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Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person on Earth to have never watched Joe Rogan.
Why are you people doing this?
Don't listen to these people who are telling you that he used to be cool.
No, he's always been a moron, you can listen to his standup from 20+ years ago and tell the guy has always been a surface-level-thinking dope that should have never been taken seriously when it came to serious topics.
That's why it was great though - he might not be the sharpest, but he was curious. He'd get someone talking and help them to find a way to get to those mind blowing implications you find everywhere you look hard enough. And instead of "for my audience, can you explain XYZ briefly?" He'd genuinely learn about the topic and give the audience a nice into that felt organic
Then he started to reject ideas that challenged his favorite beliefs now and then... At this point, he's got a lot of favorite beliefs, and he'll just straight up ruin the interview if he doesn't like what the guest is saying
He also doesn't really "interview". Interviews involve a reporter actually asking intelligent questions and follow-ups. Rogan's style usually just involves his guest soapboxing for 40 minutes and Rogan just nodding along and maybe occasionally going "I see".
I think people like Joe because the people watching are also unqualified, and have a half-justified belief that a lot of these science wizards and political professionals aren't as wise as they think they are and are fucking up the planet, and so they feel like they can relate to Joe and how he looks at things.
I'm not saying it as a good or bad thing, just that I think that's a big reason for his popularity.
He was great playing himself on Newsradio. But that's about it.
I mean, back in the day he had Bernie Sanders on that one alone was worth listening to in the time that it came out. Also a lot of his friends from his comedy days are left leaning so when he would have them on it would be pretty progressive. They have mysteriously not made an appearance for many years now.
So mysterious.
Dude is a former always-high Fear Factor manlet host that became a pseudo-intellectual when he found his niche market after his abysmal attempt at stand-up and UFC announcer. This is the guy that encouraged everyone to take medicine meant for horses because he was high when he was reading this incredibly dangerous and stupid idea for a treatment. There are like minded people that also find appeal in a platform where you talk like a pothead all day. Don't get me wrong, potheads contemplating the universe and talking about food can be entertaining; until the pothead becomes a zealot about their bullshit.
Nope. There’s two of us.
Three. I thought Josh Rogan had something to do with curry.
It goes on for too long for me to be into it, but it's not a bad thing, in my unpopular opinion. He just has people on his show from all kinds of different places. He has Bernie Sanders, Neil Degrass Tyson, Nazis, Anti-vaxxers, Elon Musk, comedians, crooks, liars, just a huge variety of people, and then he gives them an extended length of time to talk about what they're into. He's sort of a moron, but he mostly knows he's a moron, so he doesn't try to bring anything but an unqualified point of view to it, and lets the person make their argument and lets people hear it.
I watched one of his episodes interviewing an anti-vaxxer, and to me he struck a pretty good balance of letting the guy speak, but also asking important questions and repeatedly pointing out that the guy hadn't answered the question he had asked, and asking it again. Would it be better to have a science-qualified host to poke holes in the guy's claims? Yeah, maybe. But it's also not like Rogan was saying he agreed with anything the guy was saying, or trying to engineer his show to make it sound particularly plausible.
I think the impulse to ban Rogan maybe stems from the same type of thinking that says we have to ban "misinformation" from Lemmy. Thinking people just absorb whatever's in front of them, and so it's "our" job to filter out the wrong stuff lest people get exposed to it and absorb it like amoebas. I won't say that's completely wrong, but I think the solution is to teach people to be skeptical of what's in front of you, not to nominate someone to do a perfect job of filtering all the wrong stuff out so that everyone can go on uncritically absorbing everything they can still have access to.
Plus, the podcaster landscape is full of so many people maliciously trying to craft propaganda to sway public opinion and doing an absolutely excellent job at it. Rogan's just a guy who lets people talk. He's not really the villain in the podcasting propaganda conversation, to me.
Yeah but what's more likely/doable, changing the entire US education system (with this incoming government???) or deplatforming Nazis and people who platform Nazis?
Also Nazis don't deserve that type of treatment. They aren't acting in good faith and don't deserve to be treated like they are.
I watched the Alex Jones one because I didn't know anything first hand about Alex Jones. My takeaway was how could anyone believe what this obviously crazy, unhinged buffoon was saying. If anyone does, well... the problem is far deeper than hosting.
Letting people talk is an important thing, especially if you disagree with them. There is also such a thing as letting idiots talk too much, but I would argue that there are way too many debates happening on the internet that are about a caricature of a belief held by some group of people rather than what that group actually believes. In the limited amount of podcasts I've seen from Joe he does do a pretty good job of letting people articulate their positions. In most cases you have to start there before you can dismiss an idea.
Yeah. That's why I'm partly sticking up for Rogan.
It's okay to listen to your "enemies" and let them be heard in their own words. It's actually the first step to disagreeing with them and people coming to where they can understand the truth.
It's also okay to cut through the bullshit when someone's lying, of course, and I wish Joe would do that too, but the first thing is in even shorter supply than the second in the current media landscape.
But if giving Nazis a platform radicalizes 10 people to become Nazis and 1 to reconsider, then it makes for a lot of Nazi recruitment.
I like the theory, but in practice it's dangerous to give seemingly equal platforms to everyone. Some people have views that should be checked at the door.
Who decides what views need to be checked at the door, though?
You? Me? The government? The person who owns the platform? The person who hosts the show?
To you and me, anti-vaxxers are the dangerous ones. To some other people, a majority probably, the pro-Palestinian protestors are the dangerous ones whose views need to be checked at the door. What then?
No one entity should be the arbiter of that. But if most people think nazism is bad, then anyone who platforms a Nazi shouldn't be listened to, laughed off the air even.
I don't know what is going wrong (education, perhaps), but the people who support Joe Rogan are (like it or not) supporting recruiting new Nazis.
I guess what I'm trying to convey is:
You can listen to whoever you want. But if you defend joe Rogan for platforming everyone, my counter argument is he platforms Nazis and the rest he does kind of doesn't matter after that.
I don't watch him either, but you can't deny that he is already very popular and had more viewers than show on TV.
https://www.newsweek.com/most-popular-podcasts-america-right-now-joe-rogan-daily-crime-1650687
The vast majority of his podcast episodes, especially the ones with scientists and experts are quite interesting and entertaining. Not so much the ones with fighters or comedians. As someone who has listened probably a thousand episodes from him it's quite hilarious what picture of him people who don't know better are trying to paint. Yeah, he has his flaws and as with everyone, I don't agree with him on every issue but for the most part I think he's a pretty good guy.