Joe Rogan, Parody of the Open Mind

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/joe-rogan-both-better-and-worse

by thunderbong • 5 years ago

47 65 5 years ago

freddiedeboer.substack.com

api4• 5 years ago

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. That is clearly where the big bucks are in talk radio, social media grinding, etc.

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.

kardianos• 5 years ago

Have you watched Joe Rogan? What makes someone a "real intellectual"?

api4• 5 years ago

I used to like Rogan years ago. He was sort of like a cross between Art Bell and Howard Stern, but with less of a penchant for bringing on wild-ass cranks than Art Bell. I found Art Bell entertaining but didn't buy 90% of the stuff on there.

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.

brianwawok• 5 years ago

Did Rogan even attend college? I don't know enough about his background. Getting a phd is a pretty good step, but not the only step, for being an intellectual.

Going to high school and then spouting out things like taking horse medicine to cure covid would be a pointer in the opposite direction.

W-Stool• 5 years ago

"I get the sense that the people who would make up those audiences probably have better things to do ..."

This 1000%.

CountDrewku2• 5 years ago

How do you explain Reddit then?

CountDrewku2• 5 years ago

Almost the entire msm is left, hollywood is far left, tech is left, the music industry is left....

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.

belltaco• 5 years ago

Almost the entire msm is left, hollywood is far left, tech is left, the music industry is 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.

drcongo3• 5 years ago

This is a very odd article, with much sneering at educated people ("That writer, unsurprisingly, is an Ivy League-educated lifetime New Yorker") followed by lamenting that we're not in a "smarter and more adult world".

Maybe if we didn't sneer at education we could have one.

thehappypm• 5 years ago

Agree, I could barely follow the train of thought it’s so convoluted and circular

Levitz3• 5 years ago

He is not sneering at education itself, he is pointing at the (assumed) cultural and political background of that person and how it isn't surprising that someone that probably finds himself at the very center of woke culture is missing the point completely.

drcongo3• 5 years ago

I've tried reading it the way you suggest, but it still reads as a sneer at the educated to me - `of course an Ivy League educated liberal would miss the point`. I agree with quite a lot of the points the author makes, Joe Rogan is a dangerous imbecile, but I find the _way_ he makes those points very distasteful.

CarelessExpert• 5 years ago

He is not sneering at education itself, he is pointing at the (assumed) cultural and political background of that person

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.

kcplate7• 5 years ago

I have known highly educated idiots and poorly educated geniuses.

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.

dariusj182• 5 years ago

There is a built in fallacy that one can listen to all the sides and form an educated opinion from that. Firstly, if there is one truth, than there are infinite falsehoods. Secondly, I don't think the human mind works like that. We are sponges for information and the more bad data we put in it will inevitably cause confusion if you are just being a passive listener.

kmmlng2• 5 years ago

While you make a fair point, it seems like the alternative is to assume that the consensus opinion is the correct one and discard everything else. That doesn't seem like the way to go to me.

drcongo3• 5 years ago

The alternative is to trust the opinion of someone who has done the work to gain specialist knowledge of each subject. Experts, rather than Ivermectin grifters, moon-fakers, 911 truthers etc.

Zelphyr3• 5 years ago

How do you identify that one truth?

dariusj182• 5 years ago

We learn as a society to elevate those with training to positions of authority with a system of checks and balances from others with knowledge to moderate any instability.

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.

discopicante2• 5 years ago

This is the first critical yet reasonable piece I've read on Rogan. The author correctly points out that there is no left-leaning equivalent to Rogan's format. The author also correctly points out that the left is (too) often delusional in thinking that many of their values have (or could have) broad appeal across the electorate, not mention society at large.

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.

rolha-capoeira2• 5 years ago

It seems to me that there is something about American culture that is inherently right-leaning. The "left" struggles to gain any traction because they ultimately fail at marketing their ideas to the average American, to your point. There is also an aspect of playing dirty that gives the modern Republican a leg up.

Levitz3• 5 years ago

In my experience, they fail to market their ideas to the average European too.

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.

dogleash2• 5 years ago

It seems to me that there is something about American culture that is inherently right-leaning.

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.

yellowcake02• 5 years ago

The left struggles to gain any traction because they fail at marketing their ideas to a set of key demographics in a small number of swing and low-population states. The average American is a liberal American.

Levitz3• 5 years ago

The author correctly points out that there is no left-leaning equivalent to Rogan's format.

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.

lazyeye• 5 years ago

Is Joe Rogan really right-wing? Or does he just have his own opinions that dont line up exactly with the narrow railroad tracks of leftist thought. And because he's so popular that makes him a threat and a target.

discopicante2• 5 years ago

The author points out that Rogan (who I agree is not partisan) frequently has guests that the left loathe but rarely has guests that the left like and/or love.

quantified3• 5 years ago

Would you say that Bill Maher occupied the same spot on the left? He was fairly prominent until he pointed out something that seemed true but was radioactive at the time, then was cancelled.

Zelphyr3• 5 years ago

What did he get cancelled for? Not having had HBO for awhile, I haven't watched his show for some time.

yellowcake02• 5 years ago

Is Joe Rogan really right-leaning though? He voted for Bernie Sanders after all.

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.

kcplate7• 5 years ago

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.

rolha-capoeira2• 5 years ago

I used to listen to Rogan quite regularly. I think he's funny (on occasion) and is truly inquisitive (when he wants to be) and is a good interviewer of experts for the every-man. (That said, I personally never enjoyed his MMA or comedian episodes -- they have a very different tone.)

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.

100011_1000012• 5 years ago

Ironically I was the opposite, liked his early comedy and MMA, but left when the podcasts started.

kcplate7• 5 years ago

Actually I think you see what you want to see. A month ago he had an interesting podcast with Jimmy Dore. That man is as far left as the most right wing guest Joe has ever had on.

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.

100011_1000012• 5 years ago

I used to frequent the Joe Rogan forum for about 5 years, prior to any of his podcasts.

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.

klipklop• 5 years ago

Yeah the old school joe rogan dot net was pretty cool. He had some funny blog posts as well.

INTPenis• 5 years ago

Well, let's take that with a grain of salt. I doubt he BELIEVED in the world ending. He wasn't in the basement with his family hugging them and crying.

He just likes talking about it. He's entertained by entertaining his imagination.

dogleash2• 5 years ago

This gets some points right regarding the abject failure of media criticism's hamfisted attempts tocover Rogan.

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.

mindslight3• 5 years ago

I haven't listened to that much of Joe Rogan, but I feel what's he's really missing is any sort of attempt at understanding through rational criticism. Just letting people talk their same talking points doesn't particularly promote an understanding, rather it just provides another soap box next to a familiar face. The slant of both Rogan and his guests wouldn't matter much if there were analysis of the ideas presented - ie if Joe Rogan stood for some kind of wider context in which guests had to justify their ideals.

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.

robscallsign• 5 years ago

His show is a discussion and an interview, not a scientific debate, thesis defense, or a court hearing. It's up to us as listener to do as you say, use an open mind and question the information as it comes out.

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.

mindslight3• 5 years ago

Yeah, I do get that. But I think most of the desire for that comes from having way too much of the opposite. As I touched upon in my last paragraph, we need a middle ground - becoming completely passive in the dialog is just overcorrecting in the other direction.

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?

zpeti2• 5 years ago

Think of Joe rogan as a 3 hour Ted talk. Except you can’t make an interesting 3 hour presentation, but you can actually make a conversation interesting.

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

mindslight3• 5 years ago

I guess when you put it that way, I grew out of TED talks a decade ago...

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.

ouid2• 5 years ago

True confidence in ones beliefs derives from a willingness to expose those beliefs to challenge. When no one is willing to expose their beliefs to challenge (and this is manifestly true for any belief which is presented in podcast form), then it is necessasrily the case the the confidence in those beliefs is false. The problem is that basically all beliefs that people consume are consumed from bad faith persuasive essays with single authors.

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.

runawaybottle• 5 years ago

I don’t want to undermine anyone’s analysis but part of Rogan’s success was novelty. Take the first time we ever saw Ron Paul on a debate stage. You ever heard someone just outright call our middle eastern wars stupid back then? Now days everyone does it. Over time we got over Ron Paul because we realized he’s a little nutty with the Libertarianism, but kudos for standing out when it was unique to stand out.

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.

ouid2• 5 years ago

If Ron Paul was the first person you heard call the middle eastern wars stupid then I don't know if I can agree with anything you say after that. It wasn't novelty, it was anti-establishment.

burning_hamster• 5 years ago

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.

That is a fantastic point I had not considered so far.

readonthegoapp• 5 years ago

    "our media hates him, passionately and performatively"

if a $100M media deal is what qualifies as 'hate', I'd be very interested to know what 'love' looks like.

Joe Rogan, Parody of the Open Mind

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