're trying to get engagement, that's the way to do it. Like if YouTube algorithm is constantly suggesting people like Ben Shapiro or Gavin McGinnis or whatever and those videos come up over and over again. Sure. And I mean, so a lot of those people's channels do really well on YouTube. So if you interview someone who has a channel themselves, there's a very good chance that the algorithm, if they're watching your interview with that person, will say, well, here's a lot of their stuff. And then once you click there, the algorithm very quickly starts to build a picture of every individual user. If you watch your interview with Ben Shapiro and then it takes you to a daily wire video, then it takes you to like the daily wire second stringer guy, and then you're off who knows where. Right. That's, it's all machine learning, right? I mean, that's for the most part. That's, it is, it's a troubling aspect of that thing that they do where they suggest the next videos, which didn't used to be a thing. It used to be you would go to YouTube, you would watch a video, and then you would go find another video. They didn't suggest anything. And then somewhere along the line, I don't remember what year it was, but this started happening. And then they started auto playing the next video. Auto playing. Yeah. Or some kind of recommendation thing very early on, but initially it might have been restricted to just other videos from the same channel you're watching. Probably. And at a certain point, it started to recommend other things. And I don't know if you look at your analytics and see what percentage of your views are coming from that recommendations feed from other stuff. But it's significant for a lot of YouTube channels, the tagging your videos and getting the right metadata on them in order to bring an audience is an important thing. So it's a double edged sword in some sense, it sounds like. But to get back to what you were saying about, so. Richard Spencer. Oh, is Richard Spencer? Okay. Yeah. I was going to say they labeled you as right, but you're not right. Well, it's disingenuous. I mean, I've said it over and over and over again. I've never voted for a Republican in my life. I voted independent for Gary Johnson just because he did my podcast. And I wasn't happy with Clinton and I wasn't happy with Trump. I was like, this is just gross. I'm just going to vote for Gary Johnson. I didn't think he was going to win. He had almost no chance when he didn't know where what Aleppo was. I was like, that was his scream. What's his face from New Hampshire? Howard Dean. Howard Dean. Yeah. Well, voting in California also, I assume you vote in California. It wasn't going to. It's a joke. Yeah. But people conveniently will just as, or they'll say that you're a Trojan horse. You're a pretend left wing person who's really just pushing right wing ideologies. I'm like, well, which one, which right wing ideology? Is it gay marriage? What is it? I put, I'm on the left on everything except maybe a second amendment. Right. I think the criticism that could be levied if one wanted to make it into a criticism would be if you engage with right wing ideas that you don't agree with, right? Like I take you at your face, you know, face value that you don't agree with a lot of the stuff that your right wing guests say. One could make the argument that by not challenging those ideas, it's implicitly lending them more credibility than maybe you think they should have. That's interesting because what I try to do with people, unless something's saying, someone's saying something egregious, I try to let them talk. I want to know how they feel. I want to know what their thought process is. And so instead of just challenging them on everything, I want them to elaborate. And I feel like by doing that, I get a sense of how they've come to that conclusion and whether it's logical, whether it's, they've actually used their thoughts and they've really calculated and thought, this is the position I take and this is why. And a lot of people don't. There's a lot of the times when you challenge people in their positions, you find out like they don't really know what the fuck they're talking about. And the best way to find that out is to let them talk. Like Candace Owens on climate change. Right. That was, I mean, there's the Socratic method of questioning, which is why do you think that and how do you know that that's true, et cetera, et cetera, and sort of some other questions that come from it, which I do as well. I mean, I think, I don't know, to tie it to the Richard Spencer interview that I did, some of the criticism I received after was from people on the left. I mean, the people on the right- That was most of the, was people on the left. For doing the interview? Yes. Or for what I said in the interview? For what I- For doing it. Okay, yeah. For doing the interview at all, the criticism was more from the left. Right. For what I said in the interview, the criticism was more from the right, from people who just agreed with Richard Spencer. Like what things did they agree with? That it is inevitable that people with different ethnic or religious backgrounds simply will not be able to coexist together peacefully and we're better off trying to figure out how can we separate people based on their membership in ethnic or religious groups. God, that's sad. Separatism. I mean, literally, separatism. That's sad. That's a sad thought that you just can't get along with people that do other things, that are interested in other things, that come from other places, that have different religions, that have different points of view. Like, why? Yeah, well, they have a series of decades of what they call scholarship supporting their view. But for the context of my interview, I made it abundantly clear that I didn't agree with that stuff. Right. Yeah. And my view is, and everybody can have a different view about how they do interviews, my view is if I just allow the what I consider to be disgusting views to be spread out, right? You know, like a spray bottle, just spray them everywhere, not do anything else. I can't say that I'm doing something that I think is valuable. I don't feel like it's valuable. So my approach is, are the ideas known enough to be worth refuting? That's number one. If it's some weird conspiracy theory that has not even any following whatsoever, I'm probably not going to choose to even entertain it because it's irrelevant in sort of all ways. So my first question is, was Richard Spencer relevant at the time? Alt-right was rising. This guy was considered by many the sort of creator of the alt-right. He was growing a following in the context of the Trump candidacy at the time, or maybe administration. I don't remember when exactly it was. It was, I think 2016 or trying to remember when it was. I don't remember when I first heard his name. Yeah. Like, how did he become, how did he come to prominence? I don't know the sequence, but I think he had a wet and alt-right website that had articles of some kind. And then he, that website became more known. That fucking term is so talk, the alt-right, alt-left, the centrist, all these different labels are so- I'd rather talk about issues. I agree with you there. It's so clunky. But so, first thing was I did want to interview him, but if I had felt that I wouldn't be prepared to make it abundantly clear that I don't agree with the guy, and I think his ideas are terrible, I wouldn't have done the interview. So the problem I had with the critiques from the left of me doing that, some who said, the last thing we need to be doing is giving this guy a voice. That's often how they say it, or a platform. My response was, this guy's getting interviewed in lots of other places that aren't even challenging him. Right. I'm at least making an attempt here to get something in the record that there are arguments against these ideas. These are bad ideas, and I don't want to be part of the diffusion of just the ideas themselves. I'm gonna have to watch that. I'm gonna have to watch that now. Now, when you did do that, like, what was his response? During the interview? Response to your pushback? I mean, he had answers. He was well prepared. I don't know if there were unique or new arguments that I was making, but there was no argument to be made that I was letting him just parrot white nationalists talking points unopposed, which I just wouldn't feel good about that. It's not how I do interviews. Yeah, and then the left was upset that you were giving him, air quotes, a platform. A very small portion of the left. I want to be super clear. My audience is very left. Almost everybody understood what I was doing. Ten years ago, I was interviewing the Westboro Baptist Church. Most people understood what I was doing. They were more prominent at the time, but there was this sliver of the left that just didn't want the conversation to take place. And I always struggle with this because, as you can see, I have no problem criticizing that sliver of the left. My concern is getting, like, overly wrapped up to criticisms of the left that are only held by these, like, niche slices. And that's why I try to avoid going further than necessary into those criticisms.