Joe Rogan, Parody of the Open Mind
freddiedeboer.substack.com
freddiedeboer.substack.com
This makes me think of past attempts like Air America to counter right-wing talk radio only to end in bankruptcy. Or MSNBC to counter Fox News only to consistently come in third behind CNN with 25-54 year olds (the demographic that matters for TV advertising).
Perhaps the conclusion is, in the marketplace of ideas with every opportunity of distribution, some ideas just aren't selling. Maybe that's due to bad packaging and marketing but it might also be that the idea itself is bad.
I rarely if ever see this kind of reflection on the left. Hat tip to the author for writing and sharing.
From feminism, to antifa, to anything touching economics, the American left tends to get itself deep enough into identity politics and neoliberalism to disgust about anyone here (I'm Spanish).
There definitely is something regarding American politics that sets it apart from the European understanding of how politics works, I personally think that the system encouraging a two party system establishes too strong of a "us vs them" mentality and that it damages political discourse altogether.
The American left's branding is being "other" to the status quo. Nothing can simultaneously be both status quo and belong to the left. Once something moves from the "left" to "status quo" the success doesn't count, because it's no longer the "left's," it's everybodies. And the left has to find a new way to be against it (or stay silent on the topic).
Without saying anything about where the force vectors that create this common view comes from, the sum result is a narrative with bounds. Bounds that are reinforced and entrenched because they can be useful to leverage for political gain by them and/or their opponents.
So no matter how many times the left have succeed or will succeeded at marketing many ideas to the average American, some people feel they're much more ineffectual than they are.
Well I don't think there is a right-leaning equivalent either, in the sense that there really isn't any other "Joe Rogan" kind of guy out there, it's a singular, unique show. Besides the format itself, if one wants to find counterpoints or different stances to the ones presented in his show I'd like to learn how not to find those, it seems to me they are everywhere.
So he got cancelled. Literally, he had a network show that was cancelled, as well as socially cancelled. Social media “cancellation” didn’t exist since Facebook and Twitter didn’t yet exist. He’s the real deal.
“Cancelled” in 2021 implies that you have been sent out to pasture permanently for whatever it is that offended the cancelling powers that be… Bill Maher is a man who has been providing political commentary with the exception of a brief hiatus for 27 years. His “new rule” segments are all over social media and YouTube nowadays. Almost every single week those segments get massive social media reach and often gets mainstream news organization coverage.
He is an equal opportunity offender though. Right hates him for his opinions on religion, left hates him for his opinion on a “certain” religion. Right hates him for making fun of Sarah Palin’s sone with Down syndrome, left hates him for his recent tirades against wokism and the Biden administration.
The fact that he is so successful at pissing off EVERYONE and still has a weekly show on a major network that has run for the last 18 years is pretty much testament to the fact that not only is he not cancelled, but is pretty much apparently un-cancelable.
Politically Incorrect remains cancelled.
Does he occupy the same spot on the left? Who knows? He is unashamedly liberal, and doesn’t do a wide variety of topics in a long conversation format. So it’s apples to oranges. His show is intentionally more monologuely, political panel oriented, with short conversations with newsmakers. However like Rogan his guests come from both political leanings.
Edit: submitted accidentally before fixing an unclear sentence
Not really. I mean, it is used as if it means that, but almost invariably about someone who has lost no social prominence, or in fact gained it, from the thing for which they notionally have been “cancelled”.
He doesn't strike me as particularly ideological, and I've never gotten the impression that he had a partisan axe to grind. Granted that he is sometimes susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, however that's not a personality trait exclusive to conservatives.
Pretty prevalent personality trait in humans though.
My perspective is that his podcasts reflect who he really is. He is not chasing where the money is, as someone said here. Joe believed in the 2012 Mayan conspiracy, frequently talked about Lizard people and was kind of tongue and cheek...but he brought it up so frequently that I always wondered if he actually believed it. That's just a small subset of the conspiracy theories he believed in.
He has always been tech savvy, even had a T1 installed back in the day, just so he can play video games in 1990, which was $10,000 a month back then. When he started thinking about a podcast, it was pretty much with his friends, and also frequent forum posters in his board. Redban, was already working for Joe for years, he was the tech guy, so naturally he helped with the podcast.
I stopped frequenting that boards after a few podcasts, the forum userbase changed for one, but the main problem is he started expressing his crazy beliefs a lot more frequently. Before the podcasts it came up, but it was once in a while. With the podcasts it could not be ignored.
He just likes talking about it. He's entertained by entertaining his imagination.
In the regime of persuasive essays, the winners are decided much more capriciously. Why do people follow Joe Rogan? I can only speculate, but I believe that the following effects contribute significantly:
1) Joe expresses challenges to mainstream beliefs that are commonly wondered, but infrequently asked. These challenges have high heuristic weight. However infrequently these beliefs are asked, they are answered less frequently. There are lots of questions that people are afraid to ask which have sophisticated answers. Furthermore, and I can't stress this enough, some of these beliefs are wrong, and the reason that challenges are socially unacceptable is because of how much we want the belief to be true.
2) Joe has a mock adversarial style. Interviews feel like arguments, but are actually more analogous to a con-artists relationship with a shill. Unfortunately for humanity, we are very bad at recognizing the difference between an interview and an argument. Even in the rare event that Rogan challenges his interviewee in good faith, the creative mind behind the challenge is still merely one man, and that man is Joe Rogan, to boot. Not the most seasoned skeptic to have walked the earth by a long shot. The man claims to believe in Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid...
3) Joe is anti-establishment. I don't think this is a bad thing, I happen to be fairly anti-establishment. But anti-establishment beliefs do not have the kind of readily accessible counterexamples that establishment beliefs have. I can't point to the cities of tents for the homeless as an argument against basic income like I can for <current policy>. If you make an obscure anti-establishment claim, there is not likely to be a wealth of available counterarguments for the people listening to draw on.
4) The author's point. Joe at least claims to subscribe to a different regime. Where free thought and argument prevail over censorship and restricted platforms. I think that, like most people privileged with large, restrictive platforms, Joe probably wouldn't believe this is he knew that it meant opening his podcast to in-line commentary, but I think he believes he believe it, and that he claims to believe it is probably enough for most people.
So let’s take Joe Rogan now. He brings up the Wuhan Lab theory a lot, but a lot of people do now. Sadly for Rogan, the rest of the high school (broader media/society) figured out ‘you wear and listen to the same stuff the cool kids wear and listen to’. Rogan is still attempting to be the cool kid and selling it off like ‘that’s who I am, truly’. But everyone else in high school (the metaphorical immature world) is also walking around saying ‘yeah me too, that’s who I truly am’.
Rogan’s novelty factor is waning due to copy cat culture, and we all notice it. We notice it so much, we are kind of tired of the fad and everyone included - even Rogan.
In other words, we’re kind of bored of it all now. Rogan doesn’t even have to be the base case. Examine Marc Maron’s rise and fall in relevance.
For me personally, I’d only be interested in listening to a 90 year old grandmother take on the topics of today as best as she can. That would be novelty at this point. But the guy that does MMA and watches the same movies you do, supports gun rights, but votes for Sanders, it’s just like … yeah, we get it. Not that interesting anymore.
Not sure whose fault that is honestly, but let’s not over analyze that the cool kids in high school, who were once the paragons of interesting, were actual just kind of boring to begin with.
Rogan is compelling on like 2-3 topics max, and that’s okay. He is not a good interviewer of the likes of Charlie Rose, and while a subject matter expert on MMA, he is not compelling or insightful as a Quentin Tarantino interviewing anyone in movies. In fact, he is not even compelling interviewing other comedians, which often devolves into comedians jerking themselves off at how naturally born funny they are. Zero insights.
That is a fantastic point I had not considered so far.
We're already doing this, there's just a segment of society that doesn't seem to understand that skepticism isn't the same thing as critical thinking.
It would be ridiculous for the Bar Association or medical boards to be directly elected by the general populace, so they have a credentialed population with training and at least a modicum of specialization in the field.
But this author can see it because those lines of criticism are not fueled by this author's fight. Once the author moves on to their own hobby horse topics (Marxism) he seems to take another bog-standard criticism that misses the point. I see it a lot and it has a feeling of: if only Rogan would have on the correct experts to expert-splain to everyone, then they'd agree with me. Part of Rogan's appeal is that for many of cultural topics where one team has that kind of position, they aren't given permission to control the narrative on how he covers the topic.
Maybe if we didn't sneer at education we could have one.
You can't untangle those things.
Education is seen as the cause of the "(assumed) cultural and political background of that person", and therefore education becomes the target.
I’d rather be around the poorly educated genius and sneer at the highly educated idiot because the poorly educated genius tends to be a hell of a lot more interesting to me.
"our media hates him, passionately and performatively"
Where I fell off was that he consistently skewed guests to the right side of the political spectrum. Did he have Bernie Sanders on and express his support for Bernie? Absolutely. But he more often gives a platform to many people I'd consider far, far right -- and in my summation, it's because the right-leaning side of his audience is louder and demands those subjects. Ultimately, it is not a very balanced show. And that's ok, it's his show.
It's not just Joe. In America, what seems "left" to us is actually fairly moderate, politically. I liked having something to listen to that seemed to truly want to find the middle ground, at first. The show has since gone off the rails, IMO.
If I could sum up Rogan’s podcast guests it would be whatever side they lean, they tend to be a bit outside the orthodox right or left. For that I give him kudos because I think it’s much more interesting to hear from those off the beaten paths.
For instance, if Meghan Murphy is on as a "gender critical feminist", then why is Rogan letting her go on about "Marxism" ? I'm sure the term means something to her. But unless the best of her opponents are describing their own points in terms of "Marxism", then it's merely a straw man for her to bash.
If she really thinks her definition of "Marxist" is an important lemma for her main point and it's not going to color the conversation too much, then make her fully define that term how she's using it and elaborate whenever she uses it - don't let it be a "stop thinking" terminus as such terms are often used.
In general, guests should be spending the effort to make widely accessible points about their topic, to promote a larger understanding. I know these generally exist from my own attempts at understanding, because they gain followers somehow, and because the opposing camp goes out in their own weeds. Not pushing guests into the larger context just results in propagating the same old self-consistent-in-a-vacuum narrative that all of the political teams rely on.
An important part of having an open mind is questioning what is coming in. A closed mind doesn't take in a point. A too-open mind just lets any point pass through. There is a happy middle that forces conflicting ideas to be reconciled with one another, and we need a lot more of that. I don't know if Joe Rogan can actually be the person we want him to be, but he's certainly in the right position.
I like how Rogan doesn't pounce on every guest to make them defend every statement, define every term, or actively try to catch them and put them on the defensive. That is the formula used by the talking-heads in the main stream interview shows, and discussions usually just turn argumentative.
He lets his guests stand out on limbs and gives them enough rope to hang themselves if they want to, which is a big part of the appeal of his show.
The real problem is the lack of mediating authority in any of these dialogs. We need some bit of common sense that can say (for example), 1. yes there is a valid concern with previously male athletes calling themselves women and competing in women's events, 2. you have a point with the pronoun thing but you're also kind of a dick, and 3. no thanks to the "Marxism" screed that I can get any time I like from my uncle.
Perhaps we're just going through a societal phase where that type of mediating authority has been distorting the discourse for too long (Aluminum tubes! Yellow Cake!) and so we've rejected them. But without any moderating judgement, debate devolves into extremism - every camp takes their reasonable foundational critiques and uses them to logically infer self-consistent nonsense. Then you either rally behind them or another camp, or you're going to get pigeonholed as doing so anyway.
We appreciate Joe Rogan for exposing us to diverse viewpoints. But without taking an active role in their explanation, is he actually doing that job? Or is he just appearing alongside a presentation that we could have sought out on our own?
What’s wrong with someone fleshing out their views for 3 hours?
And there’s another thing you are missing. Have you ever tried to lie about something or withhold the truth for 3 hours straight? Unless you are a proper psychopath it’s basically impossible.
In 3 hours you have to be authentic or the audience will know. They will feel it. You might be authentic about wrong information, but you will be authentic. People can then decide if they want to believe that or not.
A lot of people who love rogan hate the 5 minute soundbite interviews on the traditional media. It’s fake, it’s short, it’s McDonald’s of media
I don't think any of these politickers are lying. I think they start with valid critiques of pretty straightforward things, and then extrapolate them into ridiculous conclusions. In a way our polarization is a result of extreme left-brained thinking without the tempering of wisdom.
Listening to a 3 hour unfamiliar narrative doesn't give you many places to go afterwards. It's just a huge dump that binds together many various points, and whether you found it insightful or not has more to do with presentation and self-consistency rather than it making sense in a larger context.
It's definitely better than 2 minute / 140 character soundbites. But the format is an overcorrection masquerading as a middleground.
There aren't many liberal, leftist, actual-libertarian, or centrist personalities with huge audiences. The only ones that come close to the far right are "dirtbag leftists" like Chapo Trap House who use an equally obnoxious anti-intellectual straw man bashing style. If you want the audience, apparently you gotta troll and get stupid. I get the sense that the people who would make up those audiences for higher-brow content have better things to do.
I noticed a distinct change in his guests and style when he started to get big, which probably means he's feeling the pressure to rake in those ad dollars for the networks.
A real intellectual is someone with a deep understanding of their field. It's usually someone actually working in their field, not a media personality. Actually doing things generally leaves one with little time to talk about doing them, especially to the degree that is required to build a big audience.
25% of his last 20 guests have a doctorate: Anna Lembke, MD Bret Weinstein, MA, PHD Rhonda Patrick, PHD Lex Fridman, MS, PHD
These are specialists in their fields. Rogan is exposing his audience to legitimate intellectuals. He also tends to have a melange of perspectives on his show. You may hear Alex Jones in one episode and Amy Schumer on the next. Elon Musk, Edward Snowden, Maajid Nawaz, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Dave Chapelle, Louis CK, Bernie Sanders, Sam Harris, Ted Nugent, Henry Rollins have all been guests on his show. It's hard to argue that these people aren't experts in their fields.
Going to high school and then spouting out things like taking horse medicine to cure covid would be a pointer in the opposite direction.
Oh wait you didn't because his video got removed from YouTube by other "very clever people"TM
I'm not endorsing ivermectin, I don't know if it works for covid or any other viral infection, but your reduction to people needing a PHD to make informed choices is just silly.
There is zero justification for getting on the radio and YouTube and hyping it up to the point that ignorant or desperate people try to take horse paste, especially when you combine it with soft-pedal antivax bullshit that convinces people they can put horse paste in their coffee instead of getting the vaccine.
This stuff has killed people.
https://scontent-ort2-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/241660405...
Numbers are similar in other places.
I don't think you need a Ph.D, but as you say it's one decent avenue. You can also grind yourself up, but you have to be an honest real autodidact who actually tries to learn stuff not a crank. The core characteristic of a crank IMHO is that they either stop when they know enough to sound smart or get emotionally attached to particular points of view and refuse to entertain others.
That seems to be the appeal of his show, though. He talks to experts (not all of them intellectuals) without being an expert himself. That's useful as a listener, because chances are you aren't an expert in any given field and listening to two experts talk would be borderline imcomprehensible to you.
This 1000%.
I agree that maybe when it comes to new media like podcasts or YouTube you'll find more conservatives with big audiences but I think the reason is that they've been driven out of the mainstream so they found areas where their voices could be heard.
>I think Rogan is just going where the money is, which is low-key pandering to the "alt-right" or whatever the hell it's called this week.
I think he would tell you the goal posts have moved. The stuff he says wouldn't have been controversial at all 5-10 years ago. Now he's considered right wing by many. I agree with his stance on this because I feel the same way. I feel like the left shifted so far left it doesn't represent me anymore and while I don't 100% agree with the "Rogans" of the world they feel far more sane to me than the current left.
Kind of, because reality and science have a liberal bias.
The recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said this to his 15 million audience.
>"It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump," Limbaugh said Feb. 24 on his radio show. "Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus … I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks."
>"The drive-by media hype up this thing as a pandemic," Limbaugh continued.
Most popular cable channel said this about Covid while Covid was raging in Wuhan and Italy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o
Not to mention talk radio is mostly far right wing and conservative, and very popular.
Covid raging among the unvaccinated, un-masked and people not following social distancing is just reality colliding with right wing misinformation, fake news and fantasies.
Not even mentioning QAnon.