Joe Rogan's Censorship Battle - Coleman Hughes

Coleman Hughes is a writer, rapper, political commentator and a podcaster. Joe Rogan has been in the eye of the storm over the last few weeks. I wanted Coleman to help me work out why the mainstream media has such a target on his back and whether this is going to be the standard operating procedure for anyone who gets this big again in future. Expect to learn why a coordinated conspiracy is less likely than jealous opportunism, what Coleman Hughes thinks about black people being protected from the N word, why Joe Rogan is protected against having clips taken out of context, whether Spotify should have responded the way they did and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and Free Shipping from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 10% discount on everything from Slater Menswear at https://www.slaters.co.uk/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Extra Stuff: Check out Coleman's Website - https://colemanhughes.org/ Follow Coleman on Twitter - https://twitter.com/coldxman Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #colemanhughes #joerogan #spotify - 00:00 Intro 03:23 Discussing the Joe Rogan Situation 20:46 Are Black People Offended by the ‘N-word?’ 26:30 Spotify’s Censorship Battle 36:37 How Comedians Protect Themselves from Being Cancelled 40:42 Is Mainstream Media Envious of Joe Rogan? 59:26 Are We Past Being Woke? 1:12:46 How Advanced Can Human Technology Become? 1:20:30 Where to Find Coleman - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  His success is a finger pointed at mainstream media saying, you guys are up. Mainstream media doesn't want to admit that. They would much rather believe his success is an element of him being able to weaponize racism, misogyny and homophobia and feed red meat to a bigoted audience. That's the way that they can preserve their image of saying, no, there's nothing wrong with us. We're doing an amazing job.

• 0:24Chris Williamson?

  Coleman Hughes, welcome to the show.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 0:29Chris Williamson?

  What has the response been like since you released your rap track? Because I know that you've been rapping for far longer than you've been writing, but to a lot of people, this probably sounds like finding out that Sam Harris has released a diss track on someone that it runs quite, quite counter to their perception of what you are and who you are.

• 0:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, the reception has been awesome. I mean, I've gotten so much good feedback. I think people are receiving it the way that I meant for it to be received. And it's, it's, it feels great to finally be able to converge my music identity and my public intellectual identity. Because, you know, like you said, I've been doing both for a long time in my private life, but in my public life, I've, I've been doing the writing and podcasting way more than I've been doing music. So it's good to finally show people both of these sides of myself.

• 1:24Chris Williamson?

  The track bangs as well. It slaps, man. It's really good.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  Really, really good. And you went to Ukraine to shoot some music video in the freezing cold?

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that's where it was shot. It was in like a, what would normally have been a kind of circus, as in for animals, in Ukraine. And it was not at all heated. It was in the dead of the Ukrainian winter. So it was basically like being outside in the middle of a Ukrainian winter for like,

• 1:57Speaker 00

  12 hours, two days in a row. It was brutal.

• 1:59Chris Williamson?

  That's the sacrifices you got to make, man. The sacrifices you got to make.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  I ended up having a lot more respect for actors. I had no idea the actual toll it takes to act several days in a row in conditions that are tiring and exhausting. Like, these people, like, I have no idea what they went through to shoot that movie, The Revenant, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. But, my God, the stamina it takes is far greater than you would assume from the outside.

• 2:33Chris Williamson?

  I saw a behind the scenes of Game of Thrones, final season. Now, say what you want about narratively, the way that that show finished, but looking at the cast, sat down on seats, just waiting for their turn to go as the film crew finally get the lighting right. They finally get the camera angles right, and they've run through it and run through it and run through it. It's the patience game. I imagine that a lot of actors develop a serious amount of patience while they're doing that.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you have to snap into the emotion of the scene. And it's like, it's a totally sterile environment where people are talking about lights and all this blah, blah, blah, yada, yada. And then you have to snap into the emotion of the scene. And you've got to get it, you know? And it's like, every minute costs a thousand dollars. So, don't fuck it up. Don't waste my time. It's incredible.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on this Rogan situation?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  So, I guess there are two, there are two sort of waves of what's happened. The first wave was criticism in response to his having Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, who said a lot of untrue anti-vax misinformation. And because of that, people like Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, wanted Spotify to take him off, off the platform.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  And then it seems like basically a week later, somebody, you know, strung together examples of him saying the N word and unearthed jokes that, uh, that make him look racist. Obviously, it's a, these are propaganda videos engineered to make him look as racist as possible by lifting something out of context. Still, they look bad. And basically, it's just, you know, people want his head. People want his head on a stick. And I am very against cancel culture.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  I think the way to engage people is to criticize the misinformation that they've, uh, that, that they believe. I think Joe, Joe Rogan is an extraordinarily open-minded person. He has a relationship to correcting errors and apologizing that almost no one else in, at his level of media has, right? He's a person that can say, I got it wrong and does this often in a way that is really credible and honest and, um, really admirable because he's such a genuine person.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  He has such a relationship to his audience where they know he means exactly what he says, which you can't say of any of the cable news people that are reaching, um, probably fewer people than he is. And because he has such a good relationship to the truth, even when he gets stuff wrong, I think, I mean, it, it's insane to people that, to me, that people are holding him to a totally separate standard that they would hold, uh, you know, a cable news show, all of which have also spread misinformation to varying degrees throughout the pandemic, right? Tucker Carlson says some bullshit or Don Lemon says some bullshit.

• 5:55Speaker 00

  They don't have to worry that their show is going to be taken off the network, right? Whereas Joe Rogan, because he signed this deal with Spotify partly. And because he's frankly, a lot of people in the mainstream media, I think are envious and competitive of the amount of people he reaches. And then a lot of people that don't like the fact that he's not completely left wing, obviously. He gets hate from the mainstream media who don't really defend him as like a fellow ally, as someone we want to protect because he's doing what we do. And then he gets hate, obviously, from the cancel culture left because he's not left. And I think, I think it's, it's, it's really dangerous.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  I think we have to hold the line for people like Joe Rogan, or else we lose the norm of free speech. And I know the second you say free speech, people are going to say, it's not, this is not relevant to the First Amendment. The government isn't trying to censor him. Yes, but the reason the First Amendment makes sense is because of this wider point, that free speech is a very good thing for society. Open discourse as a general cultural value is an important thing for society. And that means free speech for speech you don't always like. And I think that's very important.

• 7:15Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about some of the more right wing commentators online that have been saying, don't back down, don't apologize for anything. This is not the way to play the game?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  So they would be right for a lot of people. You know, these days, it does not make sense for a politician to apologize. No one believes it. Biden apologizes, no one believes it. Trump apologizes, well, he never apologizes. But if he did, no one would believe it because, you know, imagine Hillary Clinton apologizing. Does anyone in the world go, oh, my God, that's amazing that she can see that she's evolved so much as a person? No, it's, it's so clearly scripted, right? And frankly, I think any apology from normal media figures is going to seem scripted. The difference with Joe Rogan is he, this is the Joe Rogan effect, right? His apologies are real.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  You can, you can just hear it. You can see that he, he really thinks he should have had more people on from a pro-vax perspective.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  He is doing his best and his apologies are, he's one of the only people at his level of media reach that can apologize in a way that does not seem scripted and seems credible. And as, as a human being, I think the ability to apologize is extremely important. And that holds for your friends, that holds for your relationships, and it should hold if you have a really honest relationship with your audience, with which Joe Rogan does to an exceptional degree. So I disagree with those. I think his apology came across extremely well.

• 9:02Chris Williamson?

  I think that there's definitely a, a different element to when Joe apologizes versus when other people do it. I think the concern from people on the right is that by apologizing, you lend credence or legitimacy to people that want to censor free speech. Right? But Joe is doing his apology in a very different sort of way because of the level of intimacy that he has between himself and his audience and the amount of trust. The thing that I think that's interesting is usually when the mainstream media try to attack somebody with clips, whether that be from the like first phase of this campaign or the second phase of this campaign around COVID versus the clips of him saying the N-word.

• 9:48Chris Williamson?

  I think that the problem that they have, most of the time, the press are trying to show you a small microcosm of someone that they claim is indicative of the remainder of their character. Right? Here is the tip of the iceberg. That shows that this person is the racist, homophobic, xenophobic, whatever that we always knew that he is, and here's the proof. This is the cracks showing in his persona, and this is the actual true Joe coming through. You just didn't happen to know about it. The problem that you have is that the vast majority of people, even people who are super duper casual fans of Rogan, have probably listened to at least 100, 200, 300 hours.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  And the normal fans of him, you're talking upwards of a thousand hours, easily, that someone can have consumed Joe Rogan's content. They go, well, hang on a second. I can't take, this is the tip of the iceberg from you.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  I've already seen the whole iceberg.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Precisely, precisely. I have such a depth of connection with this guy.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  I've seen the tip and the base.

• 10:49Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  That sounded really weird.

• 10:51Chris Williamson?

  Do not say that again.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Pause.

• 10:55Chris Williamson?

  The tip and the base of Joe. But yeah, that's it. That's what they're trying to do. They're trying to use this old media narrative of here is the small segment that represents the bigger version. But they can't do that. They can't do that anymore.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you raise a really interesting point, and I think it's true. What separates this cancellation from most other cancellations is that they're not unearthing anything. There's nothing. We all know exactly who Joe Rogan has been for years now, because he has four-hour conversations every day that are completely unfiltered, where he says exactly what he thinks, right? All the evidence of him being a bad person, if such evidence exists, it's already in the open, right? There's nothing to discover. If you hate him, you hate him based on who he actually is by now. But-

• 11:57Speaker 00

  So compare that to like a different kind of a cancellation. You know, generally, it's like finding something no one knew about. Right. It's like, we found this blog from 15 years ago where Joy Reid from MSNBC said that, you know, all gay men like underage boys. Right. That's a true, that's a true story that happened. People don't really talk about it because since Joy Reid is a darling of the left, she is somehow immune to the logic of cancellation. Even though if Joe Rogan had done the same thing, people would be foaming about, foaming at the mouth about it. Which again, as a sidebar, shows you how these sort of cultural rules are used as basically

• 12:42Speaker 00

  totally arbitrary rules to fuck over people you don't like. And you suddenly stop caring about them when it's something you like. That should tell you everything you need to know about these cancellations for things you said 20 years ago. I mean, someone unearthed something of Neil Young saying something like pretty, I think it was kind of pro-Nazi. I might have to fact check that, but he said something really cancelable in like the 80s or 90s. And then he walked it back.

• 13:11Speaker 00

  But, you know, that's usually how cancellations work. It's like, this thing, oh, you didn't know Roald Dahl said, basically justified the Holocaust. Right. And now you know, and it makes you think about Matilda differently. That's usually how it works. Even in those cases, if a person has disavowed their views, I'm really against canceling them because people change so much over the course of their lives. The difference with Joe is that that's not what's happening here. It's like, they're just stitching together

• 13:45Speaker 00

  non-representative, out of context bits from a long career. And playing them back to back as if all he's been doing for the past 20 years is saying the N-word.

• 13:56Chris Williamson?

  Do you know where that, do you know where that supercut originally came from?

• 14:00Speaker 00

  Where, where?

• 14:02Chris Williamson?

  Alex Jones made it.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  No way.

• 14:05Chris Williamson?

  Alex Jones made it.

• 14:07Speaker 00

  Why?

• 14:08Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember when him and Rogan had that beef?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  No.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so him and Rogan had a fallout a little while ago. It was like semi-public. It was before Spotify. Maybe, I want to say five or four or five years ago. And this was Alex throwing a little bit of shade around in an original version of this video. Now, I might be, I might have been sold a lie by the version of the video that I've seen. And if that's the case, then sorry, Alex. But it's, I've heard from a bunch of different sources that the original video was from Alex Jones. And if you actually look at the first, first, first version, it's got Infowars graphics on it. And this was him throwing that around. So the interesting thing, I'd seen this video a bunch of times. It's been floating around Twitter for quite a while. And I've seen it, I've seen it do the rounds a fair bit. But there's equivalent versions of this for the Young Turks.

• 14:58Chris Williamson?

  There's a huge one of them floating around at the moment that's got one and a half million plays on it. They're just, same thing, out of context, N-word, N-word, N-word, N-word, N-word. There's Ethan Klein, when he tried to, when he deleted some of Jordan Peterson's episodes with him a couple of weeks ago. He said, "Both the N-word and the F-word back to back, over and over again." Da-da, da-da, da-da. "I really love saying da-da, da-da, da-da." And you're like, okay. But then the supercut of Joe, for whatever reason, decides to really, really get a lot of momentum and gravitas now. One of the things that I definitely don't think is true, that I've seen in a bunch of different group chats I'm in, is that this is part of some overarching conspiracy.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  There's some company, the one that's behind Patriot Takes, which is the Twitter account that did it. They're in support of some other super PAC organisation that is linked with blah, blah, blah. And Stool Presidente, who's the guy that owns Barstool Sports.

• 16:01Chris Williamson?

  Dude that owns Barstool Sports went on

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know, I know who you're talking about.

• 16:04Chris Williamson?

  Went on a livestream podcast with the guys that own that company that is associated with this and he's going back and forward. I don't think that there's, I don't think you need to look to conspiracy to see why these two things happened in sequence with each other, especially if, as I said, this video's been floating around for a long time and it wasn't created by somebody. I think that you've primed the like cultural algorithm with Joe Rogan's done something wrong and he's done an apology video and then people have taken this opportunity to go, right, okay, now I'm gonna try and throw, yeah, precisely. Let's, what have we got? Yep. What else can we throw at him? There's videos floating around of other stuff as well. Are you not gonna, everyone's talking about Joe Rogan's racism, but what about his misogyny?

• 16:47Chris Williamson?

  Here he is laughing at one of his comedian friends saying that he used to get sucked off in the back room of the Comedy Store. And it's just, what can you find over a 12

• 16:56Speaker 00

  Dare he.

• 16:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I know. Over a 12 or 15 year career of having whatever 10 hours of conversations a week, like 2,000 podcast episodes.

• 17:08Chris Williamson?

  But it's hard. It's hard to say.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  It's not, the individual words in context, the way that you do that, it's not forgivable, or at least it's not, it shouldn't be like something that we support. But as somebody that puts out an awful lot of content, I know that as your volume increases, you're gonna say dumb stuff over and over and over again. And over a long enough period of time, there's gonna be a lot of dumb stuff and that's how you make like a huge supercut.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Especially if you're a comedian that's often having other comedians on your podcast, drinking, smoking weed on your podcast. It's an informal conversation. They're not putting together, you know, like, you know, 99 theses of like what they think about the world all the time. A lot of times they're fucking around. That's why people like it.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  You know, listen, I think we have to also talk about the issue of whether it is, in all cases, immoral or unethical to say the N-word. Right? People are, I think, pretending not to understand the difference between mentioning a word in quotations and directing a slur at somebody, right? With malicious intent. Those are two very different things, and it's two very different people that do either one of those.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And I think people are disingenuously pretending not to know the difference between those two things, pretending not to be able to observe the difference. And, you know, it's so interesting. I finally watched the OJ Simpson documentary

• 18:49Speaker 00

  last week. And there's this moment in the OJ Simpson trial

• 18:56Speaker 00

  where there's this huge fight over whether they can admit Mark Fuhrman's N-word tape, right? This cop that got, that found the glove at the scene had a history of saying the N-word. The, OJ's defense said, "We want the jury to hear him say the N-word so that they don't trust his testimony." Right? And the prosecution said, "We don't want them to, to hear the N-word." Right? It's gonna bias their judgment. And there was this argument about it. And, and the prosecution says, essentially to the judge, "When black people hear the N-word, they cannot remain objective. It's too emotional. It's too, it's too hard-hitting. There's no black juror can remain objective after hearing that word, and jurors need to remain objective."

• 19:40Speaker 00

  Then OJ's defense comes back and says, "How dare you say black people can't remain unbiased after hearing the N-word? How dare you? It's racist, it's patronizing, it's condescending." And they were widely thought to have won that particular argument, right? Back in the 90s, the version of 90s woke that, that obtained during the OJ trial said, "Of course, black people can hear the N-word in certain contexts and understand it and remain objective, right? Remain unbiased, remain rational."

• 20:16Speaker 00

  What I find interesting now is that people are implicitly making the argument of the prosecution now as woke, which is that if black people hear the N word, it hurts too much. We can't possibly remain rational enough to observe the difference between someone mentioning it in quotation marks and somebody directing it as a slur. Of course, people can. And I think, you know, this is where the cynicism comes into this. It's like, the notion of black people taking offense at Rogan saying this word is, I think, being used cynically to take him down. Do you not think that any black people have taken offense at it?

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Oh, sure. I definitely think some black people have taken offense at it. Probably black people that are less familiar with him. Right? Like, if this is, this goes back to the iceberg question. If this is the tip of the iceberg that you're seeing Joe Rogan about, you're gonna think he's a racist. He made a jokes about, a joke about going to a black neighborhood and it seeming like Planet of the Apes, right? And then it's just like, Edward, Edward, Edward. So if, again, if that's the tip of the iceberg, you are rationally gonna think, wow, this guy's just been like foaming at the mouth with racism for years. And that, that, it makes sense, makes perfect sense to take offense to that as a black person or as any person.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  If you're familiar with much more of the iceberg, as a lot of people probably are, and Joe Rogan has a lot of black fans, I don't think they're taking offense. Because, uh, I mean, they just, they know his general character so well at this point. They're not getting new data about his character, right? They know he's a comedian that says, says every curse word. Makes fun of every group. So like, imagine, this is, this is very interesting. Imagine you had never seen the show South Park. And it's gone, what, over 20 seasons, right? Similar to Joe Rogan in that they have a shit ton of material.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  And you stitch together every joke at black people's expense ever made on the show South Park. And you have no other familiarity with it. You are going to come away thinking, how the fuck is this on TV? Is this show from the fucking Jim Crow South? Like, my god. Now, of course, the rest of us that have watched a lot of South Park, we understand they make fun of everyone. They make fun of everyone, right? We've seen the whole iceberg. That's what's happening to Joe Rogan right now. So, yeah, I assume a lot of black people, to the extent they're seeing a small sliver of what he's done, are taking offense, but again, it is, it is propaganda. This is the definition of propaganda.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  And I think that should be more widely understood.

• 23:21Chris Williamson?

  Is there a difference in a white person saying it on a podcast versus a black person?

• 23:29Speaker 00

  There is a difference in how it will be received, most likely.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't think you can... My, listen, my philosophy of communication is that I can, I'm never gonna ignore what a person is trying to say. Or what a person means by what they say, what they're trying to communicate.

• 23:54Chris Williamson?

  Even if they communicate it clumsily?

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, if you were, like, how would you approach talking to a friend? Right? If they were communicating something clumsily, you would try to get to the core of what they're saying. Right? That's, that's common sense. And, you know...

• 24:16Speaker 00

  I really, I understand that, you know, I think right now, if there were a Martian scientist that came to Earth and came to America and saw that there is one and only one word really that you can't say, and only people that are one color can't say it, and then people that are a different color can say it, they would say, oh, okay, this is what people were talking about when they said the Homo sapiens have these, uh, believe in magic, right? The home, they have a lot of superstition and magical thinking and taboos. And, you know, like, Western anthropologists will go to places where, that have had no

• 24:58Speaker 00

  contact with modernity for, you know, hundreds of years, and they'll say, oh, isn't it amazing that the natives here, they think that if you dance like this, you'll bring the rain, right? And then they'll go back to the West and think, oh, well, we're super rational here. We don't, we don't think anything crazy. We don't have any superstitious beliefs, except if you utter this magic word, you, you like instantaneously do harm, right? But only if you're one color. If you're another color, you can say that word, especially if you change the suffix of it so to like a soft A rather than a hard ER, then it's not as harmful, right? That, I'm sorry, that is magical thinking without the explicit magic.

• 25:41Chris Williamson?

  Unless you're a rapper of any ethnicity.

• 25:44Speaker 00

  Right.

• 25:45Chris Williamson?

  Because they get a pass for everything, which is now, now makes complete sense about why you wanted to be a rapper.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  And you know, like, frankly, I've heard a lot, a lot of groups of young people, like teenagers, that are not black, but are maybe Hispanic or Asian, and are from certain neighborhoods, uh, say the N-word.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  And use it colloquially, like amongst themselves in mixed-race groups of people. Like, it's a, America's a complicated place. There's over 300 million people here, and, um, everyone has a different story and comes from a different background. And I hate this, like, one-size-fits-all, these one-size-fits-all rules are so ridiculous to me.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Did you see the Spotify CEO Daniel X email out to all staff? Have you seen this yet? It only came out this morning. Okay, so it's a big, big, big, long email. Kind of, "I understand your plight. I'm very sorry that you are going through this at this difficult time." And then on one of the screenshots, "If we believe in having an open platform as a core value of the company, then we must also believe in elevating all types of creators, including those from underrepresented communities and the diversity of backgrounds. We've been doing a great deal of work in this area already, but I think we can do even more. So I am committing to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development and marketing of music,

• 27:11Chris Williamson?

  artists and songwriters and audio content from historically marginalized groups. This will dramatically increase our efforts in these areas. While some may want us to pursue a different path, I believe that more speech on more issues can be highly effective in improving the status quo and enhancing the conversation altogether. I deeply regret that you are carrying so much of this burden. I also want to be transparent in setting the expectation that in order to achieve our goal of becoming the global audio platform, these kinds of disputes will be inevitable. For me, I come back to centering on our mission of unlocking the potential of human creativity and enabling more than a billion people to enjoy the work of what we think will be more than 50 million creators. That mission makes these clashes worth the effort." So that is $100 million to historically marginalized groups,

• 27:56Chris Williamson?

  audio, music and audio content.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  What does that actually mean? What does that mean? 100, they're investing $100 million to...

• 28:06Chris Williamson?

  Committing to an incremental investment of $100 million for the licensing, development and marketing of music, artists and songwriters and audio content from historically marginalized groups.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Licensing, development and marketing. Okay, that's interesting and vague. But, I mean, big picture, they are standing up for intellectual diversity on their platform and open discourse and free speech. And I think that's, they should be congratulated for that. They are, they are a huge... I mean, they're a huge player. They're the player in the audio space and for them to just to not buckle under this pressure is a really enormous achievement for those of us that care about free speech and open discourse. They should set a precedent for

• 28:54Speaker 00

  other corporations. You know, once Spotify survives this, which I'm quite certain they will, and people move on to the next controversy, they will be seen, I hope, as a precedent for how corporations can essentially not negotiate with like quote unquote terrorists, so to speak, right? Like you don't, you shouldn't negotiate with people based on these really ephemeral kind of outbursts of outrage. You can't be beholden to that as a corporation. Compromise your mission.

• 29:39Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, to push back there, presumably there could have been a thing that Joe could have said that would be so reprehensible that he would deserve being completely removed from the platform. There could be something that he could have said, some absolutely awful call for violence, just like an endless racial homophobic misogynist, whatever barrage, and you go, okay, yeah, this is unrecoverable. I don't think that it's a difference of kind. I just think it's a difference of degree. And yes, I would agree that Spotify hasn't caved as much as they could have done, but I've just checked jremissing.com. 113 episodes are missing from Spotify, almost all of which were removed on February 4th. Alex Jones,

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  Owen Benjamin, Theo Von, two from my friend Michael Malice, Alex Jones' second one, Chris Delia. And the interesting thing is that in the statement from Daniel Elks, Daniel X, Daniel Ek, he says that Joe was the one that selected the episodes. That really surprised me. First off, because the episodes got taken down before Joe did a response, or before I found out about this response. And I mentioned, I was like, look, just straight up, think about the simplest solution to this. I can't remember what I said on a podcast two months ago. There's no way that Joe's gonna go, hmm, let me remember. Yeah,

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  845, 912. Like, he's not gonna be able to go back like some sort of Rain Man and be able to remember all of the stuff that's happened. So I presume that at the very least, it was outsourced to a team and more likely outsourced to an algorithm that's maybe fed back up transcripts that could have then been searched through. But there's some of the episodes in there that have very, very little to do with anything, but are critical of the Saudis. And Spotify is now pushing into the Saudi market. There's some episodes in there with people like Chris Delia, who although may or may not, there may be other stuff in there, but Chris has had his own sort of cancel culture thing occur recently. So the concern here is that this

• 31:44Chris Williamson?

  is a well timed smokescreen in order to be able to take down a bunch of other content that they're not happy with. So I'd agree with you when you say that Spotify hasn't caved as much as they could. But I also think that there is something going on here, whether that be at Joe's behest, or at Spotify, or at a collaboration between the two, or maybe the UFC has said, we have an incredibly fucking diverse fighter roster here. Like, there's, there's gonna be pressure from them too. But there has been some concessions made, was my point.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good point. I revise my, my judgment there. I think, um, yeah, it does. I mean, this is what some people warned about when Joe Rogan signed the Spotify deal.

• 32:27Chris Williamson?

  Yep. All eggs in one basket.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Totally. And, you know, I really, I don't, okay, so I agree with your point that there is something that is so over the line that Spotify would be justified in taking it down. I can't imagine Joe Rogan saying anything ever close to that line.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  And you know, this is the thing with free speech, I think, because the question is, are we, are we debating over a principle? Or are we just, do we all agree that censorship is okay and just disagree about where the line is? Right? So like all of us, I don't know anyone who is into Holocaust denial, or who is, who is super upset if, if a Holocaust, a straight up Holocaust deniers. Blog goes down. Yeah. Yeah, blog goes down. Or someone who is, you know, actively inciting, you know, even worse, someone who thinks the Holocaust didn't happen, but wants it to happen and is trying to get it to happen. Right?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Like through their podcast, like a modern day actual Hitler. No one is going to be too upset when that person gets their podcast taken on Spotify. You know, after all, again, it is a private company. If, if it's, part of its values is that it doesn't want to promote the Holocaust, which is pretty understandable. It can act on that. So is it like, we're, we're all drawing the line somewhere between like Holocaust denial and like anti-vax information and some of us are drawing it just like over here and we're arguing about whether Joe Rogan is in the no-go zone? Or are we actually arguing over an actual principle?

• 34:21Speaker 00

  A principle disagreement about whether these platforms should allow a wide range of speech?

• 34:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, let's not forget that by the sounds of things, Joe has taken down a chunk of these by his own choice and it's his library, man. He gets to choose what he says and he gets to choose what you listen to by virtue of what he says and who he brings on. This is a, this is something that I think about all the time. Every single decision that a podcaster makes when they're having a conversation is editorial. Me deciding to push back or not push back against something that you say, every time that I decide to either fragment the conversation, or I decide to stay on the main trunk, or I decide to move on, each one of those is an editorial decision.

• 35:05Chris Williamson?

  The same goes for what I do and don't say, what I do and don't release. I've recorded podcasts previously that I haven't released because I thought it doesn't make the author look tremendously good. Maybe they were having an off day or they weren't quite right or whatever. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna put it out. Like it'll be, it's not because they've said something catastrophic. No one's ever come on and been a-

• 35:22Speaker 00

  Right. Yeah, I've done the same thing.

• 35:23Chris Williamson?

  It's just not interesting.

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:26Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So is it my duty to release podcasts that I think are not interesting? Well, no, probably not. You're asking me to probably lose some audience in order to release, what, because of freedom of speech? It's not free, it's not my duty to release a boring podcast. So roll it forward from there. It's not a difference of kind. It's just a difference of degree. And then when you're talking about getting rid of stuff from the past, I'm sure the stuff that you've said in, in the past, where you've been like, that was clumsy and clunky and I really wish that I'd said it differently or hadn't said it or whatever, right? And as you do more content and as you do it more frequently and as it's over a longer period of time as well, norms change, cultural values around what is and isn't acceptable change. I mean, the N-word's been,

• 36:09Chris Williamson?

  you know, unacceptable for a long time. That's probably fair to say, but-

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, you know, it wasn't that long ago that people were somewhat likely to observe the difference between using the word in quotations and throwing it at someone.

• 36:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 36:26Speaker 00

  I mean, even 10 years ago, I think people were more likely to observe that distinction than they are now.

• 36:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think that that's fair. I also think that there's like a comedian's trolley problem thing going on where those guys, that their job is to try and push the limits. Their job is to, is to genuinely try and take you past the point at which you think, I, I cannot believe that they've said this.

• 36:56Chris Williamson?

  And the problem is that when everything is captured and then kept on the internet for eternity, it's easier for an audience to take something out of context than it is to do it with a live stand-up set that probably isn't even recorded. I found out only a couple of weeks ago from a friend that's a comedian in the UK, that he records every single one of his sets for precisely this reason, that if somebody complains to the club and says this person was saying whatever phobic or ism it is that we want to throw at them, they have the recording. So that's the degree, the sort of Damocles thing, the level of protection that comedians have now, or that they need to have in order to keep themselves safe.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  In the past two or three years, the big comedy clubs in New York have all begun requiring that you put your phone in a secured bag and turn it off or on silent, you know, comedy seller in the stand before you go into the club, because comedians can't work under surveillance. Comedy does not work under surveillance. I think another thing people don't understand about comedy is that comics don't know which one of their jokes are, which of their jokes are going to be funny until they tell them to an audience for the first time. They have some sense, but you know, all of the, all of the Netflix specials you see from your favorite comics were pared down

• 38:24Speaker 00

  from far more jokes that these comics tested in front of live audience in, as an experiment in order to see which ones were the funniest and, and pare it down to those which eventually make it into the Netflix special, right? They don't know. And, and the line between funny and offensive is, is, is super thin, right? And what's more...

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Whatever, you know, something being taboo is an element of it potentially being funny. Right. It's not just that funny things are often dealing with taboo topics. It's that if there is a taboo topic, it is by definition rife with humor potential. Right. Like it's a taboo is a constitutive element of humor in our species. That's just how our minds work. So in order for us, listen, we don't have to have stand up comedy.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Most places in the world don't have stand up comedy. Okay.

• 39:33Speaker 00

  America does have stand up comedy, and I think that's amazing. I think that's one of, you know, that's one of the elements of our culture that I most love. But the only way that it works is if we allow people to approach taboo subjects to find the line by crossing it, which is the only way to find it.

• 39:57Speaker 00

  And to test things out, right? We could become a country very easily that just doesn't have stand up comedy, has no robust stand up scene.

• 40:08Speaker 00

  Because we, because our culture shifts. That is a very real possibility. There's no, there's no law that says your culture has to be compatible with having a robust stand up comedy scene. I think that would be very sad if that happened. But we should, we should view, we should view the, uh, the cultural elements that allow for us to have good comedy in this country.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Those are fragile. Those are things that need to be defended. There are values that need to be defended or else they'll, they'll go away. They're not something we should take for granted.

• 40:42Chris Williamson?

  How much of this is envy by the mainstream media at someone that shouldn't have risen up to the level of cultural influence and clout that they have?

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think a good amount of it is that. I mean, the existence of Joe Rogan as such a towering figure is in some way a condemnation of the failures of mainstream media.

• 41:12Speaker 00

  I'm not saying if mainstream media were better, Joe Rogan would be a nobody. It's not what I'm saying. He's funny. He would have a huge audience regardless, but

• 41:26Speaker 00

  he is as popular as he is. He has the insane degree of popularity that he does because he's willing to have conversations that the mainstream media rules out. Okay. So like, for instance, the idea that COVID, SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the lab a couple of miles away that was constantly tinkering with things extremely close to SARS-CoV-2. The closest viral ancestors to SARS-CoV-2 in the world. Okay. Like, on its face plausible, not crazy, should be looked into.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  And when Fauci initially called the meeting in late January, early February to discuss this with the top virologists, many of them thought it probably came from the lab. Right? Okay.

• 42:23Speaker 00

  The whole media basically decides this is conspiracy, this is misinformation. And many people, you know, had incentives to, to kind of, kind of take that line. Who is the person in society that's going to really have that conversation? In a way that isn't merely finger pointing and point scoring against the left, but is truly open minded to, to evidence. Joe Rogan, right? He is going to fill that gap when CNN and MSNBC decide that lab leak is bunk.

• 43:04Speaker 00

  Joe Rogan is going to have that conversation and he's going to have it in a long exploratory way. Tucker Carlson is merely going to use it as a cudgel against Democrats and the left. And you know, flash forward to two years later, where you pretty much have the top scientists now saying, you know, it's now like 50 50 between lab leak and natural emergence. And we're taking this seriously and the World Health Organization takes it seriously. And Fauci says he can't rule it out now, has changed his position. Like that gets vindicated as a legitimate hypothesis.

• 43:46Speaker 00

  And Rogan is the kind of person that would be systematically open to that when the mainstream said it was a false conspiracy theory. And that's why he has such a large audience is because the mainstream media fails in those kinds of ways.

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  Rogan is playing in the vacuum that they have left. Yeah, I would absolutely agree.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  That would be the, the short way to say what I just took a really long time to say. But the point is, his success is a finger pointed at mainstream media saying, you guys are fucking up. Mainstream media doesn't want to admit that. They would much rather believe his success is an element of him being able to weaponize racism, misogyny and homophobia and feed red meat to a bigoted audience. That's the way that they can preserve their image of saying, no, there's nothing wrong with us. We're doing an amazing job. We are killing it. Joe Rogan is simply able to weaponize the worst in our culture and build a following as a result. That's a much more friendly narrative.

• 44:52Chris Williamson?

  Here's the thing I think that people need to remember as well. For all that Joe is probably the single most powerful media personality on the planet who commands, you know, nation's worth of plays on a weekly basis. He's just a guy. There are no rules for how you're supposed to do sense making outside of the institutions. There is no operating procedure manual that me and you are supposed to adhere to.

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  The rules of what we do and don't say, the cadence of the conversation, the type of the conversation, everything that we do, whether we keep in touch afterwards, whether we don't, whether we prep before, whether we don't, whether we, all of that is, it purely exists through the evolution of people that have done this. There's no playbook that anybody follows. So the same thing occurs for what happens if a video of you saying some things that you regret pops up. So for someone to say that Joe should or shouldn't have done whatever, well, hang in a second. You weren't saying this about the way that he conducted himself on his show, or the way that he named his show, or his artwork, or his show notes, or the links that he puts out, or how he promotes it, or anything

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  else. Joe is a guy who is leading the pack in forging an entire new world. He is failing in public and learning out loud, right? Every time that he has a conversation, it's the first time he's had that exact conversation with that exact guest at that particular time. So every single one of his errors is out there for people. And maybe he'll look back and think, do you know what it is? I'm really glad that I did those two apologies. Maybe at the time, it looked a little bit to people like I was rolling over, or like I was getting pressure from Spotify. But I know in my heart of hearts that it's because I felt X or Y or Z or whatever. Like, all of these editorial decisions that Joe gets to make, they're his. He can choose. And if you love him for the show, then as far

• 46:41Chris Williamson?

  as I'm concerned, you know, back him, I back him for what it is that he does because of all of the insights and the enjoyment and pleasure and curiosity and intellectual satisfaction that I've got from his show. I trust that Joe is doing the thing that he thinks is right for what it is that he's going to do.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Right. No, I agree. I mean, I think I should just say, if I'm going to level any criticism of Joe Rogan's show, I think I strongly disagree with the perspectives expressed by his anti-vax doctors. I do think it's misinformation. I know people roll their eyes, I think, at that word now because it's used so much. But listen, the vaccines are safe and effective, right? And I think he should do more prep when he has those kinds of controversial guests on.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  To be able to sort of challenge them on factual elements. Now, of course, if you're talking to someone who like did early work on the concept of MRNAs and is deep in the weeds, it's very difficult.

• 47:58Chris Williamson?

  There's basically no amount of prep that you can do that's going to mean that you can battle back.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Still, you know, it's, it's, it makes sense to do as much prep as you can. And, and also to have people with the opposite perspective on. And listen, that's exactly basically what he said he's, he's going to do in his apology. And, and so, you know, if I can level any criticism at the show, it'd be that. But that is a real far cry from, from the idea that, you know, it should be canceled.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  Plus, it's, it's the thing that he's suggested that he's going to try and rectify. I think the best way to do that, the best solution that I could see around those sort of topics is to do what he did with Tim Poole and the, and Jack Dorsey. You know, bring, bring, bring people on and mediate rather than having two different sorts of conversations. You know, here's one, here's another, because the bottom line is that certain types of talking points are more limbically hijacking and more seductive to people than others. And Sam Harris talks about nine 11 truthers, that there's always a degree of freedom on a conversation where someone says, well, what about the 10,000 ballots that were hidden in Virginia? Or what about the fact that steel only burns?

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  Did you know about this man from this particular principality of the fire system that said that he was in there five nights before? Like, there's just, there's too many degrees of freedom in there and you really need a specialist. And if you have somebody who is pushing the boundaries on either side, pushing the boundaries of legitimacy or of truthfulness, they can hack people's desire to believe in one particular narrative or another. And if you have somebody else who is less prepared to play fast and loose with the truth, or their general overall narrative is less seductive, you really just need them in a room at the same time so that the person can push back, the specialist can go against the specialist. And I think you're right. I think that Joe said, look, I've not been in this position before.

• 49:59Chris Williamson?

  I didn't really know that this was an issue, but I've accepted that it is one. And moving forward, I'm going to try and do something different. I think. You know, from my side as a podcaster, he tries to put out a lot of content and does it, you know, four or five hours a week. I think that that's the best that like Joe could have done.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I agree. I think the apology was great. And I can't imagine thinking that that that apology came across as groveling or submitting to something he shouldn't have been submitting to. I really couldn't disagree with that take more.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  You know, I've been in the position where I've said things on my podcast or I've had a guest that I didn't push back on enough on certain points that I later found out to be that that I really should have pushed back on. This this kind of thing, it really is inevitable in the course of a long podcasting career. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't rectify it. You absolutely should rectify it if you want to keep anything like a kind of trusting relationship with your audience. But, you know, like, I can't help but come back to this point about the massive double standards that Joe Rogan is operating under as opposed to people in cable news.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  Well, you say that, but I think especially with the second issue that we're coming up against, if there was a supercut of someone from CNN or Fox News saying the N word over and over and over and over again, I think that they would have similar or maybe even worse repercussions than Joe's going through.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  So, I mean, so it's different because the supercut would have to be cut from their own show that we've all been watching for years, right?

• 51:50Chris Williamson?

  The same story with Joe, though.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Right. So, but, but, but it would have to not be a surprise. It would have to just be, it would have to be that they've been saying this and it was fine. The network didn't care until they saw it back to back to back.

• 52:06Chris Williamson?

  The reason being, the reason being that a big chunk of the clips that are used by Joe are when the show was so small that relatively no one was watching compared with how many people watch now. Whereas the presumption around mainstream media is that it's kind of been, well, it's probably been, probably been going down, but that a similar number of people could have found a problem with it in the past. Whereas with Joe, it's like, um, this is a, a smoking gun that nobody was actually able to see. This is like secret information. Whereas if it was CNN or Fox News, it's obvious that it's not because it's been on, on cable for ages. Yeah, I understand what you mean.

• 52:44Speaker 00

  Right. I mean, you know, I come back to the Joy Reid case, for example, like they've, you know, she had a blog in, in like the, in 2000s where she said gay men tend to like underage boys and that she was, she said she was quote homophobic and um, she's, she was opposed, you know, against gay marriage. And then when she got called out on it, she claimed that her blog had been hacked. She said, oh, I didn't, maybe someone else hacked my blog. And then people confirmed that her blog was not hacked at all. And she said those things and she, she finally came out, stopped lying and said, okay, I'm sorry. My views have changed. I've been hurt.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  She's on MSNBC. No one gives a shit. You know, and, and Joe Rogan, his infractions were not actually expressing bigoted beliefs. This is, this is what gets me about it. It's, he didn't say black people were less. He didn't say, he didn't express a belief in an explicit way like Joy Reid did. He said the N word, which a lot of people take offense to, obviously. And he made a joke about going into black neighborhoods, right?

• 54:04Speaker 00

  I think there still is a huge double standard here. I think there is a, people are out to get Joe in a way that they can view, you know, Joy Reid's comments as, oh, she, she doesn't, she sees why they're wrong now and blah, blah, blah. But Joe, Joe, that's who he is, you know?

• 54:24Chris Williamson?

  Tip of the iceberg.

• 54:25Speaker 00

  And, and so, yeah, I mean,

• 54:30Speaker 00

  I, I really do think that there is a double standard here because of how many people want Joe to be canceled to begin with.

• 54:42Chris Williamson?

  If it wasn't for the fact that he was on Spotify exclusively, I don't think that this would have happened either. I think that there's low key resentment around the fact that he garnered so much support and so much money for doing something. And the show since he's been on Spotify, no one knows the exact figures, but apparently it's got even bigger, uh, which again is a kick in the teeth to mainstream media. And then finally, what you have by it being a single platform exclusive as opposed to just an RSS feed that gets distributed around the internet, you have a point of leverage. And this was the concern that people had, that by being on one platform, you don't need to pressure Joe Rogan, you can pressure the platform. And that was the concern. But I think if he wasn't on Spotify, I don't think that this, I think this just washes through. And

• 55:26Chris Williamson?

  perhaps that explains, maybe this is the first time that that video, the N word video has done the rounds, uh, since Joe's been on just Spotify. And since it's been the case that like the, the cultural algorithm was primed by the previous apology and the fact that the news stories were already talking about him, you know, the CNN horse paste, horse dewormer thing last year, kind of that kicks the ball rolling. It's into the mainstream sort of populace is, it's like boomer territory now. Okay, then we go again, then we go again, then we go again. And that just picks up, picks up, picks up.

• 56:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I do think that is the dynamic and

• 56:06Speaker 00

  listen, I mean, I hope people don't.

• 56:10Speaker 00

  I think, you know, the arguments for free, free and open discourse and allowing more speech than you would tend to are perpetually under attack throughout history. Free speech is almost never the popular position, if you look historically, because censorship is just too attractive. Us versus them, they are the enemy, destroy them, don't allow them to speak. That is always, that always has a kind of strength. But, you know, I think that it is really important to remind people of the benefits of allowing more speech than you, you would be moved to, right?

• 56:53Speaker 00

  The, the point of free speech isn't to, it's not free speech for things you like. It's free speech precisely for things you don't like and think are dangerous. Often because those, sometimes those ideas turn out to be right. As, as Joe pointed out, there were a lot of things that were once labeled misinformation about COVID that are no longer labeled misinformation about COVID, such as that cloth masks don't work, that you can get a breakthrough infection. All of these things were at one point considered dangerous misinformation, right? And the truth is, the people that are tasked with determining what is dangerous misinformation

• 57:36Speaker 00

  and what, what is not, they are fallible human beings. They're human beings that make mistakes, or they're experts that can operate under an incentive system, a politicized incentive system that leads them to bend the truth, right? So, so for example, you know, Anthony Fauci has fully admitted now that when he talks about public health information, he is not always honest. Sometimes he tells the public what he thinks it's most useful for them to hear, rather than what's true. He has admitted this, this is his, probably, it's just like his philosophy of public health messaging.

• 58:18Speaker 00

  You know, if he think, when he, he said that when only 50% of people were indicating they would take a vaccine, he said the number we needed for herd immunity was like 70. And when 60%

• 58:33Speaker 00

  Said they would take the vaccine, he pushed it up to like 80, right? So he's, he's trying to meet us where we're at, which is not honest. That's a not, not an honest way of, of approaching the issue. And you could debate whether it's good or bad. But the idea that you can't challenge anything that is officially labeled misinformation. That, that is a very dangerous idea for our society because there's gonna, a lot of misinformation is going to turn out to be true. Being able to talk and think about a lot of misinformation is, is, is going to be very important. And for better or for worse, a lot of people already believe things that are untrue.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  And simply censoring them, simply taking them down from platforms is not going to persuade people that believe false things into believing the truth.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  Talking about officially permitted and strange incentive structures. Something I've been thinking about for a while is whether or not the high watermark of the Robin De Angelos and the Ibram X. Kendys has sort of crested now. And then Scott Alexander put a post out, Why I Suck. He put this out the other day about how woke social justice issues just aren't very cool anymore. So he said, while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I'm starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke. Who's woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency and all media properties, I mean, those don't count, any real people. I guess I know one or two SJWs, but I also know one or two Catholics. It doesn't mean that they're not the intellectual equivalent of an out of place artifact.

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  So the question is like, do you think that we're past peak woke? Or have we still got further to go?

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  I do think we're past peak woke. But we may also still have further to go. I mean, peak woke was in 2020. So for example, at the height of the George Floyd protests and the riots, can you possibly imagine a company like Spotify? When pressured because one of their, their biggest podcast has a cutaway, you know, cut, cut up of the N word, they would buckle under any racism related pressure in June, July, 2020. That, you know, really remember what that was like.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  The very fact that they haven't fully buckled is proof that we are past peak woke. That we are not as woke as we were in 2020.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Of course, 2020 was like a massive spike in woke. So it's possible that it sort of goes like this and then comes down a little bit, but there's still a whole lot for a long time. So I, um, I really don't know. I don't tend to make predictions because it's very difficult to predict where the culture is going.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  But, you know, woke ideas definitely have staying powers in the universities at the very least. And that probably ensures that they will, they'll be around for some time. But the influence they have on the rest of the culture is really, that is for us as a culture to sort of collectively decide. Right? Like, how much influence do we want evangelical Christianity to have over the rest of us? That is very much up to we the people. How much influence do we want woke to have over the rest of us? Again, very much up to we the people and how we, how we talk, how we act.

• 1:02:19Speaker 00

  And, uh, you know, what content we allow on Spotify. These are all decisions that are a part of what the trend is going to become. So if this is something you care about, and it is something I care about, I think it's bad when you have, you know, maybe at most like three or 4% of Americans are probably truly woke in the sense that people think of that term. I think it's a problem when you have that, a kind of fringe philosophy like that.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  You know, take over corporate America, or at the very least, corporate America feels they have to pay homage to it. That's been the relationship of Christianity to a lot of, I mean, woke has more influence than Christianity in corporate America. And, you know, probably still, what, 40% of Americans are like evangelical Christians, right? Whereas maybe 3% or 4% of Americans are really, really woke in the sense that they, you know, they refer to Hispanic people as like Latinx and stuff like that.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  So groups can have power completely disproportionate to their actual numbers, social and cultural power, I mean. And, you know, it is very much up to the rest of us to defend whatever values we have so that small minorities with very muscular ideologies don't take over every institution that you care about.

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  There's a barber pole model of cool that's happening here as well, I think. So when your uncle on Facebook starts being anti-woke, that's when you know it's probably gotten too mainstream to be cool to do it anymore. And the same thing goes for your aunt, if she's the one that's being woke, if she's the one that's tweeting about Ibram X. Kendi. So it's like when stuff gets co-opted by the mainstream, the fact that this is an underground subservient movement, that falls away. And I think that people need to concede that a good amount of what was seductive from the woke side and from the anti-woke side was that this felt like some sort of grassroots movement, like I am at the absolute tip of the spear of what's happening with the culture.

• 1:04:56Chris Williamson?

  And that was what probably seduced a lot of people into being a part of it on both sides.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that is true. At the same time...

• 1:05:10Speaker 00

  You know, I feel like woke has been, I don't know, you know, like Elizabeth Warren was saying Latinx. And that was, I don't know, that's fairly mainstream, right? Like, I feel like it's been a while now is what I'm saying that woke has been not merely an underground counter revolutionary, if you will, movement, but has been the language of many elites and

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  and I'm not sure, you know, I, I do hope you're right. And I'm not really sure to what degree anti-woke, you know, your uncle is, your uncle is anti-woke. I think,

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  I feel like your uncle is maybe a Trump supporter and that overlaps with anti-woke, but it's, the dynamics are very tough to sort out, but one thing I hope is true. And I think is true is that, you know, when your kindergarten teacher is woke,

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  it's not going to be cool. And that's already kind of happening. And I think there is this,

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  there are basically like two very lazy assumptions that people on the far left make about the demography and direction of the country, which is like, we're getting browner and blacker as a population and less white. And therefore Democrats are going to like, win everything. Just based on demographics, if we just like, keep going this direction, we don't have to do anything. We don't have to persuade people. We don't have to win people over. We don't have to win swing voters. We're just going to win based on demographics. A ridiculous notion, ridiculous idea. And it's also, by the way, equally ridiculous for people on the far right to fear that because the share of white America is shrinking, that like, uh, you know, like their ideas are gonna evaporate, right?

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  I would like their ideas to evaporate, by the way, but it's not going to happen by demographics alone.

• 1:07:14Speaker 00

  And then this idea that like the younger generations will just definitely be woke.

• 1:07:22Speaker 00

  And even woker, I'm not sure how true that is because to the extent that woke wokeness becomes more and more, has more and more influence at the level of like K through 12. The more and more that your health teacher is woke and like your gym teacher is woke, the less and less cool it will be to be woke because you're not even anti the teachers, you're a teacher's pet.

• 1:07:52Speaker 00

  So in the long run, I think a movement like this can't.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  It can't last forever. And it won't last forever and it's, it's not inevitable. And people should feel, people should push themselves to be as courageous as they can in invoicing their own thoughts, even if those thoughts are potentially cancelable.

• 1:08:24Chris Williamson?

  And as hopeful as they can as well.

• 1:08:26Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:08:26Chris Williamson?

  Because there's a few fragilities, a few holes in the sphere that is wokeness, one of them being that as mainstream adoption increases, the coolness of being a part of some sort of revolutionary ideal starts to fade away. Another one is that intersectionality is inherently self-defeating because it starts to slice itself into ever smaller and smaller slivers. The only way that you bind the in-group together is over mutual hatred of an out-group and the purity spiral means that you need to continue to find more and more people to point the circular firing squad out and say, well, they're, they're no longer that pure person that they should have been anymore. So now we round, we shave a little bit off the side, we shave a little bit off the side and it just gets more and more pure

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  as it spirals all the way up. But I think if, if anything from me, one of the main lessons I've learned around the response to wokeness is the power of comedians and ridicule. And this is interesting when we tie it back to comedians that are doing long form podcasts and stuff like that and the danger that comedic trolley problem that.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Ridiculing something is one of the most powerful tools that you have to push back against it because you make it so toxic and contaminated that nobody wants to do it. Nobody wants to be anywhere near the thing which is socially completely toxic to be associated with. That's the best enforcement mechanism you could have. You could try and litigate it, you can bureaucracy, you can do whatever information campaign you can. But if some cool funny people make jokes out of it, that's it. Cut off at the knees.

• 1:09:56Speaker 00

  Right, totally. And I mean, I think woke woke and far right have have suffered a lot of ridicule. And you know, that's part of how comedians participate in the healthy fight against extremism is by making fun of ridiculous people. And that's something Joe Rogan has done a lot. And we, I think we owe him a debt of gratitude as a culture for being one of the biggest comedians doing that. Yeah, as far as your other point about intersectionality, I read a article, I think

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  the other day, I think it was from The Root, and it said, "Straight black men are the white men of black people." Like, this is intersectional logic, right? This is intersectional death spiral is you just, the whole philosophy is white men are evil. And almost, it's almost like the opposite too. It's like the notion of evil only makes sense in the context of oppression. Like, there are no other kinds of evil that people really care about. It's like, evil is whiteness and whiteness is evil.

• 1:11:21Speaker 00

  And so in order to describe something else evil, we have to almost talk about it in terms of white men.

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  It's like- That's the barometer now.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  -black men are the white men of black people. It's amazing. It's a very-

• 1:11:41Speaker 00

  Like it's, it's, it's one of these ideologies where it has a hammer and everything looks like a nail and the only hammer it has is your identity. That's all it's about and um, there's so much more to being a human being in this world than as, as my friend Camille Foster would say, the shape and shade of your genitals.

• 1:12:06Speaker 00

  And so it's, that's why I think that, that's one reason why I don't think it has that much staying power in the, in the very long run, but it will probably always be around.

• 1:12:23Chris Williamson?

  It does feel like the snake that eats its own tail. It's always felt like this, even when I spoke to Douglas Murray on his Madness of Crowds thing, which is what, two, two and a half years ago now, something like that. It felt like that at the time, that it's inherently fragile and the thing that I thought back then, and the thing that I think now, because I'm big into existential risk and I'm concerned about where we're going as a civilization on a species wide level, you know, AGI, bioweapons, natural pandemics, those sort of like genuine civilization ending things. Every single thought minute that is taken up by a capable, smart person that is spent working out whether men are men and women are women or not, is one that isn't spent working out how

• 1:13:06Chris Williamson?

  we get through the next 100 years without permanently curtailing our civilization's ability to reach its full genetic potential, like galaxy colonizing, multi-planetary species with trillions and trillions and trillions of lives, living the type of happiness that no one has ever yet even got close to touching. And yet, we are getting caught up asking questions about whether men are men and women are women or not, or whether or not you're the white man of the rap game.

• 1:13:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I'm skeptical of the galaxy tech utopia, what's that thing? I, I think that there, I assume there are limits, practical limits to what we will be able to do with technology. Um, that there are things we conceive that we will not be able to practically do. I don't know what that, what those things are, but I tend to think that that is true.

• 1:14:11Chris Williamson?

  There is a guy at the moment who is working on, well, the book explains it. We could get to the nearest star system, the nearest planet of the nearest star system that looks like it might be able to be habitable for life within 500 years from now with the technology that we have currently. Now, the problem that we have is that genetically, we are really, really not built for spaceflight. We get all sorts of things that go wrong with us if we're up there. So that's what he's working on. He's working on trying to genetically modify humans so that we could better survive spaceflight, radiation, zero gravity, bone density, giving, no one's given birth in space. I asked him whether or not he knew if, Christopher Mason's the author, I asked him whether he knew if anyone had had sex in space and he just sort of gave me this look.

• 1:14:54Chris Williamson?

  I was like, that looks a lot like a yes, Christopher. But yeah, I would say the one, the one big hole in we can go and colonize the galaxy is if we can do it and we arrived relatively late during the universe's maturity, why aren't we seeing other galaxies that appear to be colonized by civilizations as well? So that is a good question, but we don't know how rare Earth is and this gets into Fermi paradox territory. I think that we can all accept that even if we don't go multi-planetary across the galaxy, there are a lot of lives that should be still to come, whether we leave this planet or not, whether Elon even just gets us to Mars or not. And if that's the case, there are some challenges that we're going to face on an existential

• 1:15:39Chris Williamson?

  threat level, even just staying on Earth, let alone going elsewhere. Those are things that are really important, plus tons of other stuff that are really important.

• 1:15:47Speaker 00

  I agree with the existential threat point that we don't spend enough time really thinking about how to prevent these things. I mean, but, but let me just come back to like the tech, tech utopia thing or the fixing all the biological problems with humans that don't allow us to survive long enough in space.

• 1:16:12Speaker 00

  Um, last year I had, I had a cough that was lasting for, for weeks. So I went to the doctor and the doctor's very nice. He gave me a free x-ray, gave me, looked at me, blah, blah, blah. And he diagnosed me with a cough. And he said, would you, would you like me to give you any medicine? And I was, I was trying to record songs. I was trying to record podcasts. I was desperate to get rid of this fucking cough. And I said, give me all the medicine. And he, and he basically gave it to me, knowing it wouldn't work. I knew it wouldn't work. There's no cure.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  There's no cure for a simple cough. It's not bacterial necessarily, like simple bronchitis. Um, you know, like over the counter cough medicine actually doesn't work in meta-analysis. Like Robitussin certainly doesn't work on me as an N of one. Um, you know, antibacterial steroids for inflammation, nothing. I just drank tea for a month and eventually it went away. My point is that there is no fucking cure for the common cough yet. After thousands of years of human trying to do medicine and hundreds of years of us doing it scientifically.

• 1:17:35Speaker 00

  And the lesson in that is that certain problems are way harder than other problems. And we're not always good at predicting which problems are the hard ones. We put a man on the moon. We haven't cured the common cough. Um, cancer is another one that is turning out to be extremely hard. Um, where, where other things we just, you know, people can live their whole lives with HIV now.

• 1:18:05Speaker 00

  You know, what if the problem of, you know, immortality or really extending the human lifespan turns out to be a sort of a problem like the common cough? Where it it just is this like you can describe it as an engineering problem. You can describe it, you can understand the problem and there seems to be a theoretical simple solution. If we could only just do this, we could only just do that. But then a thousand years from now, we're still, you know, we're at most living to like 110 or maybe 120. And it turns out to just be something that's actually too hard to solve all at one go. And we just make incremental progress kind of for a long time, but then maybe plateau.

• 1:18:51Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  I think that you're right. We are not particularly good at working out which problems are the difficult ones. And it is surprising that we've achieved so such things very easily and other ones are still there as these glaring problems. I think I'm more of a both a techno theorist and an optimist at the same time that the potentials that we're going to get exponentially as we get better AI, as we have more powerful computers, as we have better programming and better understanding of everything is going to open up opportunities that we can't foresee. And it's also going to create challenges that we also can't foresee. And it's balancing those two things together. But Toby Ord's The Precipice, which is my favorite book on existential risk, unbelievable.

• 1:19:34Chris Williamson?

  And there's this big fucking risk at the bottom that's called unknown unknowns. And that's the one that in pretty much everything, it's so many degrees of freedom away from where you are now or degrees of separation that you just don't know what the problem's going to be. And for everything that you open up, there's a potential that you might decide to pick a ball out of the urn of potentials, which is really big and black and scary. And if it's one of the black balls that you pick out that you've tried to fix a problem by creating something that causes a much worse problem. And that's something that all of these unknown unknowns, right? As we continue to roll forward. So I think that you're right. There are, there are challenges that open up and challenges that are much more insurmountable than we think.

• 1:20:19Chris Williamson?

  However, I would, I feel hopeful at fixing problems. My concern is the creation of new ones.

• 1:20:28Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, I agree with you there.

• 1:20:30Chris Williamson?

  Coleman Hughes, ladies and gentlemen, if people want to keep up to date with the music and the YouTube and the writing, what's best, where should they go?

• 1:20:39Speaker 00

  Follow me at Coleman with an X in the middle, C O L D X M A N on Twitter.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  Same thing on Spotify, you can listen to my music, check out the song and the video on YouTube, it's called Blasphemy. And go to my website, ColemanHughes.org, where you can support my podcast, or you can just listen for free on wherever you listen to podcasts, it's called Conversations with Coleman.

• 1:21:02Chris Williamson?

  So, thanks, man.

• 1:21:04Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. So y'all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:21:29Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only appears October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.