The Joe Rogan ExperienceJoe Rogan Experience #2133 - Brendan O'Neill
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,323 words- 0:00 – 15:00
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast,…
- NANarrator
(drumming) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
The Joe Rogan Experience.
- JRJoe Rogan
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) Brent, what's up?
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Joe, how you doing?
- JRJoe Rogan
It is my goal-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... before the end of the world to talk to as many interesting people as possible, and it feels like that's kind of ramped up lately. So, uh, I saw you on Trigonometry, and I was introduced to your stuff through that, and then I watched a bunch of your conversations online. So I'm excited to talk to you, man. Thanks for being here.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I'm so happy to be here. You wouldn't believe it. So thank you for having me, Joe.
- JRJoe Rogan
My- my pleasure, yeah, 'cause it did- does seem like I really do want to talk to as many people as I can before-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... you can't talk to anybody anymore (laughs) .
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah. Well, exactly. H- who knows, you know, how long before talking to people is outlawed or suddenly talking to people like me and people like you?
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, I- I don't think that's gonna happen likely anytime in the future. I think too many people push back against it. But I think it- it certainly could make it increasingly more difficult, and my- my real fear is that we do something so stupid that we lose all communication, period. I have a real fear of World War III, the like I've n-... I haven't had since I was a kid. When I- when I was a kid, I was grow- growing up in the '80s-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
... we were re- legitimately worried that we were gonna get in a nuclear war with Russia.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It was a real fear. And I remember when the fall... (sigh) The fall of the Soviet Union, it was like a weight had been lifted off the shoulders of the Earth.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Like, we were like, "Oh my God."
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"Thank God it's over." So...
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I remem- I remember those days in the '80s. Uh, we watched a film at school called The Day After. Wh- did you see that? Which is a film about-
- JRJoe Rogan
I think we've talked about that.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did we talk about that before? A film about after nuclear war?
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
It's a film about Russia bombing America. It's very depressing, but it- we watched it at school, and we had numerous discussions about what wou- would we do in the event of a nuclear holocaust, how would we try to survive it. But it was on our minds all the time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
And there was also other apocalyptic scenarios, if you recall, like acid rain-
- 15:00 – 30:00
Yeah. …
- BOBrendan O'Neill
of historical ignorance, that kind of unwillingness of people to understand, as you say, that nature has been in flux since the beginning, beginning of time.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
And that's how it works.
- JRJoe Rogan
And this willingness to monkey with the truth just to push a narrative.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
It's so bizarre. And it's, it's so bizarre that it goes all the way down to gender experiments on children.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
That's how far... Which you would think would be the, the people that we would protect the most from bad decisions.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
The people that we protect the most historically. Children.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Little kids. Little kids that are confused and may have insane parents that are-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... trying to talk them into something, which is a real thing.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah. Little kids who have now been sacrificed at the altar of gender ideology.
- JRJoe Rogan
God.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
That's what's happening. This is child sacrifice in a modern form. That's what's happening. And their bodies are being used to prove an ideological point.
- JRJoe Rogan
Oof.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Which is this ideological point that gender ideal- gender identity is innate. We're born with it. You'll, you have it from birth. And in order to prove this hocus pocus idea, which has absolutely no basis in evidence or proof whatsoever, they have to experiment on children. They have to give them drugs. They have to start performing surgeries on them when they reach a certain age. They have to cut off their breasts if they're a confused girl. Castrate them if they're a confused boy. And what you have here in this grotesque manipulation of children's bodies is literally the sacrifice of children to an ideological crusade, and the ideological crusade of gender ideology. And in order for adults who want to... Men who want to pretend to be women, primarily, and women who want to pretend to be men, in order to justify their existence, they have to pull children into the equation and say, "Well, it's an innate experience. You're born with it. And we're gonna prove this by giving them puberty blockers, by putting them on a conveyor belt towards surgery, by screwing them up for life," which is what this essentially does. Uh, uh, uh, that is a very good example of how problematic ideological, uh, obsessions can be. Because what you end up with is a situation where children's lives are fucked up in the name of an ideological crusade, and that's really bad.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm-hmm. And it's real, and it's happening.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And it's so bizarre to watch people slide into this cult-like thinking en masse. And you see millions of people that support this. But I think it's enough of a mind fuck to wake up the people that aren't in the haze of it all-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and go, "Hey, this is something you actually have to fight back against."
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
'Cause this is insane.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I think, um... The optimist in me thinks that in the future, in 20 years or so, people will look back at this period and they will say, "Hold on. You gave kids puberty-blocking drugs? You..."
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, they've already stopped doing that in the UK.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah, they've stopped doing that in the UK. We have stopped doing that. I mean, you can still get them privately, but the National Health Service has stopped, um, prescribing puberty blockers.
- JRJoe Rogan
Did you hear about the guy in Canada? There's a guy in Canada that's suing the government because-
- 30:00 – 45:00
Well, it got so…
- BOBrendan O'Neill
whammy of misogyny. Let's call it what it is. This is a double whammy of misogyny. You're screwing up women's sports, you're screwing up women's right to excel in a sport that they have devoted their lives to, and you're flashing at women who don't want to see your junk. It's a double whammy of misogyny, and what's really crazy to me is that you have so-called progressives, so-called leftists, the people who've spent the past 10 years going on about MeToo and feminism and women's rights cheering this on, cheering on the obliteration of women's sports, cheering on the-... like, male cheating against women, cheering on, uh, uh, male flashing at women. So, uh, uh, th- the, w- the extent to which the world has been turned upside down by the woke ideology, I think sometimes we underestimate just how (laughs) crazy things have got.
- JRJoe Rogan
Well, it got so crazy that Riley Gaines, who had a draw with this person-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... like, literally to the 1/10 of a second, which very, very, very rarely happens-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
(clears throat)
- JRJoe Rogan
So, they only had one trophy, and they gave it to Lia.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Which is insane.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Insane.
- JRJoe Rogan
You got a six-foot-four biological male, who had a draw with a five-foot-five female-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... and you gave it to the male. That's because-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I mean, you-
- JRJoe Rogan
... you're in a fucking cult.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
But think about how brilliant someone like Raley Gains- Riley Gaines has to be to get so close to-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... to be sm- dem- demeaning-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... and yet to get so close to a six-foot-four bloke who's, who was a pretty good swimmer, even amongst men, but far less good than he was when he went into the women's.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, not even close, 462 in the country-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Right, she was way-
- JRJoe Rogan
... versus one.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... way down.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
But he was a pretty good swimmer. But imagine how brilliant she must be, to have got so close to him. Uh, she gave her life to this. She trained... I'm sure she trained every single day for hours on end, and she really upped her game, and she became excellent her- at her sport. And then in waltzes this lanky bloke, and says, "I'm gonna take your awards away from you." And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... uh, uh, uh, that, to me, it, it stinks of misogyny, it stinks of unfairness. It is cheating. Uh, but again, it's society's willingness to go along with this insanity that is the real problem.
- JRJoe Rogan
But that's what's bizarre. The bizarre thing is the willingness to go along with it, and the unwillingness, especially by, whether it's the NCAA or w- whoever it is that's dealing with these, these situations when they come up, this denial of biological reality.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
I don't know if you saw the, uh, NCAA, th- one of the women who was a representative was having a conversation with Ted Cruz about biological men competing in women's sports, and he was trying to s- ask the question, like, "Why do we have women's sports?" Like, uh, uh, i- why don't we just have everybody compete against everybody? Why do we have w-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Without a doubt. And…
- BOBrendan O'Neill
of crushing dissent, crushing freedom of speech, restricting people's right to put their hand in the air and say, "Hold on. Is this the right thing to do?" So freedom of speech, I think, is essential to all of these questions and the right of our society to do the right thing, rather than making these terrible mistakes.
- JRJoe Rogan
Without a doubt. And that was one of the most terrifying things about the Twitter files, was finding out that our own government was involved in limiting the freedom of speech of experts, of people from Stanford and Harvard-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... who were dissenting about the- what- the way things were handled during the pandemic, that you're- you're literally deciding that some of the smartest people on Earth shouldn't be allowed to talk because they don't fit this narrative that we all need to follow in order to survive. I'm hoping that most people woke the fuck up after that. And even if you went along with it in the beginning, and you haven't apologized, or you haven't consented to the fact that you were incorrect, even- even if you haven't- you haven't just accepted it entirely, you- there's a part of you that knows the world got fucked over.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
There's a part of you that knows. So when some more nonsense comes around, maybe hold the line a little better this time.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And maybe next time, when you're forced to adhere to very specific rules that are- are- are- are designed to save us from whatever thing that they have going on, whether it- like starvation. We have to give all the farms over to the government because, uh, we can't allow people to decide how much food gets made and how much... Yeah, then you have North Korea.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
Then that's- that's- it's a slippery fuckin' slope, kids.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
But it's- it's interesting to hear you say that, Joe, because one thing I've, uh, realized with COVID-19 is that there's this real culture of amnesia has set in.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I was thinking about this recently. I was thinking, when I hang out with friends and family members and have a drink or whatever, I was thinking, "It's really weird. No one ever talks about lockdown." You know when you meet friends, right, uh, uh, you will say, "Do you remember that thing that happened five years ago? Do you remember that thing that..." You- you kind of go down memory lane, and you talk about things that happened in the past. I was thinking, it's so interesting that so few of the normal people I know, so not people in the media, not people who are on podcasts, not people who are involved in political discussion like- like we are, normal people never go down the memory lane of- of lockdown and COVID. They- it's like it's become this black spot in people's minds. And-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... I think it's because, um, people don't like what they became during that period. They don't like what became of their societies. They feel an element of shame, I think, that our society so speedily turned from being relatively free to being completely dictatorial, to the extent that we were told when we could leave our house, where we could-
- JRJoe Rogan
And we're ratting on each other.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
And we were ratting on each other. We became snitches. It was a snitcher culture as well. Um, you know, and even I have had, uh, elements of amnesia setting in. So I- every now and then, I remember things that happened in the UK, like, um, you know, people- the- the- uh, the authorities put yellow tape on park benches so that you wouldn't be able to sit on a bench.
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- BOBrendan O'Neill
There was one incident where they used- the police used drones to spy on people walking their dogs, uh, to make sure that they weren't walking their dog more than once a day. And even I- I-
- JRJoe Rogan
Oh, God.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... suddenly have flashes of memory, and I have to kind of Google to make sure that these things actually happened. It's like-
- JRJoe Rogan
They were arresting people in Australia, just tackling them because they didn't have masks on.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah. Right? And- and it's like, um- it's like the Tiananmen Square phenomenon to a certain extent, or- that's forced amnesia. That's the government saying, "Look, we are going to force you to forget that incident in 1989."
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, remember all that.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
"We don't want you to remember it, so we're going to black it out." This is a more voluntary form of euthanasia. It's not actually a- a boot on the neck saying, "You must misremember all this stuff." It's more voluntary, but it's a similar process where we feel, I think, such shame, or horror, or bewilderment at what became of our societies and our willingness to let it happen that the only way we can deal with it is to pull over this comfort blanket of amnesia and to forget about it. So, it- I- I think when people look back on the lockdown moment, I do think they will ask, "How was it so easily enforced? Why did so many people accept it? Why did this Chinese idea, and we all accept that China is an authoritarian state, why did that spread so quickly to Italy and then the United Kingdom and then to America? How did this stuff happen?"
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah, and how did no one recognize it?
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And everyone sort of complied, even public intellectuals fearfully complied, didn't- didn't in any way question that may- (laughs) maybe this is like every other time that something big has come up. You've been lied to.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Well, you know, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, who was one of the- the modelers of COVID-19, a pretty controversial guy because his models for what would happen with the disease if we didn't lock down, they informed the actions of governments across Europe, especially the British government. Um, he gave an interview to The Times newspaper a couple of years ago in which he had this really interesting line where he said, "We saw what was happening in China, and we never thought we could get away with it here, but then we did." And it was just such an interesting turn of phrase. Now, he might- he might not have meant it, but it was so revealing-
- JRJoe Rogan
(laughs)
- 1:00:00 – 1:15:00
Yeah. …
- BOBrendan O'Neill
is the thing that allows us to be genuinely autonomous people who make up our minds for ourselves. Under systems of censorship, what happens is that we are grotesquely infantilized. We are reduced to the level of children whose minds will be furnished with the ideas that society thinks are good, rather than having the right to make up our minds for ourselves. You know, the great slave, slavery abolitionist Frederick Douglass made this point. He said, um,, "Censorship is a double crime." It's firstly the crime of stopping someone from saying what they want to say, which is terrible. But it's also the crime of stopping other people from hearing everything, and deciding for themselves what is true and what is false.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
What is right and what is wrong. And it's that impact of censorship that we, I think, underestimate the importance of. Because what censorship does, it doesn't just stop you from, you know, when you had that, um, uh, those millennial twats at Spotify freaking out over (laughs) Joe Rogan and his podcast and vaccination, et cetera, it doesn't, doesn't only threaten to restrict someone like you and other individuals from saying what you want to say. It also deprives ordinary people, the public, the masses, of the right to hear everything and to use their mental and moral muscles. You know, John Milton made this point in England in the 1640s. He said, uh, "The moral muscles are like the physical muscles. They benefit from exercise." And just as if you let your physical muscles go to waste, you'll become a bit of a wreck, similarly, if you let your moral muscles go to waste, you'll become a moral wreck as well, because you will become an ape-like creature who has to be told what to think, who has to be told how to behave. It's far preferable, I think, to allow people to exercise their moral muscles, to use them on a daily basis. You know, we go to the gym for our physical muscles. We should be able to exercise our moral muscles in public life by hearing all sorts of opinions and by deciding for ourselves, using our own critical faculties, what we think is right and what we think is wrong.
- JRJoe Rogan
Unquestionably. Th- and well-said. I, I think it's also a function of what's going on today with the access to the internet and social media, and the addiction that almost everyone has to both of those things, that participates in them. You, you're, you're getting so much information, and you're getting it in a way that human beings have never experienced before.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Mm-hmm.
- JRJoe Rogan
And, and it's easily manipulated. And I think that's the argument for what they're doing on TikTok in America versus what they're doing on TikTok in China.... but I think it's also being manipulated because that's what we like. We l- we like, we gravitate towards those things that they show us, and it upsets us that they know what we like. (laughs)
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
You know? This is part of it. But in China, they have a TikTok that kids aren't allowed on after 10:00 PM. It, uh, accentuates, uh, athletic accomplishments, martial arts, uh, science projects, and it's designed to foster this sense of, uh, self-worth and, and performance. And that's how you wanna... If you wanna build a stronger society-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
... that's what you would encourage. And if you want to diminish the society that is run by your enemies, you would, uh, show them the, the problem with freedom. Here, you're gonna have, uh, men with beards and long fingernails-
- BOBrendan O'Neill
(laughs)
- JRJoe Rogan
... teaching your kids about gender, and you're gonna be a... You're a plumber, and you're like, "What the fuck?"
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
"What are they doing to my kid over there?"
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Yeah.
- JRJoe Rogan
And that, that's, that's real too, and we're all, like, battling this in real time in a way that's never happened before in the entire human race as far as we know.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I think the, the, the, you know, the, the issue with social media, which is a real issue, and Jonathan Haidt was talking about this, uh, with you and, and in his new book, there is a problem, I think, with kids hanging around on social media all day long.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
And especially something like TikTok, and if you look at, um... I, I, I limit my social media use as much as possible. I'm only on Instagram, which is nicer than all the other platforms because it's just recipes and pictures of people's-
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
... holidays. It's, it's a bit more of a bearable experience. So I don't use Twitter. I certainly (laughs) don't use TikTok. I'm way too old for that. Um, but lots of young people do, and I think what's interesting about it is that, uh, I, I, I fear... One worry I have, you may disagree with me on this, but I fear that an anti-technology view is creeping in amongst those of us who might be broadly described as reasonable or anti-woke or on the favor of, uh, on the side of, of, of, um, rationality. I do feel that an anti-technology view is creeping in because I, uh, the problem as I see it with the internet and with social media is not so much the existence of these things but the fact that they've molded themselves around a preexisting culture.
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
So social media in a different era could have been one of the most wonderful things imaginable. It could have been a forum for spreading ideas or for, um, proving to the world what a big man you are, what a strong woman you are, and saying, "Look, I'm taking control of my life." It could have had a different impact entirely. But what's happened is that social media has emerged in an era in which young people, in particular, are encouraged to be hyperfragile, to mess around with their gender in a way that they shouldn't, to f- cons- conceive of themselves as mentally ill when they're not mentally ill. So you have on TikTok now, kids self-diagnosing themselves. They will literally be, um, videos on TikTok saying, "Do you have these four different symptoms? If you do, you have ADHD."
- JRJoe Rogan
Mm.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
"You have clinical depression. You're bipolar." And it's, it's four things that everyone has. Do you occasionally feel unhappy? Do you occasionally struggle to meet deadlines? And so, what I think the problem with social media is not the technology itself, not the ability of people to communicate as freely as social media allows, not even necessarily the fact that kids are on there all day long, although that is a problem. It's that it's molded itself around preexisting cultural trends towards hyperfragility, self-obsession, a culture of narcissism, a culture of brittleness, and that, I think, has exacerbated the problems in society by allowing kids to engage with that stuff all day long.
- JRJoe Rogan
And what is the root of all that thinking and behavior? What is the root of all the fragility? What's, what's the root of all the victim mentality? Where does it begin?
- BOBrendan O'Neill
I think, uh, i- it's down to a culture of narcissism. Christopher Lash wrote about this in 1979, so that's a long time ago. So, uh, a- and I think when you say, when you say the word narcissism, people think it just means self-love.
- JRJoe Rogan
Right.
- BOBrendan O'Neill
Self-involvement. And people will talk about the problem of kids taking selfies all day long and putting them online. There's more to narcissism than self-love. In fact, s- narcissism is usually triggered by self-doubt. And I think one of the, uh, one of the problems with the culture of narcissism is people's expectation that the world should always reflect their image back to them.
- JRJoe Rogan
Yeah.
- 1:15:00 – 1:16:18
Section 6
- BOBrendan O'Neill
as a con- uh, as a result of expressing those ideas. So that it is a new form of witch hunting, it is a new form of, uh, uh, uh, putting people in a metaphorical stock and throwing rotten tomatoes at them, because they have the supposedly wrong views. And so heresy hunting has come back in. And one of the points I make in my book is that, uh, cancel culture is just not a sufficient phrase to describe what we're living through. I like the phrase cancel culture. I use it all the time. It's alliterative, it's amusing, it does the job of describing generally what's happening. But it's not profound or sufficient enough to describe the tyrannical culture that we find ourselves rubbing up against all the time, one in which there is extraordinary social pressure on people to have the right opinions on all the various issues. Gender, race, climate, everything else. It's a very profound social pressure that I think people feel in a very real way. And the great accomplishment, so-called, of cancel culture is not that it takes down big names every now and then, although it does do that, but it sends a signal to the rest of society, which is, "You'd better watch yourself, because if JK Rowling can be subjected to rape threats and death threats every single day of her life for expressing biological truth, imagine what could happen to you."
Episode duration: 2:33:43
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