I think Rogan is just going where the money is, which is low-key pandering to the "alt-right" or whatever the hell it's called this week. That is clearly where the big bucks are in talk radio, social media grinding, etc.
There aren't many liberal, leftist, actual-libertarian, or centrist personalities with huge audiences. The only ones that come close to the far right are "dirtbag leftists" like Chapo Trap House who use an equally obnoxious anti-intellectual straw man bashing style. If you want the audience, apparently you gotta troll and get stupid. I get the sense that the people who would make up those audiences for higher-brow content have better things to do.
I noticed a distinct change in his guests and style when he started to get big, which probably means he's feeling the pressure to rake in those ad dollars for the networks.
I used to like Rogan years ago. He was sort of like a cross between Art Bell and Howard Stern, but with less of a penchant for bringing on wild-ass cranks than Art Bell. I found Art Bell entertaining but didn't buy 90% of the stuff on there.
A real intellectual is someone with a deep understanding of their field. It's usually someone actually working in their field, not a media personality. Actually doing things generally leaves one with little time to talk about doing them, especially to the degree that is required to build a big audience.
Rogan is an intellectual when it comes to Standup Comedy and Mixed Martial Arts.
25% of his last 20 guests have a doctorate:
Anna Lembke, MD
Bret Weinstein, MA, PHD
Rhonda Patrick, PHD
Lex Fridman, MS, PHD
These are specialists in their fields. Rogan is exposing his audience to legitimate intellectuals. He also tends to have a melange of perspectives on his show. You may hear Alex Jones in one episode and Amy Schumer on the next. Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Maajid Nawaz, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Dave Chapelle, Louis CK, Bernie Sanders, Sam Harris, Ted Nugent, Henry Rollins have all been guests on his show. It's hard to argue that these people aren't experts in their fields.
Did Rogan even attend college? I don't know enough about his background. Getting a phd is a pretty good step, but not the only step, for being an intellectual.
Going to high school and then spouting out things like taking horse medicine to cure covid would be a pointer in the opposite direction.
You do realise the inventor of "horse dewormer" who got a nobel prize for it (does that count as intellectual) also talked about how it has antiviral properties?
Oh wait you didn't because his video got removed from YouTube by other "very clever people"TM
I'm not endorsing ivermectin, I don't know if it works for covid or any other viral infection, but your reduction to people needing a PHD to make informed choices is just silly.
There is some possibility that ivermectin has some benefit for COVID, but right now there are few if any high quality studies showing that. The right answer is to do more higher quality studies.
There is zero justification for getting on the radio and YouTube and hyping it up to the point that ignorant or desperate people try to take horse paste, especially when you combine it with soft-pedal antivax bullshit that convinces people they can put horse paste in their coffee instead of getting the vaccine.
Yeah the horse paste and soft-pedal antivax shit is definitely when Rogan and also the "Intellectual Dark Web" jumped the shark.
I don't think you need a Ph.D, but as you say it's one decent avenue. You can also grind yourself up, but you have to be an honest real autodidact who actually tries to learn stuff not a crank. The core characteristic of a crank IMHO is that they either stop when they know enough to sound smart or get emotionally attached to particular points of view and refuse to entertain others.
It's clear that Rogan himself is not an intellectual. He will be the first person to tell you that.
That seems to be the appeal of his show, though. He talks to experts (not all of them intellectuals) without being an expert himself. That's useful as a listener, because chances are you aren't an expert in any given field and listening to two experts talk would be borderline imcomprehensible to you.
Almost the entire msm is left, hollywood is far left, tech is left, the music industry is left....
I agree that maybe when it comes to new media like podcasts or YouTube you'll find more conservatives with big audiences but I think the reason is that they've been driven out of the mainstream so they found areas where their voices could be heard.
>I think Rogan is just going where the money is, which is low-key pandering to the "alt-right" or whatever the hell it's called this week.
I think he would tell you the goal posts have moved. The stuff he says wouldn't have been controversial at all 5-10 years ago. Now he's considered right wing by many. I agree with his stance on this because I feel the same way. I feel like the left shifted so far left it doesn't represent me anymore and while I don't 100% agree with the "Rogans" of the world they feel far more sane to me than the current left.
>Almost the entire msm is left, hollywood is far left, tech is left, the music industry is left....
Kind of, because reality and science have a liberal bias.
The recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said this to his 15 million audience.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Most popular cable channel said this about Covid while Covid was raging in Wuhan and Italy:
Not to mention talk radio is mostly far right wing and conservative, and very popular.
Covid raging among the unvaccinated, un-masked and people not following social distancing is just reality colliding with right wing misinformation, fake news and fantasies.
You all need to learn the different between liberals and leftists and start using the terms correctly. If the entire msm was left we would live in a different world. The entire msm rallied against Bernie in the last election. Bernie was the biggest flag bearer of the left in 50 years
This is a very odd article, with much sneering at educated people ("That writer, unsurprisingly, is an Ivy League-educated lifetime New Yorker") followed by lamenting that we're not in a "smarter and more adult world".
Maybe if we didn't sneer at education we could have one.
He is not sneering at education itself, he is pointing at the (assumed) cultural and political background of that person and how it isn't surprising that someone that probably finds himself at the very center of woke culture is missing the point completely.
I've tried reading it the way you suggest, but it still reads as a sneer at the educated to me - `of course an Ivy League educated liberal would miss the point`. I agree with quite a lot of the points the author makes, Joe Rogan is a dangerous imbecile, but I find the _way_ he makes those points very distasteful.
I have known highly educated idiots and poorly educated geniuses.
I’d rather be around the poorly educated genius and sneer at the highly educated idiot because the poorly educated genius tends to be a hell of a lot more interesting to me.
There is a built in fallacy that one can listen to all the sides and form an educated opinion from that. Firstly, if there is one truth, than there are infinite falsehoods. Secondly, I don't think the human mind works like that. We are sponges for information and the more bad data we put in it will inevitably cause confusion if you are just being a passive listener.
While you make a fair point, it seems like the alternative is to assume that the consensus opinion is the correct one and discard everything else. That doesn't seem like the way to go to me.
The alternative is to trust the opinion of someone who has done the work to gain specialist knowledge of each subject. Experts, rather than Ivermectin grifters, moon-fakers, 911 truthers etc.
We learn as a society to elevate those with training to positions of authority with a system of checks and balances from others with knowledge to moderate any instability.
We're already doing this, there's just a segment of society that doesn't seem to understand that skepticism isn't the same thing as critical thinking.
It would be ridiculous for the Bar Association or medical boards to be directly elected by the general populace, so they have a credentialed population with training and at least a modicum of specialization in the field.
This is the first critical yet reasonable piece I've read on Rogan. The author correctly points out that there is no left-leaning equivalent to Rogan's format. The author also correctly points out that the left is (too) often delusional in thinking that many of their values have (or could have) broad appeal across the electorate, not mention society at large.
This makes me think of past attempts like Air America to counter right-wing talk radio only to end in bankruptcy. Or MSNBC to counter Fox News only to consistently come in third behind CNN with 25-54 year olds (the demographic that matters for TV advertising).
Perhaps the conclusion is, in the marketplace of ideas with every opportunity of distribution, some ideas just aren't selling. Maybe that's due to bad packaging and marketing but it might also be that the idea itself is bad.
I rarely if ever see this kind of reflection on the left. Hat tip to the author for writing and sharing.
It seems to me that there is something about American culture that is inherently right-leaning. The "left" struggles to gain any traction because they ultimately fail at marketing their ideas to the average American, to your point. There is also an aspect of playing dirty that gives the modern Republican a leg up.
In my experience, they fail to market their ideas to the average European too.
From feminism, to antifa, to anything touching economics, the American left tends to get itself deep enough into identity politics and neoliberalism to disgust about anyone here (I'm Spanish).
There definitely is something regarding American politics that sets it apart from the European understanding of how politics works, I personally think that the system encouraging a two party system establishes too strong of a "us vs them" mentality and that it damages political discourse altogether.
This is a great observation. Our two party politics absolutely and intentionally generate binary thinking. Definitely harms the discourse because the party politicians feel like they have to embrace the extremes to create that black and white choice for the voters.
>It seems to me that there is something about American culture that is inherently right-leaning.
The American left's branding is being "other" to the status quo. Nothing can simultaneously be both status quo and belong to the left. Once something moves from the "left" to "status quo" the success doesn't count, because it's no longer the "left's," it's everybodies. And the left has to find a new way to be against it (or stay silent on the topic).
Without saying anything about where the force vectors that create this common view comes from, the sum result is a narrative with bounds. Bounds that are reinforced and entrenched because they can be useful to leverage for political gain by them and/or their opponents.
So no matter how many times the left have succeed or will succeeded at marketing many ideas to the average American, some people feel they're much more ineffectual than they are.
The left struggles to gain any traction because they fail at marketing their ideas to a set of key demographics in a small number of swing and low-population states. The average American is a liberal American.
>The author correctly points out that there is no left-leaning equivalent to Rogan's format.
Well I don't think there is a right-leaning equivalent either, in the sense that there really isn't any other "Joe Rogan" kind of guy out there, it's a singular, unique show. Besides the format itself, if one wants to find counterpoints or different stances to the ones presented in his show I'd like to learn how not to find those, it seems to me they are everywhere.
Is Joe Rogan really right-wing? Or does he just have his own opinions that dont line up exactly with the narrow railroad tracks of leftist thought. And because he's so popular that makes him a threat and a target.
The author points out that Rogan (who I agree is not partisan) frequently has guests that the left loathe but rarely has guests that the left like and/or love.
Rogan often has very left leaning guests including scientists, authors, and politiciana. They just get less coverage. For example, Rogan had Bernie Sanders as a guest and openly endorsed him.
Would you say that Bill Maher occupied the same spot on the left? He was fairly prominent until he pointed out something that seemed true but was radioactive at the time, then was cancelled.
After 9/11, not too long after, the socially acceptable position was that the hijackers were cowards. He pointed out that taking the controls of a jumbo jet yourself and directing it into a building was not exactly cowardly. You had to take real action for a period of time and you were going to die in flames. Cowardly was paying other people to do this on your behalf. No one ever accused Japanese kamikaze pilots of being cowards, quite the opposite.
So he got cancelled. Literally, he had a network show that was cancelled, as well as socially cancelled. Social media “cancellation” didn’t exist since Facebook and Twitter didn’t yet exist. He’s the real deal.
Say huh? Bill Maher is pretty far from “cancelled” at least in the 2021 understanding of the term. Politically Incorrect ran for 9 years until 2002, Real Time w/Bill Maher has been running since 2003 nonstop!
“Cancelled” in 2021 implies that you have been sent out to pasture permanently for whatever it is that offended the cancelling powers that be… Bill Maher is a man who has been providing political commentary with the exception of a brief hiatus for 27 years. His “new rule” segments are all over social media and YouTube nowadays. Almost every single week those segments get massive social media reach and often gets mainstream news organization coverage.
He is an equal opportunity offender though. Right hates him for his opinions on religion, left hates him for his opinion on a “certain” religion. Right hates him for making fun of Sarah Palin’s sone with Down syndrome, left hates him for his recent tirades against wokism and the Biden administration.
The fact that he is so successful at pissing off EVERYONE and still has a weekly show on a major network that has run for the last 18 years is pretty much testament to the fact that not only is he not cancelled, but is pretty much apparently un-cancelable.
What’s “permanent”? Give it a couple years and see. “Cancelled” means some people “cancel” you, very likely to be a passionate froth that gets forgotten. We’ll see how durable current cancellation is.
Yes, politically correct was cancelled, still is. That cancellation was more to do with advertiser pressure and likely advertisers not advertising on his show but other Comedy Central show. It has in no way hurt or diminished Bill Mahers audience and social reach. It was also so temporary most folks didn’t even notice…unless perhaps you were a fan without an HBO subscription.
Does he occupy the same spot on the left? Who knows? He is unashamedly liberal, and doesn’t do a wide variety of topics in a long conversation format. So it’s apples to oranges. His show is intentionally more monologuely, political panel oriented, with short conversations with newsmakers. However like Rogan his guests come from both political leanings.
Edit: submitted accidentally before fixing an unclear sentence
> “Cancelled” in 2021 implies that you have been sent out to pasture permanently for whatever it is that offended the cancelling powers that be…
Not really. I mean, it is used as if it means that, but almost invariably about someone who has lost no social prominence, or in fact gained it, from the thing for which they notionally have been “cancelled”.
Is Joe Rogan really right-leaning though? He voted for Bernie Sanders after all.
He doesn't strike me as particularly ideological, and I've never gotten the impression that he had a partisan axe to grind. Granted that he is sometimes susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, however that's not a personality trait exclusive to conservatives.
I used to listen to Rogan quite regularly. I think he's funny (on occasion) and is truly inquisitive (when he wants to be) and is a good interviewer of experts for the every-man. (That said, I personally never enjoyed his MMA or comedian episodes -- they have a very different tone.)
Where I fell off was that he consistently skewed guests to the right side of the political spectrum. Did he have Bernie Sanders on and express his support for Bernie? Absolutely. But he more often gives a platform to many people I'd consider far, far right -- and in my summation, it's because the right-leaning side of his audience is louder and demands those subjects. Ultimately, it is not a very balanced show. And that's ok, it's his show.
It's not just Joe. In America, what seems "left" to us is actually fairly moderate, politically. I liked having something to listen to that seemed to truly want to find the middle ground, at first. The show has since gone off the rails, IMO.
Actually I think you see what you want to see. A month ago he had an interesting podcast with Jimmy Dore. That man is as far left as the most right wing guest Joe has ever had on.
If I could sum up Rogan’s podcast guests it would be whatever side they lean, they tend to be a bit outside the orthodox right or left. For that I give him kudos because I think it’s much more interesting to hear from those off the beaten paths.
I used to frequent the Joe Rogan forum for about 5 years, prior to any of his podcasts.
My perspective is that his podcasts reflect who he really is. He is not chasing where the money is, as someone said here. Joe believed in the 2012 Mayan conspiracy, frequently talked about Lizard people and was kind of tongue and cheek...but he brought it up so frequently that I always wondered if he actually believed it. That's just a small subset of the conspiracy theories he believed in.
He has always been tech savvy, even had a T1 installed back in the day, just so he can play video games in 1990, which was $10,000 a month back then. When he started thinking about a podcast, it was pretty much with his friends, and also frequent forum posters in his board. Redban, was already working for Joe for years, he was the tech guy, so naturally he helped with the podcast.
I stopped frequenting that boards after a few podcasts, the forum userbase changed for one, but the main problem is he started expressing his crazy beliefs a lot more frequently. Before the podcasts it came up, but it was once in a while. With the podcasts it could not be ignored.
Well, let's take that with a grain of salt. I doubt he BELIEVED in the world ending. He wasn't in the basement with his family hugging them and crying.
He just likes talking about it. He's entertained by entertaining his imagination.
This gets some points right regarding the abject failure of media criticism's hamfisted attempts tocover Rogan.
But this author can see it because those lines of criticism are not fueled by this author's fight. Once the author moves on to their own hobby horse topics (Marxism) he seems to take another bog-standard criticism that misses the point. I see it a lot and it has a feeling of: if only Rogan would have on the correct experts to expert-splain to everyone, then they'd agree with me. Part of Rogan's appeal is that for many of cultural topics where one team has that kind of position, they aren't given permission to control the narrative on how he covers the topic.
I haven't listened to that much of Joe Rogan, but I feel what's he's really missing is any sort of attempt at understanding through rational criticism. Just letting people talk their same talking points doesn't particularly promote an understanding, rather it just provides another soap box next to a familiar face. The slant of both Rogan and his guests wouldn't matter much if there were analysis of the ideas presented - ie if Joe Rogan stood for some kind of wider context in which guests had to justify their ideals.
For instance, if Meghan Murphy is on as a "gender critical feminist", then why is Rogan letting her go on about "Marxism" ? I'm sure the term means something to her. But unless the best of her opponents are describing their own points in terms of "Marxism", then it's merely a straw man for her to bash.
If she really thinks her definition of "Marxist" is an important lemma for her main point and it's not going to color the conversation too much, then make her fully define that term how she's using it and elaborate whenever she uses it - don't let it be a "stop thinking" terminus as such terms are often used.
In general, guests should be spending the effort to make widely accessible points about their topic, to promote a larger understanding. I know these generally exist from my own attempts at understanding, because they gain followers somehow, and because the opposing camp goes out in their own weeds. Not pushing guests into the larger context just results in propagating the same old self-consistent-in-a-vacuum narrative that all of the political teams rely on.
An important part of having an open mind is questioning what is coming in. A closed mind doesn't take in a point. A too-open mind just lets any point pass through. There is a happy middle that forces conflicting ideas to be reconciled with one another, and we need a lot more of that. I don't know if Joe Rogan can actually be the person we want him to be, but he's certainly in the right position.
His show is a discussion and an interview, not a scientific debate, thesis defense, or a court hearing. It's up to us as listener to do as you say, use an open mind and question the information as it comes out.
I like how Rogan doesn't pounce on every guest to make them defend every statement, define every term, or actively try to catch them and put them on the defensive. That is the formula used by the talking-heads in the main stream interview shows, and discussions usually just turn argumentative.
He lets his guests stand out on limbs and gives them enough rope to hang themselves if they want to, which is a big part of the appeal of his show.
Yeah, I do get that. But I think most of the desire for that comes from having way too much of the opposite. As I touched upon in my last paragraph, we need a middle ground - becoming completely passive in the dialog is just overcorrecting in the other direction.
The real problem is the lack of mediating authority in any of these dialogs. We need some bit of common sense that can say (for example), 1. yes there is a valid concern with previously male athletes calling themselves women and competing in women's events, 2. you have a point with the pronoun thing but you're also kind of a dick, and 3. no thanks to the "Marxism" screed that I can get any time I like from my uncle.
Perhaps we're just going through a societal phase where that type of mediating authority has been distorting the discourse for too long (Aluminum tubes! Yellow Cake!) and so we've rejected them. But without any moderating judgement, debate devolves into extremism - every camp takes their reasonable foundational critiques and uses them to logically infer self-consistent nonsense. Then you either rally behind them or another camp, or you're going to get pigeonholed as doing so anyway.
We appreciate Joe Rogan for exposing us to diverse viewpoints. But without taking an active role in their explanation, is he actually doing that job? Or is he just appearing alongside a presentation that we could have sought out on our own?
Think of Joe rogan as a 3 hour Ted talk. Except you can’t make an interesting 3 hour presentation, but you can actually make a conversation interesting.
What’s wrong with someone fleshing out their views for 3 hours?
And there’s another thing you are missing. Have you ever tried to lie about something or withhold the truth for 3 hours straight? Unless you are a proper psychopath it’s basically impossible.
In 3 hours you have to be authentic or the audience will know. They will feel it. You might be authentic about wrong information, but you will be authentic. People can then decide if they want to believe that or not.
A lot of people who love rogan hate the 5 minute soundbite interviews on the traditional media. It’s fake, it’s short, it’s McDonald’s of media
I guess when you put it that way, I grew out of TED talks a decade ago...
I don't think any of these politickers are lying. I think they start with valid critiques of pretty straightforward things, and then extrapolate them into ridiculous conclusions. In a way our polarization is a result of extreme left-brained thinking without the tempering of wisdom.
Listening to a 3 hour unfamiliar narrative doesn't give you many places to go afterwards. It's just a huge dump that binds together many various points, and whether you found it insightful or not has more to do with presentation and self-consistency rather than it making sense in a larger context.
It's definitely better than 2 minute / 140 character soundbites. But the format is an overcorrection masquerading as a middleground.
True confidence in ones beliefs derives from a willingness to expose those beliefs to challenge. When no one is willing to expose their beliefs to challenge (and this is manifestly true for any belief which is presented in podcast form), then it is necessasrily the case the the confidence in those beliefs is false. The problem is that basically all beliefs that people consume are consumed from bad faith persuasive essays with single authors.
In the regime of persuasive essays, the winners are decided much more capriciously. Why do people follow Joe Rogan? I can only speculate, but I believe that the following effects contribute significantly:
1) Joe expresses challenges to mainstream beliefs that are commonly wondered, but infrequently asked. These challenges have high heuristic weight. However infrequently these beliefs are asked, they are answered less frequently. There are lots of questions that people are afraid to ask which have sophisticated answers. Furthermore, and I can't stress this enough, some of these beliefs are wrong, and the reason that challenges are socially unacceptable is because of how much we want the belief to be true.
2) Joe has a mock adversarial style. Interviews feel like arguments, but are actually more analogous to a con-artists relationship with a shill. Unfortunately for humanity, we are very bad at recognizing the difference between an interview and an argument. Even in the rare event that Rogan challenges his interviewee in good faith, the creative mind behind the challenge is still merely one man, and that man is Joe Rogan, to boot. Not the most seasoned skeptic to have walked the earth by a long shot. The man claims to believe in Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid...
3) Joe is anti-establishment. I don't think this is a bad thing, I happen to be fairly anti-establishment. But anti-establishment beliefs do not have the kind of readily accessible counterexamples that establishment beliefs have. I can't point to the cities of tents for the homeless as an argument against basic income like I can for <current policy>. If you make an obscure anti-establishment claim, there is not likely to be a wealth of available counterarguments for the people listening to draw on.
4) The author's point. Joe at least claims to subscribe to a different regime. Where free thought and argument prevail over censorship and restricted platforms. I think that, like most people privileged with large, restrictive platforms, Joe probably wouldn't believe this is he knew that it meant opening his podcast to in-line commentary, but I think he believes he believe it, and that he claims to believe it is probably enough for most people.
I don’t want to undermine anyone’s analysis but part of Rogan’s success was novelty. Take the first time we ever saw Ron Paul on a debate stage. You ever heard someone just outright call our middle eastern wars stupid back then? Now days everyone does it. Over time we got over Ron Paul because we realized he’s a little nutty with the Libertarianism, but kudos for standing out when it was unique to stand out.
So let’s take Joe Rogan now. He brings up the Wuhan Lab theory a lot, but a lot of people do now. Sadly for Rogan, the rest of the high school (broader media/society) figured out ‘you wear and listen to the same stuff the cool kids wear and listen to’. Rogan is still attempting to be the cool kid and selling it off like ‘that’s who I am, truly’. But everyone else in high school (the metaphorical immature world) is also walking around saying ‘yeah me too, that’s who I truly am’.
Rogan’s novelty factor is waning due to copy cat culture, and we all notice it. We notice it so much, we are kind of tired of the fad and everyone included - even Rogan.
In other words, we’re kind of bored of it all now. Rogan doesn’t even have to be the base case. Examine Marc Maron’s rise and fall in relevance.
For me personally, I’d only be interested in listening to a 90 year old grandmother take on the topics of today as best as she can. That would be novelty at this point. But the guy that does MMA and watches the same movies you do, supports gun rights, but votes for Sanders, it’s just like … yeah, we get it. Not that interesting anymore.
Not sure whose fault that is honestly, but let’s not over analyze that the cool kids in high school, who were once the paragons of interesting, were actual just kind of boring to begin with.
Rogan is compelling on like 2-3 topics max, and that’s okay. He is not a good interviewer of the likes of Charlie Rose, and while a subject matter expert on MMA, he is not compelling or insightful as a Quentin Tarantino interviewing anyone in movies. In fact, he is not even compelling interviewing other comedians, which often devolves into comedians jerking themselves off at how naturally born funny they are. Zero insights.
If Ron Paul was the first person you heard call the middle eastern wars stupid then I don't know if I can agree with anything you say after that. It wasn't novelty, it was anti-establishment.
> 3) Joe is anti-establishment. I don't think this is a bad thing, I happen to be fairly anti-establishment. But anti-establishment beliefs do not have the kind of readily accessible counterexamples that establishment beliefs have. I can't point to the cities of tents for the homeless as an argument against basic income like I can for <current policy>. If you make an obscure anti-establishment claim, there is not likely to be a wealth of available counterarguments for the people listening to draw on.
That is a fantastic point I had not considered so far.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadThere aren't many liberal, leftist, actual-libertarian, or centrist personalities with huge audiences. The only ones that come close to the far right are "dirtbag leftists" like Chapo Trap House who use an equally obnoxious anti-intellectual straw man bashing style. If you want the audience, apparently you gotta troll and get stupid. I get the sense that the people who would make up those audiences for higher-brow content have better things to do.
I noticed a distinct change in his guests and style when he started to get big, which probably means he's feeling the pressure to rake in those ad dollars for the networks.
A real intellectual is someone with a deep understanding of their field. It's usually someone actually working in their field, not a media personality. Actually doing things generally leaves one with little time to talk about doing them, especially to the degree that is required to build a big audience.
25% of his last 20 guests have a doctorate: Anna Lembke, MD Bret Weinstein, MA, PHD Rhonda Patrick, PHD Lex Fridman, MS, PHD
These are specialists in their fields. Rogan is exposing his audience to legitimate intellectuals. He also tends to have a melange of perspectives on his show. You may hear Alex Jones in one episode and Amy Schumer on the next. Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Maajid Nawaz, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Dave Chapelle, Louis CK, Bernie Sanders, Sam Harris, Ted Nugent, Henry Rollins have all been guests on his show. It's hard to argue that these people aren't experts in their fields.
Going to high school and then spouting out things like taking horse medicine to cure covid would be a pointer in the opposite direction.
Oh wait you didn't because his video got removed from YouTube by other "very clever people"TM
I'm not endorsing ivermectin, I don't know if it works for covid or any other viral infection, but your reduction to people needing a PHD to make informed choices is just silly.
There is zero justification for getting on the radio and YouTube and hyping it up to the point that ignorant or desperate people try to take horse paste, especially when you combine it with soft-pedal antivax bullshit that convinces people they can put horse paste in their coffee instead of getting the vaccine.
This stuff has killed people.
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/241660405...
Numbers are similar in other places.
I don't think you need a Ph.D, but as you say it's one decent avenue. You can also grind yourself up, but you have to be an honest real autodidact who actually tries to learn stuff not a crank. The core characteristic of a crank IMHO is that they either stop when they know enough to sound smart or get emotionally attached to particular points of view and refuse to entertain others.
That seems to be the appeal of his show, though. He talks to experts (not all of them intellectuals) without being an expert himself. That's useful as a listener, because chances are you aren't an expert in any given field and listening to two experts talk would be borderline imcomprehensible to you.
This 1000%.
I agree that maybe when it comes to new media like podcasts or YouTube you'll find more conservatives with big audiences but I think the reason is that they've been driven out of the mainstream so they found areas where their voices could be heard.
>I think Rogan is just going where the money is, which is low-key pandering to the "alt-right" or whatever the hell it's called this week.
I think he would tell you the goal posts have moved. The stuff he says wouldn't have been controversial at all 5-10 years ago. Now he's considered right wing by many. I agree with his stance on this because I feel the same way. I feel like the left shifted so far left it doesn't represent me anymore and while I don't 100% agree with the "Rogans" of the world they feel far more sane to me than the current left.
Kind of, because reality and science have a liberal bias.
The recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said this to his 15 million audience.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Most popular cable channel said this about Covid while Covid was raging in Wuhan and Italy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
Not to mention talk radio is mostly far right wing and conservative, and very popular.
Covid raging among the unvaccinated, un-masked and people not following social distancing is just reality colliding with right wing misinformation, fake news and fantasies.
Not even mentioning QAnon.
Maybe if we didn't sneer at education we could have one.
You can't untangle those things.
Education is seen as the cause of the "(assumed) cultural and political background of that person", and therefore education becomes the target.
I’d rather be around the poorly educated genius and sneer at the highly educated idiot because the poorly educated genius tends to be a hell of a lot more interesting to me.
We're already doing this, there's just a segment of society that doesn't seem to understand that skepticism isn't the same thing as critical thinking.
It would be ridiculous for the Bar Association or medical boards to be directly elected by the general populace, so they have a credentialed population with training and at least a modicum of specialization in the field.
This makes me think of past attempts like Air America to counter right-wing talk radio only to end in bankruptcy. Or MSNBC to counter Fox News only to consistently come in third behind CNN with 25-54 year olds (the demographic that matters for TV advertising).
Perhaps the conclusion is, in the marketplace of ideas with every opportunity of distribution, some ideas just aren't selling. Maybe that's due to bad packaging and marketing but it might also be that the idea itself is bad.
I rarely if ever see this kind of reflection on the left. Hat tip to the author for writing and sharing.
From feminism, to antifa, to anything touching economics, the American left tends to get itself deep enough into identity politics and neoliberalism to disgust about anyone here (I'm Spanish).
There definitely is something regarding American politics that sets it apart from the European understanding of how politics works, I personally think that the system encouraging a two party system establishes too strong of a "us vs them" mentality and that it damages political discourse altogether.
The American left's branding is being "other" to the status quo. Nothing can simultaneously be both status quo and belong to the left. Once something moves from the "left" to "status quo" the success doesn't count, because it's no longer the "left's," it's everybodies. And the left has to find a new way to be against it (or stay silent on the topic).
Without saying anything about where the force vectors that create this common view comes from, the sum result is a narrative with bounds. Bounds that are reinforced and entrenched because they can be useful to leverage for political gain by them and/or their opponents.
So no matter how many times the left have succeed or will succeeded at marketing many ideas to the average American, some people feel they're much more ineffectual than they are.
Well I don't think there is a right-leaning equivalent either, in the sense that there really isn't any other "Joe Rogan" kind of guy out there, it's a singular, unique show. Besides the format itself, if one wants to find counterpoints or different stances to the ones presented in his show I'd like to learn how not to find those, it seems to me they are everywhere.
So he got cancelled. Literally, he had a network show that was cancelled, as well as socially cancelled. Social media “cancellation” didn’t exist since Facebook and Twitter didn’t yet exist. He’s the real deal.
“Cancelled” in 2021 implies that you have been sent out to pasture permanently for whatever it is that offended the cancelling powers that be… Bill Maher is a man who has been providing political commentary with the exception of a brief hiatus for 27 years. His “new rule” segments are all over social media and YouTube nowadays. Almost every single week those segments get massive social media reach and often gets mainstream news organization coverage.
He is an equal opportunity offender though. Right hates him for his opinions on religion, left hates him for his opinion on a “certain” religion. Right hates him for making fun of Sarah Palin’s sone with Down syndrome, left hates him for his recent tirades against wokism and the Biden administration.
The fact that he is so successful at pissing off EVERYONE and still has a weekly show on a major network that has run for the last 18 years is pretty much testament to the fact that not only is he not cancelled, but is pretty much apparently un-cancelable.
Politically Incorrect remains cancelled.
Does he occupy the same spot on the left? Who knows? He is unashamedly liberal, and doesn’t do a wide variety of topics in a long conversation format. So it’s apples to oranges. His show is intentionally more monologuely, political panel oriented, with short conversations with newsmakers. However like Rogan his guests come from both political leanings.
Edit: submitted accidentally before fixing an unclear sentence
Not really. I mean, it is used as if it means that, but almost invariably about someone who has lost no social prominence, or in fact gained it, from the thing for which they notionally have been “cancelled”.
He doesn't strike me as particularly ideological, and I've never gotten the impression that he had a partisan axe to grind. Granted that he is sometimes susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, however that's not a personality trait exclusive to conservatives.
Pretty prevalent personality trait in humans though.
Where I fell off was that he consistently skewed guests to the right side of the political spectrum. Did he have Bernie Sanders on and express his support for Bernie? Absolutely. But he more often gives a platform to many people I'd consider far, far right -- and in my summation, it's because the right-leaning side of his audience is louder and demands those subjects. Ultimately, it is not a very balanced show. And that's ok, it's his show.
It's not just Joe. In America, what seems "left" to us is actually fairly moderate, politically. I liked having something to listen to that seemed to truly want to find the middle ground, at first. The show has since gone off the rails, IMO.
If I could sum up Rogan’s podcast guests it would be whatever side they lean, they tend to be a bit outside the orthodox right or left. For that I give him kudos because I think it’s much more interesting to hear from those off the beaten paths.
My perspective is that his podcasts reflect who he really is. He is not chasing where the money is, as someone said here. Joe believed in the 2012 Mayan conspiracy, frequently talked about Lizard people and was kind of tongue and cheek...but he brought it up so frequently that I always wondered if he actually believed it. That's just a small subset of the conspiracy theories he believed in.
He has always been tech savvy, even had a T1 installed back in the day, just so he can play video games in 1990, which was $10,000 a month back then. When he started thinking about a podcast, it was pretty much with his friends, and also frequent forum posters in his board. Redban, was already working for Joe for years, he was the tech guy, so naturally he helped with the podcast.
I stopped frequenting that boards after a few podcasts, the forum userbase changed for one, but the main problem is he started expressing his crazy beliefs a lot more frequently. Before the podcasts it came up, but it was once in a while. With the podcasts it could not be ignored.
He just likes talking about it. He's entertained by entertaining his imagination.
But this author can see it because those lines of criticism are not fueled by this author's fight. Once the author moves on to their own hobby horse topics (Marxism) he seems to take another bog-standard criticism that misses the point. I see it a lot and it has a feeling of: if only Rogan would have on the correct experts to expert-splain to everyone, then they'd agree with me. Part of Rogan's appeal is that for many of cultural topics where one team has that kind of position, they aren't given permission to control the narrative on how he covers the topic.
For instance, if Meghan Murphy is on as a "gender critical feminist", then why is Rogan letting her go on about "Marxism" ? I'm sure the term means something to her. But unless the best of her opponents are describing their own points in terms of "Marxism", then it's merely a straw man for her to bash.
If she really thinks her definition of "Marxist" is an important lemma for her main point and it's not going to color the conversation too much, then make her fully define that term how she's using it and elaborate whenever she uses it - don't let it be a "stop thinking" terminus as such terms are often used.
In general, guests should be spending the effort to make widely accessible points about their topic, to promote a larger understanding. I know these generally exist from my own attempts at understanding, because they gain followers somehow, and because the opposing camp goes out in their own weeds. Not pushing guests into the larger context just results in propagating the same old self-consistent-in-a-vacuum narrative that all of the political teams rely on.
An important part of having an open mind is questioning what is coming in. A closed mind doesn't take in a point. A too-open mind just lets any point pass through. There is a happy middle that forces conflicting ideas to be reconciled with one another, and we need a lot more of that. I don't know if Joe Rogan can actually be the person we want him to be, but he's certainly in the right position.
I like how Rogan doesn't pounce on every guest to make them defend every statement, define every term, or actively try to catch them and put them on the defensive. That is the formula used by the talking-heads in the main stream interview shows, and discussions usually just turn argumentative.
He lets his guests stand out on limbs and gives them enough rope to hang themselves if they want to, which is a big part of the appeal of his show.
The real problem is the lack of mediating authority in any of these dialogs. We need some bit of common sense that can say (for example), 1. yes there is a valid concern with previously male athletes calling themselves women and competing in women's events, 2. you have a point with the pronoun thing but you're also kind of a dick, and 3. no thanks to the "Marxism" screed that I can get any time I like from my uncle.
Perhaps we're just going through a societal phase where that type of mediating authority has been distorting the discourse for too long (Aluminum tubes! Yellow Cake!) and so we've rejected them. But without any moderating judgement, debate devolves into extremism - every camp takes their reasonable foundational critiques and uses them to logically infer self-consistent nonsense. Then you either rally behind them or another camp, or you're going to get pigeonholed as doing so anyway.
We appreciate Joe Rogan for exposing us to diverse viewpoints. But without taking an active role in their explanation, is he actually doing that job? Or is he just appearing alongside a presentation that we could have sought out on our own?
What’s wrong with someone fleshing out their views for 3 hours?
And there’s another thing you are missing. Have you ever tried to lie about something or withhold the truth for 3 hours straight? Unless you are a proper psychopath it’s basically impossible.
In 3 hours you have to be authentic or the audience will know. They will feel it. You might be authentic about wrong information, but you will be authentic. People can then decide if they want to believe that or not.
A lot of people who love rogan hate the 5 minute soundbite interviews on the traditional media. It’s fake, it’s short, it’s McDonald’s of media
I don't think any of these politickers are lying. I think they start with valid critiques of pretty straightforward things, and then extrapolate them into ridiculous conclusions. In a way our polarization is a result of extreme left-brained thinking without the tempering of wisdom.
Listening to a 3 hour unfamiliar narrative doesn't give you many places to go afterwards. It's just a huge dump that binds together many various points, and whether you found it insightful or not has more to do with presentation and self-consistency rather than it making sense in a larger context.
It's definitely better than 2 minute / 140 character soundbites. But the format is an overcorrection masquerading as a middleground.
In the regime of persuasive essays, the winners are decided much more capriciously. Why do people follow Joe Rogan? I can only speculate, but I believe that the following effects contribute significantly:
1) Joe expresses challenges to mainstream beliefs that are commonly wondered, but infrequently asked. These challenges have high heuristic weight. However infrequently these beliefs are asked, they are answered less frequently. There are lots of questions that people are afraid to ask which have sophisticated answers. Furthermore, and I can't stress this enough, some of these beliefs are wrong, and the reason that challenges are socially unacceptable is because of how much we want the belief to be true.
2) Joe has a mock adversarial style. Interviews feel like arguments, but are actually more analogous to a con-artists relationship with a shill. Unfortunately for humanity, we are very bad at recognizing the difference between an interview and an argument. Even in the rare event that Rogan challenges his interviewee in good faith, the creative mind behind the challenge is still merely one man, and that man is Joe Rogan, to boot. Not the most seasoned skeptic to have walked the earth by a long shot. The man claims to believe in Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid...
3) Joe is anti-establishment. I don't think this is a bad thing, I happen to be fairly anti-establishment. But anti-establishment beliefs do not have the kind of readily accessible counterexamples that establishment beliefs have. I can't point to the cities of tents for the homeless as an argument against basic income like I can for <current policy>. If you make an obscure anti-establishment claim, there is not likely to be a wealth of available counterarguments for the people listening to draw on.
4) The author's point. Joe at least claims to subscribe to a different regime. Where free thought and argument prevail over censorship and restricted platforms. I think that, like most people privileged with large, restrictive platforms, Joe probably wouldn't believe this is he knew that it meant opening his podcast to in-line commentary, but I think he believes he believe it, and that he claims to believe it is probably enough for most people.
So let’s take Joe Rogan now. He brings up the Wuhan Lab theory a lot, but a lot of people do now. Sadly for Rogan, the rest of the high school (broader media/society) figured out ‘you wear and listen to the same stuff the cool kids wear and listen to’. Rogan is still attempting to be the cool kid and selling it off like ‘that’s who I am, truly’. But everyone else in high school (the metaphorical immature world) is also walking around saying ‘yeah me too, that’s who I truly am’.
Rogan’s novelty factor is waning due to copy cat culture, and we all notice it. We notice it so much, we are kind of tired of the fad and everyone included - even Rogan.
In other words, we’re kind of bored of it all now. Rogan doesn’t even have to be the base case. Examine Marc Maron’s rise and fall in relevance.
For me personally, I’d only be interested in listening to a 90 year old grandmother take on the topics of today as best as she can. That would be novelty at this point. But the guy that does MMA and watches the same movies you do, supports gun rights, but votes for Sanders, it’s just like … yeah, we get it. Not that interesting anymore.
Not sure whose fault that is honestly, but let’s not over analyze that the cool kids in high school, who were once the paragons of interesting, were actual just kind of boring to begin with.
Rogan is compelling on like 2-3 topics max, and that’s okay. He is not a good interviewer of the likes of Charlie Rose, and while a subject matter expert on MMA, he is not compelling or insightful as a Quentin Tarantino interviewing anyone in movies. In fact, he is not even compelling interviewing other comedians, which often devolves into comedians jerking themselves off at how naturally born funny they are. Zero insights.
That is a fantastic point I had not considered so far.