A few weeks ago, you couldn’t turn to a social media platform without seeing that Joe Rogan was trending. The diversity of topics boggled the mind: COVID disinformation; misogyny, pseudoscience; transphobia; and, of course, racism, thanks to the infamous N-word mixtape. Then a parallel argument came through: fair pay for musicians on Spotify. Given that Rogan was given $100 million for his podcasting contract—a number we’d later find out was closer to $200 million—the economic discussion brought another dimension into the conversation. But given all of the topics being discussed, which dimension should we have focused on?That thought led Derek to write a series of tweets on the topic, followed by a more in-depth Substack article contemplating the three main issues of concern: scientific misinformation, racism, and fair pay. The tweets led to a lot of pushback, which we’ll be looking at through the lens of conversation and debate, as well as a 2021 Pew Research poll on American political typologies. It also led to today’s guests—infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, Jessica Malaty Rivera, and civic product leader and community activist, Daniel Latorre—offering their own views on the topics, first on social media, then here on the podcast. But first, we’ll discuss the implications of intersectionality and progressive politics in a world in which social media can distort as much as it amplifies. Matthew will dish on how much he loathes everything Joe Rogan stands for, and why—but also wonders about how pragmatic his seething hatred is, or could be.Just a note before we begin. Between our last episode—in which Julian caught up with Sara Aniano and dappergander on current events in the QAnon world—and today, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and all of the news is terrible and terrifying. Since the first rockets hit, we’ve been monitoring how conspirituality influencers are responding, and we’ll bring you that data next week, as it continues to show the adaptability of the movement and the willingness of its influencers to say literally anything to remain at the center of the attention and outrage economy.Show NotesJoe Rogan: We are in Kali YugaJoe Rogan shares Sadhguru: “It is fashionable to suffer”Matthew Sheffield on Right-Left “balance” on Rogan.McInnes appearance on Rogan “instrumental” to Proud Boys’ growth: Rolling StoneBeyond Red vs. Blue: The Political TypologyRace & Class at Spotify
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.
If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep Podcast.
I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention.
And then your mind lets you drift off.
Find it wherever you get your podcasts.
That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster.
Bocas del Toro, Panama.
A secluded seaside hideaway.
Scott Makeda has no idea that his tropical haven is about to become his personal hell.
A serial killer pretending to be a therapist.
Hulbert rents a room and that's where he set up his business as a fake shrink.
Accusations of a gringo mafia.
Gun running, drugs.
A slaughtered family.
And then he goes back and he plants another bullet.
A killer on tape.
Hey man, I'm guilty.
Everybody knows I'm a monster.
The law of the jungle is simple.
Survive.
I'm your host, Candace DeLong, from Treefort Media and Village Roadshow Entertainment Group.
This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill.
Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.
New episodes drop weekly.
If you're a fan of workplace comedies like The Office or satire like The Onion, then I have a podcast that I know you'll love.
It's called Mega.
Mega is an improvised satire from the staff of a fictional megachurch.
That's the premise.
Each week, the hosts, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess, are joined by guests, people like Cecily Strong or Jen Hatmaker.
To portray characters inside the colorful world of Twin Hills Community Church, which they describe as a mega church with a tiny family feel.
The result is a sharp-witted and hilarious look into the world of commercialized religion using humor to cope with the frightening amount of power that church and religion have.
So I very much recommend you checking out Megha's episodes, like the one with Saturday Night Live's Cecily Strong playing Cece String, a hilarious character who's fresh out of jail, and also comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
You may find yourself dying of laughter and perhaps inspired to take an improv class yourself.
Megha is able to keep you laughing as you think and reflect about the world we live in.
You can find MEGA on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspirituality.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media channels, especially Instagram, where we collectively post, and on Twitter, where we have our individual accounts.
And you can also support us on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality, where for $5 a month, you can help keep us editorially independent, support our work, and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspiratuality 93, Roganomics, with Daniel Latorre and Jessica Mulati Rivera.
A few weeks ago, you couldn't turn to a social media platform without seeing that Joe Rogan was trending.
The diversity of topics boggled the mind.
COVID, disinformation, misogyny, pseudoscience, transphobia, and of course, racism thanks to the infamous n-word mixtape.
Then a parallel argument came through.
Fair pay for musicians on Spotify.
Given that Rogan was given $100 million for his podcasting contract, a number we'd later find out was closer to $200 million.
The economic discussion brought another dimension into the conversation.
But given all of the topics being discussed, which dimension should we have focused on?
That thought led Derek to write a series of tweets on the topic, followed by a more in-depth Substack article contemplating the three main issues of concern, scientific misinformation, racism, and fair pay.
Now those tweets led to a lot of pushback, which we'll be looking at through the lens of conversation and debate, as well as a 2021 Pew Research poll on American political typologies.
It also led to today's guests, infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator, Jessica Mulati Rivera, and civic product leader and community activist, Daniela Touré, offering their own views on the topics, first on social media, and then here on the podcast.
But first, we'll discuss the implications of intersectionality and progressive politics in a world in which social media can distort as much as it amplifies.
Matthew will dish on how much he loathes everything Joe Rogan stands for and why, but also wonders about how pragmatic his seething hatred is or could be.
Just a note before we begin.
Between our last episode, in which I caught up with Sarah Aniano and Dapper Gander on current events in the QAnon world, and today, Russia has invaded Ukraine.
And all of the news is terrible and terrifying.
Since the first rockets hit, we've been monitoring how conspirituality influencers are responding to this.
And we'll bring you that data next week as it continues to show the adaptability of the movement and the willingness of its influencers to say literally anything to remain at the center of the attention and outrage economy.
Speaking of next week, Speaking of next week, we've been sourcing a ridiculous number of influencer posts that has dominated our Slack channel internally.
That said, if you have anything to share, you can DM us on Instagram or Twitter if you've seen anything as well, because we're trying to get a really comprehensive outlook on the responses to the Ukrainian situation from conspiritualists.
So that said, Let's move on to this week's episode, and there's been a lot of discussion about the world's most infamous podcaster, Joe Rogan, especially over the last few months.
And we'll be talking about him today, but in a particular context with a tweet I sent out a few weeks ago as the jump-off point.
First off, we've been asked for a long time if we'd cover Rogan, and while he's not a conspiritualist per se, he has a lot of crossover into the wellness world, and increasingly since the pandemic began into pseudoscience and quite a bit of conspiracy theories as well.
Rogan was an early investor and partner with Aubrey Marcus in Onnit, whose main product, the nootropic alpha brain, Rogan promoted relentlessly for a long time in a show.
Championing the one questionable study that was conducted on its efficacy, as well as the fact that it was formulated by homeopathist and acupuncturist Janet Zand, who also happens to be Aubrey's stepmother.
And Rogan also got very into yoga a few years back, namely hot yoga, and he discussed it on a number of episodes, I guess four or five years ago now.
He's promoted other nootropics and supplements and made money on advertising from companies that produce such products.
So yes, there is crossover, but that's not really why we're talking about him today.
As most of you will recall, Rogan hosted an emergency episode in June 2021 with Bret Weinstein and Pierre Kory to extol the benefits of ivermectin in the treatment of COVID-19.
And while the notion that it could work in therapy was around before then and has continually been disproven since, that show really boosted ivermectin, as well as Weinstein, who continues championing it to this day.
And then in December of 2021, Rogan hosted Peter McCullough and Robert Malone for a festival of COVID misinformation and, I would say, disinformation, which resulted in, among other things, a group of doctors and public health officials, including one of today's guests, Jessica Melati Rivera, to author a letter asking Spotify to remove those episodes.
Now, while Rogan has received pushback for many years, these episodes brought the greatest public pressure on him to date, with artists like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell saying they were removing their music from Spotify due to the COVID misinformation.
Now, wrapped up in that argument is another issue with Spotify that's actually a decade old, back to the very beginning of that company, which is fair pay for artists.
Among the streaming platforms, Spotify is the most egregious offender of low pay, mostly because they use what is called the pro-rata system.
Now, you might have heard that they only pay .003 cents per stream, but that's actually not quite accurate.
Spotify tallies up all of the streams, I believe on an hourly basis, and then they look at the best performing artists, think of Adele or Drake, and then they pay them more per stream than other artists.
Now, how did this happen?
And that's honestly one of Spotify's dirty secrets.
And I know they're painted as Lucifer right now, but the reality is the platform actually isn't profitable because they don't own their content.
That is owned by the big three record labels, which are Universal, Sony, and Warner.
And those companies are actually getting the lion's share of profit from streaming.
Now, this isn't giving Spotify's business practices or their billionaire founders a pass, but musicians have been screaming about this issue for a very long time.
And with the focus on Rogan, suddenly there was traction on the topic because you had the pseudoscience and then the artists coming in to discuss it.
But why did Spotify offer Rogan $100 million, or $200 million as it turns out?
Because they own that content now, and they can generate advertising revenue based on it.
Now they also generate revenue from music advertising in between songs if you're not a paying subscriber.
But with content they own, they're forcing people to subscribe in order to be there because that's the only place you can listen to them.
So if you're not a paying subscriber and you just want to listen to Rogan and not pay, That's how they monetize you.
So while the bulk of Spotify's money is still in streaming music, ad revenue jumped 40% in 2021.
And compared to subscription revenue, that was only up 22% last year.
And that's the case that India Ari made after the infamous N-word mixtape came out.
So I know it's a lot of intersecting stories, but that's actually what led to my tweet and subsequent article about the topic.
Now, a Twitter handle called Patriotix, which monitors right-wing activity, resurfaced a collection of Rogan using the N-word numerous times over the years on his show and in other public appearances.
India Ari then announced she was taking off her music from Spotify after Neil Young and others had set the precedent, but she cited Rogan's N-word mixtape as being the final straw.
She had actually been arguing against Spotify's business practices for years.
And interestingly, she was a former Rogan listener, as she said in her video.
She just happened to tune out his quote-unquote casual racism during the shows that she heard them.
Now, discovering that Spotify paid him hundreds of millions of dollars while paying her peanuts was the final straw, and her videos on that topic went viral to her surprise.
She did not expect that, but it was viewed tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of times, and she went on CNN to discuss afterwards.
The other fascinating piece of this whole story is that that video seems to have actually originated from Info Wars during a time when Alex Jones and Joe Rogan were head beef together.
So it's actually Alex Jones saying, I'm going to expose Joe Rogan for being a racist.
Who made the N-word mixtape, specifically.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And that's not proven, but it does seem to be the case.
Somebody pointed out on Twitter that they could see the InfoWars logo on it, and that's where it came from.
So we're talking recursion all the way down here as we go through these stories.
It was also about years ago.
I think I came across it three or four years ago.
I was surprised to see it recycled, actually.
And it's interesting the way that recycled content can hit a cultural moment in that way, whereas a couple years ago it didn't make the same sort of impact for a number of reasons.
So let's let's summate all of this right now.
We have Rogan at the intersection of COVID misinformation, fair pay for artists, and racism.
All of that led to my tweet and subsequent Instagram posts on February 6th, which read, Quoting myself here, the entire Rogan conversation has strayed very far away from COVID misinformation, which is really what we need to focus on.
There are times and spaces for other conversations about other topics, now it's just all noise distracting from the signal.
And this leads into our main discussion today.
And I also teased some of this on Monday's bonus episode, and Julian will be covering that as well.
But that was about American political typologies.
Now, I admit that my tweet was inartful, especially the first one that I just quoted.
The Times and Spaces was not intended to punt fair pay for artists or racism, nor do I mean to imply that either of those are noise.
So I apologize for that.
That was not my intention.
I totally see how it's read that way, so I'm sorry.
And I'm happy that I got to discuss some of the pushback I received with our two guests today on the topic of intersectionality.
But, I will say that I only received pushback on the racism aspect.
Honestly, I heard no non-musicians push back on the fair pay side of things, even as they expressed support for the musicians leading the charge, and I find that really odd.
Especially since it was often cited to India Ari, who was kept saying, I'm really talking about fair pay, let's put racism to the side.
Now that said, I'll conclude by saying that while my tweet wasn't expressed well, my underlying concern has proven true so far.
The COVID misinformation episodes remain live on Spotify with the bullshit warning labels that no one cares about attached to them.
The talk of fair pay, which again, Indy already cited at length and spoke about on CNN, is once again completely gone from the conversation.
I see none of it.
And Spotify did remove a number of episodes.
That featured the N-word with Rogan.
I think it was something like 70 episodes.
Now, Rogan also apologized, which India already accepted, along with a diverse coalition of followers of his.
And then later that week, turned around and cried, cancel culture, which was my fear all along.
And now, as of today, that's where the situation stands.
These topics are so tough.
I want to step back a little from Rogan in terms of some context here.
I think the three of us agree that the episodes he's done interviewing anti-vaxxers, ivermectin slingers, and discredited quacks have been bad for the world.
I certainly agree with demanding that Spotify be much more specific about defining and enforcing policy on medical misinformation.
I think that's really, really crucial.
He's also had many guests on that I find morally repugnant, and I don't agree with him casually tossing the n-word around.
I think I get how Derek's tweets may have created the impression that he was shutting down people with legitimate concerns about Rogan.
And at the same time, I understand the impulse to want to keep laser focus for that moment on saying let's hold Spotify's feet to the fire and get them to have a clear policy that they'll enforce on anti-vax conspiracies and pseudoscience medical claims.
But the way this played out got me really interested in the political underpinnings of the culture war and conspirituality during this midterm year.
And I don't think I'm exaggerating.
Maybe I have a distorted perception, but I feel like these midterms could decide if there's actually a future.
For American democracy at all.
It's a crazy time.
So I want to understand why Rogan is so massively popular, despite his many missteps and bad decisions.
I also want to understand what makes opinions on these missteps so incredibly polarized.
But full disclosure here, even more than that, I desperately want the Democrats to find ways to wrestle the future of our country back from the GOP zombie apocalypse we seem to be rushing towards.
I did what most good nerds do.
I went in search of data.
And I found this fascinating Pew Research Center study called the 2021 Political Typology Study.
I shared it with both of you at the time.
And I found that the study gives us a deep look at the American political landscape by breaking it down into nine categories.
There were three on the left, three on the right, and three that are clustered around the center.
Now, data can be really dry.
So as an entry point, I thought I'd ask a few very quick yes or no questions for the listeners and at home if you want to just sort of notice your responses or even jot them down if it's interesting to you.
So the questions are, do you support higher taxes for large corporations and the wealthiest families and see our economic system as fundamentally unfair?
Do you think the government should be significantly bigger and provide more services to all?
Do you strongly support Black Lives Matter?
Do you think most American institutions are so run through with systemic racism that they need to be totally rebuilt in service of equality?
Do you think that gay marriage and greater acceptance of transgender people are very good for the country?
Do you think that illegal immigrants make the communities they live in better?
I feel like this is kind of like an altar call, because I'm just saying yes, and yes, and yes, like I'm saying yes over and over.
Praise the Lord.
Yeah, exactly.
So full disclosure here, I paraphrased a couple of those questions just for simplicity's sake, but I maintained the true meaning, the essence of each question.
And as Matthew's pointing out, if you answered yes to all of these questions, or most of them, I'm guessing a lot of our listeners probably did, I certainly did, it's highly likely that you belong to the farthest left group on Pew's political typology, and this is called, predictably, the progressive left.
Of course, the study itself is much more layered and detailed than this small group of questions, but the selection of questions represents an important dividing line in our culture.
So here's another question following up on that.
What percentage of the American electorate do you think also aligns on these questions and others with the progressive left?
Could it be as high as 30% maybe?
My first hunch was a little more cautious than that, like maybe around 20%.
If you're playing along at home, what's your guess?
I mean, when you look at the cultural conversation, and if like me and most progressives you get your news from NPR and the New York Times, MSNBC or CNN, if you follow trends in Hollywood around representation and LGBTQ support right now, If you see a lot of BLM solidarity posts in your feed and you saw a lot of stuff that was being very critical of Rogan a couple weeks ago, it probably then would seem like progressives should make up a sizable chunk of the electorate, right?
Well, this really was a shocker for me because that number is just 6%.
And that took a moment to process, so I'll give you one here.
Progressives, in this case, meaning voters who align with all or most social justice positions, make up 6% of the American population.
And within the Democratic Party, 12% are progressives.
So you might wonder, like, what is this based on?
Well, the study surveyed 10,221 adults, drawn from something called the American Trends Panel, which uses a rubric designed to be nationally representative by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, and other categories.
When you hear that number, 6%, you might think, well, perhaps that makes sense because progressives mostly come from minority groups, but that's actually wrong.
At 68% white, progressives are actually the least diverse of all the Democrat groups.
That stopped me in my tracks, again.
Now, on the racial politics questions like those I asked you, progressives hover at between 71% and 96% yes, while the general population clocks in between 25% and 50%, and I should add here that most Republicans are actually quite a bit lower than 25%.
Sad news.
There's another detail here that I've been grappling with since I came across it.
It's the phenomenon that some sociologists, and I'll link to this in the show notes, have referred to as the Great Awokening.
This is before the term woke became like this loaded pejorative term.
And they described the Great Awokening as being something that happened since about 2014 when white progressives for the first time actually ended up In the political positions to the left of the minorities for whom they are advocating.
It's an interesting moment.
A quite sobering example of this is that minorities and immigrants actually voted for Trump in 2020 at higher numbers than they did in 2016.
And especially that was true for black men.
As another example, the controversial slogan that came out of the George Floyd protests in 2020, Defund the Police, polled just a year later at just 15% support, while 47% actually want increased spending.
And about that, Pew also found in late 2021 that it was in fact Black and Hispanic Democrats who were more likely to back increased spending on local police than were white Democrats.
Now shifting briefly here to gender politics, there's a 2021 Gallup poll on transgender issues that is also illustrative.
On the question, should trans athletes compete on teams that match their gender rather than their biological identity, 10% of Republicans say yes, compared to 55% of Democrats, while 34% of the general population says yes.
But what about independence?
Well, on this issue, they're pretty much exactly the same as the general population, and it turns out that independents usually conform quite closely to general population averages.
And I want to turn now to looking at what this rare-seeming species, the independent, is, and why we should care.
Now, I mentioned at the top of the Pew study that there were three Republican and three Democrat groups that they identified, and then another three kind of clustered around the middle.
And many individuals in these three groups self-identify as independents, and they're labeled the outsider left.
And then the ambivalent right, and smack in the middle, the stressed sideliners.
Together, this coalition makes up 37% of the general population.
And I'm like, hold on, 37%?
That's much bigger than I would have thought.
I mean, the Democrat coalition is 35%, and Republicans are at 28.
This literally means that the independents are larger than either party.
These ambivalent centrists, unlike the furthest left and right groups, are the least sure of their political affiliation.
They're often less likely to vote.
And in contrast with them, the progressive left and the far right are the most politically engaged.
They turn out the strongest to vote.
They pay attention to politics all the time.
These are the true believers that are the activist ground troops and the digital soldiers in the culture war, lining up to vilify or valorize Rogan on the public stage, for example.
Neither of these groups is going to change one another's minds, nor the minds of the more moderate but loyal red or blue folks squarely in opposing camps.
Can I point out something that was very fascinating about this data too?
Because I hear this criticism a lot and I also have made this criticism that left and right doesn't properly represent The political landscape of America, and that's why I was so glad you found this survey, Julian, and I took to it so much because that really shows that even nine doesn't even fully represent.
But there has long been talk about a third party in America, but that middle 37% varies so widely in their beliefs that it actually makes the possibility of a third party impossible as the landscape currently exists.
And that was one of the pieces of data I took from the poll that was pretty depressing.
Yeah, I've been hopeful some years that there might be, we might end up with four parties, right?
But actually two on the outside of the spectrum and then two sort of more in the center.
I don't think a third party, you know, anytime we've tried to have third party candidates, it's been a disaster for Democrats, unfortunately.
So what we see is that when the electoral map unfolds every four years, a lot of it can be filled out ahead of time in highly predictable partisan ways, right?
I just said most of these folks are not changing their minds.
I know I'm not really.
But there's a small number of swing states and specific counties within those swing states that are usually really the ones in play as deciding the overall outcome.
Red and blue duke it out over the votes of those who actually really might still change their minds or become motivated to vote when they usually don't even bother.
And just so my bias is clear here, these are the people I want to suggest that Democrats need to target if we're going to get through this incredibly dangerous period of democracy quite literally hanging in the balance.
I'm going to keep referencing the data now, but what follows is my own analysis of what it means.
Some of this combined 37% centrist coalition make up the swing state Rust Belt voters who got behind Obama in 2008 and 2012 and then melted our fucking brains when they flipped to Trump.
This is a proud achievement, which, as Benjamin Teitelbaum told us, the author of War for Eternity, Steve Bannon, felt he pulled off with help from Cambridge Analytica and illegal data, and maybe a little help from Ron Watkins.
Trump was able to flip 206 counties red in 2016, mostly in the Rust Belt.
And Biden only won 25 of those 206 counties back.
Now, following Trump's lead, these are also the people that right-wing propagandists today are targeting very, very effectively.
They do so by being much more savvy and dirty culture war warriors.
And honestly, I think that we on the left often play into their hands like naive children with idealistic slogans on our t-shirts.
The figures who have turned the mainstream of the Republican Party into Trump cultists and stop the steal believers, who've resurrected white Christian nationalism and created pathways for Q friendly candidates to become government officials.
These are the same people organizing vitriolic school board and city council activism that may be galvanizing otherwise moderate, independent or politically disengaged parents into suiting up against supposedly evil Democrat phantoms who are traumatizing kids with masks and endangering them with forced vaccination, smuggling in disorienting independent or politically disengaged parents into suiting up against supposedly evil Democrat phantoms who are traumatizing kids with masks Right.
I often think, though, that the Democrats are playing very bad defense to this well orchestrated, dishonest and inflammatory culture war offense.
And it's bad because even though they are right, Democrats, to me, have lost the plot on who they need to be talking to and what they can hear.
So I want to just talk briefly here about who these ambivalent, centrist, swing state voters are and what their priorities might be.
Identifies the three groups in the middle as the outsider left, the ambivalent right, and the stressed sideliners.
Here's a couple sentences on each.
At 10%, the outsider left is the youngest, poorest, least religious, least educated Democrat-leaning group.
They think the two parties are basically the same, doesn't matter who wins, and they overwhelmingly believe the economic system is unfair.
They're probably right.
Whoever's in power, they get the raw end of the stick economically.
Which is why they often don't vote.
And when they do, it's still usually for a Democrat.
Now next up at 12% is the ambivalent right.
They voted for Trump, but by now they're sick of him.
They are conservative on race and gender, but are younger, less religious, and more in favor of legal marijuana and abortion rights, and perhaps fittingly, they're ambivalent on gay marriage 50-50.
All of which makes a quarter of them lean Democrat.
So a quarter of the ambivalent right group leans Democrat.
Now the last group at 15% is called the stressed sideliners.
They break 50-50 if they vote at all.
They lean liberal on economics, but conservative on social issues.
This is the least educated, least financially secure group, and they favor raising the minimum wage.
But they're opposed to gay marriage more than any group on the left.
Over 70% of them favor liberal causes like free college and socialized medicine, but that same 70% margin characterizes their support for the death penalty.
Kind of all over the place.
Now, here's something real quick.
It turns out that these three groups are all actually more racially diverse than the progressives.
Only half of the outsider left is white.
And for stressed sideliners, that number is 57%.
At 65% white, the ambivalent right still squeezes in as 3% less white than the progressive left and more racially diverse than any other Republican-leaning group.
So that's it.
That's the coalition that I'm arguing pretty much decides which way elections go.
Perhaps you noticed that they're united by a couple things.
First, they're quite racially diverse, but not particularly on board with social justice or identity politics.
But second, they're mostly working-class people who think the economic system is unfair, they want a higher minimum wage, they favor socialized medicine, and want higher taxes on big corporations.
And the funny thing is, that second group of issues all represent a traditional Democrat, union-strong, social safety net, help-those-who-need-it-the-most platform.
So here's my thought.
Why not emphasize that platform, and draw those voters in, and win some elections?
And get as much of the very important race and gender stuff done as possible via smart legislation from within the halls of power, which is the only place where it can happen, instead of fighting a losing culture war on the way to the apocalypse.
Julian, I'm so glad that you've become a class warrior.
It's great to hear, but I've got some questions By the way, thank you for going through that.
I tried to read the study, I ran out of time, but my eyes also glazed over, so thanks for the rundown.
I have some questions, however, about what this has to do with Rogan and how people respond or should respond to his various layers of BS and toxic masculinity, which a lot of people have been pointing out for years.
So, I guess my questions, they're for both of you really, but they revolve around this premise I'm hearing that The incorrect response to Rogan on social media or the unfocused response to Rogan on social media is a big part of the problem.
I don't really understand that.
I don't find that plausible.
Is that part of what you're saying?
I think it's part of the problem.
We know that politicians and media outlets kowtow to social media and they pay attention to when things trend.
And so many of the struggles that we're watching right now are occurring on social media first.
And part of the problem is that media reports on social media and that moves trends.
And so to me, why I initially posted my tweet about that was because somebody like Rogan predominantly exists because of social media hate.
He thrives in that environment.
That's what gave him his star.
And when I saw the way that the battle was bifurcating and the ways it was going, I just realized that you're not going to you're not going to make any traction on this guy there.
I have listened to hundreds of hours of him in the past.
To be completely honest, I don't listen to him anymore.
And he's gone off in the direction that I can't take seriously or I think is problematic at this point.
But I've watched him build his crowd and also the coalition who follows him, and there was no way that these little ground wars were going to make anything, and they specifically came from the progressive left.
And so that's why I thought it was an important issue.
So to say that the social media wars that are inflamed don't have real world consequences would be false, because they very much do, even if it's sometimes outsized of what the real problem is.
Well, and also, even if it's difficult for us to really gauge, because we're also going to be limited by our filter bubbles, you're responding to people who are responding to you.
It's very difficult to get a grasp on how the diversity of the response to Rogan actually impacted the general conversation.
I think that's the realm of big data science, it seems.
One of the things that people were saying on my thread was, read the room, as if I have, because of the work that I do with this podcast, that I have to feel certain ways about certain topics.
And my response, which I didn't say because I didn't get in those ground wars, but I'll say now, is that I was reading the room.
I was reading the room on Rogan's social media handles, which has a much more diverse and larger coalition than what I was seeing come at me.
So you're exactly right with Eli's term there, the filter bubble, because if you're only in this microcosm of our 28,000 followers and then you go to the 12 million download person and you start reading that room, you're going to get a very different response.
Right, and it's not going to be where I wind up in the poll, which, by the way, was progressive left.
I took the poll.
But as the Canadian on staff, that actually equals a centrist who enjoys Latin American coffee here.
But, I mean, the thrust of your argument, given our focus on Rogan, is that a focus on medical misinformation will capture more of the political center.
Like, that's why you brought this poll in, right?
While focusing on Rogan's right-leaning culture war track record will appeal to the 6%, but alienate that center.
And in the process, there's a possible advance in the disinformation space that everybody loses.
Is that fair?
Well, I mean, for me, my sense is that with the Rogan situation is that it was this massive exposure moment in which we could try to get platforms like Spotify to recognize the problem of medical misinformation.
And this could perhaps lead to precedent setting policy that could be enforced and have implications for other platforms following suit.
Right.
To me, the problem with someone like Rogan is that he shouldn't have so much influence, but he does because for better or worse, he appeals to more people than You know, any radio or TV news personality.
With regards to the culture war moment, I think the problem of medical misinformation on vaccines and COVID treatment got obscured a little bit by people wanting to shut him down because he entertains political opinions they don't like.
I don't like those opinions either.
Or that he's made offensive jokes.
I don't like those jokes either.
But I think the majority of people Who paid attention to what was going on the big stage, didn't really take the N-word video as smoking gun evidence of his deep-seated racism, and in terms of the discussion we're having, the activist left really jumped on that opportunity to brand him as a bigot, but most of the rest of the country is unconvinced, and then we moved on too quickly from the insane anti-vaxx conspiracy claims his guests made, while perhaps then further pushing support for that
absolute crap into the reflexive right-wing culture war wheelhouse.
For me, it's a matter of pick your battles.
Keep your eye on the ball and pick your battles.
Now, that's just my opinion.
People can do whatever they want.
Yeah, just one pushback on what the activist left did.
I don't think they necessarily seized on a moment so much as they said, we've been saying this for fucking years.
Yes, the show is full of bigotry.
It's always been like this.
Oh, now what your problem is is that he's also a vaccine misinformationist.
That's not completely true, at least in the small pool of responses that I got, because a number of people said, I've never listened to him before, but after seeing this, I know everything about him.
I know all I need to know.
When you said that N-word mixtape was out years ago, it was.
There was not this upswelling.
It's because of exposure and people seeing it in the way that they did.
And so I don't think that argument is totally correct.
For some, sure, but not across the board.
Yeah, and I think, Matthew, one thing I want to make really clear here, I'm not saying that the progressive left folks are wrong.
I'm not saying that anything that you just said that they were saying is incorrect.
I'm saying the question as to like looking at the broad public and saying how many people agree with me on this and so when and how should I Try to persuade them.
And when am I going to be successful in that?
And when am I inadvertently giving ammunition to the people on the other side who want to use the fact that I've hooked into an unpopular issue here that might be distracting from something that they don't want us to be focused on.
I just think there's a complex kind of strategy here and the right does it better.
Yeah, they do do it better and... Because they're dishonest.
There's dishonest and there's a lot to learn.
But I guess, coming back to utilizing this poll, I think one of the assumptions you seem to be making is that the issues of the poll track against our content.
So, the typology questions, however, at Pew, they don't ask anything about public health, they don't ask about people's trust in science, they don't ask about people's faith in the media.
It sounds like you're saying that strong concerns on those issues are firmly centrist, while strong concerns about racism and misogyny are minoritarian.
The poll, unless I'm mistaken, isn't measuring sentiments towards public health or even healthcare.
And I'm like, the other thing is that when I think about people like my late mother, who would not be in the progressive left, but would be as outraged by the misogyny, especially the misogyny and the racism, you know, alongside the vaccine disinformation.
She would argue from that position as well.
It's not like that's some sort of fringe overreach from a social justice perspective.
No, of course not.
She was a centre-left person, so I don't know how you're using... A centre-left Canadian.
A centre-left Canadian, right!
So, I don't know how you're using the typology of the poll against the typology of Rogan listeners, I guess.
Yeah, so your critiques are valid in terms of the fact that the poll doesn't really focus as much on topical medical information.
If I had found a poll like that, I would have been using that poll.
I am right now very, very disturbed by the track we seem to be on as we hurtle toward the midterms.
I genuinely think that democracy is at risk.
The culture war stuff and the political stuff all intersects with what we talk about on this podcast.
In terms of Rogan, I think it represents enough of an example of what I think goes wrong in terms of that culture war discourse and how on the left we might be able to play a little smarter, I think, a little more effectively is maybe another way to say it.
And in terms of the bigger political picture, I'm in favor of everyone You know, making a stand for what they believe in and protesting what they find to be absolutely unacceptable.
The question then changes when you go into an election in terms of what is there enough support for within the population that you can get into power where you have any hope whatsoever of doing something about your noble values.
If you're yelling your noble values into the void whilst the fascists take over, to me that's ineffectual.
I'm not making an argument for centrism as correct, or as always the best policy in all times and all places.
I'm saying in our current very specific situation, these are the voters that need to be won over, and it just so happens that they are amenable to a whole bunch of left-wing causes.
You can still hold and make intelligent moves towards the identity politics stuff getting through, but don't make it the center of the platform because the right uses that against us because it doesn't have enough support.
I feel like you are making a very powerful argument that should be a pitch for a consultancy position.
Dude, I'm on the wrong podcast.
I'm on the wrong podcast.
No, I don't think so.
I just think that, like, we're going to go back to Derek's tweet because that's the field that the three of us actually operate in.
As well as Joe Rogan, as you're pointing out, Derek, right?
This is true.
It almost feels, I don't know how to express this, it almost feels like you're trying to make a very complex strategic argument into the churning maw of social media.
You're asking people, you're asking people to be smarter.
On social media.
Here's what I'm really saying.
I'm saying, here's this data.
And actually, by the way, you had some questions about the validity or the depth of the data.
It's incredibly deep.
If anyone wants to go to the first page that I've linked to in the show notes, you'll see how we did this thing.
And they've been doing this for years.
And it's layered and it's multifaceted.
It's not just based on one survey.
It's not just 16 questions.
It's more like 27 questions in one survey that take 32 pages to get through.
In addition to that, there's like multiple waves of data they've been collecting about all sorts of different factors from, you know, economics to religion to political engagement, etc, etc.
So it's, it's deep.
And I'm saying when you look at this, if like me, you have a moment where you go, fuck, 6% are actually on board with all of this, because back in the summer of 2020, you may have thought it was 60%, or 40%, you know?
It's sobering in terms of just getting grounded in reality and then saying, okay, how do we move forward if we have any hope of making progress on these issues?
And how is the other side, how are they fighting it?
I just realized that you're actually making an argument against political bypassing.
I mean, usually you talk about spiritual bypassing.
Yeah.
When I say that, I, you know, I'm kind of being mean when I say I feel like on the left we sometimes are like naive children with slogans on our t-shirts.
I mean, it's like the idea that you can just, you know, if you just believe the true and morally correct thing and stand up and say it clearly enough, the whole world will come along with you.
But everyone thinks that what they're saying is the best idea ever, you know?
So, so how do we, how do we position ourselves?
And does, does that have a lot to do with, with our topic today or with the podcast?
I think it overlaps in significant ways because part of what the right is doing so effectively in the culture war is, you know, enacting all of these conspiracy theories.
Some of them have a lot of political traction beyond just like QAnon, right?
So we've got the critical race theory stuff and the gender politics stuff.
And when we just stand up and say, no, that's wrong and we are the morally correct ones, they just flip that against us and they get the people in the center on their side.
Dishonestly, they're wrong.
They're fucked up.
I hate them, but they get those people on their side and that's who we need to win over.
Yeah.
When you said it, when you said about social media, you're completely correct in that a one tweet response to this was not the right move for me.
I think I fleshed it out better later, especially in the sub stack.
It is, it is not the right medium for it.
Now that said, it's, We work with what we have, and one thing that I constantly say is that observation is not necessarily belief.
And sometimes when I observe something and post it, it's read as belief, and that's also very challenging in that sort of environment.
Or scorn.
Right, that was the problem, because you named the issues that you said, you know, people are talking about racism, they're talking about trans politics, they're talking about... and you were observing things, and I think you were read as, you know, these things are not important, these things are not valid, these are, yeah, these are gumming up... That was a failure.
Right, so yeah, It's very, very, very difficult to argue what you've ended up sort of developing into this episode, actually.
It's quite a challenge.
So look, Derek, I think listeners will appreciate the interviews that you did.
And I want to come back to the tweet impulse in a bit, not to flog a dead tweet or horse, but I do have one more question about it.
But we were talking, Julian, you left off by asking, what do these issues have to do with our subject matter and with Rogan in particular?
And I have some thoughts about that.
And I just I guess I think it's good to clarify a recurring theme that we have, which is that, you know, we've got these categories of conspirituality operators that we oscillate between so often that they sometimes blur together.
So just to clarify, we've got Conspirituality consumers, we have producers and then we have, I would say, disinterested or opportunistic profiteers.
So the consumers would be, you know, your family members who might be into yoga or Reiki, they might have done a yoga teacher training program.
They have concerns and allegiances that might be brain melted, but they are in earnest and I think that we can say that conspirituality gives them some kind of psycho-spiritual relief, maybe even a little bit of community.
And then there are conspirituality producers one step up in the attention economy chain.
These would be yoga teachers or naturopaths who are audience-captured into absorbing and then broadcasting that content outwards as part of their branding discourse, which is more effective for them if they're contrarian, right?
And whether they believe in this stuff or they're incentivized to believe in it is kind of this mebius strip that just They seem to accelerate on as they spin around.
And then we have profiteers, right?
Joseph Merkula, Sayer G. The disinformation doesn't.
Does it matter what they believe?
I mean, they've found that COVID denialism and conspiracy theorizing is sticky.
It's like a natural resource and they're going to frack our psyches for it.
And these are people with like huge media platforms already set up that they can instantly supercharge with COVID denialism, vaccine misinformation, moral panickery over sex trafficking, or critical race theory, whatever it is.
All of the issues are transitory.
They don't give a shit about the content.
So, who's in this category?
There's Mercola, as I said.
His standard conspiracy theory is that Big Pharma already has and is suppressing the cure for cancer and other diseases, but there's nothing really conspiritual about his scene until it begins to network with producers and believers.
So, I guess Sayerji is a crossover category between the platform and the producer, but he ran Green Med Info for 11 years before COVID broke out, and then he started mobilizing the pseudo-spirituality of his partner Kelly Brogan into his marketing.
And then there's somebody like Joe Rogan who, as Derek says, has shown some personal kind of bro interest in products on the conspirituality shopping menu like supplements and hot yoga.
But it's really not the strength of Rogan's beliefs that push him into the conspirituality sphere.
It's really about how he parasitizes conflict and intrigue.
So, he really reminds me of how the philosopher Harry Frankfurt describes a bullshitter.
So, this is a direct quote from On Bullshit.
Quote, someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game.
Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands.
The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether.
He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and opposes himself to it.
He pays no attention to it at all.
By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
And for me, that sums up the media impact of Joe Rogan.
But with all of that said, he also does some conspiracy theory content beyond the yoga and the supplements.
So, recently he shared the Kali Yuga meme with the quote, We are in Kali Yuga, the age of conflict.
This is all Benjamin Teitelman, Steve Bannon shit, right?
Hold on, hold on.
Benjamin Titleman, like as his allied, Titlebaum as he's allied with Steve Bannon, but as he wrote about Steve Bannon.
Yeah.
But hold on, hold on.
And as hugely significant right now, because this is Alexander Dugin, where Dugin gets this from, or Dugin is, I think the way to say it, who has Putin's ear.
Which is running the fucking war, right?
So all of the chaos we're seeing right now was predicted in Hinduism, Rogan says, thousands of years ago, because of course he's an expert in Hinduism now.
Civilizations move in predictable cycles, and we are in the lower left-hand square of the chart.
So the chart comes up next.
Do your best to elevate yourself and the world around you from the madness that is in the air, but understand It's also gay!
It's also gay, I'm sorry.
It's very, very homoerotic.
So the four quadrants are hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create hard times.
It's all so gay.
It's all so gay.
I'm sorry.
Very, very homoerotic.
Homorotic.
Very, very, yes.
So, there's Joe Rogan standing above the battleground in one of the four quadrants with his three bros outside of the Octagon, conferring his blessings on transformative bloodshed before he gets into the ice bath.
Also, he just shared Sadhguru.
Remember this guy?
He's perhaps the biggest stuffed kurta in the guru universe.
He's the Isha Foundation leader who, you know, hobnobs with Deepak Chopra, cruises around in Osho-level opulence big SUVs with chrome grills and stuff like that while teaching super boring meditations based on I'm not quite sure, but he's got a really good beard.
In Rogan's recent bump for Sadhguru, the guy is talking about how suffering is fashionable, i.e.
it's mostly an unnecessary performance undertaken to garner sympathy and to create a morally clean identity.
So this guy's a real shit.
And then, lastly, I want to say more about this, and I want to ask you some questions, too, because of just Rogan's whole milieu and how you both have seen it evolve, because you know him better than I. It feels to me that the top-line conspiracy theory of the Joe Rogan experience You know, this is just what I've picked up over the last two years tangentially.
And it's expressed very well, not just by these two quotes that I just gave, but also just the casual ableism, the fat phobia, the gendered weirdness of his COVID BS, the general conspiracy theory of, you know, I'm just a regular guy asking questions, all of that.
Rhymes with the basics of fascist aesthetics and ideology.
And the theory is, the undercurrent is, as a species, we are losing order, discipline, power, strength, courage.
We're heading into the soft man phase of history, which is why just the other day he said this thing about Bill Gates having man boobs.
Yeah, so who is he to talk about public health?
Incredible.
So it all fits together.
Yeah, I mean it's like Rogan is, I don't know, is podcast Dugan.
Like, change my mind.
It's without, with more humor.
One of the critiques that I've heard often is that, and it has to do with Changing school names and taking down statues is that the moral relativism, you can't judge, you can judge past cultures, but you can't expect people's pasts to magically transform to suit your beliefs on this day.
And I, as someone who listened and consumed a lot of Rogan and no longer does, but had watched His sort of transformation into the more cancel culture which is all wrapped up with comedians too so don't forget that aspect.
It has to do with a lot of his friends.
Getting canceled on college campuses, specifically.
He slowly, over the years, went more and more—I'm leaving Los Angeles, for example.
I was just in his old neighborhood cycling of Bell Canyon, and I remember when he left that house and then moved to Austin because, A, taxes were part of it, but also because he felt that the left was controlling California politics, that we can debate that or not, and, you know, overall.
Well, it's a very red state land-wise, but population density-wise, it's definitely a left state.
But the taxes and the regulations are out of control here.
I agree with that.
It's possibly why I'm leaving the state.
Not politics, but the actual how far my money goes is a concern.
All those things wrapped up and you watch someone more and more get into his own echo chamber that he both created.
And he also now is a leader of, and he won't take responsibility for because he's one of the people saying, the media, the media, when he's the biggest media source out there.
So I'm not going to change your mind on this, but I also don't want to present it as he's never said or had interesting conversations that actually We're culturally relevant, because I think he has.
I saw him at the Comedy Store a couple years ago.
His sets are hilarious, even when he's not punching down.
And you are correct in saying that he does punch down and it's horrendous, but that's not his entire milieu.
And that brings a question to mind, which is, When do you stop listening to someone?
What part of their beliefs or percentage of their beliefs do you stop listening to them to and using them as a source of information, entertainment, anything of that nature?
And for me, I was listening to Rogan up until Brian Moralescu, who was a guest on this podcast early on.
But when the COVID misinformation came in, then it really just hit me on a different level and I stopped.
There's a piece here that is, that is important, which is that he's been doing what he's doing for a long time.
He's a comedian.
He started off with his buddies smoking weed and just saying whatever came into their heads.
And they talked about a lot of conspiracy theories in the early days because his friends are really into conspiracy theories.
Talked a lot about comedy, a lot of that, that comedic mindset where you're being politically incorrect, you're pushing the boundaries.
You're like, you're trying, you're trying to find novel ways of putting ideas together.
It's not everyone's cup of tea in terms of humor.
I think usually it's not, it's not good, but.
Over time, it turned into this thing where he was putting out like, you know, four or five episodes a week, three hours per episode.
And a lot of the guests would be really brilliant academics, authors, people who are who are very progressive, and some of the other guests would be fucking horrendous.
And there's just so much content being pumped out that if you tuned out someone you've never heard of, or if you tuned out someone that you're like, I don't really like what this guy's saying, it was possible to still have a kind of a la carte experience where you're like, hey, here's Cornell West.
Here's Steven Pinker.
And part of what made Joe good at what he did is that he didn't have very fixed opinions.
He's very open to exploring and asking questions and kind of tripping out on things.
He has gotten progressively worse.
And it's a combination of different factors.
Including that his guests have started to skew further right as more and more people have realized, oh, I don't know if I want to be associated with this guy.
And so he's just sitting there soaking all of that shit up and buying into the conspiracy theories.
And along comes Brett Weinstein.
And I want to speak to that directly.
these three prominent anti-vax, ivermectin-slinging doctors on your podcast.
They're brilliant.
They're academics.
They have qualifications.
They're telling the truth.
And that, you know, sucked him in.
And it's gross.
Okay, so Derek, you've brought up, like, what's the line of tolerance?
And I want to speak to that directly.
And then, Julian, you're bringing up something fascinating, which is, what do we do with 4,000 hours of content?
And how is that going to trend over time?
I mean, I have a theory, just because we can't really find a similar person on the left who's actually also tracking left, who puts out that much content in a consistent way, I have this sense that, like, the medium itself
of solo long form podcast where basically you're at the center of the universe is just going to create an insular kind of personal responsibility, welcome to my living room where basically my mind is at the center of the universe kind of feeling.
And that is never going to track left.
It's never going to track left.
I agree with that.
I just feel like I want to emphasize that a lot of people don't think this matters.
I'm a weird person that I think this kind of thing matters.
I don't think Joe Rogan set out to be a right-wing influencer.
I think Joe Rogan had an open-ended thing that he was doing and over time it has trended further and further right in a way that we all find absolutely despicable.
There's not an organizing principle through those 4,000 hours that is, like, stealthily implementing something that's gonna, like, become alt-right.
I bet that I can bring up one aspect that might predict where he went, because it's something that I feel, like, instinctually, but because I'm not the expert, you feel free to disagree with me, but this comes out of the fact that with Rogan, I instantly Unequivocally, biologically, like, I smell the cigar smoke, I see the fucking studio, and I want to barf while gnawing my arm off.
Like, I hate everything about the entire scene.
It is visceral.
And I know instantly, within about five seconds, that that's how I feel.
And that can really inhibit having a clear view about how to navigate the particular layers of this bullshit.
Or, more importantly, how to talk with people who don't actually feel that way.
So I'm instantly intolerant.
And that means that I can take a brief scan of his content and find the material that will validate that stance.
So before the N-word clips and the Planet of the Apes thing, which I saw years ago, before the clip of him laughing his ass off while his buddy describes sexual coercion of young women, when I knew that he was having a great laugh promoting Milo Yiannopoulos, All I needed to know was that he hosted Gavin McInnes twice, and then when he was confronted with the ethics of that, he blew it off.
In case you missed it, McInnes is the Canadian alt-right founder of the self-described Proud Boys, instrumental in Charlottesville and January 6th.
He is a human blister of toxic masculinity.
And I don't know what happened to McInnes in his life, but everyone would be better off with him locked up for inciting violence.
And Rogan had him on twice.
And then Rolling Stone, I found this quote here, because McInnes would go on his show and say and brag about how well his appearances on Rogan did for building the Proud Boys.
So, from the Rolling Stone, guest appearances on Rogan's podcast were instrumental to the Proud Boys' growth, says Juliet Jeske, a student at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, who has been following McKenna since 2016 and has watched and archived all 407 episodes of his show.
On the show, McInnes frequently bragged about how many new followers he'd acquired with each Rogan appearance.
Now, he might be lying, too, right?
Jeske says, though episodes featuring McInnes were deleted from Rogan's catalog when his show moved on to Spotify, Rogan has previously defended his decision to have McInnes on saying, I had him on before he was even a Proud Boy.
I didn't know what the fuck Proud Boys was.
This was despite McInnes having referred to the Proud Boys on his show as a gang.
That beat people up.
And in a later interview, Rogan called McInnes mostly fun.
So, I see that and it's like, you tell me he's had Cornel West on, he bumped Bernie Sanders.
It's like, what that tells me is that he's really, really good at creating plausible centrism.
Not in some intentional way, but in a way that presents his openness, his liberalness to the public, and that populist centrism will pose no threat at all to injustice, and I think that's part of the formula that goes into the right word term.
Well, I mean, I think you're absolutely right, and I think, You're Canadian, and so with McInnes and with Peterson, you already knew what kind of stripes those cats had before they went on.
Most of the rest of us didn't know who these people are.
And so when they go on Rogan, I think certainly their first couple of appearances, they're mostly just presenting a palatable kind of version of themselves.
And in terms of my having listened to some Rogan episodes over the years, I was, I was unaware of those episodes.
I wasn't paying close attention.
I wasn't doing media analysis on Rogan.
I didn't give a fuck who else he had on his show, except when he had someone on that I thought was interesting and that I would listen while I was doing the housework or something, you know?
So, so yes, you can look back and you can see that.
And yeah, that he, he, he takes no responsibility and he's arrived at a despicable place.
And now we can look back at the catalog of his work and say, ah, it was there all along.
And I agree.
So here's another thing that I think was there all along, and I want to get your take on it.
Here's this nugget.
When I take, when I feel anxious or depressed, and I take a five-minute Instagram real break on the can, there is a number of MMA accounts that come up on the roll, and they show these 30-second clips of these brutal knockouts.
You know, like, flying knees to the head or to the temple or, you know, guys getting their legs broken or whatever.
And in eight out of ten of those clips, there's a standout shot of Rogan at ringside reacting to the blow that just might have, like, crushed a man's teeth down his throat.
And in all of those shots, Rogan looks orgasmic.
Like, that's his natural element.
I know he enjoys it.
He's good at it.
He loves MMA.
I think he's, in my understanding, he's a good athlete.
He's good at color commentary.
But this is the thing, is that, is it a decade now that his job is to make MMA more pleasurable for its consumers?
I think it's two decades.
Two decades.
So, how do I personally feel about MMA?
Well, something I noticed happened about 10 years ago for me when it came into my consciousness.
I was fascinated by it.
I couldn't believe I was watching men do this to each other, no holds barred.
And for a while, I reveled in it, thinking, wow, this is honest, real, authentic.
These are very brave people.
These are real men.
I don't know what I thought, but I mentioned it to my dad.
And my dad grew up following boxing.
He used to watch Ali fight on closed circuit TV.
He taught me some basic boxing defensive skills when I was when I was bullied in school.
He's not athletic.
He's kind of bookish, but he was no slouch and he played baseball and basketball and he certainly wasn't a pacifist.
But then, when I expressed my fascination with MMA in some off-hat comment in the kitchen, he gave me this look that I can't quite describe.
But the look said, like, who are you?
And then I was, like, insulted.
Like, I was defensive.
We argued briefly about it.
I said, they're grown men.
They know what they're doing.
It's consensual.
He said, have you seen that part, like repeated over and over where the attacker has clearly knocked the opponent out and then leaps on him to crush his unconscious face.
And he has so little self-control that the ref has to tackle him.
And like, that really drew me back.
Like, Like, I had seen that, and I think I had dissociated, and I didn't have an answer from my dad.
And over time, I think I realized that I'd been propagandized into thinking that this was now just somehow an acceptable part of my culture, something that I should take pleasure in, especially as a man.
And that was my first introduction to Joe Rogan.
Because I remember his voice from there.
I remember his bald head.
I used to think he was Dana White for a while.
I thought I got them mixed up.
And he helped me learn to take pleasure in abject violence.
This is not something that Howard Cosell did.
Now, okay, so I wanted to tell you guys this because I imagine that some people might say that Venn diagramming that with his podcast work isn't fair, but what I'd argue is that over those same decades, Rogan has also presided over a discourse in which increasingly selfish and toxic attitudes are more and more normalized and made more pleasurable.
And so, I don't know, like, I feel, I don't want to say, like, oh, I knew that's who he was, even though I wasn't a super fan or something like that.
But there seems to be some continuity there that is pretty clear, and it has to do with, like, some really toxic masculine stuff.
I think that we've entered anecdote a little too heavily instead of analysis.
One thing that I find interesting in this entire thing, you kind of spoke to it Matthew, but you didn't take the time to look into one conversation that he had with the Cornel West or Bernie Sanders and what was said at those moments and the influence that that could have had I'm not saying I have an analysis.
I'm saying this is the problem that I have.
And this is why I'm like confessing.
Right.
But presenting it now as this was the line without looking at that is an analysis, is anecdote.
No, no, no.
I'm not saying, I'm not saying I have an analysis.
I'm saying this is my, this is the problem that I have, that, that this is the data that I got.
And you, you, both of you said, Hey, there was interesting stuff in the Sanders interviews and when Cornel West was on and that was valuable and went out to 12 million people and, And like, I'm just totally shut down.
I cannot, I just can't with Joe Rogan.
I can't.
The guy had Gavin McInnes on and this is why I wanted to ask you Derek about tolerance because Like, both of you maybe, because I just, I did not grow up in a place where I was exposed to any of that, and so I think I had an immediate allergic reaction to that kind of, I don't know, shock jock, You know, male conversation radio.
Wait, wait.
Are you saying you had an immediate reaction to it when you saw specific things excerpted and then put in front of you?
Like, isn't this awful?
No, no.
Like, like, I think from, from early adulthood, if I heard Rush Limbaugh, if I heard, if I heard Imus, if I heard Howard Stern, I was like, Oh, wow.
God damn.
What is that?
Me too.
Me too.
Yeah, I totally relate to that.
But Derek was trying to make a point there.
Sorry.
No, no, it's fine.
It's conversation.
It brings into mind, though, this idea, again, of when you deal with tolerance is that we're all looking through things through our own personal lens, our own lenses of trauma, of what has happened to us.
And part of the issue that I have with social media in general and the way that the culture tracks is that people treat anecdote as the final word on things.
I've experienced this, so then therefore, and I'm not accusing you of this, Matthew, this is a broader point.
Yeah, I'm trying to own it.
I've experienced this, so therefore, that is how everyone should experience something.
And we had a conversation on Slack about this, and I grew up in a very closed, right-leaning suburb in New Jersey, predominantly white.
There was one black family in the town, and you know that because there's one, because that's where you grow up.
And then I had the experience of then going to one of the most racially diverse college campuses in the country that was actually designed in 1969 by a prison architect because the state knew that minority students were going to be going there, and so they made the entire campus riot-proof.
And so my education started dealing with a wide range of people, mostly related, I should point out, through athletics because all of the athletes at Rutgers live there and I was playing sports with them all year because that is part of my culture.
So maybe some of what I hear from Rogan just comes from my upbringing that I'm accustomed to certain ways of talking and being around people.
But the broader point that I just want to hit here Is that being in conversations with such a diverse range of people, not only through them, but then being a world music journalist for 10 years and through my experiences, is that sometimes when you're around people and you hear the type of talk that goes on there, it's part of the banter.
And it doesn't translate well when you're trying to speak to 12 million people in a global audience with everyone in their own anecdotes.
It does not.
But I would argue that what Julian was pointing out before in terms of the research study is that some people kind of hear it the way that I do, and some people hear it way differently on left and right of how I do.
And how do you create a coherent system and try to understand that that broad range of perspectives is all coming from different places, and when you analyze it to try to take all of that into consideration, it's impossible.
So my default is to move what Julian said.
I think these are bullshitters and liars, a lot of the people we're talking about.
But at the same time, I also recognize that a lot of people don't, and that how to engage with them, I don't have a perfect plan for it.
You said too, Derek, in Slack, and I was really, like, I thought about this all day.
You said that, did you say some of my earliest memories were of listening to Howard Stern and Imus in the kitchen with my mom?
Yeah, that was growing up.
That was on AM radio in the early 80s.
They were, before they broke apart, yeah, that was daily basis.
Yeah, so like, okay, so I'm just thinking about how wild A difference that is because I don't think I would have been exposed to anything like that ever until I'm in my 20s.
I'm listening to the CBC with my mom completely different environment and I'm just kind of fascinated by how Deep, our developmental experiences go with regard to drawing these lines of tolerance and trust that end up translating into our political capacities later on in life.
Like, it's amazing to me because, I mean, in a way, you also said, I think on Slack, you said, I spent a lot of time detoxifying from that environment.
That was the word that you used, I think.
And I'm like, And so I'm thinking that there's a difference between detoxifying from something that you also have to maintain a connection with because it's your family or it's your home, it's where you're from, and never having encountered it and just feeling like it's poison to begin with, right?
And that's going to give very different attitudes towards what do we do about the problem of Joe Rogan, because I just wish he would go away.
And I think what you're saying, and this is borne out in your life experience, is that no, none of this is going away.
This is deeply in the soil of American culture, and it's not going anywhere.
Yeah, I guess I'm realizing that I feel very strongly about my particular politics and my analysis around what Joe Rogan does.
Maybe it's not very realistic, because the end point is, I just wish he would go away.
One thing that I learned about practicing a number of different martial arts is that each one of them have things you do not do.
And there are ways of looking at it.
Capoeira strike is very different than a Taekwondo strike, and there are things you do in either that you would not do in the other.
Part of my problem with MMA is that those rules disappear and the rules of engagement are gone at that point.
So that violence you talked about is actually very problematic to me.
I don't know.
I've only sparred.
I've never actually competed.
So I don't know the kind of energy you mentioned of someone who has beaten their opponent and can't stop.
There is some sort of sorcery there biologically that I think happens to certain people.
Now, that is to say that I don't understand it.
I don't understand that impulse.
But I also recognize that it's real and it's a driving force in our culture right now.
And I don't know how to combat that because you're not going to slow that type of energy down by tweeting mad, being angry at somebody on Twitter.
Yeah, it's so interesting to hear you guys sort of, you know, just reflecting on the different backgrounds that you have.
And Matthew, I like your thoughtfulness on this.
I think for me, it's only during the pandemic that I've shifted from actually a really sort of strong free speech position on stuff where I feel like, you know, Uh, it's important that everyone get to say whatever they want to say.
And if they say something horrible, you can argue against them.
And if you give them enough rope to hang themselves on their horrific, bigoted, stupid ideas, well then everyone gets to see their ass hanging out.
You know what I mean?
Like I've, that's sort of been my attitude and I, I generally don't feel like people saying stuff.
Uh, is, is violence or destroys the world.
I think people, people, I think that if I want to feel that I can say the stuff that I, especially coming from the culture I came from, where, you know, I, I grew up, Nelson Mandela was a banned person.
You could not see his face.
I did not know what Nelson Mandela looked like.
I just knew he was in jail and he was public enemy number one for the white government and that he was the person who should be president of the country, right?
You could not quote his speeches.
His speeches were banned.
If you mentioned his name from a public stage, you could be arrested, right?
So for me, the sense of like whoever's in power gets to decide who is being silenced in the really authoritarian ways.
As a result of that, I've tended to fall on the side of saying speech is protected, comedy is comedy, music, no one should be able to tell you what you can say in the lyrics of your music, right?
No matter what it is.
I don't have as much of what I would maybe frame as a kind of maybe overly cautious sense that people saying things is going to bring about the end of the world.
Now, that has changed with COVID in terms of medical misinformation, but it's kind of a rare exception for me.
Um, I don't think people should be stopped from saying any political opinion that they have.
I am free then to disagree with them and say that they're an absolute asshole and explain why they're wrong.
And so when, you know, if Rogan had someone on his show 10 years ago and I caught part of it and I didn't agree with it, I'd be like, well, I just really don't like that.
And if Rogan seemed to be going along with that, I'd be like, well, I really don't like Rogan right now.
But then when he would endorse Bernie Sanders for the presidency of the United States the year that Trump was running, You know, like, okay, that's something that he also thinks.
And I wasn't holding him to some very specific standard of what he was and wasn't supposed to say or let other people say.
And I'm definitely questioning that much more now.
In terms of where those lines are, but I think I do still kind of come down to a large extent on the free speech side.
I think this will dovetail nicely with what we're going to be discussing next week, because when you're talking about speech and then you add disinformation into the mix, specifically,
More than misinformation, the purposeful injection of false information for an agenda, because that's what we're seeing right now with the Ukraine situation and Matthew has taken the lead on this work and it's tremendous because you notice now that people have dug in to the point of it's transcended masks and vaccines and now it's framing a worldview and
We're reaching that point now where if you don't think what happens in authoritarian countries can happen here, we're actually watching that transformation in real time with all of the right-wing figures and conspiritualists supporting Putin.
We're on a very dangerous path.
So, you know, let's keep that in mind as we move this aspect of speech moving into that conversation next week.
And now let's move to the conversations.
questions.
The impetus for this episode was an argument I made on Twitter about focusing on Joe Rogan's COVID misinformation with Robert Malone and Peter McCullough, Brett Weinstein, Pierre Kory, for example, all of which happened on Spotify.
And to keep that goal in mind, which, as you'll hear me state to our guest today, was not well formed.
My goal was not to ignore charges of racism, fair pay for artists, the transphobia or misogyny, or any of the other charges against Rogan in previous weeks, but to stay focused on the COVID misinformation issue.
I should have been more specific than I initially was, and I did flesh it out in much more detail, especially in relation to India Ari's call for fair pay for artists on Spotify.
So I did all that on my substack, and that's linked to in the show notes.
But I know better than to not flesh out arguments in more detail on social media, especially with contentious topics like this, so I own that failure.
Though, to be fair, my fear of Spotify not doing anything about the COVID misinformation has proven to be true, at least so far.
The day of my initial post, both Jessica and Daniel, our guests today, reached out to me pushing back on my argument, which led to these discussions.
And I'm happy to say they come from two different but equally important angles.
Jessica discussing the issue as a scientist, as well as one of the doctors who co-authored the letter to Spotify from the medical community asking them to take those episodes down, and Daniel from the tech side of things as he works as an activist in digital spaces.
So from my perspective, this is an example of how social media works best.
I don't know Jessica or Daniel in real life, but the social media platforms led to these conversations.
You know, so someone makes an argument and others debate that argument.
And especially considering all three of us are approaching this topic from different perspectives and backgrounds, I feel like this was a really good time to have these conversations.
I'm going to introduce them both now, then run the interviews back to back.
Now I will also note that I recently purchased a signal booster for my podcast setup, and even though I tested it before these interviews, my vocal does come in a little hot at times, so I'm sorry about that.
It's not really a volume issue as much as a little bit of distortion, though I've listened to the vocals on a number of speakers and it doesn't really take away from the conversation, you'll just hear me near the edge of red a couple of times.
And as with everything, tech is a constant learning curve.
I should know that having worked in these spaces for so many years.
Jessica Melati Rivera is an infectious disease epidemiologist and science communicator.
She earned her MS in Emerging Infectious Diseases from the Georgetown School of Medicine and has dedicated the last 15 years of her career to disease surveillance research, public health policy, and vaccine advocacy.
Her specialty is in translating complex scientific concepts into impactful, judgment-free, and accessible information for a diverse audience.
She is currently the Science Communication Lead for the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic, a researcher with the COVID-19 Dispersed Volunteer Research Network, a research affiliate at Boston's Children's Hospital Innovation and Digital Health Accelerator, An expert contributor for NBC Bay Area and CNN.
And as she told me in the Netflix, which is not represented in her CV, she also consults with Netflix on their projects to make sure they're safe for COVID.
Jessica was recently named one of the world's 50 greatest leaders by Fortune Magazine for her work on COVID-19 research and data communication.
Between her day jobs and being a full-time mother to two little kids, she also dedicates several hours a week to promoting science literacy and debunking misinformation on social media.
You know, in some of our non-interview banter, she was just telling me everything she does.
And I was literally amazed at everything she pulls off and then seeing all of the great content she posts on social media.
So definitely give her a follow.
And then we'll have Daniel Latorre, who is focused on building communities of practice around place-based campaigns, arts, advocacy, and open-source urbanism.
To every project, he brings over 20 years of professional experience, and his past work includes starting the digital placemaking program at Project for Public Places, which is a non-profit planning, design, and educational organization dedicated to helping people build stronger communities.
He also launched the Open Educational Technology and Creative Commons licenses at Scholastic.
And he helped advance sustainable urbanism with street blogs and street films, rebooting community mapping product strategy at Open Plans.
So Daniel offers talks, presentations, and trainings, and he's been at Columbia University, School of Visual Arts, Parsons, the New School for Design, and the Center for Architecture.
He was a founding steering committee member for the New York City Participatory Budgeting, leading its first online civic engagement projects.
And he's active in community organizing in the Brooklyn neighborhood that he lives in.
And as you'll hear us talk a little bit about, his family comes from Norway and Colombia, and he grew up all over the US, so he considers himself a third culture kid.
And he's also a Zen practitioner, so he's able to offer an international, cross-cultural, present-future awareness to everything he works on.
And you'll hear all of those influences come into our conversation.
Jessica, thank you so much for joining Conspirituality Today.
I really appreciate you taking some time out to chat.
Thanks so much for having me, Derek.
I want to start big picture here because you do so much in this space of epidemiology and vaccine and COVID awareness.
I mean, your resume is just all over in such a good way.
But One thing that really jumps out at me is social media in so many ways is looked upon as being weaponized for disinformation.
And you are one of the experts who are trying to use it to put forward good information, which I which I love.
What made you want to take a stance and lead in social media to try to get across good, credible science information?
You know, I kind of did it a bit reluctantly.
I mean, I always knew that to leave social media to just kind of devolve into a place for disinformation would be a bad thing.
But because so many of my friends knew my background, I was just getting inundated with questions about what was happening, how to interpret the headlines.
And so I thought, well, I could just kind of hit a few birds with one stone and answer questions publicly via my stories, just so that I'm not always on my phone texting people answers and, you know, calling people back with the same kinds of responses.
And realized very soon into the pandemic that this was a huge opportunity to bring stuff that's oftentimes in very closed doors of scientific chatter or Twitter, which can be overwhelming for a lot of folks, Bringing it to Instagram in a more visual way or even a video format just had so much engagement.
I mean, there was an insatiable appetite for science education on Instagram and felt like, well, this is another avenue for me to continue my work in science communication.
When the pandemic started, were you surprised at the ways in which public health experts were being demonized and have continued to be demonized?
Not necessarily because of kind of what had paved the way for the way politics has turned people into very black and white, red versus blue, very binary thinking.
And so it was not surprising at all to think that people who would be perceived as pro-science or pro-government issuing things like mandates or regulations would be typecasted as liberal or leftist and with an agenda.
So that wasn't actually surprising to me, nor was it surprising from the vaccine front because I've been in the vaccine advocacy space for a while.
And that has been very politicized and also very spiritualized, which is something I've followed for a long time.
It has been.
I have actually followed Wakefield for decades and been writing about the anti-vax movement, especially with the measles outbreak that happened in 2017.
But it also has been taken to another level in many ways.
Yeah, it really has.
I mean, I think that many of us who knew early on Or who we're anticipating a vaccine would be part of our solution to COVID-19.
We're just begging for the same sort of prioritization that we were that was given to Operation Warp Speed for the research and development of the vaccine.
We were hoping for something to Kind of be in tandem when it came to the advocacy and the communication of the vaccine and the vaccine research that it would, you know, involve.
Science communication is often an afterthought, which breeds, allows a lot of room for breeding misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy.
You know, that phenomenon is very, very predictable in the science space and particularly in the vaccine science space.
When I think about how science moves, science does not move at the speed of social media.
It is just impossible.
And I think about, for example, Jonas Salk and the development of the polio vaccine, which actually took decades, and he wasn't even necessarily the major player.
There were other people working on it that actually the vaccines we use today are more based on their work.
And so How do you talk to people who say, well, oh, there's another variant of COVID.
So the vaccine doesn't protect the same.
So it's all just part of some sort of conspiracy.
How can you educate in that sort of environment for people who don't understand that we're still figuring this out as we go along?
Yeah, I mean a lot of that has been training people in understanding how to interpret headlines and even training journalists or talking to journalists and saying, hey, pre-print data is not peer-reviewed, please don't use this as a headline or if you do, please caveat it.
You know, it's that kind of stuff where pre-prints were always a normal thing in my world because you wanted to see other people's work, you wanted to attempt to reproduce it based on their methodology.
And it just became like anybody was just grasping at the speed of journalism and the media and taking a lot of creative liberties with what the science was actually saying.
And for the first several months, what we were saying was we don't know yet.
And that's actually a way to build trust to say, we don't know yet.
We're still learning.
The evidence is evolving.
We are learning as we go.
This is a new variant, a new virus.
And when it came to even just talking about the new technology for this vaccine platform, mRNA, We all knew that this was decades in the making.
We in the space of science and the space of vaccine research and had been waiting for an opportunity for it to kind of like be showcasted like this.
But all people heard was new and all people heard was that sounds like genetic alteration and then it just turned into Frankenstein headlines.
Yeah, a few weeks after we actually started the podcast in 2020, I started seeing preprints being put forward as credible information.
And having covered studies for years at Big Think, I knew that that was very dangerous.
Even with the caveat, it's dangerous because it's still people, it seeps into their consciousness as, well, I don't understand how the paper, the journal process goes, so I'm just going to take this as truth.
Yes.
Now, you said you weren't surprised by all of the disinformation.
Is there anything in the last two years that has surprised you in terms of the disinformation, however?
As far as being surprised, it is kind of hard to surprise me these days.
But I do think that the degree to which people who I didn't even, I wouldn't have labeled as, say, anti-vaccine, perhaps, were so captivated by a narrative, a politically driven narrative, that somehow there was this big sinister plan
That either caused this, that was motivating this, that was hiding some of the details that were important for people to see, that folks like myself were no longer trustworthy because we surely were being paid by pharmaceutical companies.
Everything just became this interconnected plot.
um and these are some of them are friends and even family members who i'm like you're vaccinated your kids are up to date on their pediatric vaccine schedule why is this different why are you treating like all of this as some you know deep conspiracy to think that you know it was either planned it was a lab leak or whatever the story was i could not see how
Expertise now was relative to everybody and that somehow politicians who opined on the topic were as trustworthy as people with multiple degrees in the space and years and years of research experience.
Everybody was just like, well, to each his own.
You know, the truth here needs to be really, really parsed out because I don't trust anybody.
Yeah, that argument about the vaccine being developed fast.
I'm sort of like, that's what science does.
It builds on itself.
Like, that's the whole, like your phone works faster than it did 10 years ago.
Like, but you're not complaining about that.
Well, that's another thing, too.
That does surprise me, is seeing people say, like, I don't trust things like, you know, new technology as I'm tweeting on my iPhone 11.
You know, it's kind of rich.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, we've talked about the disinformation, but what have you found in terms of your own advocacy?
To be successful for reaching people and maybe some of those, I do believe there are Vax hesitant people that not everyone's an anti-vaxxer.
I do believe there's so much confusing information that some people are just confused and they are, they are trying to be like, what do I turn to?
So what have you found that actually breaks through and helps people?
Yeah, I very rarely use the term anti-vax because it is a loud minority of people.
The size and the spectrum of diversity within the vaccine-hesitant group is enormous, and that's really been my target.
And what I have seen work is bringing in emotional intelligence into science communication.
I think oftentimes science lacks empathy.
It lacks the nuance of a person getting, you know, speaking in simple terms without seeming patronizing or dumbing it down.
My goal has always been to, instead of like dumbing things down, it's to help elevate the science and data literacy of my listeners, of my followers.
Because I do think science is for everyone.
And I don't think that the scientific process ends in a lab.
It ends with people making informed choices based on the data that then becomes translated in an accessible way.
And what has helped me make those kind of breakthroughs with folks who feel overwhelmed by the amount of information or the type of information is to speak with a lot of like personal experience, to come forward as a woman of color, to come forward as a mom, to come to come forward as a woman of color, to come forward as a mom, to come forward as a person who has spent time in the lab Using all of those experiences helps build that trust.
I also think, too, that when you speak to the group as if they're a monolith, you lose a lot of listeners.
You lose a lot of followers.
And recognizing that there are a myriad of reasons that cause people to hesitate, and ones that we have to talk about, even ones that make us uncomfortable, like racism in medical care and in public health that cause people to distrust medical systems.
I attack those issues head on, and that has helped.
Well, you just preempted that segue perfectly.
So, you know, because you, you did reach out to me originally a couple of weeks ago, I posted about the Rogan incident and it was definitely, I fleshed it out more thoroughly on my sub stack this week, but it was, it was one of those instances where I just tried to cram in too many thoughts in one tweet and it doesn't work that way because it didn't allow for nuance.
And I really appreciated you reaching out.
Someone else, Daniel Latore, reached out and we talked yesterday about tech.
And this this incident in a great way, because he also gave me pushback.
And you specifically wrote that, you know, the Rogan incident was problematic because of themes of right privilege, ableism, science, denialism and overt racism sprinkled throughout many of his episodes, which I fully agree with.
So I want to start with, first of all, you saw my transmission.
You've listened to our podcast before.
And you felt compelled to reach out to me.
Why did you want to reach out and address this topic?
I wanted to reach out because myself and the co-authors of this letter were prompted by a very specific event, which was the fallout from a very specific episode that Joe Rogan had with Dr. Robert Malone.
As I mentioned before, The conspiracies, the misinformation, the disinformation has penetrated minds that have surprised me.
Minds that have been pro-science, but then they hear things that are very science-y sounding, or from people who do have credentials that are trustworthy, and they feel bewildered by it.
They feel like, I now don't know how to trust.
I've been following you, I've been following Dr. Fauci, and the NIH, and WHO, CDC, whatever, but this seems Not with consensus, what do I do with this?
And it was happening over and over and over again, like tons of DMs and texts and calls like, have you heard this?
Are you aware of this data?
And it quickly became this issue of Opinion and fact were now fighting with each other.
We had provable demonstrable data from tons of, you know, trials and research.
And then you had somebody just speaking for three hours without any fact checking, causing people to question their choices, causing people to potentially make Poor choices for their children in particular and it was very frightening to see that.
It was so viral.
It was so prolific.
I was seeing it shared by people who I trusted and that was problematic as well and so we thought okay look at this point it's not just Asking questions.
It is actually sowing confusion.
It is causing people to make choices based on this information, which is false information, and we have to do something about it.
So the letter was very specific in our ask.
The letter was, hey, can you have a misinformation policy and can you enforce it?
Because right now we don't see one.
We had heard whisperings of there being a policy that forbids COVID misinformation.
The threshold for that was so low.
It was basically you had to be denying the existence of the virus or the pandemic, which Is not on the table right now.
I mean, it is for some people, but it wasn't in the case of this three hour episode of Robert Malone.
And so we wanted to be very careful that this was not an attempt to de-platform, censor, silence, all the things that we were accused of wanting to do.
And so we sent it in, hoping that we would just cause some momentum to say, hey, When you have a platform this large, this many millions of listeners each day, and these many subscribers, there is responsibility and accountability that has to be part of this.
And we weren't seeing it.
Joe Rogan has been somebody who I find problematic for all the reasons I listed in my message to you.
But again, our ask was very specific, and it was about this.
And so I sympathized with your original post of this conversation has been, has gotten a little bit derailed.
But I think it's because we're now at a time where it's much easier to call out some things that are more agree, like the community has agreed is absolutely not okay.
Because right now, even people who are not racist, would say, well, I want to hear all opinions on science.
And that's where it gets a little bit scary.
So this situation has evolved since we initially talked on DM.
And let's take it one by one because there are moving parts here.
So I'd like to get your reflection.
Rogan kind of.
So talking first about the Malone incident, Rogan halfheartedly apologized.
I wouldn't even call that much of an apology.
Spotify comes out and puts some link, you know, to the shows, which honestly, I don't personally find that going to be that relevant, but it's something.
So how do you feel about how they've handled that so far?
I did not think that Joe Rogan's apology was an apology.
Saying, I'm sorry you feel that way is not an apology.
Saying that I'm going to do better by having people who are, you know, some people who are more based with consensus after controversial figures is missing the point.
You know, when you have somebody who is controversial It is really trivializing the scientific process by saying that it is just a matter of political topic or interpretation.
If you have an issue that is like a social issue that people have different opinions on, I can understand, okay, this is a controversial take, this is a more leftist take.
We're talking about evidence, like let's just be very specific here, evidence that proves that the spike protein is not cytotoxic.
It's not a controversial opinion to say that it is.
It is a false statement to say that it is.
And this is where it kills me when people say, well just debate.
Just get on his show and debate.
And that creates another sense of false balance.
Like we're not actually on the same level here.
We're not talking even in the same language.
We're talking about things that we have receipts for.
Actual clinical data to show that this statement is a false statement.
and it's not he said she said it's not your opinion my opinion or to each his own and so it was driving me crazy that excuse me even when he was apologizing air quotes he was essentially saying well let's have more opinions on the topic and we're like no this is again not the point
Yeah, it reminds me, I bring up this example often for a lot of things, but it's true of when Bill Nye, who, you know, is one of the early science communicators on social media and Netflix and broadly, goes into the Creation Museum and debates creationism against evolutionary biology.
It gives a platform to people who just wanted that platform to make their arguments seem credible.
Yes.
And that's what I feel about this incident.
Exactly.
The term armchair epidemiologist is extremely accurate.
At this point, everybody is an expert in interpreting data and drawing meaningful insights from charts.
Don't even get me started on charts.
There's a book that I swear by called How Charts Lie, and I see charts lying all the time when people don't know how to read X and Y axes and legends that are skewed, and you're like, this chart is bogus!
But if you don't know how to interpret data, like visualize data, it's so easy to sound like an expert, to sound like you have a claim to this sort of expertise.
And it gets really, really difficult because I think at the basis of the confusion that that particular episode was causing was, but isn't he an MD?
Doesn't he have a lot of papers with citations and a bunch of patents related to mRNA technology?
But if you dig deep, motivations are clear.
I think a lot of people who say, what does he have to lose?
Not a lot.
He has a lot to gain.
And I think looking at Andrew Wakefield is a perfect comparison.
In this case, Andrew Wakefield had a lot to gain.
Losing his medical license probably was the least of his concerns because he is a celebrity now.
And someone who took out two patents on vaccines while he was trying to discredit the vaccines that were in circulation.
So, yeah, you have to look at holistically what these people are trying to accomplish.
When I talked to Daniel about yesterday is what you brought up when you DM me, which is basically intersectionality, like the convergence of different things.
So let's move on to the racism aspect.
He comes out now, you know, a lot of people push back at me, some of them wanting to actually talk, some of them just yelling at me.
So I usually ignore the ones who yell.
But they were yelling about India Ari, who they said had sourced this N-word video.
It was actually Patriot Takes who had sourced it, and then India Ari found it from there.
But he made a credible case of why that was important.
First off, you know, it was about the fairer pay to artists, which that conversation has been going on for years.
And honestly, and this whole conversation is lost at this point because people have moved on from that, which is sad because that's what she was trying to drill down on.
But it did force a lot of people to look at this.
Rogan comes out, makes an apology.
Spotify takes down 70 episodes.
How do you feel about how that conversation has now moved?
Again, you know, when we saw the response from Spotify, it was disappointing because it basically said we were going to put COVID-19 content alerts on any content that was related to COVID-19, which there's data to show that that means nothing, right?
We weren't asking for banners.
We were asking for, you know, somebody to actually Go through the content and take action on things that were false.
So it felt like a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound.
The audit on the content for, you know, racist words, especially the use of the N-word, absolutely was necessary, but also like way overdue because those of us who've been critical of Joe Rogan and his method of journalism and other air quotes,
Um, is so problematic because he has been on record, even before those videos of him repeatedly using the n-word came out, there were more videos showing that he speaks with impunity and he knows it.
He says so with this, you know, gravitas of like, it's Spotify.
I can say whatever I want.
I can do whatever I want.
They've never come hard on me.
They've never done this to me.
They've never, you can say whatever you want.
Not just racist words, super ableist words, super problematic words, super unscientific statements.
um and so there were like blazing red flags already so to do this audit with this very specific lens i think was yes absolutely necessary but also like we've been saying in a
Much more maybe polished way, hey you have a problem here and I think you need to do some housekeeping to make sure that this doesn't continue to be a problem because their statement also said something to the effect of we have a responsibility to prioritize the safety of our listeners and also protect the creative outlets for our artists and I said it is not a creative outlet to Spread misinformation to use vulgar racist slurs.
It's also a safety issue when you continue to allow those two things to exist on your platform.
Yeah.
And a lot of that content was taken from, you know, YouTube and the other podcast streams and just imported into Spotify without any real deep dive into that content.
Which also brings up the fact that YouTube has taken down Rogan episodes before if it violated copyright issues, but not if the N word was in there.
So that, you know, there's there's a longstanding issue with tech and the information they allow and what they don't allow.
But looking at this holistically now, we'll leave the fair pay aside because that's not really your field as far as I know.
But we can look at we can look at the covid misinformation and we can look at the racism and.
And so you have these two, you know, these two topics that are being discussed now and As I feared and didn't elegantly state in the initially, they've become conflated in ways.
So how do you even begin to attack these instances of intersectionality?
We can look at, you know, just something as simple as the fact that who COVID predominantly affects In terms of race and class, right?
Because that's a whole other issue that where they do intersect.
But when you have somebody as polarizing as Rogan in this instance, how do you make sense of and get those arguments in across in a way that people aren't just going to throw up their hands and say cancel culture, which is effectively what has happened now.
Exactly.
I will say, just to the previous point, that YouTube actually did remove the Robert Malone episode for misinformation.
And that was kind of the standard we were trying to say, like, hey, it's already been taken down off YouTube, Spotify, you know, everybody's looking at you.
But when it comes to the intersectionality question, I think it's so, so important because, and I remember early in the pandemic, I got blasted for making statements publicly that racism is a public health issue and that police brutality are public health issues.
And people kept saying, why are you trying to bring race into this?
This is about science.
It's about viruses spreading from person to person.
And I said, right, but if you look at the data, and for a while while I was working at the COVID Tracking Project, we had a subset of data analysis that was just tracking race and ethnicity data.
It didn't take long for us to learn what we already knew about how infectious diseases and public health issues affect different communities.
ZIP Code is one of the most obvious indicators of health outcomes in our community and it has been for decades because of how we prioritize investing in communities when it comes to access to health care, preventative measures, and response to emergencies.
We were seeing black and brown people dying at a rate that was 2.5x greater than white neighborhoods.
We were seeing testing facilities very slowly pop up in communities of color while they were almost happening like wildfire.
in places that were affluent.
We were seeing hospitalization rates at a rate that was exponentially higher in black and brown communities.
And all of those things have a very, very direct correlation to things like access and availability, but also targeted misinformation.
We have seen campaigns that have been spun out and translated into different languages that target specific ethnic groups, specific religious groups, specific affinity groups to say, hey, this vaccine is going to do this to you.
This vaccine or this virus doesn't affect you this way because you are this ethnicity.
I mean, name it.
And it has been said about COVID-19 and ways to dissuade certain communities from following the science.
I know on our end, one of the common grifts that we see are these wellness influencers, you know, COVID isn't that bad.
And if you buy my supplement, you'll even be stronger against this flu like thing.
What are other ways that you've come across that seem to be people monetizing these fears?
Yeah, I mean, the snake oil salesperson is not new, right?
You've seen that person from the beginning of time.
You saw it in the movie Contagion with the guy who was selling for Cythia as the way to kind of like get out of the pandemic.
So that's not at all unique.
I mean, and you've seen that through just the regular pediatric schedule with these grifters who will say, hey, here's how to understand the pediatric schedule while also buying these bullshit.
Sorry, I don't know if I can cuss.
Of course you can.
Okay.
These, you know, these bullshit heavy metal detoxes, which are hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars worth of like, you know, ridiculous tinctures and essential oils and stuff.
So that grift has happened too.
You saw people like the America's Frontline Doctors saying, we have a cure, we have a cure, and it's hydroxychloroquine.
Or, you know, the government is, and this is repeated even on Robert Malone's episode with Joe Rogan, that the government is stopping the use of preventative measures by blocking access to things like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.
The amount of time And resources that have gone into these medications that do not work for COVID-19 is amazing.
And it's because we have to do our due diligence.
And there has been tons of due diligence to see if it works.
And yet, you still see, you know, a number of people in the agricultural community who were told, hey, if you can't get ivermectin from your doctor, go to your vet and get your horse deworming one, the apple flavor paste, and eat that every morning.
That was legitimately happening.
In rural communities across the country.
When President Trump made the comment about injecting disinfectants, my colleagues and I actually wrote a paper on the incidence of poison control reports and the uptick in Google search trends for ingesting bleach, inhaling bleach, all this stuff.
And I'm like, this is actually happening.
You work also, I saw, with The Atlantic, and James Hamblin's last book, Clean, was so fantastic because it just shows how so much of what's presented as healthy is really just packaging, scents, And and different colors to make you think that it's doing things.
And I think that that has infected the wellness consciousness in so many ways of thinking that I buy this product and it's natural and it'll do all these things, which it actually doesn't.
And that that has translated directly into the the unwarranted fears of what vaccinations are and how they move through the body.
I feel very strongly about this because I would say that the wellness world, specifically the nutritional wellness world, is far more toxic, far more dangerous than the anti-vaccine world because I think it has actually paved the way for it.
It has driven what we call chemophobia, this fear of anything chemical when reality is everything is a chemical.
Water is a chemical.
The air is a chemical.
And I use the word toxic and I didn't realize, I didn't mean to, but even just the word toxic has become this label where if you understood the basis of toxicity, it is only derived by one thing, and that's dosage.
And people don't understand that.
There's this appeal to nature fallacy.
If it's natural, I'm like, cyanide is natural!
Cyanide will kill you!
Formaldehyde is natural.
It will also kill you in the toxic dose.
And I think that that same kind of language of people who are not experts in chemistry or toxicology are, you know, just mulling over ingredients of things and extrapolating things on very superficial understandings of what those ingredients do on their own.
Not understanding things like chemical reactions or water activity or any of those things that involve like how a thing is absorbed or works in your pantry.
And we'll say things like, well, I don't want a vaccine that has this ingredient in it without understanding anything behind the science or the nature of that of that thing.
And that has absolutely translated into this.
What's in the vaccines?
I don't want a vaccine that has this in it.
I don't want a vaccine that does this to my body because I'm trying to do my own thing.
I trust my immune system, which actually is a very triggering statement because Nobody should trust their immune system on its own, right?
Our immune system is like our brain.
If we don't read, our brain is just an organ sitting in our head.
We have to train our brain to learn in the same way we have to train our immune system to protect us.
And I think this idea of, I'm just eating only delicious green things from the earth, and that's going to be my remedy, is such a problematic, ableist, dangerous, Very, like, privileged thing to say.
I mean, there is a trend in the people who are spinning this narrative, and it's people who think that everybody should just buy organic food, which, again, is a very privileged, ableist, and often racist thing to say.
Yeah, I was, I ate some spinach in the Yucatan 20 years ago and got Montezuma's Revenge, so it's, uh, yeah, you know, it was green and healthy, but didn't, didn't work out as I wanted it to.
But, you know, I think it was 500 years ago, Paracelsus said, you know, what heals in small doses kills in large doses.
So we've had this information for a long time.
Coming out of this, I mean, hopefully we're not going to see more variants and hopefully, you know, we do start to make some progress.
You know, living in Los Angeles here in San Francisco, two of the cities right now that remain under the more extreme restrictions as compared to the rest of the country.
So as we're Hopefully coming out of this in some ways.
How do you feel about the future of science communication?
Let's just take it broad because do public health officials start to be trusted again?
Do scientists and do nurses not have to worry about going into work and being harassed?
You know, all like big picture here.
I'm really glad you brought up the word trust, because I think that trust is not often considered a social determinant of health, and it very much is.
And I think the speed at which trust is broken is lightning fast, and the speed at restoring that trust can take years.
And I think that that's where we are right now when it comes to the future of science communication.
It's going to take years and years of rebuilding trust in public health, rebuilding trust in public figures who work in this space.
I mean, there was an article published in the BMJ this week called Trust in Government Linked with Lower Infection Rates and Higher Vaccination Uptake.
I was just reading this paper this morning.
There is a direct correlation between knowing who to trust Having that trust be established and maintained, listening to them when they admit fault, when they correct for the right reasons, when they present evidence for justifying things like policy.
We are still dealing with the consequence of science communication as an afterthought on the federal level.
We set states up for failure when it came to everything from collecting data in a standardized way, to vaccination rollout, to freaking naming Operation Warp Speed.
Nobody with a science communication background was in that room.
Nobody.
So we have a lot to learn.
And I think that my work is not done.
And it won't be for a long time.
I see fruit from it.
I also see a lot of vitriol from it, a lot of hate.
But I think that the fruit is inspiring to me because it shows me that people do feel like, well, if I lean into this uncomfortable space because I wasn't paying attention in high school biology, I actually can understand some of this stuff.
And it doesn't require a ton of technical expertise.
It requires understanding how to read a headline, how to read a paper.
How to know who is speaking as a person who is outside of consensus and how to speak, understand people who are speaking within consensus without making this a red or blue issue.
I think seeing the US Surgeon General issue a memo about the urgency and the dangers of misinformation was nice, but also something we've been saying for a long, long, long time.
But to see it kind of like reach Even the White House and the federal level is at least showing us that they recognize they've been really bad at communication and they also have a lot of work to do.
Daniel LaTorre, thank you for joining Conspiratuality today.
Thank you.
I've been a longtime listener and it's been quite a journey, you know, I think for you guys and for all of us who've been listening to you guys since the beginning.
Absolutely.
And I know you've joined our clubhouse before.
So when you reached out, To discuss what we're going to discuss about today.
I mean, we've had some rapport before, so I'm excited to talk to you about this topic.
Yeah.
But let's start at the beginning, because a couple of weeks ago I tweeted about Joe Rogan, which has been a hot topic of lately.
And my sentiment was that the conversation had strayed too far from COVID misinformation and that we needed to focus on that.
But I also said that there are times and spaces for other conversations about other topics, which was not phrased well for one tweet and needed further explanation.
Because, to be honest, the first thing on my mind was the fair pay issue.
But then obviously racism is a huge issue that needs to be discussed.
So you actually replied to me before anyone else.
Instagram was a hot mess, but Twitter actually, which is kind of funny because Twitter is a space where I actually had a number of good debates about this.
But you replied writing that intersectionality is what's needed.
Racist content reality needs as much attention.
Good thing social media isn't broadcast with few gatekeepers controlling.
I know you work in digital spaces, but I want to start off like you saw the tweet.
What made you want to reply and engage and discuss intersectionality?
Well, this whole idea, you know, of conspirituality is itself a very hybrid, you know, transdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary topic, which is why it's been so hard, I think, for a lot of people to see it.
Except for the sociologists, I guess, who kind of coined the term, and then you three, you know, representing a sort of cross-disciplinary mix collectively in addition to your You know, yoga, spiritual practices, and professional practices.
So, you know, I myself am a cross-cultural, you know, multi-racial person, you know?
So, I can't be monocultural, monolithic, mono-anything.
I always see the world in a lot of its nuances and multiplicity.
It's mosaic.
So, the, you know, in this era of, you know, this sort of just incredible confluence of awareness between BLM and Me Too, there are, I think, topics now that no longer kind of are willing to be said, like, you know, it's like Alice in Wonderland, like, jam tomorrow, never today.
And that's kind of how it's been before a lot of times, is there's a discourse that presumes that there's a sort of primary narrative that has to have everything else be placed in secondary position to it.
And so it was more reacting to that sort of pattern in political discourse that I've seen so much over the years, being an activist, being a person, you know, involved in cultural studies, media studies, you know, since the 90s, since, you know, my sort of the beginning of my political activism in like high school and university.
It's after a while, you know, it's just, so there's a little bit of that, like, And I think it's also if it was anyone else, I would have just ignored it.
But it's like, you guys know that I'm like a big fan.
And so it's that kind of thing where it's like when you love something, when you love people, you want to kind of do the effort to help polish the mirror, you know, which is kind of what we all do for each other when we're in our better selves.
I fully agree with that, and the other interview I'll be doing for this episode is with an infectious diseases epidemiologist.
So, coming from another angle, and I appreciate those takes and that perspective more than anything.
Let's talk more specifically about this topic, but for your personal work, let's kind of pull out a little bit, because when I'm reading over the Y-Cities website, I kind of see it as like a Jane Jacobs for digital spaces in some ways.
And if you could just talk a little bit about the work you do, because there's so much happening in terms of how you work with activists and community planning.
So I'd like to get a broader perspective before we dive back into this specific incident.
Thank you.
I've never heard someone explain it that way, but that is very accurate.
My Y-City work is my consulting practice, and it is about basically taking all of the lessons from placemaking, which is a community-centered approach to urban planning.
Very much, I would say, analogous to the movements in software design that are like human-centered design, user-centered design, design thinking, things like this that are very recent.
They all actually have similar origins in the 70s around UC Berkeley, Christopher Alexander, etc., which I won't go into detail right now.
It's kind of like there's just been this convergence of across silos in different disciplines and again being a very hybrid person where it's almost inescapable to avoid using sort of racialized language about identity.
My mission in life is to sort of, how do we understand technology, especially in the context of cities?
Because so much of the problem, you know, the challenge that I grew up with, with parents of two very different cultures, you know, my mother's Norwegian-American, my father is Colombian, I was born in Bogota, you know, raised in San Diego, Escondido actually, for those that know the area, and then suburban Minneapolis.
Three very different environmental, geographic, spatial, and demographic contexts.
High contrast, very high contrast upbringing.
So all of that experience spatially and socially is kind of what has brought me into the work that I do.
So I advise city officials, regional officials, federal officials, depending on the projects, community organizations, nonprofits, cultural institutions.
On these questions of how to do, how do we use technology in these places?
And they're all faced with this incredible pressure to use technology because there's so much techno utopianism and sort of white techno bro saviorism out there right now.
And the politicians have to respond because otherwise they don't want to look dumb.
And there's all this pressure to do smart cities.
Um, you know, very technocratic work from like the big corporations that most people think are smart.
Like, why would you argue against Google?
It's kind of like back in the day, it's like, why would you, why would you argue against IBM?
You know, in terms of that social power and politics, it's always safe to go with like the IBM or the Googles.
The reality, though, is that we're seeing a lot of the current, especially American, Silicon Valley originated uses of technology have not led to a lot of good outcomes.
And this is where it dovetails and why I got involved in looking at conspirituality.
Because even in my work in 2010, when I first started doing digital placemaking work, advising Um, urban planning and urban design projects on how to do better public engagement, better community organizing so that we have more inclusive and representative participation in the definition of how our public spaces in cities should be used.
There were often at the fringes people in kind of more red state zones where there were sustainable urbanism projects complaining about Agenda 21 and the conspiracy of the UN and the New World Order.
And I was like taken aback by that because I was like, whoa, this is like so fringe, but there's so much conviction.
And I saw the connections back then with the Tea Party.
And the Christian right, you know, which was very much part of that ongoing evolution that is very much at the core of what is going on today.
Anyways, that's my long-winded answer because I wanted to kind of make the connection here.
You know, I've given talks at the White House, you know, Office of Science and Technology Policy relating to participatory budgeting, which is a really powerful community engagement approach to get people to understand the value of government and taxation and the shared wealth, you know, the commonwealth that we have when we are working in a social sort of democracy sort of consciousness.
And I'm also a Zen practitioner, so The Wise City is also very much about bringing my Zen Buddhist practice and values, because I find it very, very relevant in the inclusive orientation that that offers, and the mindfulness that I think we need in our technology, in our media, because there's so little mindfulness, and I think there is an abundance of evidence
that we all are feeling between the misinformation and disinformation and the ease that the asymmetry of our current media ecosystem allows.
My wife is half Thai, half American, and she's a UX researcher.
So we could talk about dark patterns and all sorts of stuff, which is fascinating.
I also work full-time in cryptocurrency, so talk about a topic that can be used terribly, but can also be used well if it's done right.
But I'm glad you brought up the Zen practice, because in our email exchange you brought up the framing and the mindfulness around this framing of cancel culture and culture war.
And this is something I've received pushback often, this idea that cancel culture doesn't exist, culture war battle.
You write that, you know, bring to mind who benefits most from such framings, regardless of the content of the debate.
So I'd like to hear your thoughts on, you know, this creation of cancel culture and cultural wars and what you think from that broad perspective, it means to our online discourse.
You know, I've been a part of This since the early 90s, when maybe it was sort of began.
That's when I was in undergrad in university.
The culture war, you know, is very much coming from a framing of the right.
And so I kind of want to just demonstrate the other way of framing it.
Like those of us that are coming from a liberatory, you know, transnational or internationalist, multicultural, pluralistic ethic.
And there's very, you know, there's different political stripes that would share those values.
You know, we're talking about how do we dismantle white supremacy, how do we dismantle, you know, heteropatriarchy, etc.
All these different systems that are at the root of many nations, especially the United States.
And the material capital and benefit that has, you know, provided outsized privileged where white people, you know, for the most part live, they are in heaven.
They don't need to wait to go to heaven.
Like Lama Rod Owen, you know, Tibetan Buddhist author who just, recent book is called Love and Rage.
He has this amazing passage where he's like, why is it that white people get to live in heaven?
You know, whereas everyone else is in some sort of hell.
And I think about that a lot in this discourse.
But no one came up with the meme, per se.
And this is part of the battle of the meme, where it is really important to come up with an appropriate frame that encapsulates the values that we're about, that it's easy for other people to get behind.
Um, but because our media system or sorry, mainstream media tends to be centrist or, you know, status quo oriented and, um, you know, and I'm not an anti MSM person per se, but there is a critique about the politics of our different media organizations and layers.
So they tend to just go with who kind of can get the most purchase on these different frames, like culture war and cancel culture.
And especially when you have a compelling sounding polemical meme like that, it's easy for everyone to just start revolving around it.
It's also tied to the nature of our media ecosystem where even if you don't buy into that framing, if you start tweeting and talking about it, you then get more likes and shares and references.
And so the sort of celebrity, you know, consciousness of the sort of vanity metrics that also relates to subscribers or advertising click-through rates and all of these other things, that's part of the container that we're in.
It kind of rewards Um, sometimes stepping away from what you're aligned with in order to get attention, um, which is I'm just saying is a general dynamic at play.
Um, so that, that to me is the problem of just like bringing mindfulness, which I feel like this space in, in conspirituality and the critique of conspirituality.
Is and it's no small task, you know, how do you be mindful in the face of this like super virulent?
unmindfulness reactionary that's there's so many layers of reaction on a reaction on a reaction on a reaction and Engineered and also just tapping into human nature Instincts, you know it is Super difficult because there are so many sort of memes at play that are framing so many of these debates.
It's not just one it's I was listening to Sam Harris's recent podcast, which is a roundtable with George Packer and Ann Applebaum, and David Frum made a point, and I want to throw it at you.
I'm not going to say I 100% agree with this, but I do agree with part of the instinct behind it, which is he has a general rule when engaging on social media, which is if he's never heard of the person making a comment before, he's not going to comment on whatever they put forward.
And his broader argument was that there's no context of knowing where that individual is coming from before just jumping into a hot take.
Now, I, again, don't fully agree with that.
There are many things that I would see if it's coming from, as you said, a white supremacist viewpoint for an anti-Semitic viewpoint.
Right.
I don't think it's that important to really look at who the person is.
But at the same time, I understand the broader context because they were talking about cancellation.
So what do you think about that idea as a rule of engagement on social media?
Yeah.
So, you know, I advise, you know, different organizations on how to show up on social media.
That's one of my sort of specialties, you could say.
And this is why I say the bio is so important, you know, like it's especially for people who do not, who live outside of whiteness.
You know, it's like, it's really important to, and for everybody, to attempt to explain yourself.
Otherwise, others will do it for you.
And so that's part of the problem there is a lot of people don't do that or they want to hide behind an avatar persona for safety reasons.
There's sometimes legitimate reasons because of misogyny, for example, you know, you know, women are treated so, I mean, the level of Digital misogyny, you know, that is expressed in online spaces is a profound violence.
And, you know, there is But you have to balance, even myself, like I'm super mindful and discriminatory about who I follow because it's, you know, there's one thing that I remember a former colleague and friend, Clay Shirky,
He's said a lot of not-so-savvy and smart things, but one of the things that was very good about what he said back in the day in the early Web 2.0 era was that it's about filter.
Some of our challenges are just the lack of knowing that we have to be filtering, and that agency, that we all have filters, and let's actually be active in the way that we filter.
That relates to maintaining your balance of your energy, you know, your resources.
So, Lama Rod Owen, for example, one of the things that I really like about the way he talks about this is whenever someone is presenting something to him, an opportunity or an idea or something, a situation, he asks, am I resourced?
You know, and in all the different ways that that can mean, you know, spiritually, emotionally, materially, financially, et cetera.
Because when we burn ourselves down and burn ourselves out in wanting to be doing the right thing or engaging, it doesn't do anyone good, right?
So that's how I kind of, that's what that makes me think of is that there is a balance that you need to find.
But I think the way that some of the folks, you know, in that group are talking about it is still, there's a lot of that is coming from like a gatekeeper mentality of like, who do we let in?
You know, like the way Yanis Varoufakis, you know, the title of his book on the, you know, the Greek situation was like the adults in the room, right?
There's this sort of thing of, well, who are the adults and everyone else is a plebe.
It's very patronizing.
We're all stupid children, but only the elite adults at the head, you know, in a sort of very, platonic, you know, mental model are allowed to really speak or be spoken to.
And that I'm very much against.
And I feel like that's a bit of the sentiment that your sort of Washington consensus type folks, the way they talk about it.
One of the immediate and I would argue sort of reactionary comments to my initial post was that I wasn't reading the room.
The thing about the work that we do is we spend a lot of time in these influencers' spaces in their rooms.
And it's not always the best for my mental health.
But at the same time, it's informative.
And my comment actually came after being in Rogan's apology room and seeing the type of feedback he was getting.
And when we first started talking about this on Twitter, You know, you you said our feeds will reflect different things because of who we follow, which is very much true.
Rolling off what you just said, though, you also emailed that consumer choice alone will never lead to the liberation that we need.
And so I'm wondering, then, if we're talking about actually making some sort of societal progress and we can confine it to racial issues here if we want or broaden out.
I mean, misogyny is also an Another topic that is just tragic and terrible but pervasive.
But what can we do in these spaces to actually begin to progress?
Can we rely on companies creating better algorithms or do we have to do the groundwork ourselves in some capacity?
You know, because the imbalance of power is at such an extreme level, while our consciousness about this imbalance is also dramatically increasing, which leads to a lot of suffering about our situation, our predicament.
So in, you know, like what I learned from being involved in Occupy Wall Street, for example, you know, and there's a meme, by the way, that just is a great container.
It's a meme that really speaks volumes.
And what basically changed American political discourse permanently in terms of what is allowed to be critiqued and what is the debate at hand?
So what we learned in Occupy Wall Street was that, we need a diversity of tactics.
You need direct action, you need the media front, you need the change from within folks who are in sitting in very privileged places, coming from deep privilege and able to have some sort of influence to move things in different coming from deep privilege and able to have some sort of We need the Ralph Nader-like consumer campaign and awareness.
We need all of that.
I think if there's a, I'll phrase that as a question because it's like I don't have the answer. - Sure.
The question is how do we organize?
You know this is I think the big dilemma is we need to organize, organize, organize.
This was incredibly clear during Occupy Wall Street, which actually gathered folks that normally wouldn't even be in the same room, which was kind of like a flip side to what we see in conspirituality with the red pilling of a lot of otherwise liberal or theoretically which was kind of like a flip side to what we see in
All of a sudden getting sucked into content that is super anti-Semitic around whatever currency and gold stuff that is that side of crypto.
And then all the, of course, anti-COVID denialism and et cetera.
So to me, the question then is how do we organize?
Like, you know, so the, they just had, you know, there's been several gatherings of these freedom, you know, COVID freedom fighter types, right?
But where's the, you know, like, where's the appropriate aligned ethical funder, for example, to have a conference on conspirituality, right?
An intersectional conference that I would say, conspirituality, there are so many different Um, causes and movements that we see at play, especially, you know, like, look at just the way that black and brown bodies are affected very differently in this pandemic, you know, by orders of magnitude, all the anti-Asian violence.
Where's the tent, the conference, the space where we can organize?
That was a big part of Occupy Wall Street.
You know, the media, the popular press would cover the gutter punks, you know, doing direct action, you know, in the streets to constantly sort of lampoon and downplay the movement.
But meanwhile, the bulk of the, in terms of the hours of what were people doing, there were lots of circles of people meeting and sharing and talking and organizing and Many of those groups led to many other groups.
Black Lives Matter was very much influenced by Occupy, the strategy and organization.
The Occupy Sandy, the sort of environmental, 350.org, XR, Extinction Rebellion.
There's a whole host of folks where there's a lineage of activists that all met or gathered during Occupy and then continued to form various networks afterwards.
And part of that wasn't because we were just doing social media hashtags activism.
It's because a lot of us were meeting in person and those that bonding really was very generative.
So, so yeah, so this is my pitch to any folks out there.
listening who would be willing to crowdfund and or find an appropriate non-evil benefactor to have an in-person at the appropriate time with the appropriate protocols, you know, to have a conspirituality conference, you know, and something like this.
That's, like, that's my question.
That's, I think, the way forward is something like this.
I wonder, too, though, talking about rooms, what you mentioned being in Zuccotti Park.
Right.
I was in the room literally in 9-11.
Right.
So and at that point in my life, talk about Disparate groups of people coming together Under one cause I mean the months following 9-11 were some of the most special in my life Because you know you're in New York City You generally don't look at people when you walk by them and say hello, and it sounds so rudimentary but for a few months after that was Constant in you how you doing?
How you doing?
Just something simple that humanity, but it's it's hook that level of tragedy and What you're speaking about and everything we've seen in conspirituality, so often the reform doesn't come out until after the tragedy.
Is this your experience too?
Because my fear about all of these conversations is that these things are possible only after a fallout, only after the coastal waters rise and people need help getting out.
What steps from your experiences can be taken that you work with cities that are more proactive?
A part of our irony right now is our cities have become so increasingly privatized and underfunded through austerity, neoliberal austerity programs that's very much a joint venture between both parties.
So we sort of have gutted our public space in a lot of cities, in a lot of places, or it's a constant increasing fight to increase the quantity and quality of public space in our cities.
While at the same time, we've all kind of gone into our digital public spaces that aren't really public spaces.
Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
They're all like shopping malls.
They're private spaces that have a public function and That's why free speech, you know, the whole debate about Rogan and Spotify doesn't apply because those are private spaces.
You know, it's the same thing of like complaining about the security guards kicking out some kids from the shopping mall.
And like, it's just that's what you're in a private space.
You're not in the public park.
So the, but nonetheless, you know, a good public space is a very profound democratic embodiment or pluralistic embodiment because you get to be around the bodies of other strangers that may not be like you.
And I think because so many of the folks here, part of the reason why I like this conspirituality crowd is there, a lot of people are just coming from all of the sort of, Latest awareness in wellness, right, on the positive side.
So, all of the, you know, very wise increase in somatic experience and somatic realities to our nervous systems, you know, that it's not just our mind and the brain, it's our entire body.
And so physically being around other people and feeling safe is a very profound effect versus if you're sitting in front of Fox News or whatever and being told that black and brown people are dangerous and you know you need to armor yourself against them but then if you are you know if that's your only sort of and then you're on social media otherwise and you're not ever in a space where you're sharing space with people
Physically, it's it's it's I think there's a there's a corollary there.
I wouldn't say causal, but there's a correlation there with the way that we have been shifting how we fund cities that what we prioritize.
And the equal rise in the way of super private libertarian, largely defined by libertarian men, right?
Super misogynist, you know, libertarian men, Peter Thiel's, you know, of the world, etc.
that are behind a lot of the social media that we're using.
It's like, and Rogan, it's like we've got software made by man-children, you know, misogynistic man-children, and what is that media system?
What is that container?
If that's the container that a lot of these systems are largely built by, and our mediums do shape the message, you know, it's kind of, to me, like, no wonder, right?
Versus what is it like to be in Central Park or Prospect Park or pick any great park in any city?
And why doesn't every city have lots of public spaces like that where we can be meeting in public?
The corollary too is what would digital media look like if we had more apps that were created by BIPOC and inclusive networks of people and companies when the funding was not coming from a purely extractivist rent-seeking business model.
And that's possible, and that's really exciting.
So there's super exciting things that are coming out of Barcelona, especially.
Amsterdam and South America, I feel, Uh, in between the different politics and value systems that are in these other regions.
Uh, and I think there's a lot that American and, and just progressive or left, you know, um, pluralistic folks, um, anywhere can learn from some of these other, other places because we can be making our digital media very differently with these sort of, um, digital placemaking principles.
And we also need to kind of rediscover the value of being in person, which is kind of like what both Occupy, part of the power of Occupy, of Zuccotti Park, and then the hundreds of occupations across the Western world, for the most part, the gatherings in the squares movement in Europe and in the Middle East, and the Hong Kong occupation.
And then now, of course, on the flip side with the Right wing forces in what we're seeing in Canada.
So there's this rediscovery in different ways of the power of occupying space or taking up space, holding space, like literally.
And it's this sort of poverty or divorced alienation that we have with our public space that I think is part of this dilemma.
I would also argue that at least some investments from American investors and companies.
I've worked in startup spaces for a long time, so there's not enough, arguably.
Yeah.
And a lot of times it is reactionary, like Mark Cuban, you know, investing in providing affordable pharmaceuticals for people who need them.
Something as simple as that.
But it is reactionary, but it's still necessary at this point.
But to bring it home, though, I'd love to get your picture your view on, on how this has evolved.
And I'll, I'll say that part of my fear, you know, has borne out, uh, to be fair, this episode won't run for two weeks after the day we're talking.
So things could change.
I want to leave that open to the listener.
Uh, but you know, uh, the, um, I see very little about the fair artist, uh, pay.
I see nothing about the covid misinformation being taken down.
And the race issue has turned.
There was an apology that was accepted by a somewhat diverse coalition, although skewed male for sure.
But, you know, a range of ethnicities involved.
And, you know, Spotify did their work.
We took them down.
We're done.
We're good.
So the conversation has kind of stalled and entered this, what we started with, this cancel culture, culture war space.
How do you think about this?
What would you like to see come out of incidents maybe like this, this one particularly, but also we're going to have more of these incidents with other figures.
So how would you envision these shifting and moving the conversation in a progressive manner?
Imagine if there was some sort of network like what we've seen in the environmental movement, like what Paul Hawken has talked about, 350.org, Bill McKibben, etc., where there is infrastructure for coordinating campaigns across disparate institutions, formal and informal networks.
What they're doing, what the environmental, the climate justice movement is doing, from the hard-won lessons that they've experienced from the fragmentation of our media, the divide-and-conquer approaches of the opposition, what if there was a similar 350.org for this intersection of public health, racial equity, gender equity, etc.? ?
And that also is then aligned, because, you know, part of the reason why the viruses that we're having are happening relates to very much the way we are inhabiting our planet.
It is so connected to our climate situation and the way we occupy this earth.
So, it is, to me, I want to kind of flip that question, which is, what will it take for us to organize more wisely?
Um, because until we do, we're just always going to sort of be revolving around, usually, often revolving around the oppressor's framing.
Revolving around the strongmen, you know, the sort of feudal lords, the neo-feudal lords and strongmen and oligarchs that control this inordinate amount of power.
Any investors listening, I'll include Daniel's website in the show notes so you can reach out to him directly to help him fund that organization.
You know, you never know what, you know, like this going back to Jane Jacobs, you know, like her most famous quote is, you know, don't underestimate, you know, what a few, you know, people who gather together can can do.
And often, you know, that's what what starts and is most generative.
