Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan Debate Media Objectivity

A recent CNN article that was wondering how long it's been around. They were saying, see if you can find this, was COVID-19 around in humans longer than is currently believed? They think it might have existed for months if not years before it broke loose and became a pandemic. Oh did it mutate? Because it... I don't know. I didn't read the article. So what? It's a video not an article. Oh it's not? Yeah. Oh. You say CNN? CNN. Fake news. You heard me, bitch. Where'd you learn that? CNN? There's still just... It's the news, folks. It's the news. Leading scientists tell CNN that it's... Listen, CNN's trying to do their best. But they have perceptions that other people don't agree with just like everybody else. Leading scientists tell CNN that it's possible the virus didn't just come from bats in the past months but that it may have existed in humans many months even years before it grew into a deadly pandemic. CNN's Nick Poulton Walsh reports. By the way, CNN is not doing a good job. I just... I think the entire... What are they doing, Ben? The incentive. Like they're choking out the investigative, deep investigative journalism. It's exactly what you said there, the clickbait. Like look at the title. Look at the... I think they're trying to stay alive. Well yeah, but that's a problem. I think it is a problem, but I think in the defense of particularly online journalism, I think they're trying to stay alive. I don't think it's a good time for journalism now. But from what I understand, the only thing that keeps New York Times functional is the podcast. The podcast, yeah. The podcast is huge and that podcast earns a lot of money. But that's not... That means they need to innovate. They need to become the podcast. Well, we need the fucking New York Times though. The problem is they need to figure out a way to make money off of it, but we need the top of the food chain journalism. And that's what The Times has always represented. We need them. So when someone has done something for The Times, it's not so good or flawed. Yeah, okay. But it's still not... That one person, that one article, whatever it is, is not The Times. The Times stands for something. What The New York Times is supposed to stand for, what it always did when I was a kid and does now to a lot of people still, it's the cream of the crop. It's the very best journalism. It's the very best. It's the ones that have the deepest insight, the ones that nail it. And we'd like it free of bias. But it's run by humans. This is the problem with CNN. It's the problem with any news source, but we still need news sources. But it's run by humans that need high salaries. And there's a huge amount of people involved in making that system that is a CNN. So there's several mechanisms of innovation required. First, this podcast here, podcasts in general, require very few people to run. Now that there's an infrastructure to communicate with a lot of people. And then there's the Wikipedia model. So Wikipedia is thousands of contributors that create extremely strong factual information. And that's not... Like, there's very little money required to run Wikipedia, incredibly so. There are some journalists out there that are online, though, that are thriving because of the problems with legacy media. It's an opportunity. It represents, for gods like Tim Pool, my friend, Tim Pool. YouTube. Tim Pool's a fantastic journalist. He's really objective. You might disagree with him or you might not find his perspective to be in the line with yours. But that guy is... He holds those journalistic ethics at the highest level. I mean, to the highest standard with him. It's everything. And when you read his take on or see him make a take on things, he is giving you the most honest, objective take on it possible. And it's really hard to get that from a network. First of all, it's really hard to get what he does for a network because you're going to get these giant chunks where he can talk about something for as long as it takes to describe what the issue is. Whereas CNN has a segment, man. That segment is fucking seven minutes long. You better be done by seven minutes. We're going to commercial and then we're coming back with Don Lemon. And he's got a sassy take on things. And then Andrew Cooper's got new glasses. Look at that, handsome bastard. And then they're all going to talk about shit and you got to listen. And it's Trump is bad, coronavirus deadly. And holy shit, Chris Cuomo's got it. Let's go to Chris. He's in his basement. And then you see Chris in his basement with Sanjay Gupta and they're holding up chest x-rays. There's segments, man. Segments are bullshit. It's dumb. You have these standards that you've created a long fucking time ago. And this is the biggest handicap that legacy media has other than their inability to be free. Like a guy like Tim Poole is. He's an independent. They can't be free like he is. You have too many working pieces, too many producers, too many people that are telling you what direction to set you. There's people that bring you the segments. You're a talking head. There's a lot of shit going on there, man. A lot of shit going on there. Well, but you have to innovate and you have to make more. I actually disagree with you about Tim Poole. I mean, I think it's impossible to be perfectly objective or whatever. He's just one voice. He tries to be perfectly objective. If I look at it. He tries to be as objective as he can be. No, I know. You need to aspire to it and not be polluted by other influences. But I can see people like I think I'm objective, but I have very different views than Tim Poole on some things and not others. Well, there's subjective objectivity, isn't there? I don't know. Only one of us is just. Is it possible that people can look at things like you have an idea, a subjective idea of what something means when you're looking at it objectively. So you're looking at a thing objectively, you're being honest about what it says, but you also have preconceived notions of what each individual aspect of that certain thing means and what's good and what's bad. That's where the subjective aspect of objectivity comes in. When you look at certain things that happen, there's certain ways you can look at something and not have a bias, but look at something and you have a preconceived idea of what aspects of it should or should not be tolerated. And maybe sometimes it takes someone else to come along and say, okay, well, why do you hold these beliefs? So yeah, you're absolutely right. But the problem is that based on your skill set and your momentum in history, you might look at a very particular aspect objectively and not see the bigger picture. For sure. So Tim Poole has revealed and has focused on certain aspects of problems in the system and he continues to focus on them, maybe not seeing the bigger picture. That's impossible for any one person to see the bigger picture, I think. I tend to see in a lot of things the beauty of things and focus on the positive. You're talking about that even with viruses. Even with viruses. Is that non-objective? Beauty is not an objective word. Well, this kind of is what we're just saying. There's a subjective aspect to your objective view of a virus. Right. But it's choosing on which parts I focus in on. And also the other thing is choosing the ways you talk about it. So the ways you reveal that objectivity. You can be positive, you can be negative, you can be very cold and fact-based, you can be very flamboyant and very kind of excited, use a lot of visuals, all those kinds of things. And all of that changes the way the messages carry. Which is why we should have thousands of Tim Poole's as opposed to sort of... Well, I think they're going to spring up out of the void that's been created by this distrust in legacy media. Especially now. I don't know if you've been paying attention, but YouTube, there's so many people, like my brother has not put the camera on themselves, right? And say their opinions. Yeah. Say he's doing a bunch of reviews of scientific papers. They're all like... They started a show. There's so many just... There's thousands of shows springing up. Dude, there's 900,000 podcasts. Yeah, it's crazy. Well, it's over a million now, I think. It's hit a million. When did it hit a million? Probably last week. I'm for sure. People are starting podcasts right now. It's a crazy number. Well, especially now, right? While they're on lockdown. People are doing like the lockdown chronicles. I think it's a symbol of where we're going, right? You're becoming... Look, when I do this thing, I'm doing this thing four or five days a week and I'm becoming more connected with people in some weird way that no one ever thought it was ever going to happen before. Where there's people that are listening to my voice right now in their ear while they're running, right? A lot, not a small amount. If you could see the actual number of people right now with earbuds in, running, listening to this podcast, you'd be like, whoa, that's kind of crazy. Stay hard. You're running. Stay hard, motherfucker. But... Running faster right now. This kind of connection is a dip into the next dimension. That's what this is. And it seemed like it wasn't. It seemed like it was just a radio show you were doing on the internet. But then somewhere along the line, it became this weird thing. And that's what it is now. Podcasts are a weird thing, especially one that reaches the numbers of people that this one reaches. And for that to be in my hands is a weird position. And I'm... You know, while it's happening, I'm like, oh, look how fucking strange this is. I didn't anticipate this. I always anticipated this being some weirdo fringe thing that very few people would connect with, which is why I never tried to censor it at all. I tried to do a vast majority of it completely high out of my mind and hang out with fun people and just talk shit and have a good time and not have a different perspective. Some people have a public voice and a private voice. I try to have the same voice. Just be me. Just do that. This is... That's why I tell people when they say, what's Joe like behind the scenes? That'd be awesome if you were totally different. But I just tell them it's the same guy. It's just, this is awesome. I'd be a bummer. Wouldn't it be a bummer if someone was like a super dick behind the scenes? Yeah. And I've... Yeah, that'd be a bummer. Or like, you don't have to be a super dick, but you're just a totally different person. Like, put it on an act. Yeah. Like, you put on that mini skirt. Take off the tattoos. Hug those curves, baby. But the point is, what I think this is, is a step into the way humans are going. And this is just one step that we didn't think was a step. It's a podcast. I thought it was just like a radio show that you do on the internet, but it's not for some reason. It's more involved and more entangled and more intense. And then, and then also it has an impact, right?