Welcome to the making sense podcast. This is Sam Harris.
Okay. Well, my friend Joe Rogan has come under considerable, public scrutiny and personal attack in recent days.
And I want to say a few things in response to that controversy.
I've been critical of Jose coverage of covid and vaccines.
In particular, I was critical of his platforming, Peter McCullough, and Robert Maloney.
I reached out to Joe privately about that and I said a few things publicly.
As you might expect. I restrained myself in public because Joe is a friend, but I didn't leave any doubt about Where I Stood.
My primary concern was that given his vast audience, get in public health messaging wrong. Even a little wrong, could do a lot of harm.
Joe is generally considered to have the biggest podcast on Earth and he has greater reach than almost any mainstream media Outlet. So this comes with great responsibility, but it's a responsibility that Joe never saw it and has been slow to appreciate and understand why. I mean, Joe is not a scientist or an academic, or a journalist, or he's a comedian and because he's a comedian, whatever. The topic he can always pull.
Ripcord by saying, what the hell do? I know? I'm just a comic, right? This is something that I, and many other podcasters can't do, and he podcast so much. He sometimes produces 20 hours of content a week. So there's no way he can prepare for most of these conversations. Nor is there time for him to edit his podcasts.
He used to release everything live. He said, stop doing that. But the spirit of his podcast hasn't changed. He just flips on the microphones and begins rolling with his guests. And while he may know something about their work. He is rather often learning what they think in real time, right, along with his audience and then responding in the moment.
Based on his years of doing just this having long and searching conversations with an incredibly diverse range of guests. And letting his curiosity, be his
guide,
on most topics, this approach to podcasting, as serve Joe and his audience, very, very well. And the fact that the Joe Rogan Experience is the biggest podcast on Earth is all the proof. We need of that.
But this approach to podcasting doesn't work so well for every guest and every topic.
Notice being a comedian always provide an alibi for getting your facts wrong. So I was very glad to see Joe pivot last week at acknowledge that on the topic of Public Health he could and should be more rigorous and careful in the future. This was in response to Neil Young and other musicians, pulling their music off of Spotify in protest over Joe's messaging around covid.
So when I saw that video, I jumped on Twitter and said Well Done brother because she'll promise to treat the topic of vaccines and covid with more care and to bring on other experts to balance the opinions of the heterodox people. He'd been talking to as you all know the pandemic as a topic I've hit several times and I've been to stress to see how other podcasters like Joe have covered it. I thought Jose Instagram video promising to do things differently was about as good as it could have been.
He wasn't defensive. He didn't double down on any mistakes. He acknowledged that he was slow to understand the enormous role. He now plays on our information landscape and he promised to correct course, so Bravo.
But now, another controversy has erupted for which Joe also felt the need to apologize.
Someone cut together a real of moments where Joe said the n-word on his podcast going back 12 years. I think in the second apology Joe made it clear that in none of those instances was he using the word as a racist slur? Rather he was talking about the word itself about its use in comedy and about it's magically destructive properties. And in his apology he went so far as to say that he was wrong to have used the word even in this way.
And that is the white man is just not his word to use for any reason in. Any context. I want to say a few things about this s apology and about the way it's being received. First. I should say a few things about Joe as a person, anyone who knows him and he don't have to know him, personally. You can just be a fan of his podcast because what you see, there really is Joe anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to Joe's podcast.
Its nose to a moral certainty. That Joe is not racist and there really is nothing more. That needs to be said on that point. There is simply no workable. Definition of racism. That includes, Joe, Rogan and insofar, as there is an enduring problem of racism in our society. People like Joe are not a symptom of it, rather. They are the Cure.
Joe is an extremely ethical person and he has an extraordinarily large and diverse set of friends and social context. It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of another human being then Joe. So Joe Rogan is your version of a racist. You have reached a moral and political dead, end. What's more? I think Joe actually went too far.
Are in his apology about using the n-word is totally understandable that he did because he's been taking a tremendous amount of fire. Even the White House came after him this week. It's been completely crazy.
So, I understand why you felt the need to disavow his prior use of the word entirely. But let me take a moment to spell out why I think that's a mistake.
There is simply no question that American hysteria around the use of the n-word is pathological and dishonest.
And destructive of people's integrity.
And an offense to basic
sanity,
I remember an example over 20 years ago, long before social media and of course, long before we spoke of cancel culture, we would have called it political correctness back. Then, we're an aide to the mayor of Washington. D.c. Used the term niggardly in a speech. Niggardly is a synonym for stingy and it has no etymological connection to the n word.
Needless to say, some genius in the audience, got mightily offended. And the controversy was such, that the mayor's aide resigned and the mayor accepted his resignation. This person was later reinstated in another role. I think, but it's a sign of How Far We've wandered from the path of progress.
That the NAACP at the time recognized just how absurd and demeaning of its own interests. The initial taking of offense was Julian Bond, was the chairman of the NAACP said, quote you hate to think that you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding. And then he said, it seems to me that the mayor has been niggardly in his judgment on the issue.
Okay, that was great. Right? That was decent. That was sane. Needless to say, we could not expect such a reasonable response from the NAACP today.
Here's what I think is patently, true morally, and intellectually and therefore politically in the end.
The idea that a white person cannot say the n-word for any reason when discussing its use, when reading Huckleberry Finn out loud, when dissecting public controversies of the sort that I'm discussing now is completely insane to hold. This view is to attribute magical properties to words. It's the very essence of a childish relationship to language. It makes
Mockery of the very real social problem of racism that is bigotry as applied through the lens of race.
Leaving aside the question of systemic racism, because there's a lot to debate about the scope of that problem today.
I don't deny that it still exists and what has always been pernicious about systemic racism. Is it? The people implementing racist policies need not be consciously racist to perpetrate further harm, but of course, the pendulum has also swung violently in the other direction as I've said before, on this podcast. I think it's safe to assume that there is almost no desirable place to work or study or mingle in American society.
Today in Academia, in film, or television or journalism or Tech, you could literally take the highest status, 20% of every corner of our culture. There is almost no place and perhaps there is no actual place at all. We're being a person of color isn't a positive Advantage for gaining entry in the year 2022.
Of course, it's excludes Asians where now white adjacent.
Again, there's a lot of debate about the ethics of all this and they're certainly questions about affirmative action and related policies where I don't even know what I think. But we can leave all of that aside because that's not the sort of racism. We're talking about the racism of which Joe Rogan has been. Accused is real racism, psychological racism. He likes white people better than black people racism.
When we're talking about a person using the N word to convey, his racism, or using it in such a way as to reveal his racism, whether he meant to or not, then everything depends on the beliefs and intentions of the speaker to know if a person is racist, we have to know what he thinks and feels about other human beings. Most importantly, we have to know what sort of world he wants to live in to allege that a
And is racist, is of necessity to claim that he cares about the variable of race in ways that he shouldn't. But he prefers certain groups of people for reasons that he shouldn't that he takes pride in things. He shouldn't and that he has contempt, or at least disregard for certain people based purely on the color of their skin, or some other superficial.
All characteristic.
Real racists, don't want people of other races to truly succeed and they feel more or less compassion for the suffering of other human beings based primarily on their racial identities.
This is why the some of my best friends are black. Calumny is so silly and destructive. If a person is white and some of his best friends are black. I don't care what jokes he laughs at. He is not a racist in any way that Society should worry about. And if you doubt that there is something you don't understand about what it means to have good friends.
So using the n-word as a racial slur is completely different from using it in some other way. And if you insist that, the word itself is magically destructive like Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels. If you insist upon treating its use by a person of the wrong skin color in any context for any purpose as some kind of diabolical incantation.
If you really believe that someone somewhere will be harmed by any conceivable, use of the term based merely on the color of the speaker's skin. You are just morally, unprepared to solve real problems in our world, in any culture that takes this attitude is morally, unprepared to solve real problems, too.
And that's why I'm afraid we are. We are mired in a culture that appears totally unable to even identify much less solve real problems because it has grown hysterical over imaginary ones.
There were other things that Joe apologize for in the second video.
Things, which are sounds like, he should have apologized for these were things. He said, is the comedian that now sound bad, even in context. He told jokes in the past that he wouldn't tell, today. It's only decent to notice. However, that literally, everyone not just comedians. Everyone is in this spot because the Norms have shifted massively.
You simply can't judge comedy or any other cultural product from 10 years ago by the sensitivities of today. It's just not fair to because it doesn't give an accurate picture of a person state of mind then or now and most important. If you watch Jose recent video, there is no question that he offered a complete apology for things. He genuinely regret saying what more could we?
Spect a well-intentioned person to do.
I've noticed two reactions to Jose most recent video.
Both of which seem like moral errors to me first, there were people who smell blood in the water, and who are now calling for Jose anihilation with even greater forever. These are people on the left for whom. No apology would ever be sufficient though. Ironically these same people love Redemption stories about murderers and rapists provided. They have the correct skin color.
Find me a black man who has shot a cop and then apologized for it. Or in some cases, hasn't apologized for it. And I'll show you vast numbers of people on the left who are eager to see him brought back into the fold, and even canonized as some kind of saint. But find a white guy, who told a bad joke in 2007, and these same people will want to see him destroyed for it.
that is a bit of hypocrisy that everyone left of center has to become allergic to
And then of course are the responses from the right or the altar right or the Q&A on adjacent or the I don't know what to call it politically the Amway to online and woke. This is the only problem I can keep track of response which in light of the left's, reaction has declared that apologizing is always and everywhere, a mistake. You can't give an inch to the woke mob. Otherwise you're finished. So all you can do.
The stone wall and double down.
From a purely PR point of view. These people aren't necessarily wrong. They're often right in Joe's case. They probably are, right.
Here's one thing that's important to be clear about. Joe didn't have to apologize of all the people who could weather a controversy like this by saying absolutely nothing or by telling his critics to just go to hell. Joe is probably in the best position to do that. Even if Spotify drops his show, Joe will be fine. It would be trivially easy for him to create his own platform where he'd be answerable to no one and Legions of his fans would follow.
There and he would still have the biggest podcast on Earth, but he chose to apologize because he genuinely regretted saying certain things. And I felt bad about how their resurfacing made many people feel. And that's exactly how you would want him to respond. So in my view, he took a risk by apologizing and he did this because it was the right thing to do.
Here's the culture. I think we want or should want.
We want people when they feel they have done something wrong to apologize. This is a way for them to express regret over regrettable things and to communicate their Goodwill toward anyone they may have hurt. However, inadvertently.
I've never had to issue a public apology of the sort that Joe has released twice this week. Perhaps, my time will come, but if I ever felt that there was something I really should apologize for, I would find it very depressing. Not to apologize for fear of the apology backfiring. A sincere apology is a moral good. As is the Forgiveness with which it is often met.
We want to live in a world where people offer sincere apologies and we want to live in a world where sincere. Apologies are generally accepted. This is born of the recognition. That no one is perfect. Each of us is a work in progress. Everyone is growing and forgiveness itself is one of our highest
virtues.
Forgiveness is a fucking miracle.
And we want a culture that makes us better at both seeking it and bestowing it. Not one that views every apology as a source of Shame. And as an invitation for further scorn there really is a ray of ethical daylight here that we must recognize asking forgiveness and receiving. It is how we repair our relationships and the fabric of society itself.
Oh.
Anyway, as I said, Joe is a friend.
But I would like to think that I would defend anyone of his character who found himself at the center of a similar controversy and Joe, if you're hearing this, you can rest assured that tens of millions of people who have never met you.
Know, and love you for precisely Who You Are.
Because unlike almost anyone else, you have built your career by letting them do that. And that is both remarkable and a true Refuge at a time like this. Keep your chin up, my friend.
