Joe Rogan and the Ethics of Apology (Episode #273)

Key Takeaway

When you have caused harm or genuinely regret something you said, resist both reflexes: stonewalling and self-protective doubling down. Name the mistake plainly, explain what you will do differently, and leave room for others to decide whether to forgive. Harris’s central practical claim is that sincere apology and sincere forgiveness are not signs of weakness; they are the mechanisms by which trust, relationships, and public discourse can be repaired.

Episode Overview

Sam Harris responds to controversies surrounding Joe Rogan’s COVID-19 commentary and resurfaced past use of a racial slur. While defending Rogan’s character and arguing that context and intent matter in judging speech, Harris focuses on the ethics of apology: people should be able to acknowledge genuine mistakes without an apology becoming an automatic invitation for permanent condemnation.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Joe Rogan and the Ethics of Apology (Episode #273) from Making Sense with Sam Harris. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris okay well my friend joe rogan has come under considerable public scrutiny and personal attack in recent days and um i want to say a few things in response to that controversy i've been critical of joe's coverage of covid and vaccines in particular i was critical of his platforming peter mccullough and robert maloney i reached out to joe privately about that and i've said a few things publicly as you might expect i restrain myself in public because joe is a friend but i didn't leave any doubt about where i stood my primary concern was that given his vast audience getting public health messaging wrong even a little wrong could do a lot of harm joe is generally considered to have the biggest podcast on earth and he has greater reach than almost any mainstream media outlet so this comes with great responsibility but it's a responsibility that joe never sought and has been slow to appreciate and i understand why i mean joe is not a scientist or an academic or a journalist or he's a comedian and because he's a comedian whatever the topic he can always pull the rip cord by saying what the hell do i know i'm just a comic right this is something that i and many other podcasters can't do and he podcasts so much he sometimes produces 20 hours of content a week so there's no way he can prepare for most of these conversations nor is there time for him to edit his podcasts he used to release everything live he since stopped doing that but the spirit of his podcast hasn't changed he just flips on the microphones and begins rolling with his guest and while he may know something about their work he is rather often learning what they think in real time right along with his audience and then responding in the moment based on his years of doing just this having long and searching conversations with an incredibly diverse range of guests and letting his curiosity be his guide on most topics this approach to podcasting has served joe and his audience very very well and the fact that the joe rogan experience is the biggest podcast on earth is all the proof we need of that but this approach to podcasting doesn't work so well for every guest and every topic nor does being a comedian always provide an alibi for getting your facts wrong so i was very glad to see joe pivot last week and acknowledged that on the topic of public health he could and should be more rigorous and careful in the future this was in response to neil young and other musicians pulling their music off of spotify in protest over joe's messaging around covet so when i saw that video i jumped on twitter and said well done brother because joe promised to treat the topic of vaccines and covid with more care and to bring on other experts to balance the opinions of the heterodox people he'd been talking to as you all know the pandemic is a topic i've hit several times and i've been distressed to see how other podcasters like joe have covered it i thought joe's instagram video promising to do things differently was about as good as it could have been he wasn't defensive he didn't double down on any mistakes he acknowledged that he was slow to understand the enormous role he now plays on our information landscape and he promised to correct course so bravo but now another controversy has erupted for which joe also felt the need to apologize someone cut together a reel of moments where joe said the n-word on his podcast going back 12 years i think in the second apology joe made it clear that in none of those instances was he using the word as a racist slur rather he was talking about the word itself about its use and comedy and about its magically destructive properties and in his apology he went so far as to say that he was wrong to have used the word even in this way and that as a white man is just not his word to use for any reason in any context i want to say a few things about this second apology and about the way it's being received first i should say a few things about joe as a person anyone who knows him and you don't have to know him personally you can just be a fan of his podcast because what you see there really is joe anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to joe's podcast knows to a moral certainty that joe is not racist and there really is nothing more that needs to be said on that point there is simply no workable definition of racism that includes joe rogan and insofar as there is an enduring problem of racism in our society people like joe are not a symptom of it rather they're the cure joe is an extremely ethical person and he has an extraordinarily large and diverse set of friends and social contacts it would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of another human being than joe so if joe rogan is your version of a racist you have reached a moral and political dead end what's more i think joe actually went too far in his apology about using the n-word it's totally understandable that he did because he's been taking a tremendous amount of fire even the white house came after him this week it's been completely crazy so i understand why he felt the need to disavow his prior use of the word entirely but let me take a moment to spell out why i think that's a mistake there's simply no question that american hysteria around the use of the n-word is pathological and dishonest and destructive of people's integrity end an offense to basic sanity i remember an example over 20 years ago long before social media and of course long before we spoke of cancel culture we would have called it political correctness back then where an aide to the mayor of washington dc used the term niggeredly in a speech niggerly is a synonym for stingy and it has no etymological connection to the n-word needless to say some genius in the audience got mightily offended and the controversy was such that the mayor's aide resigned and the mayor accepted his resignation this person was later reinstated in another role i think but it's a sign of how far we've wandered from the path of progress that the naacp at the time recognized just how absurd and demeaning of its own interests the initial taking of offense was julian bond who was the chairman of the naacp said quote you hate to think that you have to censor your language to meet other people's lack of understanding and then he said seems to me that the mayor has been niggerly in his judgment on the issue okay that was great right that was decent that was sane needless to say we could not expect such a reasonable response from the naacp today here's what i think is patently true morally and intellectually and therefore politically in the end the idea that a white person cannot say the n word for any reason when discussing its use when reading huckleberry finn out loud when dissecting public controversies of the sort that i'm discussing now is completely insane to hold this view is to attribute magical properties to words it's the very essence of a childish relationship to language and it makes a mockery of the very real social problem of racism that is bigotry as applied through the lens of race leaving aside the question of systemic racism because there's a lot to debate about the scope of that problem today i don't deny that it still exists and what has always been pernicious about systemic racism is that the people implementing racist policies need not be consciously racist to perpetrate further harm but of course the pendulum has also swung violently in the other direction and as i've said before on this podcast i think it's safe to assume that there is almost no desirable place to work or study or mingle in american society today in academia in film or television or journalism or tech you could literally take the highest status 20 of every corner of our culture there is almost no place and perhaps there is no actual place at all where being a person of color isn't a positive advantage for gaining entry in the year 2022 of course this excludes asians who are now white adjacent again there's a lot to debate about the ethics of all this and there's certainly questions about affirmative action and related policies where i don't even know what i think but we can leave all of that aside because that's not the sort of racism we're talking about the racism of which joe rogan has been accused is real racism psychological racism he likes white people better than black people racism when we're talking about a person using the n-word to convey his racism or using it in such a way as to reveal his racism whether he meant to or not then everything depends on the beliefs and intentions of the speaker to know if a person is racist we have to know what he thinks and feels about other human beings most importantly we have to know what sort of world he wants to live in to allege that a person is racist is of necessity to claim that he cares about the variable of race in ways that he shouldn't that he prefers certain groups of people for reasons that he shouldn't that he takes pride in things he shouldn't and that he has contempt or at least disregard for certain people based purely on the color of their skin or some other superficial racial characteristic real racists don't want people of other races to truly succeed and they feel more or less compassion for the suffering of other human beings based primarily on their racial identities this is why the some of my best friends are black calumny is so silly and destructive if a person is white and some of his best friends are black i don't care what jokes he laughs at he is not a racist in any way that society should worry about and if you doubt that there is something you don't understand about what it means to have good friends so using the n-word as a racial slur is completely different from using it in some other way and if you insist that the word itself is magically destructive like voldemort in the harry potter novels if you insist upon treating its use by a person of the wrong skin color in any context for any purpose as some kind of diabolical incantation if you really believe that someone somewhere will be harmed by any conceivable use of the term based merely on the color of the speaker's skin you are just morally unprepared to solve real problems in our world and any culture that takes this attitude is morally unprepared to solve real problems too and that's why i'm afraid we are we are mired in a culture that appears totally unable to even identify much less solve real problems because it has grown hysterical over imaginary ones there were other things that joe apologized for in the second video things which it sounds like he should have apologized for these were things he said as a comedian that now sound bad even in context he told jokes in the past that he wouldn't tell today it's only decent to notice however that literally everyone not just comedians everyone is in this spot because the norms have shifted massively you simply can't judge comedy or any other cultural product from 10 years ago by the sensitivities of today it's just not fair to because it doesn't give an accurate picture of a person's state of mind then or now and most important if you watch joe's recent video there is no question that he offered a complete apology for things he genuinely regrets saying what more could we expect a well-intentioned person to do i've noticed two reactions to joe's most recent video both of which seem like moral errors to me first there were people who smell blood in the water and who are now calling for joe's annihilation with even greater fervor these are people on the left for whom no apology would ever be sufficient though ironically these same people love redemption stories about murderers and rapists provided they have the correct skin color find me a black man who has shot a cop and then apologized for it or in some cases hasn't apologized for it and i'll show you vast numbers of people on the left who are eager to see him brought back into the fold and even canonized as some kind of saint but find a white guy who told a bad joke in 2007 and these same people will want to see him destroyed for it that is a bit of hypocrisy that everyone left of center has to become allergic to and then of course other responses from the right or the alt-right or the q anon adjacent or the i don't know what to call it politically the i'm way too online and wokeness is the only problem i can keep track of response which in light of the left's reaction has declared that apologizing is always and everywhere a mistake you can't give an inch to the woke mob otherwise you're finished so all you can do is stonewall and double down from a purely pr point of view these people aren't necessarily wrong they're often right in joe's case they probably are right here's one thing that's important to be clear about joe didn't have to apologize of all the people who could weather a controversy like this by saying absolutely nothing or by telling his critics to just go to hell joe is probably in the best position to do that even if spotify drops his show joe will be fine it would be trivially easy for him to create his own platform where he'd be answerable to no one and legions of his fans would follow him there and he would still have the biggest podcast on earth but he chose to apologize because he genuinely regretted saying certain things he felt bad about how their resurfacing made many people feel and that's exactly how you would want him to respond so in my view he took a risk by apologizing and he did this because it was the right thing to do here's the culture i think we want or should want we want people when they feel they have done something wrong to apologize this is a way for them to express regret over regrettable things and to communicate their good will toward anyone they may have hurt however inadvertently i've never had to issue a public apology of the sort that joe has released twice this week perhaps my time will come but if i ever felt there was something i really should apologize for i would find it very depressing not to apologize for fear of the apology backfiring a sincere apology is a moral good as is the forgiveness with which it is often met we want to live in a world where people offer sincere apologies and we want to live in a world where sincere apologies are generally accepted this is born of the recognition that no one is perfect each of us is a work in progress everyone is growing and forgiveness itself is one of our highest virtues forgiveness is a [ __ ] miracle and we want a culture that makes us better at both seeking it and bestowing it not one that views every apology as a source of shame and as an invitation for further scorn there really is a ray of ethical daylight here that we must recognize asking forgiveness and receiving it is how we repair our relationships and the fabric of society itself anyway as i said joe is a friend but i would like to think that i would defend anyone of his character who found himself at the center of a similar controversy and joe if you're hearing this you can rest assured that tens of millions of people who have never met you know and love you for precisely who you are because unlike almost anyone else you have built your career by letting them do that and that is both remarkable and a true refuge at a time like this keep your chin up my friend you