Jon Stewart and Joe Rogan: Wearing Masks and Weathering Online Criticism

There's got to be more emphasis on testing and there's got to be more emphasis on showing people how to keep their immune system healthy and then recognizing people that can't do that and doing what we can to protect them. You're going to wear a mask. Joe Rogan, he's saying out loud, I'm going to wear a mask now. I've always been, I was fucking with Bill Burr to try to get him to rant. People think I'm really serious about that. I was like, what are you going to wear a mask? And I see Bill over there steaming. I'm like, here he goes. Like I wear a mask whenever I go out in public because it's the law and I don't want anybody yelling at me. But also though, when you decide, no, I get tested. I get tested all the time too. What's on a side? Don't what? How great is burr? He's the best. I love him. He's so funny. He's so funny and so prolific, but here's the thing that I almost love you more. He'll just send me like a video of like a great drummer that he loves. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's really good, but I just love that dude. He's so good. He's great and I love getting him wound up. That's what I was doing with the whole mask thing. And people think I was like really arguing you shouldn't wear a mask or you're a bitch. God, it's, but that's also the problem with sound bites on Twitter. Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, it exists. It's the content factory and you know, anybody that creates content, you know, then that goes out into the world. Look, they're looking for, for, for eyeballs too. And that's why I always feel like, like I take shit, but I can't complain about it because that's part of the game. Right. That's part of the game. That's what I do for a living. So like when people say political correctness, it's, it's overwhelming. I just say like, Hey man, it's just other people pushing back and getting to say their shit. And that's exactly what they should be doing. The internet has democratized, you know, outrage. And there's more speech now than there's ever been before in the history of the world. Like we all know, you know what it's like? What's the movie with Mel Gibson where he knows what women, what women think? Yeah. Right. So he had ESP Twitter and the internet is just, we all have developed ESP and now we know what everybody is thinking. It's all every day. We're just bombarded by what everybody's thinking. Well, you're also bombarded by the people that spend the most time doing it because there's a lot of mentally unwell people that spend their entire day camped out on Twitter having arguments. And if you want to venture into that world and risk your consciousness and your health, your mental, your literal mental health by communicating in this really crude manner with text messages and, you know, arguing over semantics with people that you don't even know, it's, it's a terrible way to exist. Are you on Twitter? Do you have a Twitter account? I have a Twitter account, but I don't read it. You read? No, I post things on Instagram. They go to Twitter occasionally. I'll post things on Twitter, but I don't read it. It's just too toxic, man. I get it, you know, and I know when I've fucked up and I know when people are mad at me, when it's legit and valid, and I know when they're mad at me for nonsense and I, I am my worst self critic. So I don't need other people yelling at me. I know what I did wrong. I stay clear. Healthy. I think that's the only approach you can have in this environment. I think it's a healthy way to look at it. And, you know, I always try and keep myself like you figure when, when people are coming at you, there's probably going to be something constructive in there. Yeah. Sometimes I have the energy to like find it and sometimes I'm just like, I really can't do this today. Yeah. Sometimes you can't do it, but yeah, there's value in criticism. It's very important, but not too much. It's like anything else. Like you, there's value in a little bit of snake venom. You develop a tolerance, but if you get a big fat dose, you're dead. And it's in many ways, it's the same with interacting with people that are upset with you, there's going to be people that are upset with everybody for no reason, no matter what the story is in the news, even if it's clear cut to you and I, there's going to be someone who has a violent opposition to that idea. It doesn't mean they're right. And it doesn't mean you're right. It just means people have a lot of different ways of looking at the world. And if you want to exist in conflict, in perpetuity, stay on Twitter and stay on Twitter all day long and just argue with people. I don't want to do that. You know, and again, it's not that I don't have any room for improvement. It's not that I don't appreciate or accept or recognize the value of criticism because I definitely do. It's that it's not healthy. It's not healthy for me. It's not, it could directly affect the kind of content I put out. It's not good. That's what I was about to say. Do you feel like one of the hardest thing to do is to maintain your kind of creative barometer so that you don't let those kinds of things when you feel like they're not constructive, pull you too far to the outrage world or some other things like to maintain that. And that's why I think it's good. Like what you do in terms of conversation, like you basically say, you know, I'm going to do long form because that, you know, feels like, at least from my perspective, the healthiest form. Yeah. Is conversation. But even in that case, people will take long form, edit things out of context, and then it becomes the same problem that we have on Twitter and with everything else. You get these little sound bites, these little video clips, and you don't understand the full context of the conversation or what was actually said. And then people get outraged at that. It's, you know, it's, uh, we are living in a very strange time and I believe it's an adolescent stage of communication. And I think it's going to give, the frustrations for this are going to give birth to a better form. And I think one of the things that podcasts, uh, what it's in response to and the popularity of the long form is in response to people being upset with like these traditional late night talk show things where there's a window here with one guy on the right and a window here with a guy on the left. And there's a person in the center and they're yelling at each other. And then you cut to commercial and you don't really feel like things got resolved. So the response to that where people are gravitating, it's three, it's theater. Yeah.