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I listened to a lot of Rogan podcasts. Mainly before 2020. It was a different time and the show was a lot more interesting with a range of guests from different backgrounds. The few times I’ve listened post 2021 have all felt a lot more political and conspiratorial. It’s been a sad deterioration of a show I once found entertaining.

It’s worth noting that Rogan used to be deep into moon landing conspiracies. He mentions on his show a few times how he now sees the error of his ways. Perhaps some people just have tendencies for conspiracy and it was only a matter of time before another took hold.

Prior to 2020 he was already peddling 9/11 truth conspiracies, fake moon landing conspiracies, and anti-vax conspiracies. His entire success rests on pushing absurd nonsense to credulous bros to make them feel like they're "in the know".

I've heard a very small handful of clips from Rogan. The two that I heard this week were him talking to someone who disagreed with him, showed him a study, and Rogan still didn't want to admit he was wrong, and another, which I"m told is quite old, where he was going on about some new primates and a primatologist called in to tell him he was wrong and he talked all over her and mocked her credentials.

These may be very rare and cherry picked examples but they still don't make me want to give him any more of my time.

> and that monoclonal antibodies are orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult to make.

We’re in a global heath crisis and the average people have been convinced that they need to be concerned about big pharma’s “bottom line” instead of doing what’s best for humanity.

Millions of lives are being ruined by pandemic response measures and you’re arguing that we can’t give out life saving treatments because it’s too costly. We’re sacrificing the average person’s (already somewhat poor) quality of life to spare big corporations the cost of making a positive contribution to the world.

In a world where we have political leadership that is deserving of trust these corporations would have had their freedoms trampled first instead the common person. Instead they’re posting record profits while the rest of us suffer.

The hardest thing for me to swallow is millions of people are ok with this and support it! Without any personal gain they’ll preach the good word of our modern oligarchy and shame dissenters. Seemingly out of nowhere “big pharma” can do no wrong and is above reproach.

> We’re in a global heath crisis and the average people have been convinced that they need to be concerned about big pharma’s “bottom line” instead of doing what’s best for humanity.

You know that pharma companies aren't literally paying for their own treatments out of their own pockets, right?

The government and insurance companies are paying the pharma companies to produce these things. It would be the pharma companies' dream come true if the government paid them thousands of dollars for monoclonal antibodies for every patient instead of a < $20 vaccine.

This is what I meant when I said that the conspiracy theories aren't even logically consistent. Baffling that you think the pharmaceutical companies don't want to produce the more expensive drug.

> You know that pharma companies aren't literally paying for their own treatments out of their own pockets, right?

Yes that is my entire point. The average person is paying out of pocket for this pandemic and you’re saying we can’t force corporations to do the same.

As of today how many people in (say) the US are actually locked down?

Anyway, what if it just too costly vs. vaccinating early? Rogan says he won't take the vaccine but then takes, like any rich person would, a giant concoction of experimental treatments. That probably doesn't scale when you can have thousands of cases a day in even a relatively small area.

I think the intention of the poster before you was to highlight that monoclonal antibodies (likely) actually make more money for big pharma than a course of vaccination. A lot of anti-vaccine rhetoric revolves around vaccines being a big pharma cash grab.

For context, each dose of most of the covid vaccines is about $40 while a round of monocolonal antibody treatment is around $1,500. The vaccine has a dramatic effect in limiting the affects of covid and (as far as I a non-doctor know) stack with monoclonal antibodies if needed. Its just dramatically cheaper if people are vaccinated and not as many people need this treatment.

Addressable market for vaccines is larger than treatments: all population vs. those get sick

Also vaccines as those we have today are recurrent revenue: one shot every 6 / 12 months?

What? The vaccine is free and widely available. None of this is making any sense. Do you know what it costs to treat someone on the ICU?

The striking part of your sentence is the exact argument against nationalized healthcare. That is, why are healthy people forced to pay higher rates so that people who don’t take care of their bodies, who are overweight, smoke, don’t exercise, don’t get vaccines, can receive the same coverage at the same price? Heart disease is the number one killer, far exceeding COVID deaths and Unless the country is willing to enact forced exercise, I don’t see why they would enact forced vaccine mandates.

I don't drive on roads on the other side of the country in which I live, but my taxes still go to building them and maintaining them.

This is what it means to live in a country - you pay to raise the overall quality of life for your fellow citizens, which has an uplift effect on you as well.

I've lived in the US and couldn't believe how ghastly, confusing, expensive and irritating the alternative to nationalised healthcare is. Very happy to be back in Australia, and I will cheerfully continue to pay taxes for the benefit of my fellow citizens.

edit: why does an Israeli medical researcher's blog show this:

""It’s been nearly two years now and my confidence in publicly funded science is completely destroyed. I don’t believe anyone reasonably intelligent can read the COVID literature and come out the other side without concluding that universities and governments cannot tell the difference between science and scientism. Our society is completely in the grip of people who have effectively evolved under selection pressure to strongly resemble scientists without actually being scientists. Their work looks roughly right from a distance - there are data tables, charts, equations - but when you sit down and read it the scientific method has gone AWOL. I am now explicitly open to counter-narrative claims I’d never have previously considered."

edit: looking for the actual reference here [0] it appears that it is an embedded quote, not the author. Please confirm for yourselves

[0] https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/what-convinced-you-containm...

Without any context or analysis, this snippet could easily be applied to the surprising (if still 1% of the whole) of scientists who have thrown themselves into the work of pro-virus propaganda, or creating fake studies to boost ivermectin.

Simple common sense comparison of the % of vaccinated people ending up in the hospital with COVID vs unvaccinated ending up in the hospital with COVID is all you need to see the vaccine works.

mAB do work too but only if you test for covid and use it within the first 5 days or at least 10 days of illness.

"an Israeli medical researcher"

Does he have a name? What has he published before? Is he even an expert in the field?

This has been my experience. There's still some reputable journals out there, but you have to be really careful. It's amazing though how much absolute BS there is out there in academic papers. I've read so many that started interesting and then as soon as you get into the methods you realize it's all just air. The worst part is, if you don't have a handle on statistics and a fairly high degree of scientific literacy, they really DO look ok (polished even!) at first glance.

If you are going to paste what you claim to be a direct quote, please provide a source.

It’s baffling that anyone thinks a quote from an unnamed “medical researcher” is a logical debunking of all of modern COVID science.

The vaccine unquestionably reduces severe infection, hospitalization, and death. It’s not even a question at this point.

I suppose this is why Rogan’s anti-vaccine conspiracy drivel thrives despite not even being logically self-consistent: There’s an appetite for contrarian information, and those who enjoy this contrarianism will unquestionably absorb anything, no matter how illogical, as long as it’s contrarian.

It would have taken you less time to throw the first sentence into Google and find the source than it would have taken you to write your snarky comment.

https://swprs.org/professor-ehud-qimron-ministry-of-health-i...

> The vaccine unquestionably reduces severe infection, hospitalization, and death. It’s not even a question at this point.

If I may, this claim alone is the rallying cry of the anti vax movement - the original reasons given for emergency use was vaccines prevented infection for 90% of patients.

Anyone who took a quick look at the study knew that was bonkers… the methods obviously (and confirmed in hindsight) weren’t controlled properly and don’t support a reduced infection claim…

So the narrative shifted to preventing hospitalization - so the value given by not getting Covid is gone… you will get covid it just won’t be as bad.

Well now we are in the lottery effect where everyone believes they will be the one to beat the odds…

> the original reasons given for emergency use was vaccines prevented infection for 90% of patients.

The vaccine does prevent serious infection for the majority of patients.

Deaths are so much higher in unvaccinated COVID patients that it's not even a close question. The vaccine works.

preventing infection /= preventing serious infection. They have different implications.

Agreed that vaccines prevent serious infection.

Citations needed? I have questions about basically every one of those sentences.

Here's one - if you're interested, you can continue to look for others...

Absolute Risk Reduction = 1·3% for the AstraZeneca– Oxford, 1·2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·2% for the J&J, 0·93% for the Gamaleya, and 0·84% for the Pfizer– BioNTech vaccines.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S2666-5247(21)00069-0

It doesn't look like it came from Researcher. According to [1], it's a quote by Mike Hearn, a software engineer.

[1] https://eugyppius.substack.com/p/what-convinced-you-containm...

This quote is from a UK software developer and the author of the damning analysis of the Ferguson model https://dailysceptic.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

You haven't actually listened because he's 100% for the vax for high risk groups. I'd be really curious how you can "easy disprove" the main themes that come up on his show: natural immunity is better than the vax, big pharma has a long history of lawsuits and criminal penalties for falsifying data, effective treatments do exist, and there's a higher risk profile of the vax than public authorities let on. Those are the big themes, so please, "easy disprove" them?

Per the last one: The FOI lawsuit pertaining to FDA approval (follow Aaron Siri) already revealed in the first 2.5 months of the rollout that Pfzier received 130k case incidents of adverse events. VAERS shows staggering incidents of disability and death, and he's spoken with many physicians who believe there's useful signal from VAERS like there has been for over 30 years. A bunch of countries have now slapped myocarditis warnings on either Pfzier or Moderna. He talks about the 15+ people he knows who have had serious reactions after second dose or booster including his friend's daughter who's now dead. Our family friend here died after booster. The articles about european footballers dropping on the field from cardiac issues (greater than previous 20 years combined) is a signal too. He even had a guest talk about fake vax card going around in Hollywood because many celebrities/people of means don't want to risk it. There's plenty of other statistical or otherwise anecdotal signals that you can hear about if you decide to listen to his show, or you can follow dozens of other people on substacks who track these issues. But please go ahead and disprove all of it.

Rogan is doing this because it makes money and in his mind, there's nothing unethical taking advantage of people who want to listen to conspiracy theories and questionable medical advice. There are a lot of people out there who don't really care, as long as their pockets are lined and they can go to their walled mansion.

The outrage economy, as they call it, is the new cash pump of the post-factual society media. It exercises a remote code execution flaw in human physiology that gets us a little involuntary shot of adrenaline.

Subliminal advertising doesn't work, but this truly does. I wonder if we'll treat it the same way. The FCC issued a warning to broadcasters in 1971:

> We believe that the use of subliminal perception is inconsistent with the obligations of a licensee, and therefore we take this occasion to make clear that broadcasts employing such techniques are contrary to the public interest. Whether effective or not, such broadcasts clearly are intended to be deceptive.

https://www.lawpublish.com/fcc1.html

Agreed, Joe definitely had a golden age where he interviewed quite well.

The Spotify move and perhaps the 100m that came with it have seen him interject a lot more of his own opinions though.

I’ll still tune in if the guest is great. But I find myself wishing joe would bite his lip far more often than before.

He's a garbage-quality thinker himself, but he's always been great at getting people to let their guard down and start talking and he has pretty good selection of people on his show.

Same here. I used to listen to a lot of episodes and he had super interesting conversations. But the whole covid situation really sent him off the deep end. And the more the "establishment" tries to push back, the more he's digging in.

The last Rhonda Patrick episode was specially hard to watch. I guess it's the last time she's going to be on.

I'm listening more to Lex Fridman these days, even though he's had Weinstein on recently...

> The last Rhonda Patrick episode was specially hard to watch. I guess it's the last time she's going to be on.

That's the only recent one I've tried to listen to, and I agree. You could tell she was trying not to upset Rogan, but she was also completely uncomfortable with what he was saying.

She later posted a long follow-up on her own website to try to correct the misinformation. What a sad situation.

My wild guess is that it can divide his audience, and that it brings more ads, it increase his audience, and then he makes more money.

Bad publicity is publicity, and then it's money.

Facts and reality are not linked to money.

Hank Green tweeted about this.

That's the reality of the internet now: lies are more profitable. Everyone wants an underground, alternative source of information.

His IQ is directly proportional to that of the interviewee, as is his ability to spot grifting.

Not a Rogan fan, but hes not anti vaccine (has said that in those exact words many times) and he is vaccinated.