Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman
Uploaded: 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-04-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Free speech and why you should give a damn, Jonathan Zimmerman.
Why should we give a damn?
Well, we should give a damn because free speech has been at the heart of every
movement for change in this country.
Every great warrior against oppression was also a warrior for free speech.
But wouldn't it be convenient if we just silence people we disagree with?
That seems a lot easier for me.
No, it's natural.
All right.
It is natural, right?
And that's why we have to resist it.
Like, I get it.
Like, everyone's experienced that.
Everyone's seen somebody or heard somebody they despise and say, God, I just
want that person to shut up.
Right.
And that's why we have to resist it.
There's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current
political climate, unfortunately.
I think that was exacerbated by the Trump administration and this desire to,
like, stop a lot of the QAnon stuff and the Pizzagate stuff and a lot of these
conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold.
And they were like, how do we stop this?
We've got to stop these people from talking.
Right.
So, that's the argument for censorship.
That's one of them.
And the other argument has to do with race and ethnicity.
I mean, the other argument is that, you know, it harms minorities.
And I think those are different arguments, but sometimes they're connected.
So, you mean censorship against racism?
Correct.
You know what you're saying?
Correct.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or sexism or homophobia or any of those things.
Yeah.
It's, I think one of the problems that we're dealing with in today's climate is
not just that everything is, like, hyper-politicized and people are really very
passionate in debating things online, but just the nature of online discourse
is so limited.
It lends itself to, like, simple sentences, you know, 140 or 280, you know,
symbols.
It's just not enough.
It's not enough characters to express yourself.
And then also text.
You know, unless you're writing a book, it's hard to get all your thoughts out.
And also, one of the things that people that study communications have taught
us is that when we have exchanges online, they tend to be more uncivil.
But we will type things and text things about somebody or to somebody that we
would never, ever say to their face.
Of course.
Yeah.
I don't do that.
I try really hard to not do that.
And I stopped even going back and forth with people on Twitter a few years ago.
And now, I take, like, about a year and a half or so ago, I took it even
further.
I don't even read my mentions.
I don't go in there.
You know, I just, and then I just, I open Twitter up, like, once a day to see
if something crazy is happening.
Is there any place on fire?
Is anybody doing something they shouldn't be doing?
Like, what is happening?
Well, yeah, I'm an op-ed columnist.
And a couple years ago, I stopped reading the commentary about the op-eds.
Yeah.
Because, you know, generally, it's not that well-informed.
I mean, there are exceptions to that.
But generally, it's just people shooting from the hip.
And often, just in a really nasty and derogatory way, it doesn't help.
What do you think about social, what is it about social media that lends itself
to toxic exchanges?
Because it seems to be, I know people that are pretty friendly, positive people
in person.
When I meet them, they're friendly.
They hug me.
And then I see them online.
I'm like, you talk so much shit.
Like, why are you doing this?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, obviously, the anonymity is part of it, right?
I mean, it's, you know.
But they're not even anonymous.
I know.
But you can trick yourself into thinking that, right?
Right.
It's just, it's you and your keyboard, right?
And a bunch of symbols.
There is something that's weirdly dehumanizing about it, right?
Yeah.
You can trick yourself into thinking that you're not dealing with other human
beings.
It's just a bunch of text.
Right.
And that, you know, this idea of don't say something to someone online that you
wouldn't say to them, to their face.
A lot of people don't like that.
Like, no.
Because I don't want to be uncomfortable, but I want to express myself.
So if I'm around you, if I said what I really felt, I would feel uncomfortable.
I don't like it.
But I don't like what you did or I don't like what you said.
So I'm going to be like, fuck you.
And I want to say that online from the safety of my own living room.
Again, I get that, but it's more than a little cowardly, right?
It is a lot cowardly.
Yeah.
But there's some benefit in being cowardly, too, though.
This is that there are people that, for whatever reasons, maybe they're
socially awkward.
They don't have the courage to say things to someone's face, but maybe that
person needs to hear them.
So this is the other perspective, like in favor of talking shit.
Yeah.
Well, look, again, I'm not against social media.
That would be like being against oxygen now, right?
Or air, right?
It's part of our lifestream, right?
I think the question is, you know, how we can use it in ways that help us
communicate and understand each other.
That should be the question we're asking, right?
You know, how can we put it to positive rather than negative uses?
Well, free speech is not just being able to express yourself now.
Now it's being able to express yourself through these private companies, which
is very strange.
So now the arbiter of free speech is YouTube and Facebook and Twitter.
And it's like, wow, like those are the town squares of our world now.
Yeah.
And, you know, when I discuss the free speech question with my students, I
often say, look, anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of
speech restriction they'd like, provided that they tell me who's going to do
the restricting.
Yes.
All right.
And often it comes down to Jack Dorsey, you know.
Well, it's not really Jack.
It's really the other people that work with Jack.
Yes.
Right.
His company.
In defense of Jack, though.
Yeah.
He honestly wants Twitter to be wild.
Absolutely.
He's even proposed a separate Twitter that is completely uncensored or you can
have the moderated Twitter.
No, I think that, you know, in his public statements, I think he's been admirably
ambivalent about this.
You know, I mean, I like him a lot.
I really do.
Right.
And I think he, before Trump got cut off, which I didn't agree with, I think
Dorsey generally had the right idea, which is when we see something posted on
Twitter that we think is, you know, wrong or horrible, instead of muzzling it,
what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents.
Right.
And we're going to put a flag on it saying, by the way, we think this is
bullshit.
And here's why.
And look, that's a form of free speech as well.
Right.
Using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorrent is an
act of free speech.
Yes.
And I think that seemed to me to be Dorsey's impulse rather than muzzling
people, adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen.
Do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when
you're running an election, right?
So, like, if you only have a few months when an election's rolling around and
there's this person who is, like, getting all these people riled up and saying
a bunch of crazy shit that may not be true and they have a choice to make.
Like, you can let it play out its natural course.
Like, the logical and informed response to bad speech is always better speech.
Like, how do you deal with bad speech?
You combat it with debate and more articulate, more well thought out, more
sensible speech.
That's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively
looking at the two arguments, they look at that one and go, well, that makes
more sense.
This guy is trying to rile people up, but he's incorrect, and this is why.
But you only have three months.
Correct.
And there's a natural time that these things take to play out before you figure
out what's bullshit and what's not.
Right.
And also, the other thing I'd add, Joe, is although I agree with the dynamic
you just described, in order to pull that off, you need a certain sort of
education.
Yes.
Right?
And that's why I think, I mean, you know, one of the things I study is
education, and I think that's absolutely a critical part of this discussion,
right?
To reason and deliberate in the way you were just describing, that's not a
natural act either.
Yeah.
We don't kind of the womb doing that, right?
We need institutions to teach us how to do that, and they've not done a very
good job of it.
Yeah.
And teaching people how to think about things and how to look at things and
analyze things in an objective manner.
What's going on?
Sorry about that.
Is he leaning back?
Is that the issue?
Not enough volume.
Teaching people how to think is not necessarily, like critical thinking skills,
it's not really highlighted in school, especially in high school.
It's not something that you really spend a lot of time.
Well, unfortunately, I mean, we give rhetorical obeisance to it, but we don't
do it nearly enough.
And when you interview kids about their high school experience and you ask them,
you know, did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where
there was real debate, generally they say no.
Yeah.
And the problem with debate is oftentimes you're just trying to win, right?
Right.
Sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic, or they'll
touch upon, like, certain things, like, you know, and that certain things that
they think, like, whether or not it's valid to the conversation, they'll add
those things to it because there's certain social clout to those subjects.
Definitely.
Look, the hardest thing to do as a young person is to figure out what you
really think.
Right.
Not what the people around you are saying, your peers or your parents or your
teachers, what you really think.
And the problem is we haven't actually created educational institutions that
help people do that.
Right.
You know, I mean, what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've
heard from others rather than to come up with, like, okay, what do I actually
think about this?
Right.
It also sounds good if you can mouth things that other people have said really
well and you can kind of put it in your own words.
Sure.
Sounds smart.
And also, I mean, you know, remember, if you're in high school, you're an
adolescent, and adolescents, like we know from developmental psychology, they're
very attuned to other adolescents, right?
Yes.
I mean, that's what it's about.
Yeah.
You know, it's who's cool, who's cute, who's going out with whom, you know?
And so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort
of tailor your opinions to the people around you.
But that's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for our democracy.
I mean, one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all
teenagers now.
And we're all doing precisely that, trying to figure out who's cool and who isn't,
right, and trying to get on the right side and, as you were saying, to mouth
the right things.
Yeah.
And being with the cool kids.
Correct.
You want to be at the cool table in the cafeteria.
Whoever they are, right?
You know, and again, it's not good for you.
No, it's not.
Or our democracy, more to the point.
I was really lucky when I was young, and we were talking about this earlier
when you asked about my accent, that I moved around a lot.
And I think that was really good.
It sucked at the time because, you know, I moved to San Francisco when I was
seven, from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then Florida when I was 11.
And then when I was 13, we moved to Boston.
It was a lot of moving.
And because of that, I didn't develop this, like, core group of friends that I
grew up with.
It was, you know, it was a little chaotic, but it fo