Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1595 - Ira Glasser
Uploaded: 2021-01-15T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1595 - Ira Glasser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1595 - Ira Glasser' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1595 - Ira Glasser

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day
all right let's just get into it ira first of all uh thank you for being on the
show i really
appreciate it well thank you for having me it's great it's a perfect time to
have you on i mean
this is uh i mean we're talking about free speech in the time when the
president of the united
states has been banned off of twitter and facebook and it's right it's a wild
time what do you make
of that well you know facebook and twitter are private publishing right i mean
what we don't
exactly know what they are they're not exactly like the times or like uh nbc or
abc um but
they're close they're they're certainly in the private sector and and the
private sector has
always had has always had the discretion it's their first amendment right to
decide who to
publish and who not to publish um you know it's different with facebook and
twitter because they
claim to be uh platforms like the telephone company that you know anybody can
use to have
the conversations but they're they're not quite that they they really are a lot
like a publisher
and you know if the times decided to fire one of its columnists uh because it
didn't like what he wrote
they have a first amendment right to do so but they're not the government so
you know in that to that
extent um what facebook and twitter did is perfectly legal and and not really
different than what a publisher
or a broadcasting company would do if it decided to uh to change or or fire one
of its one of its anchors
or one of its columnists um on the other hand they are sort of like a platform
uh like a an electronic
soapbox that they've erected in a in a park and invited everybody and anybody
to come and when they start
picking and choosing uh no you're not good you're not good you're okay you know
you know they when they
start being a gatekeeper uh you run the risk of them closing people out of of
uh a national dialogue
and depriving people of an audience basically and that that's a problem and it's
a problem we haven't
figured out how to work out yet uh because this medium is in its infancy you
know it's people forget that
that the printing press started in the 15th century in 1400 and something and
it took hundreds of years
before uh uh freedom of the press and uh worked itself out in ways that we're
familiar with now
uh and we're you know we're right at the beginning of this um internet speech
uh medium and uh it's hard
it's hard it's hard to say uh i i think facebook and twitter had the right to
do what they did in banning trump
um but the question is if they start banning anything that they don't like
then they're really closing off the public conversation
to people and what what's the criteria how do you do that
yeah it's also it seems to me that we're using these outdated
things to compare like uh comparing it to the printing press or comparing
facebook or twitter to
publishers or even comparing them to something like a utility like the the
power there there's
something new there's something completely different and we i mean i hope it's
not going
to take hundreds of years to have some sort of a freedom of expression online
in these things but
they're monopolies it's not like anybody could have bought or made a printing
press
and printed their own books or printed their own newspapers not everyone can
make their own twitter
you know it's too it's so complex and there's so many users on it it yeah there's
very few places
where you can like legitimately get your word out in a way that you can with
twitter or express yourself
well but you know and it's true that these this medium is analogous to
utilities in some ways
analogous uh to publishers in some ways but they are new yeah and they're
different that's that's right
but but consider this when i was growing up uh i was a teenager in the 50s
um a big problem with free speech and the democratization of free speech was
that
nobody had access to anything i mean you had the times you had the washington
post you had the hearse
newspapers you had nbc and abc and cbs and that's where most speech occurred
and nobody had access to
that um so even with even with the monopolistic bans uh that twitter and
facebook uh are doing these days
or can do have the power to do um the fact is is that uh many many millions
more of people ordinary
people have access to huge audiences uh than did uh 50 years ago um uh you know
if you couldn't get into
the times and you couldn't get into the washington post and if you couldn't get
onto television
um you could speak you were free to speak but nobody heard you yeah and so you
know it's a lot better now
even even with questions about abusing the power of of being a gatekeeper that
twitter and facebook have
it's uh it's just such a strange time for this because it's uh in the middle of
the
like we're at the end of the president's run he's still in office but yet he's
you know everybody wants
him out as quickly as possible because you're wondering what he's going to do
and he can't really
express himself uh publicly anymore it's it's just so strange yeah well of
course you know
he's still the president if he held the press conference uh everybody would
cover it um and he
you know if if uh i i used to say uh back in the day that uh you know my father
was a construction
worker with a fifth grade education and uh if he had something to say he could
say it to me he could say
it to our family at thanksgiving but uh he didn't have access to an audience of
the kind that roosevelt
had when he went on the radio and he couldn't get into the times as easily as
as the governor of new
york if the governor of new york held the press conference so you know it isn't
it it isn't different
in that in that respect i'm not too worried about a president not having access
uh to a public audience a
president has tremendous power uh to attract attention and and that that was
true 100 years ago um what
i'm worried about are ordinary people what i'm worried about are are people
like you um uh people
you know who have something to say uh but their freedom is that they get to say
it in the closet you
you know where nobody hears them uh you know there's an interesting story uh a
real case that happened
in the 60s uh when james meredith who was the first black person to uh enter
the university of mississippi
uh was shot when uh on his first day there and it was a it was a real outrage
it was in the early 60s
and a uh a man named sydney street uh a black guy living up in harlem in new york
uh was so angered that you know he he he wanted to say american ideals uh
american principles of liberty
and equal rights have just gone up and smoked today and if he had stood on a
street corner at 145th
street in harlem and stood up on a soapbox and said that the only people who
would have heard him
were a few dozen people who passed him on that street corner so what he did is
he got out in
the street corner and he burned an american flag it was his flag he owned it so
he wasn't destroying
anybody else's property he burned the american flag and by burning the american
flag he attracted
television cameras which his words by themselves would not have attracted so
the television cameras
came and he got to say i'm burning this flag to symbolize the fact that if a
guy like james america
can get shot just for going to school uh america's ideals have gone up in smoke
and he got onto the
six o'clock news and and millions of people heard it heard his words and he was
prosecuted for burning
the flag which was a crime at the time and his case eventually went up to the
supreme court and the
supreme court overruled it and said it was symbolic speech uh but but the
reason that i'm telling that
story is that is that it it it demonstrates how before there was an internet
people had to figure out
dramatic things to do uh to get their message uh to more than a handful of
people and that's why you
know benjamin spock burned draft cards that's that's that's why sydney street
burned the flag uh that's
why there were demonstrations uh instead of just instead of just words and and
uh you know it worked all
right uh for some people but for the most part uh most people could not get
their messages out to large
audiences until the internet came and so even with twitter and facebook acting
as gatekeepers in ways
that trouble us uh because we don't know what the limits are we don't know what
the standards are and
we don't know why we should be having these private people decide who gets to
hear what uh but even with
that um this the ability of ordinary people today to reach huge audiences with
whatever it is they want
to say is much much larger i mean by by orders of magnitude larger than it was
30 or 40 or 50 years ago
unquestionably um but it just concerns me when a corporation has the ability to
dictate even if it's
a problem president even if it's someone is as crazy as trump just when a
corporation gets together and
they decide decide that this guy can't use their platform anymore a platform
that hundreds of millions
of people use it just it just seems very strange well it is it is it is a
problem because there are no
standards right and that's what that's what i mean when i say we're just the
beginning of thinking about
how how to how to do that i mean here's here's what what i see as the issue um
if you allow facebook and
twitter to make these decisions in the same way that you allow the times and
the washington post and
and television networks uh to decide what what they publish um then you run the
risk of of arbitrary
exclusions uh from from people's speech reaching large audiences um not just
the president who has
alternative alternative alternative means uh but ordinary people the only way
to remedy that is by law the
only way to remedy that is to give the government the power to regulate what
these corporations can do
and all of our history shows that if you give the government the power to
regulate speech you're going
to be in a lot worse shape than if you allow the private sector to do it
because who in the government
are you going to give that power to um you're going to give it to trump you're
going to give it to
juliani you're going to give it to joe mccarthy um you're going to give it you
know to to roosevelt
during the war who might have uh barred japanese americans from speaking to
large audiences i mean
who are you going to give that power to and our entire history shows that the
only way to regulate
private power is through government power and if you regulate speech through
government power and
you give the government the power to decide who gets to speak and who doesn't
get to speak
we will be in far worse shape uh than we are in in having the private sector do
that that's that's
the dilemma i think wouldn't another option be make some sort of a law instead
of having the
government regulate who gets to speak and not to speak make some sort of a law
that distinguishes
or makes a distinction like what is twitter what is youtube is it a public
square is it a place where
people should have the freedom to discuss just like we have the right to use
the electricity you have
there's there's certain utilities that you're you're all you have a right to
use those well that's my
right that is my inclination my inclination is that that um uh the best way to
think about it may
be to think about it uh the way we think about the telephone company yeah the
telephone company
supplies the wires and the mechanism for you and i to have conversations and
for us to have conference
calls um with with uh even with hundreds of people on those calls and they don't
have anything
to say about what what we say they don't have anything to say about the content
you and i can
get on the phone and discuss anything we want say anything we want um uh and
and the telephone company
simply supplying the wires i think that that is the best way to start thinking
about this problem now
now 