Observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience
lulu.substack.com
lulu.substack.com
But at some point it occurred, "Shouldn't at some point, if we're listening to all this that, we stop being a dumb guy who doesn't know anything and actually have opinion / challenge some of these things with some facts / solid ideas?"
But I never saw that happen, and as time went on the "I don't know" excuses just felt ... more and more insufficient, dumb by choice, or just excuses.
At some point just being "dumb" and listening to every rando person makes you susceptible to / a target of a bunch of horrible randos with bad ideas ... An open approach is admirable, but not learning along the way is not.
Seems like talking about ideas for some is more a form of amusement/ entertainment/ mental stimulation (in the same way recreational or escapist drugs can be mentally stimulating), especially if there are no outward signs & indications that a person is committed to testing out, applying, integrating, and even replacing formerly held and inferior ideas – a process which involves a lot of trial end error, failures, humility, perseverance, and delayed gratification. It might seem open-minded and intellectual, but if across time, there's no change in belief via deeper understanding from considering new and different perspectives, that then results in outward action, then all the talk in the world about ideas and perspectives is just hot air.
Maybe that's not Joe Rogan and his loyal audience? I dunno!
This sounds very much like philosophy. In general, readers of philosophy enjoy looking at many frames without privileging any particular one.
Or, in other words, the ideas and values that people live their lives by usually work for them, to some degree. Often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious. Making changes to a working system that one relies on isn’t something to be done lightly. You can see this with a specific subset of psychedelics enthusiasts, who end up completely fracturing their ability to function in reality. Or in people who don’t have a working value and belief system in the first place and end up being preyed on by cults.
Human life is infinitely complex. None of us have it figured out, and none of us are going to figure it out even if we lived for a thousand years. What’s the biggest code change you think you can make to a working piece of software without introducing a bug? That entire piece of software is only a fraction as complicated as the human condition.
> It might seem open-minded and intellectual, but if across time, there's no change in belief via deeper understanding from considering new and different perspectives, that then results in outward action, then all the talk in the world about ideas and perspectives is just hot air.
Sure. Is that so bad? The cautionary tale on the other side of the ledger is every failed attempt to build a utopia based on theory. This sort of thing was one of the leading causes of unnatural death in the 20th century.
To be clear, I think it’s definitely possible to err on the other side as well. But erring on the other side looks like being unwilling to play with ideas at all. You need a sandboxed environment if you’re going to play with ideas, and even when an idea is promising enough that you might want to take it out of the sandbox, it’s hard to tell whether that’s because of the merits of the idea or just a vulnerability in your sandbox.
What I'm pointing at are people who think they're actually considering ideas as if they're trying to better themselves or understand a situation or concept so as to learn how to integrate it into their consciousness, but really they're just seeking mental stimulation with no intent to grow or take any real meaningful action. If you make no claims to be toying with concepts for the purposes of actually implementing them, I respect your choice to do so since I know what to expect. But I'm more pointing at the types who might like appearing as if they're seriously considering ideas and how to implement them, but in reality they're fairly complacent. The easy solve here would be to not present yourself as if you're actually going to do anything with the concepts you play around with in your head for amusement, and just own up to treating all this as a frivolous mental exercise. There's absolutely value in that, and there's no shame in owning it proudly.
The noun form of “solve” is “solution”, FYI.
Compared to a clam, maybe. I am definitely smarter than a clam. Probably.
I admire your defensive use of 'probably', as clams can contain pearls of wisdom.
The other thing that bugged me about him is he pretty much has a playlist of topics he hits on most episodes. Hunting, Jiu Jitsu, DMT, etc. It's pretty interesting the first few times but after a while it's gets a little old. I still have a generally favorable view of Rogan but I haven't listened to an episode in years. I think the controversy around him is probably a bit overblown though.
I'm surprised the show is still on. I'd have thought its niche had been filled several thousand times over by podcasts.
Not at all.
I have a distinct memory in which I’m driving alone, late at night, on a long road trip. I don’t have any unlistened podcasts downloaded, I’m not in the mood for music, but it’s late and I would like to hear another human voice. So I turn on the radio. The night sky is a magical sight that implies endless possibility, so I’m not in the mood for sports radio or Dave Ramsey. I don’t know if I ended up listening to Coast to Coast AM or one of its imitators, but I found something along those lines and it hit the spot.
These days my unlistened podcast collection is large enough that I rarely get to that point. And my unlistened podcast collection is that large in part because the radio dial is a little bare lately when I hit "scan" in most of the places I'm apt to do so.
But even so, I wouldn't say he never challenges people, especially if it's something he actually does have a strong opinion on, like MMA and fitness stuff. There's a (in?)famous episode where he interviewed Adam Ruins Everything and they had a pretty big debate over some of Adam's assertions, like the idea that alpha males don't exist, or that men only seem to be better at sports because the sport was designed for them to be better at it.
I don't know what show you're listening to. I'm not a regular listener, by any means, but I hear Rogan routinely bring up things that he learns from other/prior guests. Often to challenge whatever he's hearing in the moment.
It really feels to me that people are just looking for reasons to attack him because he "platforms" voices they don't like. That was fine when he was just a comedian with a podcast, but now he has An Audience (tm), so it's Bad.
Rogan has certainly had some cranks on his show (IMO), but I'm comfortable enough with my intellect that I can listen to these (or not) without having my brain turned to mush.
It's an interesting turn of phrase, because there's a very real pipeline in which people with less-trained critical thinking skills listen to Rogan -> cannot distinguish openness from endorsement -> believe Rogan is endorsing anti-vaxx voices -> contribute to an aggregate increase in community transmissibility of communicable diseases with proven neurological impacts -> said diseases turn immunocompromised people's neurons to "mush" at an increased rate, through no fault or Rogan-listening of the victims' own.
Rogan has consistently made a decision to prioritize the "vibe" of his podcast over pushing his interview subjects in a way that would make it clear that his provision of a platform is not endorsement. Sure, he challenges things as you have mentioned, but when he challenges anti-vaxx voices no more or no less than he would a guest who, say, had an opinion about hunting he didn't like, that creates a responsibility that I think does scale with audience size.
https://www.npr.org/2022/01/21/1074442185/joe-rogan-doctor-c...
Strategic lying is employed for the "greater good" in the context of this way of thinking frequently, the most egregious example probably being Fauci telling the public not to wear masks because privately the government believed that there wouldn’t be enough protective equipment for health care workers -- they didn't want the dumbs to panic-buy and leave hospitals vulnerable.
Not looking to get into a covid debate, just pointing out that even governments will lie to keep the dumbs from doing something they don't like, and I think that's bad.
You don’t get to treat adults like children. They are adults who might know something you don’t.
It’s just toxic discourse.
True, but it could also be their priorities are somewhere other than yours. Which might be okay or might not depending on whatever.
What these "experts" and politicians did though... treat people like dumb children... completely inexcusable.
If this is your opinion, perhaps the problem is that society undervalues critical thinking skills. Not that an entertainer isn’t shilling in the correct directions.
If the intellect and judgment of mankind ought to be cultivated, a thing
which Protestants at least do not deny, on what can these faculties be
more appropriately exercised by any one, than on the things which
concern him so much that it is considered necessary for him to hold
opinions on them?
- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)
No matter, we can just spoonfeed everyone the received and accepted wisdom. Then there will be no need for any faculties of discernment.
The Catholic Church has its own way of dealing with this
embarrassing problem. It makes a broad separation between those who can
be permitted to receive its doctrines on conviction, and those who must
accept them on trust.One of the thing about Rogan's interview with Lazar is he fails to ask the obvious questions - such as "what are your credentials". 'Cause with Lazar, that question already takes you to dubious territory since Lazar's answer is "I have a PhD but MIT erased my records" (and his thesis advisor went along with this?).
And this kind of left a nasty taste in my mouth concerning Rogan. Sure, his questions might be just naive but it seems more likely he's using that naive pose to avoid the mine fields of the guests he likes.
The fact that he didn't with Lazar but did with Bigelow indicates to me that he favours Lazar, and considers his story to be genuine, and that kind of bias is detrimental to the interview process.
I do feel for Rogan here...he's doing more-or-less the same thing he's been doing since the start, but now it's "wrong", because other people are expecting him to behave in a particular way. He builds an audience by being a good conversationalist with a huge variety of different, sometimes nutty, people, and suddenly uptight folks expect him to be Walter Cronkite.
Public figures who can heavily influence discourse and thought have an ethical obligation to not give unchallenged credence and a drastically increased audience to their nonsense. If Rogan thought that Goebbels was interesting and let him do his thing for hours to an audience of millions, he would be held to a higher standard. If Rogan thought that Ted Bundy was interesting and let him tell "his side of the story" without challenging it with the truth, he would be held to a higher standard.
This is a basic which we should expect of our society.
And your hypotheticals about Nazis and serial killers are totally irrelevant. You are arguing in bad faith and trying to inflame the discussion.
Normative ethics really don't just exist in one person's head.
This is not a question of whether or not people can think for themselves or whether they believe what they hear, and whether he's a comedian, politician, or astronaut has no bearing on what our ethical standards should be as a society.
We should expect better.
> You are arguing in bad faith and trying to inflame the discussion.
The fact that you have seemingly never really read philosophy or considered what we, as society, should expect from public figures does not mean the argument is in bad faith or inflammatory.
It is, very simply, a reductio ad absurdum. If your position is that the "rest of us" are capable of thinking for yourselves, who we allow to influence/control public discourse/thought should be up to individuals, then surely there's nothing wrong with having Nazis or mass murderers given airtime.
If you do have a problem with this, then you draw the line somewhere, and it's just a matter of determining where. If you have a problem with it, then you believe that some discourse is antithetical to the principles of a well-functioning society, and that we have a duty to shield people from it.
The question is where you draw that line, and why "he's just a comedian" (with 11-12 million listeners who see him as having "interesting conversations" with people who are not comedians) absolves him of a duty not to use his platform to spread dangerous misinformation. Not that he does it all the time, but it does happen sometimes, and the same normative ethics apply all the time.
Do you think you would get his 11-12 million listeners to agree with you on what society should expect? Who gets to decide that?
> then surely there's nothing wrong with having Nazis or mass murderers given airtime.
You invoked Godwin's law twice. What sort of argument are you going to win by invoking Nazis and worst case scenarios? Surely the slipper slope fallacy applies here?
I'm not sure why you presume that "we, as society, should expect better" means "this applies only to Joe Rogan listeners and we need to convince them." It's a general stance on how society ought to operate, and the use of "ought" is in the "how ought one live?" question raised by ethics.
We get to decide that as society. This isn't a new concept. Society would not have advanced to a point that we were capable of having this conversation at all if "we" had not already agreed on basic principles, such as "you should not steal", and "you should not murder", and "be generally honest in your dealings with others if you want to keep your reputation". These are all inherent rules of society which you implicitly follow in order to be part of it.
Holding public figures who have a louder voice to a standard of behavior which does not actively undermine society by giving credence to disinformation isn't some horrible leap or infringement upon your freedom. It's avoiding the Gracchi.
> You invoked Godwin's law twice.
Mentioning Nazis isn't Godwin's Law. Feel free to substitute some other bogeyman who you feel giving an unfiltered platform to would deteriorate society.
> What sort of argument are you going to win by invoking Nazis and worst case scenarios? Surely the slipper slope fallacy applies here?
No, it doesn't. Honestly, I'm getting the sense that you've never engaged in any kind of philosophical discourse before, which this is sort of veering into, and throwing out the names of fallacies doesn't mean they apply.
The point is, as I said in my last post, a reductio ad absurdum. It is constructing a contrapositive. It is saying "if we follow your reasoning to its logical conclusion, this is where it leads; verify whether that's true or false, less black and white."
And it was false/shades of grey. Clearly there is some level at which even ardent JRE listeners believe giving people a platform is harmful. So the question is "what are the guidelines for when something is too much?"
My position is, as repeatedly restated, that those with a greater platform have a duty to not do harm to society by allowing crackpots to talk without being challenged, whether that's denying climate change, believing lizard people run the government, believing we are secretly in contact with aliens, taking veterinary antiparasitics on the advice of one person rather than the guidance of literally every medical organization on Earth, etc.
It has no been made clear anywhere what the position of Joe Rogan defenders is other than "he's just a comedian; you shouldn't take him seriously; people can think for themselves; he doesn't have any obligation to question them". But again, it's apparent that having Nazis or murderers on with an unfiltered platform would cross some line. So where is that line? Where are Joe Rogan defenders drawing the line of what is "too much" to air? What is the basis for drawing it there and not somewhere else?
"You're not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
-President Joe Biden, 2021
https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-2021-video-saying-vaccina...
Comedians don't qualify as "public figures" in that context. I'm not a Joe Rogan defender and don't particularly care about him one way or another, but you're obviously just making things up and trying to gaslight us. Let us know when you have a valid point to make instead of resorting to inflammatory comments about imaginary Nazis.
As for a "line", how about this. Comedians can say whatever asinine shit they like and the rest of us are free to laugh or ignore them as we please. There are no lines in comedy. Grow up.
Isn't this a "court jester" interpretation of comedy? The comedian debases themselves on all issues so thoroughly that it creates a convenient bi-directional fiction: I can ignore things that bother me, because they are just the ramblings of a clown. And so they can say whatever they want, with no requirement that it make sense (because there is no "low" they won't sink beneath).
The debasement of "journalism" to the point where it applies to Joe Rogan and/or "news networks" which have actively fought (and won) court battles on the basis that no reasonable person would believe the statements were actually true, or news radio which for decades gave equal airtime to "both sides" even if one of those sides believed in a Hollow Earth does not mean that "journalism" has lost high standards, merely that the term has been horrifyingly diluted in the United States.
> If you want to bring Nazis into this then how about all of the practically fawning interviews that US media had with Adolph Hitler right up until he invaded France?
Whataboutism is an intellectually bankrupt argument. Nobody is defending those journalists, but if you're going to try to make a whataboutist argument, apples-to-apples works a lot better than "with the benefit of hindsight, we know that Hitler was bad and that Ford would have actively led a fifth column if he could have, so they were bad". You could equally say "if you want to bring Dwayne Johnson into this, then how about all of the love for Cosby as America's Dad?"
The known facts are different.
If you want to assert that a comparison to Nazis (and I used Goebbels as an example because he was principally a radio propagandist rather than Goering, Himmler, Heydrich, etc; he's the sort of person who would have seemed like a harmless marketing geek) is bad in a whataboutist sense, you would do much better to say "if you want to bring Nazis into this, then how about Speer? He wasn't (actively) involved in the Holocaust and he could have had a lot of interesting things to say about architecture and designing an imperial capital?"
Second, the thing with national level news isn't just that people are "uptight". It's that there are many professional and well-practiced liars out there eager for a softball venue (people less obvious than Lazar usually). These sorts of people make significant money from their deceptions and Rogan is an enabler of this stuff, making vast amounts of money himself.
Edit: and just on the question of Rogan's evolution. Just by Wikipedia's bio, I'd say he didn't start with small nuts and graduate to fronting professional conmen. Rather, he started MMA chat, built to national level and then moved laterally to interviewing people saying "hypothetically true" things about the world in generally.
Hold up, think about what that statements means.
1. Let’s take the guy’s word at face value who is totally okay helping spread deception.
2. And the rich person says he’s not continuing to do “action that made him rich” because he wants even more money, but because he enjoys it.
Should that statement really be taken at face value given the context and the claim?
JR giving dubious theories a friendly platform is extremely harmful if his listeners are buying those arguments and repeating them.
I listened to that interview, with no background on Lazar or UFO-aficionados in general, and it seemed pretty clear he was full of it. I'm able to make my own decisions without the host telling me how I should think about the guest or needlessly arguing with someone they ostensibly brought on in good faith.
For instance, if you're talking to a Bitcoin developer and you ask them "what about the energy use", it's just a boring question that's been asked millions of times. You likely know the answer. I'd much rather they get in the weeds about some proposal or technical issue.
> If someone is an expert in their field or has a depth of experience, I'd prefer him to be challenged by someone with a similar level of expertise.
Preparing for an interview will give you some superficial understanding, which will probably fall apart during the interview, unless the interviewer is very intelligent/curious (Sean Carroll's Mindscape and Newtons Apple comes to mind).
Another alternative would be to have people on both sides present, but I've never seen that work out. The discussion you get with hostility is nowhere near the discussion you get with curiosity.
I would much rather listen to a musician interviewed by someone with experience with recording & songwriting & making albums, who can ask intelligent questions about the craft & process & equipment. (Warren Huart's interviews with music producers are a great example.) Not some random gossip journalist asking "So what are your inspirations on this album" and "what can we expect from your tour".
I think that's why broader podcasts are popular. You don't really know the specific topic you're getting, but it's often pretty interesting, and you can go deeper from there, finding the one or few expert podcasts that talk about that topic.
I have tried podcasts like that before (Farnam Street's "The Knowledge Project" comes to mind), but I found that often the guests weren't always interesting to me. If the hit-rate wasn't high enough I'd end up unsubscribing.
Derek Sivers tried doing the reverse, his podcast feed was every interview he'd done on other people's podcasts. So he was always the guest, but it introduced me to new podcasts & hosts I'd never heard of. That's actually how I found The Knowledge Project (and I did love the Knowledge Project interview with Annie Duke, who wrote Thinking In Bets).
Edit: Guess I should link those episodes for anyone who might be interested:
Ignoring an unsolved and critical issue simply because it’s been asked before is odd.
If someone is pushing something with an awful unmitigated issue, hell yes they should be challenged on it.
Cigarette company CEO: We understand that our product is dangerous and believe adults should make a judgement call as to the risks. We offer a lot of products to help people quit...
Aren't you glad you wasted N minutes with that canned response? Or were you expecting a change of heart and him relinquishing the role of CEO and dissolving the company?
> If someone is pushing something with an awful unmitigated issue, hell yes they should be challenged on it.
I don't want my interviewer to be doing advocacy or "mitigating" issues. I want to listen to an interesting conversation. Not everything has to be advocacy.
Can it EVER happen, since he is a talk show host that must be dumb and constantly say 'Lets hear what some folks think' and bring even more people to his show?
I don't look to podcasts like these to make their guests conform to my beliefs, I look to them to see novel perspectives and to glean what I can from them for my benefit, and simply because looking at other perspectives in a format like this really does entertain me.
"Horrible randos" got where they were in some way, and it's certainly possible that they might have a unique perspective that might be helpful or that what they say might actually be information I need. I wonder if Edward Snowden, for example, would be classified as a "horrible rando" if he hadn't been the guy that worked for them and blew the lid off of what the government was surveilling but had only speculated about what they were doing as an outsider with his actual self as a contact in the NSA. He would be saying the same information, but his credibility would change. Which doesn't mean it couldn't be true, as it obviously was in this case. Dismissing him as someone who shouldn't be listened to would have been a mistake.
I keep a lot of thoughts flowing in my head to compare new information against and to make connections with and rate their truthiness as more information comes in. The more information the better. You don't find the truth by listening to people restate your set of beliefs every day.
But it's not really about hearing the same perspective multiple times that I'm after, it's hearing from multiple perspectives.
The problem is that Joe has some really strong opinions and uses the "I don't know" schtick as a cudgel to avoid confronting contrary evidence. Look at how he responds when pushed on aliens, COVID, etc.
Thankfully he's not like that in the majority of interviews, but anything dovetailing a conspiracy is painful is listen to.
In my experience, the overwhelming majority of people who think they are smart and challenge "dumb" ideas with "facts" are the truly dumb people (see anyone in corporate media or government for examples of this).
Not if that's the format of the show, and the show is wildly successful.
Also: what's an example of a really good interview show where the interviewer only brings on people they agree with, or else brings on people they disagree with in order to tell them they're wrong? That sounds like a debate show rather than an interview, and it doesn't sound like my cup of tea. Reminds me of those political interview shows on TV where the host cuts the guest off to yell at them.
I've listened to probably 100 episodes so far, and I don't recall being exposed to any horrible people. Do you have some guests in mind? It seems they're incredibly rare.
It's him talking to Joe Diaz, where Diaz is bragging about how when he was the manager at Laugh Factory he wouldn't book female comics unless they sucked his dick. Rogan asks him how many women he did this to and Diaz says a dozen or something, and Rogan starts hyena laughing like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard.
Rogan gets some great guests on, but don't be fooled by his "aw schucks I'm just a bro asking questions" act. He knows exactly what he's doing and he's a lot more predatory than his on camera character.
Something to consider before you associate your brand with him. Probably better to find an up and rising podcast.
Edit: freetime2 dug up the clip below and it's even worse than I recalled.
I don't think this is really relevant, I know plenty of people that will joke in the same way about other women besides their daughters and mothers.
And that's without addressing the fact that Diaz' comment is potentially rooted in truth...
In my experience (from observations) most of those people do not think the way you do, and if someone will say something like that to their daughters/mothers they will want to just fuck him up.
> It's a double-standard, and our wives/daughters/mothers are going to see that.
They see that already pretty clearly I think. Unfortunately that's the world we are living in, patriarchal world where by the law all genders should be equal but in reality men make more money than woman in same position, leadership positions are dominated by men, if a woman had a lot of partners some people will call her slut but in case of men they call him playboy etc. Double standards are everywhere around us.
(Warning -- Potentially Not Safe For Work)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/26pf4s/an_irishman_a...
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/comedy/news...
I'm generally fairly ambivalent about Joe Rogan. I will listen occasionally if he has an interesting guest, and I feel a lot of the outrage about him is overblown. But I agree this is pretty disgusting.
So yeah, I would really not associate my business with this cluster of clowns.
Why is that so trivial to you?
So this clip alone isn’t really enough to come to any conclusions.
That would be truly awful if the stories he told were at all true, but without additional evidence I’m inclined to believe that they’re nothing more than a comedy routine.
The story in this video is offensive for sure, but in context it also wasn’t really all that taboo to make those types of jokes back when this was recorded.
However, that doesn’t have to change the fact that if his comedy’s content (true or not) is offensive to you that you have to like it, accept it, pay to see it…etc.
But right now we’re talking about a comedian who’s essentially recording himself performing. It’s quite obviously different.
It would be silly to assume a comedian is telling the truth during a performance, and absurd to claim said comedian is gaslighting when he later explains that he was joking.
Back then! Jesus Christ.
I think this comments section demonstrates it. TFA is a pretty uninteresting retelling of their experience in Rogan's studio. Yet the top HN comment is pearl clutching over that 12-year-old Diaz clip that has nothing to do with TFA and all of HN is going on record to be tough like Scruff McGruff on raunchy stories.
And did you guys, like, see what Joe did? He laughed at it. Like a hyena.
"He won't give women a job unless they suck his dick, but boy is he great!"
>At a long desk in the big main room sits an attractive nurse. She offers us an enhancer of B12 or NAD+, through a shot or an IV.
>I get a shot of NAD+, which is supposed to be good for energy and metabolism. NAD stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and I don’t know what the + is. (Actually, I don’t know what any of it is, but the nurse said she takes it, and if you saw this woman, you too would ask for a shot of whatever she’s on.)
What are we supposed to take away from this? Is this nurse actually trained for this? If so, isn't the author completely dismissing that training because the nurse is attractive? If not, isn't Rogan basically just hiring a model to pump his guests full of unknown drugs? Neither option is great. And this was written by the VP of Communication for Substack and is approved by Rogan. This isn't some unauthorized look behind the scenes. This is what they want to advertise. It just gives me the creeps.
> Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) is a coenzyme central to metabolism. Found in all living cells, NAD is called a dinucleotide because it consists of two nucleotides joined through their phosphate groups...NAD exists in two forms: an oxidized and reduced form, abbreviated as NAD+ and NADH (H for hydrogen), respectively. [0]
It's worth noting that NAD+ is well-known. Artificial supplementation I'm not so sure about, but it's inside you already. I...somehow doubt they're just injecting raw NAD+ but I suppose it could be?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotinamide_adenine_dinucleot...
I don't really care about the specifics of what they are injecting. I am objecting to how they are pressuring people, perhaps unintentionally, in the moment to accept the injection of a substance in which the injectee admits they don't understand. It is especially ironic considering Rogan's various comments about vaccines. Thousands of doctors can tell me that the COVID vaccine is safe and I am supposed to doubt them. One nurse tells me NAD+ is safe and I am supposed to believe her.
I am just guess of course, but I am pretty sure anyone able to achieve a CEO or VP title of a well known internet media company probably has the ability and determination to say the words “no thank you” if they don’t want something injected into their body when asked. I am neither a CEO or a VP of an internet media company, but just a normal dude, and I have no problem telling someone “no”.
Honestly have really reached that place where HN commenters feel that we have to protect wealthy and successful adults from big bad podcasting boogeymen?
Have we reached the place in which empathy must be conditional? I can feel bad for people who are put in an uncomfortable situation regardless of their level of success.
Angelina Jolie might have won an Oscar, have hundreds of millions in the bank, and was able to turn down his advances, but I will still feel empathy for her for being the target of Harvey Weinstein's sexual harassment. Rich and successful people are still people.
Empathy…is that what that was? See I took it as someone calling Joe Rogan a bully and belittling two successful intelligent adults as being effectively too simple and stupid to realize they were being bullied. Frankly, that’s far from empathy…that’s elitism.
This is not an accusation against the author's character. Like I said in my original comment, I don't know what she is trying to say with that comment. Although I guess that is its own accusation. Maybe the VP of Communication isn't great at her job if I don't understand what she is trying to communicate.
This a nurse not a metabolism researcher, she might know a fuck ton about NAD+ but it wouldn't be because she's a nurse. Most medical professionals (especially nurses) are trained on the delivery of medical care, not necessarily the ins and outs of supplements.
It's a nurse, who's giving you a shot of you want it of a supplement that may or may not do anything.
Like, for an example of the opposite gender, if someone you trust says they did a particular treatment to fix male pattern baldness, then it seems reasonable to put some weight in their personal experience and how their hair looks after the treatment, especially if you don't trust the official descriptions/PR/advertising claims, then even small amounts of anecdotal but real evidence might seem more valuable.
I'm not going to buy a pair of shoes just because Michael Jordan wears them. The shoes aren't the reason he was good at basketball and there is no reason to believe this nurse was attractive because of these injections.
So yeah, I like Joe Rogan, and I'm fine with associating my brand with him. But if you know rising podcast stars like him - please share.
Sure, but it's pretty easy to find plenty of similar instances throughout the JRE catalog.
Do you live up to that standard, or would someone be able to find some damning evidence of some dark side of you?
Is it possible that people are messy, not always consistent in their behaviour, that they have bad days? That they haven't thought everything through, that they get caught in the moment and regret it later?
Is there any grey area to you?
Suggesting that gray areas exist would absolutely not imply that everything is gray.
Furthermore, my critique had several angles, each alluding to the possibility of a different interpretation.
How is my post binary in any way?
Not all dark pasts are created equal
Apologizing would help, for example.
My degree is in neuroscience. People aren't consistent. The self is mutable. That doesn't mean we shouldn't hold each other to standards? We're intensely social creatures, the opinions of others has incredible transformative power (positive and negative) on our behavior.
Rogan has had opportunities to apologize for the clip or change his behavior. He has not.
Seriously, what do you expect him to do when someone says something like that? Immediately end the broadcast and summon the police? What exactly do you think shows like this are for?
Instead of "hyena laughing", he could maybe go, "Wait, wait, you actually did that? That's how you hired women? That's pretty fucked up, you know that, right?" and then start having a tough conversation about it.
In point of fact, it is perfectly possible to ask hard questions without being judgmental. It's objectively wrong to deny employment to a woman just because they won't blow you, but if Rogan is as skilled of an interviewer as so many people paint him out to be, then surely he is capable of approaching the subject with tact. Give your guest the space and the comfort to feel open with discussing their past experiences and how they may view them now.
If, however, they end up feeling shame and shut up, well - that's on them.
Unless Rogan is secretly operating the world's longest, most elaborate public sting operation, I don't think the "let 'em hang themselves" argument really holds water.
A decent person would waste no time talking to a person like that to begin with, let alone give them a massive platform to be heard far and wide.
Not sure if that's a net positive overall, but it's something to consider.
it's not like rogan was the one asking someone to suck his dick, if anything he exposed someone else
plus, why is laughter painted as agreement? it's a mechanism of coping with ridiculous circumstances. i'd probably laugh out of that whole conversation becoming super awkward
In general people aren't keyed into what falls under programming into rightwing extremist views. The formula is simple: make an argument about something that doesn't really matter, make it convincing by cherrypicking the "facts", and glossing over the inconvenient ones - then make it feel pressing and relevant to the audience by citing a [usually exaggerated] example of how this has affected some poor-mans life. It's a process that relies on ignorance, while setting off parts of the brain that lead to attentive behaviour - the exact realisation that facebook also made, hence why they significantly favour anything that gets the "angry" like-response.
Joe Rogan isn't alone in this of course. Talk-back radio does it, Reddit does it, 9gag does it - no matter where you go on the internet you'll find a place where you can be angry and scared about something that doesn't affect you one bit.
As for the media companies and personalities pushing this: yes they know.
Also politically what I've written doesn't come under "left wing", it actually doesn't come under any political wing. Trying to turn this into some left/right wing disagreement is only a distraction. Indeed if you're feeling challenged in your views, then maybe the Internet isn't for you.
(1)https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/26/faceboo...
Don't people on the left do this too, though? I mean you don't have to look much further than the comments on this story. Joe Rogan is a podcaster - nobody has to listen to him if they don't want to. And I get that he has a wide audience, but the entertainment that other people choose to consume ultimately isn't a very big concern for me and how I choose to live my life. And yet look how controversial the comments are on this fluff piece about what it's like to visit his studio for a day.
Being external the USA helps provide a reference point that people inside the USA often lack.
However the key difference in my point is that people shouldn't be made to feel as if they are victims to things that don't actually matter - it's verging on propaganda.
> people shouldn't be made to feel as if they are victims to things that don't actually matter - it's verging on propaganda.
I agree with you in principle here, but one issue I have is who gets to decide which things "actually matter"? I think that if you and I were to compare things that actually matter to us, there might be some irreconcilable differences.
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-c...
I am a victim to things that literally physically affect me that are caused in part by Joe Rogan et al. creating a narrative that violence against me and people like me is justified and/or funny.
Why is your first instinct to equivocate instead of holding people responsible? It's a weird impulse a lot of people seem to have.
Whenever someone is bashing a particular group of people for exhibiting a certain trait, I think it’s worth questioning whether that trait is really unique or unusually common in that group. Many times it is not, and it is just our biases that make it seem that way. And just in general I find that it’s unproductive to make disparaging comments about large groups of people.
I do regret saying "people on the left". I used it as a counter-example to the parent comment which mentioned "right-wingers", but if I could amend it I would probably just say "people in general".
With regards to holding people responsible: I don’t know - I think it’s ok for people to have and express opinions about things that don’t affect them personally. I think where we often fail is in maintaining a healthy perspective and open mind about things - but on the other hand I don’t think it is my place to tell other people what they are allowed to get angry at or how much they are allowed to care about something. But I am all for open dialogue and questioning people about their beliefs, respectful debate, etc. - which I guess is my version of "holding people responsible".
I'd say it's a learned behavior that feels that way because we live in a society that rewards it far too much and to regularly.
Much of stand up comedy comes from an extremely dark place, and its successes derived from relating stories about their messed up lives to an audience who for a fleeting moment live vicariously through them or find humorous the complete insanity and barbarity they just witnessed. And this type of comedy is very successful. To deny this is at best naive and myopic and at worst deliberate ignorance of the world around us.
It's not exclusive to the east coast; go listen to some Bobby Lee brothel stories on YouTube and prepare to be uncomfortable. These are real people, telling real stories about their past.
Please understand that people have different tastes; there is a large audience for this type of humor; everyone else try not to choke on your own tears laughing it up with Stephen Colbert.
All the HNers coming out to put it on record how disgusted they are with the story remind me of that Daniel Tosh clip where a heckler shouts "rape is never funny" and he goes "it's not... but wouldn't it be funny if someone raped [the heckler]?" and everyone laughs.
It's like watching people get offended on the behalf of babies over some dead baby jokes and then lecturing each other on a forum.
People forget that edginess used to mean that but it turned into bits like Chelsea Handler retelling how she got gangbanged over the weekend.
The OP is trying to assassinate character by what a person laughs at.
Fwiw, I have an extremely dark sense of humor and I’m not arguing in either direction when pointing out the handle. I do find Rogan problematic, however.
These "jokes" are not funny, and in fact are disturbing to folks that have actually internalized and lived the fact that these "jokes" are a reflection of culture.
It wasn't a joke, Jesus Christ, and the fact that you offer that up as a defense is in and of itself telling.
They don’t have many employees. They don’t take much time to produce shows. They don’t have countless assistants to schedule logistics. They keep their operating costs modest. And yet their shows reach a mass audience.
I respect how a small team has kept onto their autonomy and continues to grow and be in the headlines constantly depending on what was discussed. They just push content into the world and the world reacts to it.
He was one of the fist big podcasts and livestreamers before others started doing the same. Most of his initial (and repeat) guests are simply friends from these various industries.
He's not that different to a top-tier Youtuber or influencer of which there are hundreds who have managed to build successful content businesses with very small staff.
They are all just standing on the shoulders of the platforms and content creation tools which allows them to affordably produce and distribute high quality content to billions. Something which has never previously been possible.
According to [1], JRE launched in late 2009. According to [2], podcasts took off spectacularly in 2004 and by 2005, every man and his dog had a podcast (paraphrasing, obvs.) Whilst he has been doing it a long time, he was relatively late to the party.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Joe_Rogan_Experience [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_podcasting#Timeline
Nobody watches top tier YouTubers, rather than others YouTubers, because of the platform. The platform is absolutely saturated with others, making identical content. It's the same with podcasts. The same guests are almost always making rounds to all the other podcasts, yet people prefer Joe Rogan over all the other podcasts the guests are on. Why?
The top tier people have some mix of personality traits, physical traits, work ethics, or talents that separate them from everyone else. That ability to be so massively separated is what should be considered "impressive", since it's provably not trivial or common.
I’m always impressed by someone getting to number one, on their own merit, because I know the reasons are extensive rather than simple. Well, except for something like OnlyFans.
It’s the highest listened to podcast for many years now. You don’t find that impressive?
I’m not a Howard Stern fan, but I’m impressed by the reach of his satellite show.
Do you not find podcasts impressing at all? Reaching millions of people for hours each week is very rare.
Joe identifies as a man.
I use singular they all the time, especially online where people are accounts and not people.
If only the rest of us could do so much with so little.
A podcast doesn't stay relevant with a large and loyal audience unless it's actually good. To pretend like JRE is a continued success purely because he was on TV before 1) ignores the countless podcasts started by people far less famous than Rogan was when he started which have failed to take off and 2) sounds like a cynical, resentful thing you tell yourself feel better along the lines of "well, if I came from where Rogan did, I'd be just as successful."
Whatever you want to say about the reasons anyone tuned in to begin with, it's transparently unfair (and betrays your own "issues") to not offer a balanced perspective which includes the need to acknowledge the obvious which is that Rogan's success just might be _also_ due to the fact that he is a good interviewer, that he has good guests on his show, that he's able to spark interesting conversations, etc.
The idea that his TV stint and MMA fame makes a listenership of 12M an automatic thing is just laughable.
Don't like Rogan? Don't listen to him and leave it at that.
2. Some people come to his defense.
3. "Why is there so much effort to defend this person?!"
You appear to have missed that context and have launched into a passionate defense of his talent, behavior and personality. As a bonus you've dipped into the ad hominem well at least twice.
If you think it's impressive that somebody very famous can make a podcast with only three employees, ok. Go ahead and be impressed.
Unfortunately in today's environment, many people (most of the ones who don't like Rogan) think it is incumbent on everyone to be a wokescold. They think that having a conversation with someone somehow grants them legitimacy or "normalizes" their views, while intelligent people with coherent, well-thought out principles understand that legitimacy is not something that is granted through proxy.
The team behind the team started small and have managed to stay small despite the massive audience. Very cool indeed.
The Zuckerberg interview he did was probably the most important interview of the last few years, and to go 3hrs with anyone with a calm and consistent interest and disposition is a direct result of his level of physical fitness and world class expertise as both a comedian and martial artist.
There is a mind required for comedy that is transferrable where instead of making people laugh, you can use it to disarm people and get them to open up and share what they believe. Rogan's interview style is very closely related to comedy but just slowed down to a Tai Chi level, where there is an arc in the discussion where most people run out of neurotic energy after about an hour, and then instead of gotcha'ing them, he is just accepting, and then nudges them toward challenges, but not to catch them out, but to get them to be honest. The effect is beautiful.
There is a lot of middlebrow anxiety about him, but I don't think it has standing unless it's from someone who is also pro-level funny, fit, and competent in their discipline.
He was a state champion in Tae Kwon Do when he was younger and is a black belt in BJJ. He's very experienced in multiple types of martial arts. He doesn't compete because he's 54 years old but he still trains every day.
Statistically, "of all time" should probably include some dead people...
You mean of all interviews done anywhere? Surely, that's hyperbole.
What exactly came out of that interview that's worth noting other than that Facebook throttled a Hunter Biden story (which we already knew had been done across social media platforms)
You should think about the tens of thousands of journalists who have done the same thing for a hundred years without being fit, comedians or kickboxers or whatever.
The whole comment reads like idolatry.
Interesting comparison to journalists though. Who would be a peer as an interviewer? Maybe George Plimpton, Christine Amanpour, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, or Dominick Dunne?
Personally, I respect physical competence, techne over episteme, experiment over theory, performance over criticism, predictive power over post-hoc explanation, etc. It's more of an orientation than an idolatry.
No matter how hard you practice, you can’t fake funny.
If you think Joe Rogan is an impressive interviewer, your mind will be blown away by someone like Terry Gross. She appeared on the Tonight Show and Fallon showed a photo of a book Gross had read before interviewing the author - stuffed full of notes, page corners turned down
Stephen Colbert presenting her Peabody award covers her show better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pl8mkTFY-D8
And as you say, people like Terry Gross and Oprah and Diane Sawyer and Mike Wallace and even Howard Stern (who is one of the best ever at interviewing) actually do research ahead of time. And the interviews are far better for it. Having an off the cuff conversation is fine. Having awareness of the person you're going to talk to, familiarity with their work and with what they are about, is even better.
Watching Oprah interview Lance Armstrong remains a master class in the art form and her ability to interview such a wide range of people about so many things is just incredible. Likewise, Terry Gross does what she does so well -- and is one of the best audio journalists of all time, that it's honestly comical for Rogan to even be in the same sentence.
I think Letterman has been doing some interesting stuff lately in the gray area between those extremes. He's a humble funnyman that keeps things a little loose, but you can still tell he's done some prep and is quite well-read.
That's a good list. I'll add more, because I think you're being pretty dismissive of journalism and the art of the interview that has been born from journalism:
Terry Gross, Diane Sawyer, Mike Wallace, Larry King, Bob Woodward, Lesley Stahl, Bryant Gumble, Bob Costas, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters (who I personally don't love but who I can't deny has excelled at the art form and created many of its best elements), Jane Pauley, Gwen Ifill, David Frost, Audie Cornish, Kara Swisher.
There are many, many more I'm forgetting. Interviewing has long been a stable of radio and television broadcasting. Not all broadcasters are journalists, but there is significant overlap.
The two greatest living interviewers are Oprah Winfrey and Howard Stern. Stern isn't a journalist per se, but he is a broadcaster and he's absolutely as good as anyone who has ever done it (other than maybe Oprah, who has the ability to interview anyone and make it tantalizing). And I think Joe Rogan is a good interviewer and has absolutely improved over the years (as one would hope if you do something for hours a day for over a decade), but he doesn't even come close to either of them.
And yes, interviewing is a physical act and an act of stamina, but I'm not sure what your point is here. Most journalists who are adept at the interview (and I'm sticking with primarily broadcast interviews here because written interviews, while equally important, are a different beast that often require far more stamina and time than doing a televised or audio broadcast of an interview) have that level of stamina, or more.
I would put Terry Gross miles ahead of both, and believe Stern's skill as an interviewer laps Winfrey several times. But I'd put nearly everyone on your list ahead of Winfrey as well.
I'm curious: why did you call out Stern as "not a journalist" but not Winfrey? Neither one of them bears even a passing resemblance to a journalist as far as I can tell.
As for why I call Oprah a journalist and not Stern? I mean, Oprah has worked in news. She has research teams for her various shows and projects. Her talk show could definitely delve into tabloid stuff (especially in the 1980s, though she pulled back before the format became deranged in the 1990s), but like Donohue (a legit newsman), but she started working in local news when she was still in high school. She’s the definition of a broadcast journalist. For every tabloid story she’d get into (which often were often not far removed from what you’d see on Dateline or 20/20 or 60 Minutes or other newsmagazine programs), she’d also do deeper dives into reporting highlighting stuff that people in her audience didn’t know about. She'd visit places and talk to the people. And yes, she had research and fact checking teams on her show. Oprah is a journalist in my mind. She’s a populist and her audience target is different than the typical reader of FT or even the New York Times or people who regularly listen to NPR, but she’s a journalist all the same.
Stern, in comparison, is a DJ and a talk show host. He was a program director and disc jockey who then got into shock jock stuff at the height of that era and then created a genre-defining morning show. He reads headlines but he doesn’t do news. He might break news based on his questions, because he’s incredible at his job, but he’s not trying to tell a larger story or narrative. He's not going to go to a town in America that didn’t have Black people for 75 years to talk to residents and try to get to the heart of the racism. He's not going to go to Auschwitz with Elie Wiesel. What he can do is make the subjects he interviews reveal more about themselves than they planned. He can make people comfortable enough to show who they really are. And his technique is the same technique any good journalist would use, but he wouldn’t call himself a journalist and neither will I.
The line between broadcaster and broadcast journalist is thin, to be sure. And someone like Terry Gross or Charlie Rose are definitely more on the “journalism” side than Oprah usually is. But Oprah is still trying to tell broader stories. She’s still doing research. Stern is much more akin to Johnny Carson or Mike Douglas, Merv Griffin, David Letterman, etc. Oprah isn’t Diane Sawyer, but she’s closer to that direction.
Both are great and I don’t think Stern not being a journalist hurts him or his credibility or his work at all. If anything, he doesn’t have to be held to the standards of journalism or whatever. Whereas Oprah has been rightfully criticized for having people on her shows over the years spreading pseudo-science.
To put it another way, if you lie in an interview with Howard Stern and he knows you’re lying, Howard might push back on your or make fun of you a bit, but he’s going to let you go on an lie. But if you lie to Oprah, and she knows you’re lying, she'll push back. She's usually not combative, but she'll dig in more. And if she finds out you lied to her? After she defended you? She'll eviscerate you in front of a live studio audience, alongside media critics from the top newspapers in America, as part of a discussion on truth and ethics and fact checking. She'll admit her own culpability and faults, she'll take her lumps, and then she'll cut you to the core in front of God and everyone.
It’s not clear to me at all, to be honest.
> Personally, I respect […] experiment over theory
Yet your theory above on how competence in a physical discipline confers ability to conduct interviews for longer periods without becoming neurotic seems entirely unsubstantiated by experiment. Are you aware of any studies that back it?
Dick Cavett has forgotten more about the art of the conversational interview than most people have ever known. Intelligent, perceptive, and witty. I'll take his 40-year-old youtube clips any day of the week over the wannabe everyman that Joe Rogan pretends to be.
According to the parent comment, in order to criticize Joe Rogan, I have to "get on his level" first. Got it.
Brb, gonna go do some whipits.
Swisher has had him on her podcast multiple times since then and also had very good, very substantive interviews with him.
Side note: Zuck has clearly invested many, many, many hours in media training over the last decade or so and it has paid off. He's still far from a good speaker but he's so much better, it's honestly impressive.
Confrontational interviews are a difficult style to do well, and probably not a great style for Joe Rogan in particular. If the guest is smarter or at least more quick-witted than the interviewer, the interviewer can be made to look like a fool.
Also, it’s very easy for that style of interview to make people close down and rely on rehearsed talking points. If you really want to know what someone thinks, you need to create a sense of emotional safety for them to open up. Especially these days. You can’t make the interview feel like an interrogation. Even literal interrogators will tell you that.
Sure, a light-hearted chat with easy questions can of course make a person open up, but when it comes to the billionaire CEO of one of the most powerful companies in the world (or some high-powered politician, or whatever), is it ethical to donate what basically amounts to a PR job (answering softballs and getting to seem relatable while ignoring problematic topics) that is framed to viewers/listeners as an interview?
“Yeah, I heard something about Facebook and privacy that sounded bad, but I saw Zuckerberg on Joe Rogan talking about hunting elk and smoking weed, he seemed like a relatable guy. I’m sure he tries his best and wouldn’t betray his users on purpose.”
Exactly. Part of the reason Joe Rogan is so huge is that a lot of people are sick of the current interviewing model, where some sneering journalist (who usually lives in Brooklyn) asks a bunch of leading questions in an effort to humiliate his guest by luring them into a contradiction.
Well-adjusted people don't regularly enjoy watching others get humiliated. They'd rather see an interesting conversation between interesting people, which is exactly what Rogan gives them and exactly what the traditional media does not.
Why is this the first I'm hearing of it? It didn't seem to have any effect on how Facebook operates.
There are several podcasts that I will occasionally listen to where the host of the show repeatedly talks over whoever else is on the podcast with him. Usually the brunt of it is a "sidekick" or co-host.
I get it, it's your show, but like, if someone is talking, let them talk!
Maybe it's the longer format that gives that "breathing room." No matter: I can listen stress-free without getting upset that someone is saying something and he keeps barging in.
That being said having watched a few JRE podcasts he definitely has his dogma that comes out in many episodes, here are a few: "hallucinogenics are good for expanding consciousness", "Most social media is a bad echo chamber", "tribalism is bad(and is the cause of most of todays issues)", "censorship is happening at a mass level", "medical solutions are not a one size fits all fix", "ufo's are most probably real" etc.. He definitely comes across as someone with a open mind and seems to be a life long learner but I think some of his ideas are somewhat out there. I would not classify him as someone who is dumb, which is strange as alot of HN folks seem to peg that on him.
I'm really confused by this stance, because the top podcasts are never swarmed by one specific perspective. On my apple podcast the podcasts on "top episodes" lists for me both the nyt daily and ben shapiro in the same top 5. If I filter to news podcasts only, they're the top 2.
media being MSM like NBC, NY Times, CNN, etc. Podcasts and even the popular ones are longtail so they will have divergent messages than the MSM players. But Joe Rogan has more viewers than some of the smaller networks top shows and that puts him squarely in the field of MSM, and those players mentioned before are all seeing ever shrinking audiences and JR is seeing his audience expand and he has 100x less of the support and administrative staff than those networks do, it must infuriate them to no degree and I can see why they would want him shut down.
But to address the point I think you're making, just because two shows have different viewpoints doesn't mean they're not the same- 'Fox and Friends' and 'The View' might have opposing ideologies, but they're the same show.
It's completely dumbfounding to compare staff sizes of a podcast to worldwide journalism institutions. It borders on bad faith. "They" want them shut down? Who is they?
"To paraphrase Rule 34: if it exists, Joe Rogan’s studio has jerky of it."
There is one and only one indication for parenteral cyancobalamin (B12) administration and that is deficiency thereof due to inadequate production of gastric intrinsic factor or a disease of the terminal ileum. Period.
It's hard to take anyone seriously who would encourage podcast guests to receive vitamin B12 injections without documenting deficiency. The evidence on this subject is widely available; so if Mr. Rogan gets this so wrong, where else are his impaired reasoning processes taking his 11M followers?
Specifically Australia’s elderly Hungarian and Eastern European population, it seems to be literally something inbuilt in them to come in and demand it. They swear by it. And as much as I absolutely hate tipping the hat to rubbish complementary and alternative treatments, or which vitamin supplementation has to be amongst the definitively most wasteful, it is simply not possible to convince some people
You are aware of a study of B12 injections in non-deficient individuals indicating no benefit? "No evidence" is not the same thing as "evidence against".
So you want an authority, rather than to make your mind up yourself?
Watching an interview where both participants are less than perfect challenges you to think for yourself.
> where else are his impaired reasoning processes taking his 11M followers?
The same place everyone is being taken by all the media we consume.
It is ironic, but watching someone like Alex Jones forces one to think. The real problem is how do we learn to filter when an “authority” is speaking or writing?
> Watching an interview where both participants are less than perfect challenges you to think for yourself.
i mean, would you take programming advice from two guys who have no experience in making actual software?
does that actually force you to "think for yourself" or just cause other listeners with no experience to become misinformed, and those with real experience tear their hair out in frustration?
But people have this weird way of taking things they like and not only rejecting criticism but making it their whole identity. Joe can do no wrong and if people dislike him it's because they don't "get it" and they are just being soft.
Joe also likes to deflect by saying "I'm an idiot don't listen to me" which hey that's fine but if you're going to ramble about how the moon is made of cheese then say "don't listen to me" but then bring on a guest who is going to talk about how the moon is made of cheese; the line that is being pushed is pretty clear even if it is unintentional.
This is exactly why he’s so popular. Most people are laymen. Joe doesn’t have a research team coming up with optimal talking points. He’s a regular minded guy asking regular questions. He achieves depth through the sheer length of interviews.
would this imply something is not right with our society because there aren't laws against listening to joe rogan.
I don’t believe censoring Rogan is justified/wise/useful/etc. — even if it were it’d still be illegal anyway. But does that mean I think we should just throw credulous folks to the wolves with snarky remarks like “won’t someone think of the credulous people?!”
We should think of the credulous people, and take society’s threats against them and their threat to society seriously.
Humanity has proven to be so wrong about so many things before, best let the discussion flow instead of trying to kill competing theories...
Any of us could write an app that generated "theories" ... a few may even turn out to be correct or close.
Research shouldn’t be locked up behind paywalls and in ivory towers. It should be public knowledge and lots of basic questions should be asked about it.
And, in general, revolutionary new scientific ideas are targeted at scientists rather than the lay public. Ideas like new models of the solar system don't tend to take hold because the public thinks they are cool but instead because they become inevitable within the scientific community. Being less able to go on JRE and talk about how awesome ivermectin to a massive listener base is isn't going to limit scientific breakthroughs in the future.
A while ago I read that lots of people were upset with Joe Rogan for having Alex Jones on his show. I really didn't know anything about Jones other than what you see on cable news and Rogan I'm fairly neutral on. So I found an Alex Jones episode and played it. Jones came off as being entirely unhinged. It was not flattering at all. They were basically winding Jones up and then letting him explode.
I think he sees himself a lot in the tradition of Stern and Opie and Anthony, where some outrageous stuff is cool. He doesn’t see himself as a media outlet but a guy who wants to have fun and push weird shit. Obviously it’s caused him trouble with the anti vacc guys he had and he’s sort of normalised his show a bit, but still I think he sees himself in that tradition. He’s not looking to be Dan Rather.
Is it though? I assumed it meant people found his show entertaining.
Everybody is using heuristics to navigate an extremely complex world, most of the heuristics are pretty good (which is why they persist), but they also have corner cases.
This statement is not even false. One is inevitably a layperson in most things, even at one's job (like Rogan is at interviewing interesting people), but also usually not layperson in at least some things.
Turns out the left wasn't any better than the right, they could just be honest when they weren't in power. Once they were, well it's obviously your fault for holding them to the same standards they held the other team to.
I'd also say the same thing about Al Franken - he was pretty deliberate about "de-comedying" or whatever it was he called it when he went into his first term in the Senate. I will admit that that would not have been as much work for him as it would be for Stewart.
There's a play by play of it on Crossfire's Wikipedia page also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossfire_(American_TV_program...
It's sort of a nuanced issue, since a lot of people took The Daily Show seriously in that era anyway. The difference is, of course, that Crossfire and its ilk were/are unserious in subtle ways, and seemed meant to be taken seriously. I'll leave it up to you, the reader, to decide which space Joe Rogan's show lives in (I actually couldn't tell you, never having seen it).
Presumably people watch CNN for different reasons and with different expectations than they watch Comedy Central.
Tucker Carlson's rebuttal was that Jon Stewart could book political guests that wouldn't come on Crossfire, so he had a journalistic duty to ask hard questions.
Which... felt kind of weak to me. For profit media is for profit, and both Crossfire and Daily Show were beholden to the bottom line, and had to calibrate their behavior against that. Edward Roscoe Murrow, they were not.
PS: My favorite Stewart line from that interview remains (paraphrasing) "Crossfire isn't theater? Tucker, you're 35 year old man wearing a bowtie. This is theater."
https://www.npr.org/2005/01/11/4279560/tipper-gore-and-famil...
These people may put some thought into what they say. And some of them may be smart people. So sometimes they have good points. And sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are right. And sometimes they are wrong. But you should just laugh. And if they give you a new perspective on something, find out more reliable source. Why are you taking jokes seriously?
And it's not just the USA, see Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, whose resumé previous to being elected president consisted of being a politically relevant comedian.
I saw someone make an argument that the rise of celebrity politicians is about television. See also JFK, kind of one of the first "celebrity" politicians in the age of TV -- not that he was an actor first, but still.
The senile Joe Biden?
I struggled with it for a long time, without even knowing I was struggling with it. I fact-checked one of them and realized the truth of the whole comedy situation, and I've viewed them completely differently ever since.
It's a cop out. Often times he's very serious about the political points he's making, even if he packages the point in a joke. The point or argument itself isn't a joke, at all. So you can't do that but then hide behind "I'm just a comedian!" when there's a flaw in your argument.
Then look up Jon Stewart on Crossfire.
I can't find a version of that interview that isn't edited, you really should watch the entire thing as it went out over the air.
But here's one that shows the important parts (imo). Note the timestamp is 57 seconds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RkqzRs95Sc&t=57s
Jon Stewart was publicly saying what everyone wanted to say. The only person he could get ahold of was Jim Cramer, but you can FEEL the anger. That anger wasn't just Jon, it was your average Americans.
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Jon Stewart was consistently getting named in polls as the most TRUSTWORTHY news source, and a lot of it was for this. As a comedian he was pointing out the ridiculousness of the politics, and he wasn't doing it because it was a republican in office.
Because Jon Stewart was saying what most people WANTED to say.
I can't find the skit, but during the Iraq war the US lost _PALLETS_ of money. Think about that. PALLETS OF MONEY. Jon Stewart did a skit where he made fun of it because how ridiculous is that? You send literal pallets of money and don't put enough security on it to prevent it from disappearing?
---
There's this idea of court jester's as being the only people who could safely say certain things. I'm no historian so I can't speak to that historical accuracy, but that's how I view Jon Stewart.
People are aware that he's a comedian, and they're aware that he's highlighting very specific things. But given the news media then (and today), there's a reason he was considered by many people to be the most trustworthy news source.
When Jon made those statements about only being an entertainer, he was defending himself from attacks by the media, not by your every day American people. That statement in particular, put in context, was him showing how ridiculous it was for these organizations to be attacking him.
> There's this idea of court jester's as being the only people who could safely say certain things. I'm no historian so I can't speak to that historical accuracy, but that's how I view Jon Stewart.
I believe that's exactly how Rogan's audience views him too. I am not a fan of Rogan. But this seems pretty similar. The difference is just that you disagree with Rogan's fans and agree with Stewarts, ok...
The difference is just that you personally think Stewart is generally more trustworthy than Rogan? If so (and I generally agree), why didn't Stewart accept that responsibility instead of trying to abdicate it with "I'm only an entertainer, you can't hold me to the standards of news media". Don't both Stewart and Rogan have the responsibility to in fact be held to the standards of news media, when millions consider them trustworthy as news media? I think both of them are irresponsible and acting in an untrustworthy manner if they say "I'm only an entertainer, I shouldn't be held to the standards of a news source", while being considered a trustworthy news source by many. How do we know if someone is trustworthy as a news source? By evaluating them as a news source, not letting them get out of it with "I'm just an entertainer, you can't hold me to that standard".
That doesn't abdicate the press of their responsibility, but is instead a sign that we've reverted back to feudal power structures.
If everyone believes you're an adulterer you have a responsibility to cheat on your spouse?
---
In addition, this is why cherry picking is frowned upon. Jon Stewart was responding to the ridiculousness of CNN, Fox, et al, running hit pieces on him, and they started running hit pieces on him because they were showing up in polls as less trustworthy than Jon Stewart.
What you're basically claiming here is that because he's more trustworthy than CNN, Fox, et al, he has a responsibility to trustworthiness. AT THE TIME this was happening, the general sentiment was the opposite. That the trustworthiness of CNN, Fox, et al was SO BAD, that even a comedian, whose job it is to take things out of context and stretch the truth for a laugh, was more trustworthy than CNN, Fox, et al.
This was all going on during the second Iraq war, where Bush and Cheney was giving speeches about mission accomplished atop aircraft carriers with the banner "Mission Accomplished" while we were still sending more troops.
It was clearly a political maneuver and Jon Stewart was making fun of it whilst CNN, et al, were mostly not calling them out. But people aren't _stupid_, they knew it was ingenuine. That Jon Stewart, a fricking comedian, was the only public forum really highlighting how disingenuous it was is WHY he was getting voted as more trustworthy in polls. Jon Stewart was pointing this out.
And you know what? The people were fucking right. When the 911 responders were getting dicked who was it that fought for them? It sure as shit wasn't CNN, Fox, et al.
---
Without that context, what you're doing here is cherry picking, and I suspect it's because the current "social politics" surrounding joe rogan are causing younger people to let it bleed over onto Jon Stewart.
No, becuase someone thinks you've done something bad doesn't mean you have the have the responsibility to do something bad.
I think Joe Rogan encourages people to build a worldview off of things he says, encourages people to treat him as reliable news, and profits from them doing so, both monetarily and by influence over what people think. He has a huge amount of influence over what people think, based on people believing that he's a straight shooter. Then when called on whether he's doing so responsibly, whether he really is straight-shooting, he says "I'm just an entertainer, it's not a relevant question". I think it's irresponsible and manipulative.
I don't see how that has anything to do with thinking someone is obligated to kill if people believe they are a murderer, that's a ridiculous and silly analogy that just doesn't work.
I think Jon Stewart did/does the same thing as Joe Rogan. He has a huge amount of influence over what people think, based on people believing that he's a straight shooter, and he likes, encourages, and profits from this trust and this influence -- it is intentional. Then when called on whether he's doing so responsibly, he says "I'm just an entertainer, you can't expect that of me or hold me accountable for it, it's not what entertainers do". I think it's irresponsible and manipulative.
Can you be specific about how you think the cases differ?
As for your question, I've already explained the context around Jon Stewart and I have no interest in a culture war.
People? Period? If you truly don't think journalists and political leaders, among others, have a responsibility to behave responsibly with the truth and their methods, and that people are right to expect that of them and evaluate them on it...
Then I guess we have enough of a different worldview that communication is indeed difficult.
I'm not sure what makes something a culture war to you. I am a leftist critisizing both Joe Rogan and Jon Stewart. My problem with Jon Stewart is not with his politics, which I largely agree with. To me, a culture war approach is more thinking that you must pick a side and then insist those on the other side are without virtue and those on yours without flaw -- I am also not interested in that.
One almost begins to suspect this is all a front for disliking Jon Stewart ;)
You have a good day.
And of course you've thought about Jon Stewart a lot, that's obvious.
Stewart fits right into the political infotainment environment. His show was intentionally laced with jokes, but other than that it was very similar to the highlight of "top news stories" you'd hear on other cable news stations. The depth (shallow) was probably about the same for most news stories as well.
Stewart also, despite his claims of being just a comedian, would go on serious moralistic diatribes. Someone brought up his Cramer interview, and that's a good example. The guy clearly doesn't view himself as just a comedian there. Like Rogan, they're willing to go after and call out others as if they know more than them (whether or not they do is another discussion), but when called out on their failures they pretend they're just goofballs and never pretended to be anything more. It's dishonest.
Personally, I dislike Stewart because he's often prone to hypocritical moral posturing. He took a unflattering picture of Charlie Rangel up and laughed about his "front butt." Then a year later he took Newsweek to task for having a bad picture of Michelle Bachmann, saying that you can argue with her politics but it's never appropriate to attack someone's looks. When the only black writer on the show took issue with one of his impersonations, he yelled at the guy and cut ties with him. Now he's going around lecturing white people about how they have to listen to black people.
I believe that he in fact popularized the phrase "fake news" first, to use it to refer to himself, to do exactly this, defend himself when called out, saying "hey i'm just fake news, why are you trying to hold me to real news standards?"
I think it totally paved the way for a lot of misinformation (that now tends to, but not always, be right-wing oriented), and I think it's a mess.
Here's someone else making the same connection in 2016: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trump_jon_stewart_stephen...
It's not just Stewart, it's part of the general merging of "entertainment", "news", and "politics". But I think Stewart is a fore-runner in serving roles that are actually both "politics" (advocacy of positions) and "news" (informing as to what's going on) for their audience, while disclaiming accountability for performing those roles responsibly because "it's just entertainment" -- an approach that has been adopted by Rogan, among others.
[In case you think I am making this critique from the "right" I am most definitely not]
This is right out of the Jon Stewart playbook. He can say he’s a “comedian” when criticized but clearly loves the influence he has a “journalist.” Great schtick if you can pull it off.
Trump’s presidency showed that it entirely wasn’t.
EDIT: for those who don't remember policital comedy/commentary shows were not a thing before The Daily Show. Sort of like how people forget conversational format and ajax weren't really a thing before gmail
As for misinformation, the word you seem to avoid saying - you clearly don't have any problem identifying when Joe is unsure of what he is saying, so I guess you are concerned about what other people are thinking. I'm not sure your speculation about how other people think is grounds for useful feedback. In fact I'm not sure you know much at all 3 episodes in.
He was "intelligent" maybe a few times in his life. Those are represented by the third eye on show's emblem/logo.
Resulting in "asking dumb questions and thoughtlessly yielding to the last authority that spoke" being portrayed as some height of intelligence.
Unless you are an expert in every field of every guest, you have no room to patronize. Joe absolutely asks good questions and and receives and considers contradictory information, as any casual listener knows.
I see what you're getting at but I think you're putting the cart before the horse here. JRE has become a highly politicized target and criticism(or praise) of the show is a proxy narrative for half-dozen other issues. This is just more identity politics spilling over into more facets of our lives.
>Joe also likes to deflect by saying "I'm an idiot don't listen to me" which hey that's fine but if you're going to ramble about how the moon is made of cheese then say "don't listen to me" but then bring on a guest who is going to talk about how the moon is made of cheese; the line that is being pushed is pretty clear even if it is unintentional.
I think the diversity of perspectives is a valuable part of the show. But it's a balancing act with many pitfalls.
Could you elaborate what you mean? Especially the term 'identity politics' feels like it is charged and in danger of being mis-interpreted.
He has deliberately made it that way because it is highly profitable for him.
idk, i feel like the majority of trump supporters already listen to JRE. Those that don't support Trump would hate Joe giving Trump the time of day and therefore risk losing those listeners while gaining none. I don't see an upside to Trump being on JRE.
Post Jan 6, Trump is a pariah for anyone not running in a Republican primary.
Examples of stupid things he's said?
Like, I wholeheartedly agree, he doesn't achieve good interviews by the quality of his questions.
Except... that he kind of does, in a weird way. Experts on the show are happy to use those questions as a launching point to correct whatever incorrect assumptions he had in asking it.
He's very good at getting people to open up and talk. Perhaps dumb questions play a role in that? Perhaps they make people feel comfortable by validating their expert status in the room or something, I don't know. But I do know that it seems to work. I also know he's a comedian. Comedy is fundamentally a weirdly manipulative art form... You carefully craft a set of jokes and then practice over and over again to make it feel like an organic, albeit funny conversation. Every little pause, intonation, turn of phrase, it's all intentional. So, being that he is a practiced comedian, it's possible some of that interview style is pretty intentional too.
I think [1] is a balanced evaluation.
"...In short, Taleb resists categorization. If I had to pigeonhole him, I'd call him an anti-guru guru. That is, he mercilessly bashes other gurus, pundits and prophets and warns you not to fall for them. He depicts himself as a brave, lonely truth-teller in a world of fools and frauds. In so doing, he becomes a guru himself, with a cult-like following...
...even if you question what Taleb is saying—and you certainly should—he forces you to examine your own biases and assumptions. Yes, he can be irritating, but so are many of our most original thinkers..."
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/nassim-tale...
Bullshit along the lines of: Did you know statisticians believe the normal distribution curve is infallible and perfectly describe real world scenarios? This actually false. Therefore, statisticians are stupid, and you're smarter than them for understanding otherwise. And I am smarter than everyone for having pointed it out.
He doesn't force you to examine your own biases and assumptions. He tricks you into believing that you have done so and have come out wiser. He's just yet another fool and fraud in a pit of fools and fraud.
I have people in my friend circle who have opinions about joe rogan ( and his audience) even though they've never listened to him.
Even top comment on this thread is a meta comment about unreasonable behavior joe rogan supporters or something.
Notably, the one other exception is Joe calling bullshit on Ben Shapiro's claims.
The show has never invited anyone in favor of affirmative trans healthcare, for instance. But they did invite Debra Soh and Abigail Shier almost purely because they were against it.
But because the JRE pretends it's a free speech zone where no opinion is unheard, it creates a very biased view of public opinion in viewers. A division into "the woke mob" of ideologues and the "intellectual dark web" of people that are supposedly free of ideology. The show is massively contributing to what it says it hates.
He’s had Blaire White on.
She might be trans, but she really is on one ideological line with Shrier und Soh. I'm not sure if White would call for all transition to be banned when opportunistic (as some members of the GOP do now), whereas I have doubts about Shrier and Soh being honest about finding transition acceptable in principle, but that's really the only difference.
Or are we not talking about the same person?
The parent post is someone who doesn’t listen to Rogan, and a perfect example of someone that casts Rogan as a transphobe because he dares to not tow 100% of the views that they want him to.
This type of philosophical fascism is what is ruining our world today.
LOL.
That's not just a random bar I set, it's been pretty heavily requested - but everyone knows it wouldn't happen because of prior criticism.
Even Tim Pool invites people to the left of the liberal democratic baseline (that I'd call center-right at best, but I'm also used to a more european notion of left and right) occasionally. Why not the JRE?
The Bernie interview was great, but it was a tactical campaign move. He wasn't going to be too contrarian with Joe when the audience is Joe's.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/tulsi_gabbard/41253...
She might not be as far left as you would prefer, but there is no doubt she is on the left side of the US political spectrum. (And please don't bother wasting our time with that tired old trope about the Democrats being equivalent to center-right party in European politics. We're not in Europe.)
It's hard to point to a voting record as evidence of one being a leftist or not, when actual leftist policies are not typically put up for a vote in America. Her ideological score puts her in line with Tim Ryan, who is currently running for Senate in right-leaning Ohio, and is competitive because of the very fact he isn't a leftist. Despite what you may hear, not all Democrats are socialists. Far from it.
Without even loosely-defined characterizations of what a political ideology is and where it falls on our (albeit very imperfect) scale, terms like "leftism" are doomed to a future of being weaponized by their opponents, who themselves shift right and decry moderates as "radicals".
All of that aside, I'd still like to hear your rationalization for her recent appearance as the host of a far-right talk show where she, among other things, referred to the sitting attorney general's investigation of a former President's alleged crimes as one having "all hallmarks of a dictatorship". Is hosting Tucker's program an endorsement of every position he's ever espoused? Surely not. But I'd say it's a level of support akin to giving a speech at a political candidate's rally...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FT_22...
In present internet discourse, 5-percentile radical leftist opinions are peddled as if they represent any significant group of people in this nation. Anyone who does not agree with their often non-scientific ideological framework is labelled as right-wing-fascist irrespective of ground realities surrounding the person or the topic.
What we're witnessing here is a takeover of the American left by a very particular strain of political activism. Like all activists, they too care more about ascendency in the power struggle and aesthetic markers of cultural victory, instead of practical solutions for improving the lives of the population they represent.
> We're not in Europe
If Europe had anywhere near the racial/cultural/religious diversity of the US, then they'd be on their way to a swift turn to the right. Orban is the canary, and the rise of the right in Germany/France/Italy is exactly representative of that phenomenon. Social safety nets do not make for left-liberal ideology. Most of these socialist-paragons demand incredible conformity (scandinavia) and have restrictive abortion laws [2] among other traditionally right-wing traits.
[1] https://preview.redd.it/iwnju4entbw81.jpg?width=1024&auto=we...
You fucken serious right now?
Europeans love to use ethnic subgroups of white as markers for diversity, but the distinctions are much smaller. Culture and religion(or the manner of its rejection) on the other hand seem to be greatly homogenous in European nations.
Each European nation seems to have a secondary ethnic group of ex-colonial immigrants (France : West Africa, England : North (erstwhile) India, Germany : Turks (not colonial)); but they too seem to be othered within their identity as a nation.
The US actually tries a 2 directional cultural exchange with its immigrant groups. The friction and vitriol that you see, has to do with a genuine attempt at mutual integration. It starts with surface level differences like having access to every cuisine to having celebrities of every ethnicity. But, it also goes deeper. America almost has 'I made this [1]' approach towards appropriating cultural products that start elsewhere. To an extent, the reason Americans get so loud about losing their culture, is because American culture is so weakly defined & fluid. On the other hand, you might not see Germans or French people abusing 'immigrants' because unless you fully integrate, you will always be othered. The very rigidity of the culture, makes it 'feel' like a welcoming place to outsiders.
Americans love to self-flagellate, but the country has done better than any other country at developing at identity that isn't racial, religious or cultural in nature. That's not to say that the conditions are great here. But integration and cultural exchange are hard problems, and not-too-bad is about as good as it gets.
[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/079/173/ed2...
That aside, it's very funny to accuse the left of shifting the overton window after a republican president that pardoned his co-conspirators, called for insurrection and then took top secret documents home - a crime he himself increased the penalty for. So much for law and order.
Yes, but that implies a certain 'conflict theory' approach to cultural development.
It is an 'all is fair in love and war' framework, which fully enfranchises the obstructionist policies of Mitch McConnell and the executive overreach of DeSantis which involves banning of CRT in schools. If opinions ossify at adulthood, then the only 2 plans of action are brainwash during schooling or disenfranchise your opponents using every slimy trick in the book.
Never convince, never compromise and certainly never rely on a representative democracy to achieve the closest outcome to consensus. I for one, refuse to espouse this theory.
> republican president
I'm not American or white and I dislike Trump, but the 2016 and 2020 elections solidified my opinion of the internet left being a unrepresentative sample of the left-leaning populace in the US. Democrat voters resoundingly rejected Warren/Sanders in 2020 despite the left's best efforts to convince you otherwise. The absolute media onslaught faced by him was unprecedented, and excellent evidence driven organizations were falling over each other to take 'Not-Trump' stances on every policy he ever suggested.
I used to trust NPR, NYT, ACLU & Scientific organizations a lot more until the 2016 election. Now I have to go read the very papers/stats/documents these organizations source from, with conclusions that often contrast the headlines of these very articles.
This is dumb misconception, too. It is absolutely false. If anything, Europe (even if you focus solely on Western Europe -- if not, "slightly" would be "extremely") is slightly more conservative than America, especially socially. That may seem false if you look from certain angles, like social welfare, but those are red herrings (e.g., social welfare's a lot easier to expand when taxes are already very high, when your poverty levels are already way lower, etc.).
What people really want is someone who, as best they can, is a bit humble and a bit curious. A note which Rogan hits a lot better than most. It is irrelevant whether he is right or wrong, that isn't what people are looking for. They can't assess that and frankly most people don't prioritise the truth that highly. If they want to be told what is right and wrong they can go watch cable and get told by the likes of government officials, or the clergy. Neither are popular. People want to know what opinions are floating around.
From that perspective, Joe Rogan does no wrong. He is fulfilling a role that people are desperate for. It is easy to overestimate the confident and noisy moralisers who worry about normal people hearing things that are not true - they aren't actually popular. That class of people are the sort who staff censorship bureaus.
Joe Rogan also has lengthy interviews with major figures like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, which aren’t done by traditional networks like CNN.
I’m having trouble taking people who don’t see the value in that seriously — because it seems obvious to me why people would want a diversity of information.
I think there's some truth to what he says here. For some topics he actually just does let people talk. And that's fine. But there are some topics where Joe isn't just "asking questions" but is actively pushing a particular viewpoint.
The first and most obvious one is vaccines. Covid has broken this man's brain. If you go back to March 2020, his interview with Michael Osterholm [1] was actually really good. It was one of the first I saw that recognized how serious this actually was. But for whatever reasons, Joe has decided vaccines are bad and he's had a parade of grifters and charlatans on to back up that view (eg Robert Malone). There is absolutely no evidence in the world that will change his mind.
The second is all his manosphere [2] content. He really rode the wave of popularity of Jordan Peterson in particular and really gave him a platform with no pushback whatsoever. The recent rise of Andrew Tate is just the latest manifestation of this (fun fact: Tate dated JP's daughter a couple of years ago).
The third is transgender people. Trans people broke a lot of people in a way that's reminiscent of 1990s era homophobia. Bill Maher is another example of this.
So a big part of Joe's popularity isn't just a "dumb guy asking questions", it's that he pushes very normative and popular opinions.
Joe Rogan as recently as last week said the vaccine is mostly safe and saved millions of lives. What he says is that the vaccine is more dangerous to some people than the narratives and pharmaceutical companies says. And he despises how you can’t even talk about the negative effects for some people without being cast as an anti-vaxxer. You entirely proved his point.
The exact same thing applies to transgender people. He believes 100% in their ability to be treated as the gender they believe they are. But his main disagreement is pretending that it’s okay that biological males vs biological females is fair. It’s not, especially in sports like MMA which he is an expert in.
Yet by talking about it, he is cast as a transphobe just like you accused him of.
And to correct you further, the 90s were the period where gay rights went mainstream so you’re even wrong about that. That when people started understanding that it wasn’t a choice and was biological. Shows like Dawson’s Creek really humanized being gay for an entire generation. That’s when Canada made gay marriage legal.
- "How Joe Rogan Became a Cheerleader for Ivermectin" [1]
- "Fact-Checking Joe Rogan’s Interview With Robert Malone That Caused an Uproar" [2]
- "What the Joe Rogan podcast controversy says about the online misinformation ecosystem" [3]
> But his main disagreement is pretending that it’s okay that biological males vs biological females is fair.
Sports isn't fair, period. It's why there's no "under 6 foot" NBA league. It's only with trans people that people suddenly (pretend to) care.
> And to correct you further, the 90s were the period where gay rights went mainstream
- "ABC shelves Ellen" (1998) [4]
- "Why Laura Dern Didn't Work For A Year, Despite Jurassic Park's Success" [5]
- "How ‘homophobia’ denied Sharon Bottoms custody of her son in the 1990s" [6]
Examples here are legion. Homophobia permeated popular culture (eg TV and box office movies). There was progress made, sure, but homophobia was so normalized at the time. I have to wonder if you lived through this era (as I did) or just read about it.
I mean, homophobia was still weaponized into the 2000s. Many credit Karl Rove with weaponizing state ballot measures on gay marriage to win the 2004 presidential election [7].
> Dawson’s Creek
technically the coming out storyline was 1999-2000 I believe and was controversial. Roseanne [8] is probably a better example. Picket Fences ended up censoring a kiss scene in 1993 [9] and caused quite a lot of controversy at the time.
[1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/joe-ro...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/arts/music/fact-check-joe...
[3]: https://www.npr.org/2022/01/21/1074442185/joe-rogan-doctor-c...
[4]: https://money.cnn.com/1998/04/24/bizbuzz/ellen/
[5]: https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2485962/why-laura-dern-didn...
[6]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-homophobia-denied-shar...
[7]: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=230634&page=1
[8]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Ask,_Don%27t_Tell_(Ros...
[9]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_%26_Spice_(Picket_Fences...
When I said “mainstream” I didn’t mean they were generally accepted. I meant that the issue of gay rights became a topic. Some places like Canada openly legalized gay marriage without much of a protest. Gay rights infection point was definitely in the 90s and only got stronger. It wasn’t like the 80s where gays were openly mocked like in Three’s Company
Passed the House on July 12, 1996 (342–67) Passed the Senate on September 10, 1996 (85–14)
What happened later is remarkable, but it wasn't even close in 1996.
In my experience, it’s the opposite with Joe Rogan. His fans seem pretty casual, it’s the people who don’t like the show who are extremely outspoken about it.
What's interesting about Rogan is you can often find theses talking head types getting easily flummoxed by normal questions that are outside of the ritualized interactions they're used to. Watch Rogan talk to Shapiro about his criticism of Colin Kaepernick, or him asking Bari Weiss why she calls Tulsi Gabbard an "Assad toady." He seems to like both of them (perhaps even to the poitn where both are friends), but his simple questions end up making both of them look completely foolish. And because he's genuinely curious and doing it in a non-aggressive manner, it doesn't get lost in the furor of a antagonistic debate format.
Again, I agree with your criticisms of him and could add several more myself. I think it's one of those situations where in the valley of the blind, the one eyed man is king. The traditional forms of public debate are so shallow that a curious guy just asking random questions can short circuit most of the folks there.
But while he may be genuinely curious the sum of his questions and his guest choices express a thesis and for avid listeners seems to become a program of study that leads somewhere.
It seems like it's always freshman year of college at the JRE and you're learning all this fascinating stuff that shows you the world is larger and more mysterious than you imagined, but he never quite gets to sophomore year when those mundane details are filled in and you see why all the quirky, obscure things remain quirky and obscure.
I guess on some level it's not his job but since he has had this success I do wish he would take it on, to give the listeners more protein with their sugar.
And it affects us too, not just celebrities.
I'm fine with dilettantes (I am a proud one) and recognize that there are some real polymaths in the world, but it creates a tricky situation for the show. A lot of people who lose a specialized debate try making their case directly to the public and the ones who survive become quite good at it and know what they need to do to get on the right podcasts.
The ones who won, who might have the better ideas, are bisy working in the field and if they communicate to the public at all it is without the polish of someone who makes their living that way.
That is, of course, a well known problem in science communication.
If you think that's impressive, listen to Terry Gross's interview with Hugh Heffner.
https://freshairarchive.org/segments/playboy-hugh-hefner
I think Rogan is just barely smart enough to know to never step into Gross's studio.
I find that this is a reaction to a reaction.
I have frequently heard women (and some elitist men) make fun of those who listen to Joe Rogan, long before Joe was every heralded as a hero of the masses. It is only after he started receiving what was perceived to be unjust criticism that people started leaning into the 'with him or against him' polarization.
It is somewhat interesting how he's made it so long with no major scandals. There was the covid stuff, but it was pretty tame to me compared with even run of the mill Twitter drama. I get the sense that he's very good at staying out of situations that are sketchy.
/eyeroll
To an outsider it looked like Chris was there for the opportunity not the conversation.
He seemed unwilling to express himself which is strange because the company he founded is centred around doing exactly that.
There might be only two major changes JRE has gone through content wise during the hundreds of episodes: no more co-host and no live broadcast. That's remarkably good and he had good enough taste to not ever take part in things like mid-show ads (as in stopping the chat in its tracks and starting to read ads).
It's rare that someone can land it so early on and keep that magic recipe going. I bet touring radio shows for his entertainment business helped him gauge what kinds of radio shows were nice vs. the ones that were cumbersome.
> I get a shot of NAD+, which is supposed to be good for energy and metabolism. NAD stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and I don’t know what the + is. (Actually, I don’t know what any of it is, but the nurse said she takes it, and if you saw this woman, you too would ask for a shot of whatever she’s on.)
Am I the only one cringing at people taking random injections from random strangers claiming they have a semi-medical degree?
Who is claiming this exactly?
If I were to take supplements, which I don't, since I consider it to be pseudo-science[1][2], I would get them from my local drug store which has the german equivalent of a FDA license and regular audits.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29v6rNFjlLI
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/07/the-vitam...
Let's look at it empirically. Among elite athletes, how many take zero supplements? I can't prove that they're getting any benefit but the correlation between performance and the use of certain supplements is so strong that I suspect there's something real going on. (And by supplements I mean real supplements, not PEDS which are an entirely separate category.)
Soon a new world of injections and supplements will be yours if you want it.
Nightmare fuel.
People just snort/eat/shoot/smoke whatever? It's been through how many shady people on the way to you?
There's also a risk/reward factor - many drugs are incredibly enjoyable, and users feel it's worth the risk.
E.g., fentanyl.
> Later, just before taping, Joe goes over and gets his own jab of NAD+.
Some things would be little changed from today but obviously others would be very different. One of the weirdest things was the patent medication section. Just things like "Dr Fowler's Feminine Medicine" or stuff like that. Lots of promises to help out illness and zero lists of ingredients. It's absolutely bizarre to me, but I suppose not to everyone.
In fact, I'd be willing to bet that few nursing associations would look kindly on offering people unprescribed snake oil injections outside of a medical context and with no knowledge of their medical history.
My wife currently works as a nurse at a hospital. She's tired of the poor working conditions at the hospital so she's applying to work at an infusion center for better hours and pay.
Calling it 'good for energy and metabolism' in one of those wishy-washy ideas about how the body works. It's not clear how adding more of one component of metabolism will affect how energy is moved around and released from food.
Anything that we build is an extension of our mind, and oh lord is that an interesting choice of props, pictures and workout machines.
I'm at the fifth top-level thread and we're already down to "ugh, I bet he doesn't even use the decorations in his studio!"
Regardless, I like his interviews and his guests are often very interesting especially when their views go against the grain. Take his recent interview with Alex Berenson for example, the only person ever to litigate himself back into Twitter after a lifelong ban, great interview.
I don't know if I agree with GP, but I understand where the sentiment is coming from. It's not that Rogan is a paragon, it's that the average quality of MSM journalism is low enough he may be able to crawl over the bar.
Don't assume that just because we subscribe that we are being indoctrinated to every stupid comment he makes. That assumption infantilizes is all.
The overreaction to filter content based on that assumption is a much more problematic issue than the content itself.
> Almost all of us know Joe is a moron.
I'm quite certain Joe Rogan is above average intelligence, and that people who doubt that are usually abusing Joe's public and unforgiving curiosity which will sometimes lead to basic questions or ridiculous statements - that is the price of curiosity, which clearly we fans are not only willing to pay, but look forward to.
I said this in another comment as well—but a lot can be said that he actually lets his guests talk rather than talking over them as is the habit of some.
A moron with a hundred million podcast, after having fairly successful careers in both comedy/acting and fighting.
And you're here in an online forum calling him a moron.
He might be a myriad of things, but a moron he isn't.
YouTube: Joe Rogan Explains His Interview Style
A people so detached from reality, common sense and common people that they might as well be considered a separate species.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies, generic tangents, and internet tropes.
Episodes with Rhonda Patrick
#1555 - Interview with Alex Jones
First couple interviews with Jordan Peterson
Mike Tyson Episodes
Jack Dorsey and Vijayya Gadde – #1258
Paul Stamets – #1035
I could say this episode alone hooked me on the whole world of podcasting in general.
[0]https://twitter.com/lulumeservey/status/1511376638487019524?...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/business/media/substack-l...
Someone get that clip when he's talking about monkeys and a woman with a PhD in monkeys calls in.
Looks like someone doesn't actually listen to JRE but parrots some talking head viewpoints instead.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
I certainly understand not liking Rogan, but your comments aren't really on point. Idiot? Moron? Lacking personality? "always tried to copy the behavior of his guests and lacked own viewpoint"?
These do not appear to be the observations of someone who's actually watched the show.
But you're not right regarding me not watching "the show". I've seen the interview with Musk in which Musk said "this stuff doesn't work on me" while pretending to inhale smoke from a pot joint. I've seen Dan Aykroyd interview which was basically Dan Aykroyd advertising his skull-bottled vodka. I've seen dr. Rhonda Patrick episode, dr. David Sinclair episode and maybe 10 to 15 more episodes.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I went through a very brief "this guy is fucking cool!" phase but after really getting to hear what he's got to say, my opinion of him is that he's a behavioral copycat and a moron.
b) If I want to call Joe Rogan an idiot because I find his views and lack of intellectual rigour to be commensurate with that of someone who is ignorant and reckless then not sure what the issue is. He is a public figure after all.
I would argue it’s mostly a podcast, not a CNN/FoxNews interview. But since I only listen occasionally and feel there’s a lot of emotion attached to this subject ( for some reason ) I might be wrong…
It does when they start affecting people's lives in serious ways.
For example him pushing ivermectin.
Having a large platform/following does not automatically make someone trustworthy. Low key, why do we live in a country where the opinion of an MMA judge/podcaster influences people so much, it's impossible to endlessly validate any claim.
We may need to transition to a more authoritarian model of speech in which content produced by an individual should be truthful, or we just endlessly play wac-a-mole on the latest rando who gains a following
The answer to this question is yes.
Have you ever had to make an effort to be overly agreeable with others in order to avoid conflict? I would imagine that a talk show host would make a point of trying to keep things civil in order to keep the "back and fourth" open.
If the guest and the host were immediately pissed at each other, it would be a lot more difficult to carry on a conversation.
It's so hard respecting people that still fall for Joe's obvious shtick at this point. A child just asking "why?" over and over would be as interesting, and would likely come without the platforming of altright folks and semi constant COVID misinformation.
Edit: honestly why did I even post in this thread. I guess I should've skimmed other posters comments before writing some of my replies. Yikes.
In other words, he hosts people with viewpoints that some disagree with. And with covid there is like about 6-12 month lag between when something is "misinformation" and it becomes "we always knew this'. Example: The vaccines don't stop transmission. Covid could have been a lab leak. Lockdowns fuck over the working class and kids. Etc, etc, etc...
Most of the time "misinformation" is just a derogatory way to frame something one disagrees with.
Edit: And it is funny this is getting downvoted. A thread with 400 comments but only 160 points.
In my opinion he has taken some problematic view points, but others would agree with him more, and many would say he just plays devil's advocate and likes to talk hypotheticals and dig into interesting topics. I don't think any of this really matters.
The issue is that the views come from one guy, get amplified in some man-cave banter with a few guys paid by him, and then broadcast to an audience "larger than Belgium". This isn't normal. Media companies have layers of editors, they have at least some diversity, a woman will hopefully look at a story or script before it goes out, sometimes even a lawyer might tell them to tone it down a bit. Even celebrities with big followings on social media are likely to have more input on many of their postings than Rogan does on his broadcasts.
A bit of a filter is a good thing for everyone, whether it's trusted friends who can and do tell you when you're wrong, an editor at work, a legal team, whatever. It's also honest. I think Joe Rogan could use a filter.
Sexism much?
It's important that we see the world as it is, rather than as some theoretical thing out that where we can just plug in different variables and go "Well now look!"
We have a wide variety of media outlets to expose experience of different groups. That fulfils what you're looking for. You can find opinions of pretty much any group no matter what.
What your proposal would do, most groups wouldn't get a chance to translate their experiences. Biggest and/or loudest group would dominate the narrative. Everyone else would be tuned out to bigger or smaller degree.
Actually, we already had your solution. Back in TV-dominated era. Only vetted content would make it to the public. With marginal groups silenced. Well, those marginal groups just started tiny podcasts to tell their stories :)
What do you think would happen if you take those tiny podcasts and force them to act like big media of the old days? Can you silence some dude streaming from his kitchen?
Yes he’s never taken his show as a responsibility/burden to seek out some absolute truth to to guide men to an utopian future through his influence - but in those respects he would have likely failed had he fallen for that trap - the whole point of his show is this is who he is and he is not trying to make YOU do anything (maybe exercise ?). This is just something he does and he does his best not to think about it.
You are not the great enlightened above a sea of unwashed masses.
If I wanted to listen to something sanitized and approved by a legal team I would just watch CNN or Fox News.
Also... how do you know he doesn't get plenty of input?
> This isn't normal.
Literally no popular media figure is remotely close to normal.
Jesus Christ, do you understand what you're saying here? A man can't speak and be heard without a woman going over it first?
Also a five year old.
One of the things I respect about Joe Rogan (I am not really a listener unless someone wants to discuss a particular show in my social circle) is how often he says (and seems to mean) "don't listen to me, wtf do I know" or words to that effect.
Compare that any politician who is 100% sure of X until X is only supported by 49% of people.
There's a ton of money to be made pushing agendas and peddling hate. And then you run into the age-old question: who controls the filter? How do you regulate controversial content?
HEAVEN FORBID we have a single publication that doesn't have four teams of people checking lists of who can't be mentioned in a negative fashion....
I will say that the Jimmy James Macho Business Donkey Wrestler reading is one of my fav things ever to be broadcast on American television!
You inherently infantilize the public when you assume they agree with, or are indoctrinated by, media they consume. Adults are capable of disagreeing with long form content they consume.
What is more damaging are the sound bytes and headlines that get amplified on short form social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, which offer conclusions and misinformation and not conversations.
Joe Rogan is a bit of an idiot, but his audience mostly knows that. They listen to him because there are nuggets of truth in his podcast that most MSM won't report.
What concerns me is that the traditional media are not able to make interesting podcasts that connect as well with most people.
Don't blame Joe Rogan for what he does, blame everybody else for not being able to do the same.
Joe Rogan has no power by himself, only by traditional media not wanting to let people talk freely on the radio anymore. No one runs unedited interviews anymore. Everything is massaged into the viewpoint that the journalist already has.
People like Zuckerberg have orders of magnitude more power, but they aren't so easily seen and heard.
There will always be powerful people, and a moderator like Rogan isn't anywhere near to the top of the ladder.
Cool, who do you suggest should do the filtering? We could create a ministry of censorship.
The problem seems to be that you don't like this kind of content and would much prefer "safer" things to be popular, but that's exactly how we get harmless TV shows and meaningless music ruining the fun for everyone.
Every opinion that deviates slightly outside of the current zeitgeist has to be watered-down, censored, scoffed down upon, and diminished.
Everything has to be reviewed by bloodsucking lawyers rather than talking like a normal human being.
Somehow a lone white man is not allowed to express his opinion without a layer of ''diversity'' to somehow make it acceptable.
Joe has a following bigger than Belgium precisely because the rest of the media is such a bland and fake piece of shit for the reasons you mentioned. If you want to point the finger at anybody for the success of Joe Rogan, look in the mirror buddy.
I don't see anyone getting worked up that Dan Rather has "too much power as one person"
Sometimes editors and a corporate machine behind the news isn’t the best thing.
Take, for example, Amy Robach. A CBS reporter who wanted to air the Jeffery Epstein story years before he was arrested for the second time. Then ABC tipping off CBS and the leaker being fired.
There’s also the Chris Cuomo basement scandal.
Or Brian Williams lying about his experience covering Iraq.
Or Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss being pushed out of their newspapers.
Or studies showing that the media covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine far more than the US invasion of Iraq.
Or censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Also haven’t seen much about the contents of the diary in the mainstream press…
The media has failed time and time again on what I outlined above and much more. They have an agenda, be it left or right, that is larger than any one person and are largely beholden to advertisers and whatnot.
I applaud independent media. There are a lot of people doing really great work on substack. Jimmy Dore, for example, does amazing reporting and really shows the bias of the media.
People like Alex Berenson, Matt Taibi, Glenn Greenwald, etc are doing really great investigative reporting that I once respected mainstream outlets for.
Just because someone has a large audience doesn’t mean they should be censored. Talking to people about things for hours is invaluable and Rogan does a great job on his show.
https://nypost.com/2019/11/05/abc-news-amy-robach-claims-net...
https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-glenn-beck-program/cbs-fi...
https://freebeacon.com/media/chris-cuomo-fakes-emerging-from...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/brian-williams-credibility-ques...
https://www.globalissues.org/news/2022/04/12/30585
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
Maybe we don't need to water down every piece of information and discussion that exists.
Your comment is more evidence of the notion that "problematic" is the woke religion's "blasphemous".
The amount of authoritarianism in this comment is staggering