Joe Rogan surprised by revelation of who ended America's 'woke period'
During the latest episode of the Joe Rogan Experience on July 2, Masad (pictured) claimed that many companies recently went through a 'woke period where you couldn't talk about certain things,' like the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. 'Has that gone away?' Rogan asked, leading Masad to smile and reply, 'Yeah, yeah, totally gone away.' When Rogan followed up by asking what changed the culture so quickly, Masad simply said 'Elon.'
The Replit CEO then added that Musk's purchase of Twitter (now called X) completely removed the stigma of voicing opposing viewpoints in public and online. 'Buying Twitter is the single most impactful thing for free speech. Especially on these issues of being able to talk freely about a lot of subjects that are more sensitive,' Masad explained. Masad, a Jordanian-American whose family is from Palestine, noted that he had faced fierce criticism from colleagues for talking publicly about the situation in Gaza.
Despite calling himself a 'moderate Palestinian,' Masad said he has been called anti-Semitic for supporting a two-state solution, which includes protections for Israelis, in the region. While speaking about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Rogan claimed that society was devolving into groups of people being convinced by their leaders that another group of people were their enemies. 'It's [expletive] insane. And the fact that it's still going on in 2025, with all we know about corruption and the theft of resources and power and influence, it's crazy that this is still happening,' Rogan said during the podcast.
Masad then said he hoped the internet was starting to reach its potential as a platform for opening minds and removing the 'veil of propaganda and ignorance.' 'It was starting to happen in like 2010, 2011. And then you saw YouTube start to close down. You saw Facebook start to close down, Twitter. And suddenly, we had like this period of darkness,' the tech entrepreneur said. Although Rogan said that this censorship initially had good intentions of trying to weed out hate speech, it quickly went too far when tech companies began silencing 'malinformation.'
Malinformation is a term used to describe truthful information that is still censored because social media companies and governments claim these facts are harmful to the overall public good. 'That's crazy. You're turning adults into infants, and you're turning the state into God. This is the secular religion. This is the religion of people that are atheists,' Rogan warned. 'The west was never about that. The west was about individual liberty,' Masad replied. The two men then shifted back to Musk's takeover of X, with Rogan arguing that the changes the CEO instituted 'opened up discussion.'
While Rogan said that the changes meant to promote more freedom, such as reduced content moderation and restoring suspended accounts, allowed more hate speech to sneak back into X, he argued that more people are now able to tell the difference between news and propaganda. 'You have a lot of people that are recognizing actual true facts that are very inconvenient to the narrative that's displayed on mainstream media,' Rogan said. After Musk purchased Twitter in 2022, he noted that his goal was to 'maximize free speech.'
Musk has also repeatedly called out what he referred to as the 'woke mind virus' that was threatening society. During an appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience in November, Musk blamed woke culture for attempting to censor humor and satire, with polarizing topics like social justice essentially becoming off-limits to criticism. 'The woke ideology makes humor illegal. There are so many humor no-fly zones. You can't make fun of anything,' Musk told Rogan in 2024. 'At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It basically gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel, armored in false virtue,' Musk added during a 2021 interview with satire website the Babylon Bee.
In the wake of Musk's acquisition of X, other major tech and social media platforms have caved to mounting pressure to roll back censorship online. In March, lawmakers in Washington subpoenaed officials at Google, demanding they turn over company records tied to the censorship of Americans during the Biden presidency.
Republicans have long accused the Biden Administration of pressuring major companies into censoring free speech during and after the coronavirus pandemic, which Rogan and Masan also criticized during the July 2 podcast. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also publicly confessed that both Meta and Facebook censored conservative opinions on an 'industrial scale' during this time.
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