#1084 - Douglas Murray

Joe Rogan (0:02)

Keep this about a fist away, okay.

And we're live. Douglas, first of all, thanks for joining me. Appreciate it.

Douglas Murray (0:09)

Great pleasure to be with you.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Looking forward to talking to you. You've become an example to me, or your conversation with Sam Harris has become an example to me of how squirrely things have gotten lately with the way people interpret conversations about ideas. Because of this, Jamie, pull that thing up. This is a tweet that someone sent out, and he got a strike, a community guideline strike, just for listening, just for putting you on his playlist, a conversation between Sam Harris and you. And this man, or I don't know if it's a man, I just assumed. I'm a problem. I'm a part of the problem, part of the patriarchy.

P-T-R-K-C-C-X on Twitter. That is his screen name, his or her or zur screen name on Twitter. And got a community guideline strike for just putting this. Now I brought this up to, I was having dinner with some friends, one of them who used to work at Google, and someone who's there was a highly ranked person at YouTube.

I brought this up.

And the exact quote was, that was because it's hate speech. And I said, you said that so flippantly. I go, please tell me the contents of the conversation. Do you know what they talked about? I go, how did you say that? She goes, well, I'm sure if someone marked it as a community guideline, or as a community strike, what is it called, a community guideline strike? Yeah, that it must be hate speech. I'm like, do you understand this is Douglas Murray and Sam Harris? I bet that's not what the conversation was about.

Douglas Murray (1:53)

I bet it wasn't too. I'm trying to think what we did talk about now. It's making me nervous. I mean, but I know it definitely wasn't hate speech by any sane definition of those words. This sort of thing is very disturbing to me. Very disturbing. You notice it happening with other people, of course, and that's disturbing enough. It's more disturbing, of course, than it happens to you, but it's slightly surreal. I mean, I know Sam Harris a bit.

Not a hateful person.

My most sort of yogic, calm, blissed out West Coast of America friend. And I'm pretty amazed that anyone at Google or anywhere else would think that anything that could come out of his mouth were hate speech, unless you decided that hate speech is just anything you personally don't like or that words don't matter anymore.

Joe Rogan (2:47)

Well, that's what I'm concerned about. I'm concerned that there's an agenda that people who work in these, we don't even have to name the organizations, but in certain organizations are extremely left leaning. And I mean, it's probably better than being extremely right leaning.

It really is. It's probably better than them being white supremacists, white nationalists, hate groups, it's probably far better that they're radical lefties. But it becomes a problem when you're doing things like that because things like that limit free speech and they limit the free discussion of ideas. I didn't listen to your conversation. I think I listened to a little bit of it, but I didn't listen to enough of it to know whether or not you guys started screaming out the N word halfway in.

Douglas Murray (3:33)

I'm sure I'd remember.

Joe Rogan (3:35)

I'm sure you would. I'm sure I would have heard about it.

Douglas Murray (3:38)

I'd be blushing more at this moment.

Joe Rogan (3:40)

I had, another thing that I talked about with this same person, I brought up Jordan Peterson, and you know that there's issues with every time he's on podcasts, the podcasts get flagged for demonetization, and the exact words were he's a troublemaker.

And I'm like, what in the fuck are you talking about? Like, are you listening to his conversations? He is very articulate and he's extremely careful going over these ideas that I think we should all be discussing. So to call this hate speech or to call someone a troublemaker, to me it's simplified or symbolizes what we're dealing with today. This is a very strange time when it comes to communication and the people that regulate and distribute our communication.

Douglas Murray (4:28)

It is, and whenever I've had a chance to speak with people in that kind of world, in that sort of role, the question I always want to ask, among other things, is do you know where this is gonna lead? Do you know what it's gonna do if you keep breaking down definitions and terms and words? Do you know what happens, for instance, down the road, if you keep on saying that Sam Harris and Douglas Murray are having a conversation about something, it's hate speech, do you know what relief that's going to give other people down the road about what they're gonna be able to get away with? This is what's being created all the time at the moment, it seems to me. This idea that you police the discussion along incredibly narrow lines that happen to surround your own comfort zone and call everything outside it, not just stuff I don't agree with or things that I would argue with or debate with, but hate speech.