Check out this video of Joe Rogan clarifying his views on the COVID vaccines.

I’ll focus on this excerpt at the 2:50 min mark

Here’s the thing. These are not like planned statements. Let’s be real clear. When I say something stupid, I’m not thinking about what I’m going to say before I say it. I’m just. saying it, right? I don’t have an off-air and an on-air voice. I don’t. I have me. This is it. I got through the fucking net and I’m swimming in open waters, okay? And that’s just how I live. If you say you disagree with me, I probably disagree with me too. I disagree with me all the time.

This illustrates a big problem. Way too many of us are walking around thinking that we need to talk only in prepared statements that are approved by our tribe. This is abnormal and stifled conversation, unhealthy for civilization. We need to get back to the idea that conversation is a collaborative enterprise where we listen charitably and test each others’ statements with the aim being that we can figure something out together, rather than trying to “win.” Meaningful conversations are always somewhat messy works in progress. This is the HxA way.

We need to reset the dial so that our public conversations better resemble our private thoughts. Currently, many people are out there listening in order to harpoon you as though the only thing you uttered (out of 100 things) is that one clunky thing that offended them, ignoring that conversation and thinking are processes by which we should be incrementally working our way toward truth, together.

Thus, I appreciate what Joe Rogan said in this clip. When we have conversations, we should not reading prepared inner scripts. That would not be real conversation. There should be a lot of missteps, especially when we are grappling with complex issues. We should always be charitable listeners, giving the speaker their best foot forward (until and unless they exhibit bad faith). We should always be willing to point out where we agree with the others before criticizing the one thing we disagree with. That establishes trust and opens up a robust conversation where all participants come away with a changed understanding of the others or of the world. This approach exhibits basic decency–it is the approach marriage counselors urge in order to keep marriages healthy, as indicated by John Gottman. It applies to the rest of us too.

One last thing. There are a lot of people out there engaging in nasty sport rather than conversation. They are wearing their language police hats, demanding compliance with their own standards of political propriety. I often wonder how they talk with each other in the privacy of their own homes, however. Do they demand trigger warnings from each other in their living rooms? Do they jump on each other for failing to use the proper pronoun? I suspect that they freely and privately admit facts that they condemn in public.

We need to urge each other to see live-time public conversation as an opportunity to learn from each other and to freely admit our low confidence levels and ignorance of some of the things we’d like to believe. We need to speak in public much more like the way we think and converse privately.