Edward Snowden on The Joe Rogan Experience [video]
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He will be remembered for a long time because of the actions he took, but if he had not done anything else, his book would be remembered on its own as a discourse on what being human means in these times. But, it will never be viewed on its own, and that is a tragedy.
Pardon Snowden.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8um6lImuWQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio
Mostly the legal system is not encouraged to be politically correct.
Mr. Snowden broke his oath and leaked confidential data. His defense is the greater good. That should prevent prosecution.
Mr. Clapper lied to Congress when he said "Not Wittingly."
Mrs. Clinton failed to safeguard confidential data.
Others have broken the law, and they are not prosecuted.
We should prosecute those who break the law. They should defend themselves accordingly.
The real solution to this mess is for Congress to pass a law that exposing illegal activities is allowed. Wait - they did! The whistleblower protections don't work. More corruption.
Do you mean prevent conviction or are you taking the stance claiming "the greater good" means you shouldn't be tried?
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/17/us/politics/obama-commute...
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/2/donald-trump...
What can you do, when the institution you should report illegal acts to, is the one perpetrating them?
The government won't let that happen. They'll say that, for national security reasons, the public can't be allowed to know the actual impact of the secrets he disclosed. And if we can't see the impact, it's impossible to weigh judgment.
Democracy can't work in the face of such secrecy.
That’s his whole point. But if you truly care about the law, shouldn’t government officials also be put on trial for breaking the law on a much more massive scale?
> Our Congress has 535 members for precisely this reason, the president answers to Congress and is not a king, and even the Chief Justice does not rule absolutely.
The reason he went public is precisely because the system of checks and balances didn’t work in the first place. In case you’ve forgotten, government officials actively kept members of congress in the dark and even lied under oath.
He touches on this in the podcast. He claims the vast majority of Congress had no clue and only the Gang of Eight had that access. If true, the implication is that the full representation of the People was not present to provide those checks and balances
Does it change anything for you if it wasn't just his opinion, but some sort of majority consensus instead—even if that only arrives in the history books? (Only asking in principle, as a hypothetical—not making the claim that Snowden in fact was right.)
There seems to be a fundamental problem with what you're proposing here—of course the vigilante approach is riddled with obvious issues too, but I just want to point out that what you're describing isn't clearly an effective way of dealing with things either.
You're basically saying the system works and we should trust it to evaluate and handle Snowden correctly: we have Congress, and they'll make the right choices if not the president.
But, the giant government programs exposed by Snowden are already a striking example of how we can't rely on Congress, at least to handle this matter correctly. Why would we assume the same entity which created the problems that were exposed is going to then handle the exposer fairly?
(I don't know the precise link between the exposed programs and Congress—so maybe they are separate/unrelated enough that my suggestion is inaccurate.)
“If I’d made preexisting arrangements to fly to a specific country and seek asylum, for example, I would’ve been called a foreign agent of that country. Meanwhile, if I returned to my own country, the best I could hope for was to be arrested upon landing and charged under the Espionage Act. That would’ve entitled me to a show trial deprived of any meaningful defense, a sham in which all discussion of the most important facts would be forbidden.
“The major impediment to justice was a major flaw in the law, a purposeful flaw created by the government. Someone in my position would not even be allowed to argue in court that the disclosures I made to journalists were civically beneficial. Even now, years after the fact, I would not be allowed to argue that the reporting based on my disclosures had caused Congress to change certain laws regarding surveillance, or convinced the courts to strike down a certain mass surveillance program as illegal, or influenced the attorney general and the president of the United States to admit that the debate over mass surveillance was a crucial one for the public to have, one that would ultimately strengthen the country. All these claims would be deemed not just irrelevant but inadmissible in the kind of proceedings that I would face were I to head home. The only thing my government would have to prove in court is that I disclosed classified information to journalists, a fact that is not in dispute. “This is why anyone who says I have to come back to the States for trial is essentially saying I have to come back to the States for sentencing, and the sentence would, now as then, surely be a cruel one. The penalty for disclosing top secret documents, whether to foreign spies or domestic journalists, is up to ten years per document.”
Excerpt From: Edward Snowden. “Permanent Record.” Apple Books.
We see this with Mr. Clapper "not wittingly" testimony to congress.
We see this with the Lavabit case.
When the game is rigged, your only option is not to play. I am occasionally encouraged by our country's judicial system doing something right. The fact that this is astonishingly rare is the canonical problem, circular to the issue Mr. Snowden raises.
The federal courts embraced this quasi-faux legal perspective that they could capture data and store it and then post-hoc get a warrant for the previously captured data. This is is corrupt and immoral. In general this is the reason I believe Mr. Snowden should not present himself for trial, because we do not have ethical folks in the courts or congress who will give him a fair trial.
> he was also wrong
what do you mean?
At least that's how I parse the language itself, and I've also heard this position from numerous acquaintances.
The problem here isn't even so much the government is being shady - that has happened before, it will happen again. I can understand people not feeling threatened by constant snooping even though I disagree.
To me the real problem is how effectively the government has kept this subject from creeping into the public debate. The scary part is the secret laws and precedents that elected officials aren't allowed to even tell their constituents about. Government officials are not reliable; this is far to much unaccountable power even if people involved were allowed to discuss what is happening.
Why aren't the not-technically-interesting parts of this wiretapping program legal for government agencies to talk about? If they need to be hidden, why not go straight to the logical conclusion and classify a bunch of other laws?
Democracies can't handle this level of secrecy. The whole thing is going to fall apart one way or another - the path America is going down isn't stable at all; something is going to have to change radically. Either the intelligence agencies will gain supremacy over the government, the government itself will go rogue or the secrecy will have to end.
EDIT I'm going to bed before I see the whole video, but around 1:46:00 - the bit with J. Clapper. Case in point that the whole system of checks and balances can't work.
EDIT2 And around 2:10:00. Barbaric stuff; it is like centuries of accumulated Common Law and parliamentary legal tradition never happened. People need to be able to occasionally talk about this stuff in formal setting.
Snowden is pointing out an issue. And he has done it with courage that I massively respect. You hardly see it these days. And that makes it anxiety and fear inducing, as the solutions are unknown.
But think of it this way - tomorrow someone might hand you a diagnosis of cancer. You can freak out about it or you can find a Cancer specialist to see what options are available. Asking the technician who gave you the report what the odds are, doesn't make any sense. He knows only how to create the report.
In this case just look to history, to understand how these things play out. History is the Oncologist.
Intelligence agencies have hard problems to deal with. On top of it, they are giant bureaucracies which means cockups, incompetence, turf wars, hiding issues are the norm. All that amplifies the problems, causes defensiveness, over-reactions and reactions to reactions.
If you read the history (and these days there are tons of resources) this sequence of events (of overreach) has unfolded a thousand times. There are a whole bunch programmes that have been shutdown because one group or the other got carried away or did damage. That history (in out current environment of over information/disinformation/misinformation) is what will always be a source of hope and faith.
The oncologist deals with the consequences of the observation: communicate with the patient, gives advices on treatments, makes a therapy plan, deals with families, answer to their questions, takes the hit when the relatives think that the solution is not good enough or an Indian shaman could cure everything with snake's poison.
Snowden have done good, but escaped from the consequences of his actions.
A position that made everything he's done questionable
Had he faced a trial, even the most unfair of trials, would have put him in the position of being at least true to the values he was trying to protect.
Question the authority, suffer the consequences.
Question the authority, go to Russia is not what generally the public opinion accepts as "honest".
There is much to say also about who leaked the data but didn't protect the source.
The identity of deep throat has been made public after Nixon was already dead for years and Mark Felt was already an old man suffering from dementia.
I’m pretty sure questioning the authority without fear of retaliation is what the first amendment is supposed to be about. But that aside, your phrasing is a bit misleading. Snowden didn’t question the government. He exposed illegal activities by the government.
I find it interesting that you posit Deep Throat's approach as somehow more noble. If Snowden had anonymously leaked and kept on working would that have been less questionable or more honest?
This is a good point. In an ideal world their job would be less...complicated. So our job as intelligent, capable citizens is to make the system more ideal for them to do their duties.
Making a "captive workforce" out of AI tools and robots is, to me, the ideal solution. Either way it's inevitable. Since no one else will, I'm trying to get out ahead with thoughtful early planning. Communicating a common goal for the nation without fear is the way to get the technology into the hands of the right people. It's up to us, the intelligent and "good people" communicators, to push for it.
Very true. For example I think Marx did a great analysis but his solutions lacked. Same happens often in medicine. People who observe something are asked to also explain it. But if they can’t explain the observation it doesn’t mean the observation is wrong.
The problem is how to be sure the line get not crossed ?
I think a lot of our problems stem from the undermining of our system of checks and balances, and whatever is up with the fourth estate. I'm digressing, but I recall a time when journalists would be roasting public officials over these issues.
I think it was clear and overt during the Bush era that there were some dubious claims thrown around about "we need this to prevent another 9/11", with "this" being vague, broad, varying with the particular speaker. It was disappointing to many when Obama embraced some of these conclusions.
I based this on my theory that there are things that the general public does not know, and will never know, that influence the decisions POTUS makes. Until you are privy to that information, it’s easy to take a contrarian viewpoint. Once you have the information, and the responsibility for making decisions that might save American lives, it’s a lot harder.
I’m not saying that any of these policies are right or wrong, or that the general public should be kept in the dark about whatever it is we’re being kept in the dark about. It’s just a theory I have about how the world works. I have no way of proving or disproving it, but I think the evidence supports it.
If it weren't partisan politics, you wouldn't be seeing roughly 15 senior officials from the NSA/CIA/FBI leaving the public sector to take jobs at CNN & MSNBC.
I'm curious why most people don't find this to be deeply disturbing.
I think you are conflating a few issues.
On the one hand there is the bipartisan surveillance issue that Snowden shined a light on.
More recently we have a bunch of Trump and anti-Trump narratives and sometimes conspiracy theories.
I suspect some people on the thread have squished those into one. But the intelligence community is likely complicated, motivations multi-faceted, people holding diverse opinions. I don't think these things are the same, or you can dismiss or endorse one cause for the other.
If you look into the folks who were in the spotlight pushing "we need this to prevent another 9/11" they were mostly former military and some with intelligence connections... but the real connection was their political connections.
Many outright stated the information they were provided to go on TV with came from politically associated groups not some secretive internal policy. In fact intelligence groups internally pushed back on some of the claims and political appointees ignored them.
The government isn't given the trust needed to regulate or otherwise do its job efficiently. See various civil engineering projects, explosive cost growth whenever contractors compete for bids. People justify that as evidence that governments as inherently inefficient.
Government is abusing civil liberties through spying on everyday Americans. Relatively nobody cares.
The government is being corrupt, privileging senators' pet projects or program over the good of the nation. See the Senate Launch System. Nobody cares except space nerds. At the same time, NASA also supported the various effort to commercialize space, which is a major win.
What do you propose as the magical "proper" incentivisation?
If nobody cared, the only illegal domestic data collection program in the Snowden docs wouldn't have been shut down. It has been.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsas-...
If nobody cared, Google wouldn't have encrypted its cross-datacenter traffic. It has.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2014/03/staying-at-forefront-of...
The media won't carry a story that their numbers tell them doesn't have legs with the audience.
Why is that?
The two communities above are receptive to messages about government overreach and corruption, the general public seems not to care much.
I suspect this is largely because libertarians and conspiracy theorists (which do overlap to some extent) are already skeptical of government "goodness" and anything that feeds that skepticism is easily accepted. The general public places government on a higher moral plane of existence and any challenge to that is met with skepticism and excuses.
The end result is that those that speak out/expose the government are sidelined and punished through smears or government action. See: Attacks on Gabbard, Ron Paul, Snowden, Bill Binney, Assange, etc.
It always fascinated me that the discussion of the leaked Clinton emails conveniently focused on the speculative source and motivation, never on the content of the emails with valid DKIM signatures. There is literally no question that those emails are real and unaltered.
Fake whistleblower: still works for CIA, whistleblowing has purely political rather than administrative effects, and ongoing adulation in the press.
If you don't want to see this on HN, then downvote and move on.
A whistleblower that is heavily covered in the media because he or she aligns with the orginization's goals (sell headlines) is not 'fake'.
A whistleblower blowing the whistle on a hierarchy unable to directly fire him will also, not surprisingly, not lose his job.
The others sited didn't follow the legal procedure which would have allowed them to also enjoy whistleblower protection.
No True Whistleblower gets "glowing plaudits" and "ongoing adulation".
What is their name? IDK. What exactly did they hear? IDK. From who did they hear it from? IDK.
People here seem awfully sure about something they know nothing about.
How so?
Take the lessons of Manufacturing Consent and apply them to the contemporary political context instead of Vietnam and East Timor, even if the elite media seems to be aligned with your own political beliefs.
But I don't see any reason to belive that it constitutes 'controlling the media'.
Well you are on a technical discussion board. There are many people here who are in the position Snowden described there. You can bring your brick to this discussion without having to become a hero as he said. This would push a public debate if you'd kept it up.
Why isn't it happening?
Maybe the government doesn't have to do anything at all and it's still not happening.
"You can't awaken somebody who pretends to be asleep" goes for all sides.
Can't any member of congress simply use the speech and debate clause to make what they know a matter of congressional record?
> When I hear you just speak, I go "actually this is a thoughtful guy."
When he validates Joe, he validates Joe's audience, and it becomes Snowden's audience. He did this with Trevor Noah too; I think he's intentional about it while very cleverly appearing not to be. It's a good thing Snowden is the one who blew that whistle, and not somebody less calculating.
It's very likely that a lot of less calculating would-be Snowdens are lying in unmarked graves out there somewhere.
It was an interesting discussion however.
For a long time there was a view that attention spans were diminishing. Facebook and Tik Tok reduced content to the smallest possible dosage.
But look at this. This is one of the world's most popular podcasts and it's nearly three hours long. You see it too in TV: what is a Netflix series but a 13 hour movie?
I see a definite trend towards long form content right now, which I think is quite positive.
High-speed internet has blown open the information bandwidth cap so that now content can be created for every attention niche. This is just anecdotal, but it seems to me part of the decline of traditional journalism has to do with article length. People either want short, snappy headlines that tell them the essential information, or long, elaborately-written pieces thousands of words long. The only reason mid-length articles existed before was a compromise between the two groups.
Online audiovisual content is refreshing in that it lasts exactly as long as the creator(s) intended to treat the topic. Likewise for article length in blogs.
With newer media, it doesn't matter if you have a 22 minute episode 1 and a 47 minute episode 2 - you create the scene, shot and/or episode length that works for you artistically.
The show is successful because it knows that Google exists - it knows there's a universe of information outside the bounds of the show. It provides the gestalt and it's up to the listener to explore the details.
Joe's issues are that can be long winded at times, and he fails to press people on some issues which occasionally sucks (the first episode with Jack Dorsey, the last episode with Alex Jones, or the recent episode with Bob Lazaar). Most of the time, however, that's exactly what I want. I don't want two blowhards shouting at each other, I want two people trying to understand each other's ideas and to learn something new from it.
I don't have time for most of this drawn out content.
(I did listen to the entire Joe Rogan - Snowden podcast but that was a first)
Then you cannot listen to many. Joe speaks so much bollox with an authoritative air that if you didn't know the subject you would think that Joe did, when many many times he clearly does not.
I agree they are interesting when he lets the guest speak (even if completely disagree with them) or it is on something Joe does know about / has researched. But that is far from all the time.
Joe also has a habit of ignoring the guest at times and carrying on down his own little conversation alley, usually when he got too stoned - which ruins the conversation IMO
I agree that he tends to bring up his favorite topics all the time, which gets a bit repetitive but it's ok. You can't expect him to run hundred of conversations without being repetitive.
To me this is as good as it gets for a talk show that has a wide ranging set of topics like the JRE. Joe Rogan isn’t an expert and doesn’t pretend to be unbiased on all issues. His community, I think, understands his limitations. He just runs a good conversation, and that’s all I want to hear.
The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease.
And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims.
He is also into things like moon landing conspiracies and all that good stuff that generate a lot of internet traffic, but I think in a bit of a hypocritical way as I'm pretty sure he doesn't really believe in any of that stuff and just talks about it for the clicks.
Chris Kresser is not an "acupuncturist". And this is a classic ad-hominen ;-)
Joe kept interrupting Khan because Khan was avoiding answering the asked questions.
And Chris kept mentioning the elephant in the room, which is that the randomized-controlled trials (the gold standard in nutrition) don't show a statistically significant link between heart disease and meat or saturated fat consumption and that's a fact, being also the subject of recent meta analysis, that used GRADE to reach the conclusion that there is no good evidence for the claim that meat causes cancer and that adults should probably continue their current meat consumption:
https://examine.com/nutrition/red-meat-is-good-for-you-now/
This isn't to say that meat or saturated fat is good or bad, but if listening to such a podcast causes anger at the people daring to question a "cardiologist with 20 years of experience", then maybe you should consider that you yourself have stepped in the land of ideology / religion and that's just not compatible with science or health for that matter.
The problem of putting someone with acupuncture training debating a cardiologist is that, in the eyes of that huge audience, he presents those opinions as perfectly equivalent, alternative to each other and equally valid.
When in fact, one person has basically no idea of what he is talking about, but in the eyes of the public, and because they are put side by side, they are seen as equivalent when they are not.
Why not put him against a non-vegan cardiologist then? Someone at least with equivalent training.
From a scientific point of view, the only diet that as ever shown to stop the progression of heart disease is a whole-food plant-based diet.
Khan replied to the questions, not sure why you are saying he avoided anything. It's obvious that Joe took Kresser side during the debate.
What kind of tough questions did he ask Kresser compared to Khan?
They said that although a link exists, its not worth it for people to change their diet, which has triggered outrage on the scientific community.
One of the authors of the studies meta-analysed complained that he never saw such as misrepresentation of the data.
The author of the meta-analysis is someone with strong financial links to the meat industry, so thay study is suspect, to say the least.
When you open someone up after a heart attack, what do you find clogging their veins? It's cholesterol. What happens when you eat cholesterol? Your cholesterol serum goes up.
If Joe could have found a serious cardiologist that would claim that cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, he would have long invited him to the show.
But the best he could come up with is Kris Kresser, which kind of says it all.
> The other day he set up a debate on nutrition where he covered the topic of heart disease, and he put a cardiologist (Dr. Khan) with 20 years of experience debating with an acupuncturist (Kris Kresser) on the causes of heart disease. And he kept interrupting the doctor and taking the acupuncturist side on the most absurd claims
I haven't listened that episode, or really many Joe Rogan podcasts at all. But isn't that kinda the opposite of an echo chamber? He had two guests on with opposing viewpoints, and gave both of them a fair shake, even when one of the guests had an minority (absurd) opinion?
Medical science is able to speak with brilliant clarity hard-earned from centuries of experimentation on the topic of heart disease.
If I hear a discourse involving a cardiologist and a layperson, and it's not really made apparent who is the expert and who is not, then I call that an echo chamber.
Or maybe he just finds it interesting? I find myself on paranormal sites from time to time even though I know it's 100% (or at least 99.9%) bullshit. It's still fun to read.
There is already so much scientific ignorance in the general public, there is so much misrepresentation of science already.
A ton of people actually believe thinks like the Earth is flat, Joe many times gives a voice to that type of quacks for clicks.
His podcast many times acts as a vehicle for spreading ignorance, other than that yes its entertaining and people should know better. But often they don't and that's the problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_k
He used to believe that, and now he doesn't.
He will gladly give his huge platform to the most complete wacko as long as it makes a good story and gets him his clicks, spreading a ton of misinformation and reinforcing common ignorant beliefs in the process.
Counterpoint:
Be brave about hearing stupid arguments. They are a whetting stone for your own thoughts.
It is not smart, courageous, healthy or prudent to prevent yourself from being exposed to bad ideas.
But as a whole, I do find that he has a very wide variety of guests which show all sorts of view point. Just don't take what you hear in any single podcast as absolute truth.
Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac. - "M.S. L.Ac." means Master of Science, Licensed Acupuncturist. This is his formal training, all I'm saying is that he shouldn't be presented as an expert to Joe Rogan's audience in the topic he was interviewed on.
He's the best out there now as he's got the pick of his guests (the result of a forward feedback loop of being a good interviewer).
But view/listen to enough of them and you'll learn to pick the gems from the drivel, like almost everything.
There are of course the interviews which are actually him being interviewed (he does most of the talking)... But I think that's part of why it makes for good listening. He keeps the conversation going. Even with a reticent guest, most interviews go for 2 hours or more. So in the end you extract something useful out of it.
Joe does little research on most guests (mostly due to the sheer volume of guests I'm sure), which could be a more stylistic choice if he were a deft interviewer who could think on his feet and dig deep anyway, but he's not. He's an everyman and asks very surface-level questions. As you say guests are (usually) given wide latitude to own the mic, which works great when it's a guest with a compelling narrative. It works terribly when the guest is very ideological or has some sort of agenda they are adept at selling.
The times he does challenge a guest (sometimes way too aggressively as others in the thread have shown), oftentimes he has missed the point entirely, and the guest has to back up and try to patch the conversation. Once that happens a couple times the flow of the interview is really disturbed and it takes a long time to recover.
I like Joe as a person, and admire his discipline, but to call him a master interviewer would be as accurate as calling him a master comedian because he has been grinding so long.
For a supremely frustrating example of Rogan not 'getting it' listen to the last hour-ish of JRE#1350 with Nick Bostrom, where Joe simply can't wrap his head around The Simulation Argument.
He mentioned this actually few times and its interesting that he learnt to be patient and non-combative no non-issues.
Half of the time i pay attention to how he runs the podcast instead of actual conversations.
That one was not well-reasoned or patient, but other than that, I've found almost all of Joe's podcasts to be very good. He's definitely one of the greatest interviewers on the planet right now.
That's also because most news networks don't have the luxury (or the willingness) to do 2 hours interviews with a single person in the first place. They need to make things short so they can drown you with ads at every break.
On the other hand, it feels like most of the podcasts have a shallow content level if you are already familiar with the subject, and sometimes the conversation/questions tend to go into the stoner mysticism realm.
But mostly Joe gets it spot on and does a great interview. What this does to popular discourse? When a small % of the population watch these types of long form interview and get deep, thoughtful and insightful answers to complex ideas .... and some % of the population watch Fox and read tabloids to get their news.
How does society fix this huge knowledge divide?
Bostrom really failed there. He simply did not explain the argument very well. Everything Bostrom said is clear to someone who already understands the argument or has experience with statistics, but it was not at all a good explanation for someone who doesn't have the necessary intuitions to understand why they are more likely to be a simulated agent.
Average number of words per article was 764.
While you can get long form fewer and fewer people read it, myself included. If a major player like the BBC resort to news in an average of 764 words the majority of people are not getting deep/insightful/challenging news or information.
In my 20s I used to read long form broadsheet articles on a Sunday, I don't seem to have the attention for it any more. Even articles from hacker news that are too long I just go straight to the comments to get a digest. I suspect my mobile phone addiction is to blame, even last week I signed up for blinkist after I tried to read Ray Dalios Principles for the third time and didn't have the attention for it when I saw an ad for the summary on blinkist and just signed up.
Not sure what point I'm trying to make but I just believe super shortform, dopamine induced hit of information may be detrimental to me/society in the long run.
*edited as table of data not displaying correctly
I also imagine on some other forum out there someone is lamenting the popularity of the Joe Rogan Experience while the media of their liking gets even less exposure, and wondering how they fix that knowledge divide in society.
- Why should it?
- Isnt the divide inevitable anyway (X knows about Shakespeare, Y knows about quantum theory, Z knows how to grow corn...)
When he interviews people from tech, it’s usually cringeworthy for me. And very entertaining in fields I know little of.
You should check out #947 - Ron Miscavige [1]. It is the one episode that comes to mind where JR's behavior and impatience really bothers me. The guy's story is quite sad and Joe seemed distant and distracted the entire time.
I imagine that being stuck in Russia, with the pressure he's under has contributed to this. I do wonder how much of this personality bubble was in place when he made the decisions he did.
Nevertheless, I do have a love hate relationship with what he did.
Hate - revealed to the world endless amounts of national security data that was not directly relevant to these constitutional encroachments.
He worked with journalists in order to avoid this. He gave the government a head's up before the press released anything everytime they released something new.
What more do you think he should have done?
How were those documents not still incredibly valuable and shed a lot of information on the functioning of the American Empire. US citizens should just be interested in their constitutional rights, but also in the absolute shit-show that is their foreign policy.
Sadly those insights got mostly ignored, as the US really has no actual foreign policy debate anymore.
I would've wished they talked about a bit more about other topics to see what Snowden and his opinions are like outside of the general theme of mass surveillance. At the 2 hour mark, Joe tries to switch and asks about his current day-to-day life. But they switch back to the main theme after about 10 minutes.
To have snowden speak uninterrupted for 3 hours, especially on a podcast where Joe usually interrupts people, was a blessing.
Edward Snowden: How Your Cell Phone Spies on You:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFns39RXPrU
Edward Snowden on America and Russia’s Diplomatic Woes:
He caused me to question what it means to be a patriot.
He drove me to learn about the importance of open-source encryption software for storing (VeraCrypt) and transporting data through networks (VPN).
Knowledge is your power over your government.
2. First time Joe has done a podcast with someone OTA (as far as I know)
Regardless, Joe's getting so many good interviews in the past two years.
I wouldn’t want to see a Sean Penn/El Chapo incident[0] happen with these two.
[0] https://theintercept.com/2016/01/12/sean-penn-el-chapo-opsec...
Joe has been a better journalist than 99% of real journalists. Makes pretty much everyone else look like an amateur at this.
I kind of wanted to checkout Joes podcasts on the go, but I don’t want to listen to the whole 2 or 3 hours. Instead, a list of topics with timestamps would be much better. So I hacked together a little feed and a player doing just that.
This episode is also already live:
https://joeroganplayer.com/episodes/1368
Granted, it’s all done manually at the moment, but I share the work with friends also interested in this.
Joe Rogan Experience #1214 - Lawrence Lessig is really good one.
Prior to that, my experience with Shapiro was the stupid videos people would share on Facebook of him "OWNING the libs." So I expected an absolutely terrible interview where I was going to be disgusted with the guy constantly. Granted, I don't agree with him on a lot, much at all really, but when he's just talking out his views on points, I appreciated the candor as to reasoning for various things on his end.
My takeaway from it, outside of the "for the clicks" YouTube videos that are shared, is that while I may not agree with him on a lot, when he is explaining his points and not going for the jugular, I feel like he isn't questioning my intelligence by tossing various falsehoods at me constantly that I then have to go look up. Instead, it is typically analysis of a situation followed by a conclusion I don't personally reach typically.
And had it not been for the Shapiro interviews on JRE, I'd have just continued to outright ignore this guy as another "provocateur" out for the clicks and shares.
It definitely helps me to see how other people might think about a topic which they may not be able to articulate well.
He certainly reaches some strange conclusions, but it is fascinating to see how someone gets to that point and try to better understand other viewpoints.
Just finished listening to richard dawkins earlier this week
The politically and professionally diverse guests they are able to get, no doubt with the assistance of Joe himself, is absolutely incredible. You rarely see a show where you can have an extreme right wing radio host be a guest, only to have a slew of high profile left wing candidates on months later, with zero fucks given in making sure it's family-friendly.
I really don't think that his actions were clearly thought out and he won't get a pass any time soon.
The second half of your first paragraph suggests otherwise so I'm kinda confused.
My conclusion is that part of his reveal was clearly naive and that it doesn't have any value regarding citizens or national improvement (incompetence in big groups ? color me surprised).
He would have been more beneficial to sleep on the knowledge for a while, filter what's important and find better leverage to make a change. Something less naive.
When he talks, only very rarely I hear something relevant. At best, his good points are:
- shift toward abusing surveillance technology
- paradoxical laws regarding accountability of the government (you cannot have a fair assessment of government actions if it's illegal to look at it)
- a bad government can abuse long stored data against you
But really he's babbling for hours and very few comes out at even surprising. NSA had access to network/deep packets long before Google and even 9/11. Yes we all have smartphones.. boohoo, it's well known that these are potential privacy backdoors. People just don't care, or at best the rich enough will buy an iphone (if Apple is really that good regarding crypto and privacy).
Again, that's just an opinion right now, if someone can shed a light on what's important in his case, please do, I'll read carefully.
ps: there's also a lot of moments where he's mostly telling his life which I find disturbingly immature in tone.
Theses guys just shared naked pics of peoples ...
This kind of power corrupt ...
First, he is willing to give a voice to many who won't be able to tell their stories on mass media.
Who other will let speak people like James Damore? What major broadcaster is willing to interview Jordan Peterson without protraiting him as a villain?
He respects his guest, when in disagrement. His interview to Jack Dorsey (not much of his liking, I presume), was criticised for not being aggresive enough.
The interviewed is not afraid of a headline out of context.
Given the current political climate, I'm not suprised a MMA guy is capable of doing what most journalists don't.
https://www.quora.com/How-much-money-does-Joe-Rogan-make-fro...
For example (in my case) if you listen on Apple Podcasts you can hear 5 minutes of him talking about brands. These brands probably pay him tens of thousands per episode to get a shoutout. Pretty sure YT may make a good contribution, but not so much that he relies on it.
I assumed it did and they got cut out?
Not a fan of Stephen Crowder (sp?), but that interview was pretty uncomfortable. Generally though, yeah, I think he does well interviewing people.
Edit: The people downvoting me are hypocrites. The function of downvoting to make something less visible. Are you saying what I say has less value and should therefore have a lesser platform?
But to be serious, everyone acknowledges that what some people say is of more value than what other people say, and should be seen by more people. We just disagree on what the things that have value are. And your insistence on arguing about the former, rather than the latter is tiresome and dishonest.
/s
Surely you understand that what you're suggesting here is totalitarian? The value you mention is the strengthening of a society where freedom of ideas is considered a core value.
Unlike you though, I think freedom of speech trumps everything. You should be free to espouse your unfortunate views, as should everyone else. When you deny a voice to people you just drive the thinking underground where they get stuck in an echo chamber like Nchan with no moderating or criticizing voices. That's the real danger.
I'd much rather have neo-nazis giving talks at universities where people won't take them seriously, boo them, and debate them than escalating in an 8chan echo chamber until someone does something radical like a mass shooting.
This is me pushing back against your ideology and hopefully providing a small check to the certainty with which you hold your views. Slightly more productive than trying to silence you.
Though, as much airtime as Rogan has given to conspiracy theories- I guess it makes sense that it turns my recommendations into absolute nonsense
My unpopular opinion: Whistleblowers shouldn't be punished in a rogue state.
I wonder how / if it is possible to convince the public that laws and oversight are necessary for good government.
The public learns the lesson that X is necessary when they see the consequence of not-X. Hopefully there is a gap between total lawlessness and the public realising that some laws are good and not just "red tape".
An alternate response to "Things aren't bad enough for people to change their ways," is to revise our predictions of the likelihood of catastrophe, and eventually decide that perhaps things aren't quite as doomed as we think.
For things like climate change, where we have scientific evidence of the necessity of change, it seems like it needs to get worse before the change will happen, though I still don't hope for things to get worse. But for something as subjective as civic values, it seems especially wrong to me to hope for disaster just for the sake of shaking things up. After all, there's no guarantee that a disaster under Trump would move civic values in the right direction anyway.
- Richard Nixon
The attitude is not a new phenomenon at all.
- DJT
The problem here is not that the people in power want to "question" the laws, they're literally ignoring them and breaking them, in secret, without the consent of the people.
It's only when this stuff is uncovered that these perpetrators shift to "questioning"-- as though it's a open debate, it's not.
His recent statements about the emoluments clause.
The list goes on.
That's not someone looking into strange random laws as part of an effort to improve government, that is questioning things purely to further his personal goals / enrich himself personally.
The spying was equally supported by the Democrats as well as Republicans. They further try to restrict freedom on the net by their newest attempt with the CASE law. It is one of the most consistent pattern of established parties.
Trump didn't win because it would be helpful for his base. It is to evict people that failed to bring forth sensible policies.
It is reactionary, but perfectly understandable. If everyone ignores the rules, we will do that too.
I am no American, but that is what it looks like.
>It is to evict people that failed to bring forth sensible policies.
What policies? Doesn't every new politician claim exactly that?
Because he has a pretty clean alibi for not implementing mass surveillance.
In the case of the massive spying by government we are dealing with secret laws and/or the executive branch writing its own law. This is not very compatible with democracy.
The separation of powers in three branches is not strictly necessary for a democracy, just a mechanism through witch it is attained. Surely, there could be examples where the powers are slpit another way that could still qualify as democracies.
If, somehow, the will of the people were to accept spying as a cornerstone of their society, trading privacy for safety, would it still be a democracy?
Anyways, sorry, for nitpitcking, but something just sounds... incomplete in your answer.
It's an interesting question. For reasons like that I prefer to talk about liberties, which include privacy and the need for authority to be checked. These are of greater necessity than universal suffrage, though having representatives of the people elected for set terms certainly can help to put a check on authority, it's not always a guarantee of that! How often have tyrants been voted into power.
> Montesquieu actually specified that the independence of the judiciary has to be real, and not merely apparent. The judiciary was generally seen as the most important of the three powers, independent and unchecked, but it is also likely to claim to be the least dangerous one.
He also touches on this in the video (around the 1h40m mark). It seems quite difficult to keep our democracies in check if the judiciary doesn't really hold real power.
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Really wish he had gone that route instead of the one he chose - and we'll never know for sure how pure his intentions were/are because of it.
HN doesn't seem to be much better than reddit in this regard
This issue is super duper clear but nobody seems to "get" it.
Too enamored with the idea of a folk hero to consider the fallout from a long view perspective.