Exactly. The guy who is an "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter" doesn't have a conflict of interest, which makes him less biased and more believable.

BIG conflict of interest… if someone goes on his show stating something like “brushing actually destroys your teeth, you should take X supplement which I developed and read my book” he gets money and viewers interested in this “no brushing” thing. If the conclusion is that you should brush and use toothpaste he doesn’t have a podcast.

He’s in the industry of going against “mainstream [ie scientific] knowledge”… which provides him and endless stream of salesmen who cherry picked scientific papers that support their schtick… and a lot of interested listeners who get an excuse for everything they don’t feel like doing (“oh, this guy on Rogan said brushing destroys your teeth, so I guess I’m better off leaving them alone”)

> BIG conflict of interest… if someone goes on his show stating something like “brushing actually destroys your teeth, you should take X supplement which I developed and read my book” he gets money and viewers interested in this “no brushing” thing. If the conclusion is that you should brush and use toothpaste he doesn’t have a podcast.

This seems to be equally valid for basically any media (using brush and toothpaste is not news). Would you say that all media is in BIG conflict of interest? Or how is Joe Rogan fundamentally different?

It's different because that's the niche he's focusing on. He's not the only one... Oprah? (to a less sensationalistic extent), Gwyneth Paltrow? Malcom Gladwell also had huge success with books that cherry-pick scientific publications to "prove" things that go against conventional notions in various fields.

We know that traditional media has analogous biases towards celebrity scandals, and towards FUD and polarization in politics, and that bottom feeder broadcasters with no ethics thrive on those.

... He does it with lifestyle / well-being specifically, inviting people that peddle diets, supplements, etc.

That's not fair to say. The guy who is "Ultimate Fighting Championship color commentator, comedian, actor, and former television presenter" has a massive conflict of interest, namely between generating viewership and presenting factual information. Everything he presents is a choice on a gradient between those two.

These snake oil salesmen have quickly cottoned on to the fact that they can take disenfranchised and usually uneducated groups and regurgitate them their own opinions with the air of authority, thus gaining an almost fanatically loyal following.

It's the new age televangelists, but instead of preaching salvation for tithe, they preach actually dangerous drivel that gets people killed. It feels like a low point in human evolution, where our tools enable sociopaths to mislead clueless masses on an industrial scale.

And do you know what is the worst aspect of this? That we can't ban them in good faith, because banning information is a slippery slope one way street that we mustn't take a single step on. The only way out of this quagmire is education, but it's a long slog that will pay off in decades time and only if we make a great effort now. It's literally the tree we have to plant and yet our current generation won't get to enjoy it's shade.

Exactly this!

Less biased I agree with. To be more believable I need to look at the merits and details. Sometimes he says things that I could argue are true. Other times I can make an agreement he shared complete hogwash.

Being less biased doesn’t make one more true. Both can be wrong

I'm a fan of Joe Rogan, but the "doesn't have a conflict of interest" argument doesn't seem correct to me. The point of Joe's podcast is that his biases and motivations are transparent, not that they don't exist. Joe is interested, like many people, in contrarians. It's a heuristic that leads him to interesting conversations, and those kinds of interesting conversations are why the podcast is so popular. Oftentimes people who seem one-dimensional in media coverage are shown to be much more than meets the eye when placed in a long-form non-confrontational setting. There is no guarantee of factualness or good faith in any conversation on the podcast, and in many cases he will bring in verifiably crazy people just to see what they're really like -- these are some of the most popular episodes, by the way.

Even if he isn't in a conflict of interest, that doesn't mean he has any kind of qualification on any scientific matter. Scientific debate should continue in the scientific community, not on podcasts and social media.