#1682 - Jesse Singal

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

Hello, Jesse.

Nice to meet you. I've read your tweets multiple times.

Jesse Singal (0:19)

I'm sorry to hear that.

Joe Rogan (0:21)

You're a tweeter, man. You're out there. You're out there waiting through the swamp.

Jesse Singal (0:24)

I want to learn from you how to stay out of that shit. It destroys me.

Joe Rogan (0:27)

It's not for everybody to stay off.

I think for some people, it's a very useful tool. It's very useful. That's how I found about you. I found out about you through Twitter.

It's great for promotion. It's great for getting your ideas out there, but it's not great for rational, kind discourse between other compassionate human beings. There's very little of that going on there. It's a lot of like being in a mental health institute.

Jesse Singal (0:53)

Well, I was going to say, I think it. I know people from real life who I don't know for sure, but I think like being on Twitter is exacerbating their mental illness.

Joe Rogan (1:01)

100%. And during the pandemic, that was highlighted.

Jesse Singal (1:04)

Oh my God, you have nothing else to do. You're just online and it's like a middle school cafeteria, but more sociopathic. It's horrible.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Yeah, it's just, it's so bad for people. And you see them unraveling as the days go on, and you just want to go like, go run, leave your phone at home and go for a run.

Jesse Singal (1:20)

Here's what I don't get about your ability to stay off is I have one a millionth the notoriety of you. Some people hate me, but no, I have trouble not checking in on what people are saying about me, and that's what fucks you up. Because then you go down the spiral and you pretend that this angry 15-year-old in Ohio, who's talking shit about you, that you can convince him you're a good guy. And that's crazy because he's not trying to have a conversation. But I find I can't stay away from those fights with the angry 15-year-old in Ohio.

Joe Rogan (1:51)

Or the angry 45-year-old in Manhattan.

Jesse Singal (1:54)

Maybe more often than that.

Joe Rogan (1:55)

It's just people, man. It's a bad way for humans to communicate. And I think one of the things that happens on Twitter that's really kind of strange is that the bullied become the bullies.

It's like you get a lot of people that had a really rough time in high school and socially, and now they found this circle of people that agree with them and they're all, for lack of a better term, they have mental health problems because there's no doubt they're filled with anxiety and chaos and they're on there all day long and they're just arguing and attacking people. There's some people that I follow and I don't follow them. What I do is I bookmark their page and I go back to it because I don't want to get into it, but occasionally I'll go and see, like, okay, let's look at this science project and I'll just see, oh, look at this, we have ten hours of tweeting today. And it's ten hours of slinging mud and being shitty and calling for people to be de-platformed and it's just a terrible way to live your life.

Jesse Singal (3:00)

And what's weird is during those ten hours, all they've received was approval for that behavior. So it gives you a completely warped view of-

Joe Rogan (3:07)

Until they don't. There's this one lady that I follow.

She's an academic and she's fucking loony and they came for her. Boy, when they came for her, it was wild watching her scramble and trying to placate and trying to calm them down and seeing that it didn't matter. You could look at the bulk of her tweets and what she does as an academic and it's not a bad person. She's just loony. She's just a loony progressive who thinks that the only way to make change in this world is to attack people and to vehemently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as either a racist or a Nazi or alt-right or including people that are clearly none of those things.

Jesse Singal (3:53)

What I'm fascinated by is these communities where you constantly have to look over your shoulders because if you say the wrong thing once, you're basically out of the community. This isn't just on the left. This actually happened on the right with Trump where people who didn't support Trump, it was like bye. It doesn't matter if you've been a good conservative 20 years. There was a socialist lefty writer in New York who had done a lot of good stuff. She wrote a Times piece about how she met Barry Weiss and how they got along. She's like, I thought I would hate Barry Weiss. I like Barry Weiss.