1mo ago

Time travel

47 comments

Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person on Earth to have never watched Joe Rogan.
Why are you people doing this?
- 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.
- 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 was great playing himself on Newsradio. But that's about it.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

It's entirely possible

“What if we gave a renaissance man DMT? Imagine being a renaissance man seeing machine elves. Did they have DMT in the renaissance? Jamie, pull that up”

Alternate approach: just say to him, "I'm a time traveller."

Somewhere, there is a compilation video of Theo Von entertaining himself by seeing what level of transparent ridiculous nonsense he can spout and still have Joe Rogan go along with it, and it generally works every single time.
In general I don't agree with Rogan hate. He has all kinds of people on, and sometimes they say some nonsense which he then gets blamed for, but he's mostly just letting them air out whatever they want to say. He even pushed back a little on Trump, told him that he didn't think that people in Europe rake their forests to prevent forest fires, that kind of thing. But if you're deliberately trying to lie to him, it's not hard to do.
Edit: Found a good example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SasSXNjgWhI
I greatly enjoy Theo's subtle nod of victory when he says everyone thinks owls can read, and Joe Rogan says, "Yeah..."
- Rogan hate is on point. You think he did a good job pushing back on obvious Trump nonsense? LOL. He ended up endorsing the guy because Joe thought he was more honest than Tim Walz! What the fuck is that? Even good ol' Joe ain't really that dumb. He's a paid off hack.
  
  What? No, he definitely didn't do a good job pushing back on Trump. I said he pushed back a little.
  It's like you guys only have two characters in your internal mental puppet-show, and if I'm not the good puppet, I've got to go as the bad puppet. Just read the message, I said what I said the way I said it for a reason.
- When your platform is as massive as rogan's, you have a responsibility not to cause harm through misinfo. He's worth hundreds of millions. He could have a full time fact-checking team instead of poor Jamie having to debunk the bullshit his guests spew. Even when he does push back, it's lukewarm and wishy washy. Like when he had crowder on and interviewed him about his anti-trans documentary, and the fucker claimed there were millions of children under 18 on hormone blockers. Jamie looked out up and the number was less than 1000 per year in the US. To which crowder replied that it was at least hundreds of thousands.
  Also on the original topic, this lives rent free in my head:
  
  Joe's audience isn't there for fact finding. Hiring fact finders would cost more in ratings than it would in salaries. Joe's entire purpose in existing is to make facts seem boring and irrelevant.
  
  Like when he had crowder on and interviewed him about his anti-trans documentary, and the fucker claimed there were millions of children under 18 on hormone blockers. Jamie looked out up and the number was less than 1000 per year in the US.
  See, this is what I'm talking about. It sounds like you wanted him to get into an extended argument with Crowder, or kick him out of the studio, or something. I think it's okay if someone makes a claim, you on-the-spot look up the truth and tell your audience what the actual truth is, and then move on. I think people are capable to determine for themselves that it's an indication that Crowder is full of shit when that happens and start to incorporate it into their mental picture. He's chill enough about it that Crowder is willing to go on the show, but he's also not trying to be impartial about what the actual truth is. I can't off the top of my head think of any other place that would interview Crowder from a "neutral" point of view, but also, not let him get away with bullshit and fact-check him to his face in real time about it, not from an "opposing" guest, but from the official editorial voice.
  He could have a full time fact-checking team instead of poor Jamie having to debunk the bullshit his guests spew.
  This part, and the greentext about it, I'll pretty much agree with. It is damaging that Joe's wading into these complex topics and bringing no qualification whatsoever, which sometimes leads to awful fuck-ups like the Trump endorsement.
- Honestly my favorite thing is watching Theo spew absolute bs and people believing him. My only experience with Rogan is select clips like that with Theo making him believe total nonsense, if only for a moment
  
  I think it's Theo's way of entertaining himself, and also checking whether the person he's talking to has a functioning brain in the conversation. He's been doing it to Rogan for years and as far as I know, Rogan has never passed the test.