Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1274 - Nicholas Christakis
Uploaded: 2019-03-28T20:19:59.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1274 - Nicholas Christakis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1274 - Nicholas Christakis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-03-28. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1274 - Nicholas Christakis

gay folks took over the rainbow four three two will it work today jamie yes
hello nicholas hey
joe how are you man great to meet you it's really good to meet you too uh i
became aware of you
like many people did with the infamous halloween costume incident at yale uh
where uh explain that
for people who don't know what happened because it was kind of a crazy scene it
went national yes it
was a moment when uh around the country many students were struggling with how
to balance
conflicting um sort of needs a little bit closer to your face conflicting needs
uh uh how on the one
hand to create an environment in schools where people everyone sort of felt
welcome as we've
democratized uh admissions to our american universities as i think we should
have
people from all walks of life have started moving into these institutions
claiming them for their own
which i think is appropriate but at the same time these institutions had
wonderful heritages of
commitment to free expression and open debate and um and reason as a principle
for resolving our
differences and that's and some of those values came into tension and so around
the country there
was a lot of uh heat about this and i happened to walk into a propeller uh
myself and um and wound up
um in some challenging uh circumstances and um you know i i it was not it was
not the um worst thing
that's ever happened to me but you know it was in the top 10 uh challenging
moments i've had in my life
let's say yeah that's a very lawyer like way of describing exactly what
happened well yes i mean
the thing is i you know i i i you know i struggle i mean you can tell the story
if you want and then
i can correct things but here's the thing is it's my job to be a teacher and i
have taken responsibility
for teaching young people and it is the case that many people lost their their
minds i mean lost their
senses and and and the faculty too incidentally i mean you know there it's one
thing to talk about
people in their in college age people but then you know the faculty also didn't
necessarily do what
they should have done but um but the thing is is that you know my commitment my
commitment is to
is to teaching more generally and i don't want to be defined by that event i
don't want that to become
a the most important thing about me you know i have this book sure this book
that we're going to
talk about that is an important thing in my life instantiates my values it
talks about what i think
is important about the world so so i'm trying to be balanced about it just it's
one thing that
happened i did my best it's in the past let me let me help out here because you're
being so nice
about the whole thing um so people know what we're talking about there was a an
incident that was
captured on someone's cell phone where you were standing many people it was an
hour of footage five
or six different angles so a clip went viral but i want to emphasize that there
were many people filming
that day and an hour or more of the two or three hours i was out there is
available but well i'm glad
that you had the courage to do that though to stand out there and talk to those
kids but some of them
were clearly there's something that happens when people become extremely self-indulgent
when they
know that they have this platform and they uh have someone who is in a position
of authority and they
get to hamstring them in front of the public and that's what i felt was going
on just my understanding
of human nature i knew what she was doing what she was doing by shouting and
screaming this is our
fucking home you know you know we're supposed to be safe here i was like oh i
see what's going on she's
throwing up the flag of virtue for all of her friends to see how amazing she
was so she's putting
on a show people do that it's it's it's human nature you handled it admirably
you stood there and you
you just listened to her and you never yelled back and you never raised your
voice and you you remain
calm but that sort of environment where the children and i want to say children
they're basically adults
but acting like children but this is one of the ironies the people that age you
know can fight in
wars and lose their lives yes so i think it's a it's a difficult challenge
because on the one hand
it's right and appropriate to hold people responsible for their actions
certainly if you're 20 years old
you're an adult you're still growing you're still changing you're still
learning i'm not the same man i was
when i was 20 but you have to be responsible for your behavior yeah and so i
don't think you get a total
pass either it's hard no you do not get a total pass and you know for folks who
don't have a 20 year
old in their life and don't remember what it was like you know you're not a
fully formed thing yet
you're you're filled with chaos emotions and hormones and yes and then you're
at school and
you're probably away from the instructions of your parents for the first time
and you know you're
cutting loose and trying out new new ways of communicating that way it's it's a
lot of it's
a mess but most people felt horrified watching that that you were subjected to
that when you're being very
reasonable and also what it all came about was your wife had sent out an email
saying like hey
maybe it should be okay for someone to wear a halloween costume you know maybe
it's okay to for
someone to dress up like crazy horse yeah well well actually just to be clear
what erica was saying in
that note uh was not this is very important intellectual distinction i think we've
we've lost a lot of
nuance in our political lives in general in our country right now and also in
the in the nuance
in the way we think about difficult topics so what erica was saying was not
that necessarily the
people she was not taking a position on any particular costumes like this is
okay in fact
many of the costumes that would have offended the students would offend her
what she was saying was
that she didn't think the university should be telling students what to wear
right she and she was
asking the students do you students really at this age at yale do you really
want the university to
be sending you guidance on what to wear perhaps you should think about that you're
adults you're smart
you're in an environment that privileges free expression do you really want to
grant the power
to an institution to tell you how to communicate yeah and people then uh
thought that she was saying that
uh that she was defending a particular course of action what she was saying was
um you uh she was
saying do you students really want to surrender that kind of control over your
own lives to older adults
and apparently many students did actually they wanted they did so i don't
believe they did i think they
wanted absolute enforcement of what they thought to be wrong or right yes yes i
think that's right so they
they they uh they did though many but not all of the students i mean let's be
let's also be very clear and
part of the motivation in in erica uh writing that note was that uh many uh
many of her students and
in fact many hundreds of other students felt infantilized by this policy and
there had been a
big build-up prior to that event including an article in the new york times
about these halloween costume
policies around the country and weren't they kind of ridiculous and so there
was a there was a kind of
a a ferment where people were saying wait a minute do we really need adults to
be told in this institution
especially given its commitments to open expression uh what to wear and keep in
mind that there could be
many ways in which a costume that offends you might not might i might not know
why so let's say you've
been abused by a priest and you were uh that one of the the rules said you
shouldn't mock religion for
example was what one of the one of the provisions so so a university-wide email
went out signed by 13 people
saying um you know don't don't uh don't mock people's deeply held faith
traditions well what if for the
sake of argument you had been a abused by a priest and you wanted in halloween
to dress up as a catholic
priest for example uh you know holding a doll and someone else who had a
different who was catholic was
very deeply offended by that well who should adjudicate that like you know do
is it the role of the the
institution to come down and say yes you can express yourself this way no you
cannot and so the argument
was let the young people learn let them sort it out themselves let them learn
by talking to each other
expressing themselves saying you know that hurts my feelings here's why it
hurts my feelings and the
other person said oh i understand or i don't understand i reject that reason
and and sort of buy into a
kind of commitment to free and open expression that actually i think ultimately
serves the objectives
of righteous social progress if we really want to do better in our society or
in any society in my view
we have to create an environment where we can talk to each other grant good
faith uh listen carefully
make subtle distinctions and and free people up to express what they're
thinking so we can have a real
marketplace of ideas that's you know my commitment or my belief well that's a
wonderful belief i love it
i mean that's really i i couldn't agree with you more more enthusiastically
that's really that sounds
like the best possible environment for growing up and learning as long as you
have someone to sort of
moderate or someone to mediate if things go sideways yes or i don't think you
necessarily need a third
party mediator but you do need a shared understanding of of uh core liberal
principles and these principles
do include as i mentioned earlier a kind of commitment to free and open
expression a commitment
to debate a commitment to reason so how are you and i going to come to a better
understanding of what
is true about the world we could fight right and then the stronger person would
decide what's right
we could vote it doesn't seem quite right either you know 350 cardinals voted
that galileo was wrong
that didn't make galileo wrong or we could use principles of reason and inquiry
to try to
appreciate the world together right we're looking out at the world and saying
that's confusing you know
does the sun does the earth revolve around the sun or does the sun revolve
around the earth or that's
confusing should a king have monarch you know should a king have ultimate
authority in a state or is that
not how we want to organize a state so we you and i look at the world and
debate and think about okay and we
exchange reasons and we use evidence and ways of understanding and studying the
world that to me
is the only way to truth actually now some people will think that religion is a
way to truth right
they think that the truth is you know is god given for example now i am very
sympathetic to religious
belief systems but i don't think that's a way to truth it's a way to some
truths actually it's a way to
some some wisdom but anyway so that's what our universities and our society our
universities are
officially committed to that the mottos of our universities are all about free
inquiry and pursuit
of knowledge and our country is committed to that in our bill of rights right
we have a commitment to
free and open expression freedom of assembly freedom of religion and so forth
and and those ground rules
then in my view make it possible for us to have a better society and and there's
more i can talk about
i'm sure we will get into it no i'm sure we will those again i couldn't agree
with you more enthusiastically
i just think we need more reasonable conversations and less screaming and less
shouting people down and
less stopping mob action yes yes the mob action is very weird because i don't
remember it well from the
like from the vietnam war protests to what's going on today there was this long
gap where you didn't hear
about universities shutting down speech yes this is fairly new this is within
the last u