I occasionally listen if he has a guest I am interested in. When talking to James Hetfield (Metallica), they got to talking about bees (Hetfield keeps bees).
After about 10 or 15 min, Hetfield says something like, "Sorry, I could talk about this stuff forever. Your listeners don't want to hear me talk about bees."
And Rogan says, "No, they'll listen. This shit is interesting."
For my part this is what makes him worth listening to. He just tries to find what his guest is interested in and passionate about and lets them go off on it.
Its refreshing vs more "Do you still talk to Jason Newstead? What about Dave Mustaine?" type interviews that Hetfield always gets.
Traditional media is all about opinions and to tell you what you think. Quick! Put this idea in this box! If you think this then you must be that. There is not enough room for people to be wrong or explore alternative ideas. There is such angst, as if the society was so fragile that one badly categorized idea would make all the society crumble. Quick, it has to be correct on the spot before it spreads further!
The irony is that the article recognized that but then couldn't help himself to condescend to the public and Joe Rogan at the end. It gave a pretty good description of the Joe Rogan experience and then failed at replicating it.
While I'm no fan of Alex Jones, the tone of the article towards the end saddened me. The article seemed like it was approaching a genuinely insightful conclusion, but veered at the end in a somewhat jarring contradiction of the conclusion the first half was approaching.
"Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble. Especially when he talks about Twitter, a company that brings together Joe’s two biggest blind spots: his basic misunderstanding of the concept of censorship and his tendency to see the world through a thick cloud of Axe Body Spray. (No, Joe, Twitter banning white nationalists from its privately held publishing platform is not censorship—it might be a risky corporate policy, but it is not censorship.)"
The First Amendment and Censorship are related, but two distinct topics.
The author also seems to suffer from the common illness of believing he has the ability to read minds:
"Rogan’s most recent Netflix special is often funny because Joe Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these? “I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he says during the special, which is something all comedians say, and is sort of true but also sort of not. People reveal their deepest selves in the subjects they keep revisiting, and the hills they choose to die on. With Rogan, you can often see and hear the tension between what he knows he’s supposed to believe and what he really thinks. Joe Rogan may be all about love, but beneath the surface he’s seething."
He also seems to believe he Knows how people should Behave, and how to accurately measure aggregate harm in society:
"Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good. It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it."
And then finally capping it off with this gem:
"My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table."
Apologies that that wasn't clear, hopefully this explanation clears up any misunderstanding.
The idea that you have to not only be the "right" mouth (whatever the hell that means) but also _prove_ that you're the "right" mouth are the exact type of thought crime / virtue signaling principles that I think Rogan and his audience rallies against.
The author even further cements their bias when writing about how Rogan constantly talks about his left-wing views, but that his "actions" somehow point him to being more right-wing (though the author only points to things Rogan has _said_, but I digress) - as if Joe needs to do more to prove he's a left-wing ally (aka "virtue signaling") and the occasional right wing guest makes him worthy for "re-education" to make sure he becomes the "right mouth" for the right points.
A statement is no more or less true for having been uttered by Einstein or by Stalin.
Nicely put.
I like that he leaves it up to me to challenge the bullshit in my own mind. Sometimes I need to parse information with only one set of external biases influencing my cognitive process, instead of factoring in the interviewer's biases as well. They are likely both full of shit to some degree.
> That it's a tacit endorsement.
This is like thinking everyone should stand up for everything all the time. It's just silly.
This is a philosophical position: do you see the interview as a way to learn or understand how someone else thinks on specific topics, or do you want to use the interview as a club to tell them why they are wrong (and virtue signal to your audience how right you are).
I find it much worse for a biased, or uninformed interviewer challenging a guest on every point they make (usually by relying on slogans, talking-points or simply a strawman of their position) - making the entire conversation an exercise in frustration for the interviewee and the listener.
>There's an argument that it's actually not noble to let bullshit go unchallenged.
Bullshit according to whom? Joe Rogan had Bernie Sanders on recently, I can tell you right now, a good half of what Bernie was saying was pure bullshit. I'm pretty sure Bernie supporters would disagree with that.
Except Rogan isn't necessarily even good at that. All you'll really learn about are the talking points they want to present to the world. Without pushing them on some issues or asking them to argue or defend those points it's impossible to understand how they actually think about the issues. Or as someone else in this thread put it, if you're not pushing back at any point then it's just an infomercial.
That's a subjective assessment. I think Rogan is very good actually, and there was circumstances when he skewered the interviewee by simply asking them to clarify their position. The recent example of this was his interview with Bari Weiss, who had the self-inflicted misfortune to simply assert that Tulsi Gabbard is an "Assad Toadie" and Joe Rogan, politely, asked her to clarify - and Bari fell over herself and couldn't even define what 'toadie' meant in context. I've never seen that kind of politie (and unintended) evisceration on network TV.
>All you'll really learn about are the talking points they want to present to the world.
It's actually quite hard to delegate to talking points in a 3 hour freeform conversation. I would argue that the alternative, the 60 Minutes-style interview format which wholly consists of talking points and sharp edits to fit a narrative. Those kinds of interviews are much more prone to simply generic speech as the interviewee tries as hard as they can to be uncontroversial because they know the interviewer is actively trying to catch them buggle some phrase, and then push this sound bite in every preview of the interview.
>Without pushing them on some issues or asking them to argue or defend those points it's impossible to understand how they actually think about the issues.
That's what makes him great. He's humble about his level of knowledge. He knows he's ignorant about many things. Referencing the Bari Weiss interview, how many interviewers would ever admit to not understanding a word or a concept and genuinely asking for a definition. This is in sharp contrast to "mainstream" interviewers pretending they are experts, when it is painfully obvious they are not.
>Or as someone else in this thread put it, if you're not pushing back at any point then it's just an infomercial.
You say that and maybe it feels that this should be true, but if you actually listen to his interviews, it just doesn't come of as an infomercial. I keep going back to contrasting mainstream interviews which in fact, do come off fake, wooden and infomercial-like.
Something ironically the adversarial 1min sound bytes hadn’t achieved
My take on this is that some journalists just parrot the talking points of the party or some faction from the political party they are affiliated with. So when they interview Bernie, they will pepper Bernie with questions that, for example, the Warren or Biden campaigns provided them with. And those questions will always be leading questions of the form "Have you stopped beating your wife".
And interviewers talking down to the audience is especially annoying if you get the impression that they miss the larger picture, or even worse, you know more about the topic.
I think he is popular because standard news media interviews have become that bad.
If you like that kind of style, Tilo Jung might be an interesting watch. He's doing quite long (45m-2hour) interviews. His style is not adversial, but he certainly asks tough questions. The interviews are uncut, and he gives his guests a long time to answer each question.
Most of his content is in german, but here is a playlist of his English content:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLuQE_zb4awhXlktpo-3t4...
The classic example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPJ0AB12h1I
I wish my media was more adversarial, especially in politics since so many politicians go on TV and spout complete nonsense with no challenge whatsoever by the people who really ought to know it's nonsense.
It has gotten so bad that the Democratic party regularly shames and rallies against even appearing on a non-friendly. Take Warren's refusal to go on Fox News [1], or Pete Buttigieg's refusal to go on Dave Rubin [2].
I hold Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard in high regard, for going on Fox News and Joe Rogan, and explaining their opinions to an audience & network with opposing ones
[1]: https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2019/05/20/elizabeth-warren...
[2]: https://www.thewrap.com/dave-rubin-on-the-outrage-mob-pete-b...
They're still head and shoulders above people like Alex Jones but they're just a setup and punchline relative to news as of late. I'm all for hearing the opposing sides but when all they seemingly have is petty name-calling, Whataboutism, or insane conspiracy theories, I'm just not interested.
https://youtu.be/pXqSTOUwMPg?t=55
It's honestly shocking how much you can learn about what's really going on in the world from watching literal comedians compared to "trustworthy" "journalists". The news is such obvious theater, I suppose the boiled frog theory probably explains how we got to this point with almost no one noticing.
But Michael Parkinson[0] could be one of the inspirations for Joe Rogan considering the model and style.
- Open to nearly any idea.
- (almost) Never talks down to the audience or his guest. Although the motivations are almost certainly different, this is a bit reminiscent of David Letterman always playing a bit of a fool. It's generally endearing to most people.
- Generally friendly and congenial.
In a world full of Joe Rogans, you wouldn't have very many good interviews. He's not adversarial, he's often not prone to, nor equipped to meaningfully disagree with a guest, and he's open to multiple, mutually contradictory opinions. But, the adversarial interview has gained in popularity for so long that it's become the norm. In this environment, he's a breath of fresh air. There really is a place for hearing someone lay out their views in a long, methodical way without being badgered every few minutes by an interviewer looking for a sound bite.