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Comment by throwaway803453 | Hacker News Reader

Culture can be defined as the qualities that make one society, whether separated by space or time, notably distinct from another. With that said:

* Joe Rogan: Podcasting is now a legitimate profession and long form interviews are common.

* Joe Rogan: Juijitsu and MMA were previously obscure.

* The former U.S. President: Never compromise, form a strong opinion without any or few facts, and never admit mistakes. We now have an epidemic of this personality type. When I was young I was warned this "street thug" way of thinking is what kept people in my neighborhood poor. But now it's everywhere.

* Sam Altman and PG: They literally created a new culture: Startup Culture

* David Goggins: Democratized extreme athleticism

* Jordan Peterson: Millions of bedrooms are cleaner today than they were 10 years ago.

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The thing is that you're largely talking about people who have influenced culture, whereas the article seems to define "culture heroes" as people with name recognition across society (presumably including across ages, regions, religions, politics, etc). Not super clear but I read it as "in the US" since language barriers make it very clear that the median culture is very much on the other side of the globe.

I don't think any of those people other than the former (two) US presidents cut the mustard. They might have changed culture, but they're not "heroes" in the "icon" sense.

For cultural icons that everyone across society recognizes, for better and worse I have to imagine those ridiculous segments where they go around and interview random people to ask them who people who I think are comically well known are only to find that people don't know who like Kamala Harris is. Terrifying, but that's what I think the OP was getting at.

Who else might I add? Who would a 15 year old from Chicago recognize as well as a 73 year old in Tallahassee?

Robin Williams maybe? Literally Mickey Mouse? Payton Manning? Elon Musk?

I know I'm out of touch, but I didn't recognize the name for Joe Rogan, Sam Altman, David Goggins, or Jordan Peterson. I have no doubt they have impacted my life, I've even studied karate for over a decade and had friends training MMA and BJJ in class with me; Joe Rogan himself never came up though so while it's awesome that culture now includes MMA and BJJ, Joe Rogan himself is not a culture hero by this classification.

Street thug thinking makes people rich, all those listed business executives became rich this way.

I think you’re attributing a lot to a few there. Absolutely Joe Rogan helped make podcasts the phenomenon they are today, but so did a whole lot of other people. Same with PG and Altman: “startup culture” exists outside of their influence.

I guess my metric is “if they didn’t exist, would their achievements have still happened?”. I’d argue with PG and Rogan they would have, but that Trump would not. Another I’d include on that list is Steve Jobs.

>Absolutely Joe Rogan helped make podcasts the phenomenon they are today, but so did a whole lot of other people. Same with PG and Altman: “startup culture”

Ricky Gervais really got the ball rolling on podcasts early on. I'd credit much of it to him, Steven Merchant and Karl Pilkington. Frankly I think that podcast still represents the best work in the medium.

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