The Covington Kids Outrage | Joe Rogan & Sam Harris

Just such a, it's recreational. Yeah. There's a- Well, I mean, it's back to Jack. I mean, it has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular. Yeah. I mean, you have, like, so for instance, I missed the whole Covington High School Catholic fiasco. Because you're not on Twitter. I basically was ignoring Twitter. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, like, man, this is interesting. This is blowing up, but I was so off Twitter there was no temptation for a hot take for me, right? And I saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these, like, like Kathy Griffin, right? Basically calling for the doxing of these kids, you know, given all that she has suffered, you know, from mob behavior online, and she's, you know, whipping up her own mob, it was just nuts. But it's normal. That's what people do. It's what the platform is calling out of people. But it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful, then they reinforce their base. Like, that now she's like so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her. Like anyone on the right that does anything, she's calling for her side to go after this person. Like reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe, that she's a part of that left wing tribe. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's so obviously everyone has a lot to lose doing this, especially in a case where all the facts aren't in. And if you just waited a beat, even the New York Times got this wrong. The New York Times writes an article about the kids in the MAGA hat that they have to rescind. And the, so then as the dust is settling, and I see these people, some people are doubling down, some people are issuing public apologies, I see somebody who's actually kind of, you know, branded herself as one of my enemies for a reason I can't fathom, but this journalist, Kara Swisher, who, you know, she works for Recode and Vox now, but she's got a big podcast and she's a big, she actually writes for the New York Times now, she's got an opinion piece, a regular column for the New York Times. She's a tech journalist. And I happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against, she said some disparaging things about me on Twitter and we had an offline conversation about it. But I saw her, she said one of the most vituperative and, you know, fairly crazy things in response to the kids initially. And then once more information came out, she walked it back and she basically apologized, you know. Good for her. And so I said, good for you, Kara. I just wanted to support this norm of acknowledging that you got something wrong. And I wanted to do it even, I wanted to actually do it for someone who I know really doesn't like me. Like, I mean, that was an added bonus for me because that's another norm that I think we should support. Like, we should play fair even with our enemies, right? And I mean, honestly, I try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me, even someone like Glenn Greenwald or Ray Zosilon. I mean, people who have just lied about me endlessly. If I get something wrong about them, I publicly apologize for it. So I did this and this was at the absolute 11th hour with respect to this scandal online. When I saw the kind of pain I was getting just for supporting Kara in her walk back of this thing, at a moment when it was obvious she should have walked this back, I got people saying, you know, unsubscribing from your podcast, you are, you know, now I know you're a fucking racist. You know, it was just pure pain. And I just thought, wow, man, that's, you know, it's like, you just touched this thing at its very end and you know, the slime gets on you. So yeah, it is, it's the medium, you know. We had no opportunity to do this before. It is the medium and it's also people that don't feel like their opinions are being heard. Like they want their opinion to be heard and they want it to be heard right now. And it might not be a very well thought out opinion, but they know that they have the ability to blare it out. And so they, they just send it out. And that, the ability to do that is just intoxicating for folks. That they can reach you. You talked about this with Jack. There is a, what makes Twitter especially good for this is that everything has the same stature. Like your tweets no bigger than the other tweet that just called you an asshole. Yeah, that's my Kurt Metzger take on it because Kurt Metzger was a hilarious standup comedian. He, he'll write a Facebook blog only. He only writes on Facebook. He's like, I like how it's set up. He's like, it's, there's a big, it differentiates between me and these fucking idiots who are commenting under there. Although ironically, I hate Facebook. I can't even, I mean, just the graphic design on Facebook, I find so offensive that I can't even look at Facebook. So I use it as a publishing channel, but I'm, you know, I keep threatening in my own mind to just delete the account. Cause I just don't, I mean, I've only read the comments three times, maybe ever. And every time I read them, it's like, Jesus Christ. It's like YouTube, but alive. I know it's like YouTube, but with people with their real names. It's, you know, this is a new world that we're living in, and everybody's trying to navigate this thing and figure it out as it goes along. And not everybody's doing it well. And I think this world is going to get more and more intrusive. I think this is just the beginning. I think we didn't see Twitter coming, whatever comes after Twitter. And this is one of the things that I, before the podcast, I wanted to really talk to Jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line. Because there's going to be something that's more invasive. There's going to be something that is more, whether it's, I think probably something in the line of augmented reality. Probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books, look like a fucking cork board at a bookstore. Although strangely, we're living through the golden age of audio here. It's like we went full into video and we're poised to go like 3D and VR. And then all of a sudden, audio is king.