We live in Joe Rogan’s world
Does the value of free speech mean we have to let for instance Joe Rogan tell his massive audience lies about Covid?
One said it was the vast size of his audience that made him so dangerous. Another suggested it was the fact the average age of his listeners was just 24, and hence particularly persuadable.
Another expert said he appeared to have a cult of personality. One said he had repeatedly spread misinformation about Covid, and ignored calls to stop.
These were among just some of the accusations levelled at Joe Rogan, podcaster, influencer and sometime actor, from more than 150 scientists, doctors and healthcare professionals who have said the 54-year-old was “extraordinarily dangerous”.
They sent an open letter to Spotify, which hosts Rogan’s podcast, urging it “to take action to halt the spread of false information about the coronavirus and the efficacy and safety of vaccines.”
“Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Joe Rogan has repeatedly spread misleading and false claims on his podcast, provoking distrust in science and medicine,” wrote the experts from the US, Canada, Britain and Australia.
“He has discouraged vaccination in young people and children, incorrectly claimed that mRNA vaccines are ‘gene therapy’, promoted off-label use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 (contrary to FDA warnings), and spread a number of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories.”
As if it’s all a game, or entertainment.
Imogen Coe, Founding Dean of the Faculty of Science at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, claimed Rogan has not simply spread misinformation once, but kept doing so.
“Why would someone deliberately share information that is potentially damaging to the health and well being of others? That needs to be addressed and health professionals in particular have a duty of care and scientists have an ethical responsibility to speak up,” she said.
Why indeed? Rogan does it and many of his fans amplify it, because…? The cover story is “freedom” but what a stupid, piffling notion of “freedom” that is, especially from people who rely on the whole network of social connection and obligation that makes it possible for them to have their dopy podcasts in the first place.
The cover story isn’t so much “Freedom” as “Truth,” I think. I strongly suspect Rogan sees himself as a whistleblowing activist, promoting accurate information to people who are only then in the position of making a choice. Of course, it’s easier to believe what just happens to get you a lot of benefits.
Wasn’t Rogan the one who defended the moon landing “hoax” position in that debate with Phil Plait all those years ago too?
Google confirms.
But it does go to show that the actions taken to tamp down the madness of Alex Jones left a vacuum for Rogan to step into. I like his acting on News Radio, Fear Factor was kind of a dumb idea (there’s only so many gross bugs to eat and ways to jump from heights or swim underwater,) but he has found a gold-mine with his podcast. And the ones that appease to Truthers are the goldiest mines of all.
His defenders say he’s “Just asking questions.” Not the right ones, nor to actual experts, but hey, he’s not paid for that kind of thing.
“Just asking questions” seems to be doing a lot of work these days.
I meant the cover story for why we can’t just shut Rogan down is “freedom.” Not his cover story, but the cover story for why he must be allowed to continue making the pandemic worse.
I think his position is that if you are young and healthy, exercise and eat right*, that your body is going to be resistant to Covid and other ailments.
* In which his version is various all meat diets** and spending several hours a day working out.
** Which is another questionable thing he promotes along with consuming copious amounts of marijuana***.
*** I find this part odd for a self professed fitness advocate.
The Ivermectin thing is irresponsible to say the least, but he seems to get persuasive (to him) guests who’s opinions he mostly goes along with.
@Ophelia
Ah. That’s so.
The marketplace will decide.
I have watched a few of his Youtubes, and he seemed mostly inquisitive and reasonable to me generally, but when he went to Spotify I haven’t watched him since (I don’t do subscriptions). I never saw him as an MMA announcer or on Fear Factor either because I don’t watch that kind of shit, but when he started interviewing people I found interesting on Youtube I watched a few. I find him kind of a macho/rebel type but he doesn’t present himself that way, at least in the interviews I saw, but I haven’t watched any of the sports figures or grown adolescents he’s interviewed, as I have better things to do. He has a fairly eclectic range of guests on there, or used to, not sure about what he’s up to on Spotify. Probably taking himself too seriously like everyone else seems to be. :P
If his position is that if you are young and healthy, exercise and eat right, that your body is going to be resistant to Covid then he’s even stupider than I thought.
He probably is stupider than you thought, he’s definitely stupider than I thought. :D He has had some guests I find interesting, but also some absolute pieces of shit like canned hunter Ted Nugent, so a lot of it is unwatchable dreck.
In short, the “lies” that Rogan supposedly spreads about COVID are at the very least not straightforward falsehoods, but rather are controversial topics of public concern where he has probative conversations with other people that he happens to film. There is no compelling evidence that these kinds of conversations are “making the pandemic worse” — and certainly there is no reasonable argument that preventing these conversations from taking place in the name of making the pandemic better is worth the very high risks to freedom of thought and expression that would obtain.
One day, fairly soon, the pandemic will be over. But the precedents we have established for public discourse will remain, and they will be applied to other matters of public concern. It is already the case that Twitter and other social media platforms ban people willy-nilly for not toeing the trans dogma line hard enough — where one risks their financial livelihood and their social life if they attain a certain level of attention and fail to affirm obvious nonsense on demand. The demanders often have “science” on their side, or at least torturous declarations of fealty to trans dogma by scientists, giving a patina of objective consensus to their gobbledegook.
Are those the kinds of people you want deciding what sorts of podcasts you have access to? What sorts of opinions you are allowed to consume and express? Because they would like nothing more than to be able to dictate these things for everyone, under colour of law if possible, in the name of their religion of the oppressed. These are the same kinds of people (and, very often, the very same people indeed) who are so certain that Joe Rogan is an evil fascist COVID-denier (and a transphobe and dangerous conspiracy theorist to boot).
I resisted, for a long time, the temptation to watch any of Joe Rogan’s much-ballyhooed podcasts, allowing my impressions of the man to be formed by articles and tweets based upon other articles and/or tweets which might at one point have been based on a clip or quote taken out of context, amounting to a few seconds’ worth of an hours-long conversation (or a series of them). But in the last six months or so, I decided to actually do a reality-check on these impressions, and I was somewhat surprised by what I found.
Rogan is both more and less than his detractors would have him, those whose opinions have manufactured a sort of looking-glass consensus over who he is and what he does. In reality, he’s…fine? He’s mostly just a dude who has long, unstructured conversations with a lot of different kinds of people; some of these people are indeed experts in a particular field of public interest (including many doctors and experts in infectious disease during the pandemic), many of them are professional comedians, and some of them are just his friends. Some of the conversations are sympathetic, some are antagonistic, some discuss a few out-there ideas — especially older ones, where the ratio of intoxicated friends to sober professionals was far higher than it has been in the last few years.
My impression of the man now is that he’s led an interesting life and has a few good insights, and like everyone, he has some beliefs that can seem breathtakingly stupid when considered in isolation, especially when those beliefs are inferred by just a few words interpreted by someone who was predisposed against him in the first place. But I respect the many times I have heard him fact-check himself in real time, admit that he has been wrong, disclaim his own lack of expertise in any topic he’s speaking about that doesn’t involve hand-to-hand combat, and defend views and people against his own “tribe” when he feels they have made good points. Notably, fairly recently, he had an interesting conversation with Dr. Sanjay Gupta specifically about COVID and his own treatment at the hands of CNN (for which Dr. Gupta is an on-call expert), during which Rogan showed a far more nuanced grasp of several issues than I was expecting based on the impressions I went in with.
Many of the points in the quoted article aren’t exactly true, and are in fact at least as misleading as they claim Rogan has been. In particular, I have heard him urge the vaccine for anyone who is immunocompromised, older, obese or otherwise stuck with “comorbidities” — and encourage young and otherwise healthy adults to vaccinate if they are worried of spreading COVID to other more vulnerable people; I have heard him rebut guests who imply that the pandemic is a hoax or that COVID is never a serious illness; and I have seen him have deep and adversarial-yet-amiable conversations with people who take the pandemic more seriously than he does. A recent episode with Josh Szeps touched upon the misrepresentation of Australia’s anti-COVID measures, which I found enlightening and encouraging.
What Rogan does not seem to do is offer certainty where he isn’t certain or authority where he is not an expert, especially if what he is expected to be certain and authoritative about is a controversial or evolving issue. Many of the issues for which he has been accused of promulgating misinformation (e.g., the costs and benefits of adolescent athletes getting an mRNA vaccine versus their risk profile of catching and spreading COVID, or the efficacy of wearing masks all day in closed spaces, or the costs and benefits of closing in-person public schools) are themselves subjects of scientific controversy and public debate amongst policymakers and public-policy wonks, where a real consensus has been slow to develop if it has developed at all, and where often many “right-thinking” people can get get quite deranged if you do not take the maximally-terrified position even where the evidence doesn’t break their way.
Most of Rogan’s podcasts, even with experts, are as close to a simulacrum of a “real” conversation with regular people as I have come across in podcast-land — involving rambling, looping back, impromptu googling, tangenting, offering fresh opinions and talking out loud in order to sound out those opinions in the first place. Now, we can differ on whether exposing millions of people whose average age is supposed to be (shock! horror!) older than that of a normal college graduate to regular-ish people having regular-ish conversations about any number of things is “responsible”, but…these are the kinds of conversations most of these people are having anyway, and it is terribly infantilising to all of them to posit that but for that malicious bastard Joe Rogan, they would be some Independent writer’s idea of an upstanding citizen who acted responsibly during the pandemic.
I suppose I am exposing myself to accusations of fanboydom, but I honestly recommend signing up for a free Spotify account and listening to a few episodes, or even just scroll through the episode list and take note of the diverse array of guests he has on and topics he covers. Of particular interest to this commentariat would probably be his conversations with Meghan Murphy and Jesse Singal, though the others I mentioned are also interesting.
Trying to shame Spotify into doing something about Rogan is fine. Futile, but fine.
Getting the government to shut him down is not fine. I’m surprised that you’re scorning the notion of freedom of speech as a “cover story.” Is it a “cover story” when we say that police in the UK shouldn’t be able to intimidate people for gender critical speech? (And if your answer is, “but gender critical speech is true, and Joe Rogan’s isn’t,” well — who gets to decide that?)
As it was put in A Man For All Seasons:
Well, I didn’t explicitly say I want the government to shut him down. I’m not sure exactly what I think, except that I think technical medical issues are different from political opinions, and that normal rules can bend some in emergencies.
DD @12 Thanks for your perspective, like I said I haven’t watched his newer pods, but if Spotify is free (not sure how I got the idea it wasn’t) I might go take another look. The pods are very long as you say, and I don’t have the attention span for much of it, but if I can cherry pick a couple with interesting guests it’s not the worst thing out there. I haven’t seen Rogan take a hard line on things and is mostly inquisitive from what I have seen, and while I disagree with him on the Covid stuff, he’s much less arrogant than say, a Bill O’Reilly or a Tucker Carlson type who think they know everyfuckingthing. I suppose if he’s taking himself too seriously now I could just shut him off, no big loss. I don’t think he’s particularly bright, but he does seem to want to understand things better without beating up guests in disagreement. He does have that going for him.
“If his position is that if you are young and healthy, exercise and eat right, that your body is going to be resistant to Covid then he’s even stupider than I thought.”
I’m not here to defend Joe Rogan’s other statements, but this one strikes me as more-or-less accurate, depending on how you interpret “resistant to Covid”. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-from-covid-by-age-us/ – that only breaks down by age but it’s clear that young people have a death rate orders of magnitude lower than old people. The difference probably gets starker if you break down by obesity and other comorbidities (diabetes, etc.)
I consider myself to be “young and healthy” – I am vaccinated and boosted because I’d still prefer not to get sick, further reducing the chance of tail risks is good, and I’d also like to do what I can to avoid spreading to more vulnerable people. On a personal level, though, I haven’t been worried *for myself* since relatively early on in the pandemic.
twiliter,
Spotify’s free tier is more than sufficient if you don’t mind ads in between songs or interspersed into some long podcasts. I strongly advise the desktop app for this, though, as the mobile app is frustratingly buggy and intentionally unusable for the free tier (I have read the issues with it resolve when you pay for the service, which was probably an evil executive decision at some point).
More than anything, I think Rogan is kind of bewildered by how popular his show is, and he seems to do a lot of work to keep his own ego in check and just enjoy the ride. It’s called “The Joe Rogan Experience”, and I get the impression the early years were zanier, but I have yet to listen to a podcast where Rogan makes it about himself or inflating how great or smart he is; sometimes he barely even talks, if the guest has a lot to say. (His presence was minimal for the recent conversation with Oliver Stone, and he maybe posed five questions to David Goggins — though the latter I suspect could have spent ten hours talking about himself nonstop without Rogan even being in the room.)
He’s hardly a saint, but he is an enthusiastic and curious and cuddly meathead who tells his friends he loves them, encourages exercise and unprocessed foods, and shows a striking amount of empathy and understanding for different kinds of people in different circumstances. He may not be the smartest person in the room, but there are many worse people we can all think of to have the most popular podcast in the world.
Red @16 Well this is anecdotal so bear with me. ;) My stepson (early 30’s) is still unvaccinated, and I have asked him why to no avail. He is young, very fit, eats healthy, and makes it a point to do so. The weird thing is that his half brother (mid 30’s) died from Covid in Florida last year (no underlying comorbidities other than overweight) and he explains it away as his brother didn’t get the proper care from the hospital. He was also unvaccinated and leaves behind a wife and 4 kids. I don’t know if it’s a youthful air of invincibility or what, and so far he hasn’t contracted the Covid. He won’t tell me why, and when I tell him I am vaccinated and boosted because if I do get the Covid, I don’t want to die from it. I don’t tell people what to do, it’s not my thing because I expect the same from them. The fact that a healthy young immune system is better equipped to fight off Covid, in my view, is not a good reason not to get vaccinated, it could easily mean the difference between simply quarantining yourself at home for a few days, or fighting for your life at a hospital while your loved ones are kept away from you. So if Rogan thinks that an all meat diet and working out several hours a day will keep you safe from disease, then I think that’s a stupid opinion. Maybe it works for him, but promoting that kind of lifestyle for the general public is ridiculous. My guess is that an all meat diet is particularly unhealthy, and that most people simply don’t have the time or motivation to do weight training and aerobic exercise several hours a day. It’s unrealistic, but I don’t think he’s being malicious, it’s just that he sees things from his own point of view. For me, there is really no reason not to get vaccinated, it’s free, takes a few minutes, and is good insurance against impending death, but then again, who am I to tell people what to do? I am not a medical expert. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
twiliter@18 at one point in time there was some uncertainty around whether young men should get the Moderna booster – the (relatively low) risk of covid for a vaccinated but not boosted young person vs the (also relatively low) risk of myocarditis. When the CDC recommended that *all* adults with normal immune systems get the booster shot I decided it was likely to be very safe – I generally view the CDC as irrationally *slow* to approve/recommend treatments and vaccines in a situation like a pandemic where there’s lots of uncertainty and circumstances change quickly. So if they are saying the benefits to me outweigh the risks I believe them.
Beyond that, I see no reason why even low-risk people shouldn’t get vaccinated and I find it very frustrating that so many people refuse, even some who are clearly objectively at relatively high risk. Our health system would be having a much easier time right now if there were fewer vaccine skeptics. Not to mention that getting three jabs over the course of a year is much less of a hassle than lockdowns, travel restrictions, daily mask wearing, etc (not that it’s an either-or, but the vaccine is the least-annoying part of the pandemic interventions)
An all-meat diet sounds ridiculous. Anyone whose health improves on that diet was probably eating way too many refined carbs, which are genuinely pretty bad for you. But they should be replaced by whole-grains, lentils, vegetables, etc rather than just eating copious amounts of meat. Also I’d be surprised if even Joe Rogan means “working out several hours a day” when he says “healthy” or “fit”. Exercise definitely produces diminishing returns – a little goes a long way but each additional amount has less impact – but so many people in this country don’t even get the bare minimum.
One of my friends has historically been somewhat anti-vaccine/pharma. Even they came to the point where they felt vaccination was the right thing to do. Interestingly, their adult son and his partner elected not to get vaccinated. I understand this was because they both believe strongly in eating an organic vegetarian diet, exercise (he’s a fitness coach), and generally being pure. Their infant child has a serious health condition that places them at risk. They moved to the USA recently and have since all become ill with Covid. Thankfully mild doses, but apparently still very unpleasant and debilitating. none of us can understand taking that kind of lottery with our own health, let alone a dependants.
Anecdotally, I do know people who’s health has improved moving to very low carb diets. It takes extreme effort to get your carb intake below around 4%. I’ve never tried going that low, but my health improved (and I lost weight) when I simply went on a restricted carb diet (no pasta, very little rice (brown), very little potato or bread. It’s hard, because I love good bread and rice that has soaked up curry sauce is divine. My partner refuses to lower carb in her diet, but then she trains obsessively and eats as much as me despite being half as much.
Rob, I did try a low carb diet back in the mid 90’s for about a month and definitely lost weight, but also I felt a little sick, my bowels were a mess, and my skin was terrible. I can just imagine what was going on internally, as I didn’t take a blood test to see how healthy I was, but it wasn’t very healthy considering how I felt. I think what works for a person individually is the best thing, which takes some experimenting. There are so many theories and formulas that I have become skeptical about diet plans, I think they are all BS. Experiment and do what works for you is my advice. It takes a while but after trying a few things and seeing the results it can help make a decision about what you can live with, long term. From most of what I’ve seen, as it pertains to weight loss, most of the fad diets are simply some form of malnutrition or other. They generally work short term, but it’s not sustainable. As my grandpa used to say when he saw an overweight person, “He (or she) needs to cut back on the vittles.” Pretty much says it all. :D
Red @19 My neighbor got the first Moderna vaccine and had a bad reaction. She’s 88 and it knocked her for a loop. I got my first shot shortly after but went for the Pfizer one because of that. I also insisted that my mother, who is also 88 get the Pfizer shot instead. I live very close to the CDC and have a good amount of respect for their intentions and advisements. I’m ok with their slowness if it means they are waiting for the right recommendations. I am also hesitant to go get vaccinated for anything, for instance the flu shot. I have had the flu and lived through it without too much discomfort, but not for years and years. I have never had a flu shot. From what I have seen and read, Covid is much more severe than the flu. There are some reports of Omicron being less deadly, which is fine because i’m vaccinated anyway. I’m not afraid to say why I never got the flu shot, it’s because I have an irrational fear of needles, or a phobia if you prefer. A real phobia, not just some needles disagreeing with me. ;) I got vaccinated for Covid despite that, twice, and boosted. Weighing the risk of Covid against the flu was not a tough decision given the CDC and other medical expert’s recommendations. I still won’t get a flu shot. Freedom, man. :P
Twiliter, yeah for most of us a normal varied diet in moderation and some modest exercise does the trick acceptably well. My one friend who has gone hardcore low carb has found it’s the only thing that controls a potentially life threatening heart issue. The various prescribed drugs were generating side effects that were landing him in hospital (and not controlling heart issue).
Back to Rogan, there’s this, riffing on a previous post by Tim Ross Comedy…
Seems to sum Rogan up well enough.
LOL… Urine, uranium, what’s the difference. All natural. :D
twiliter, my students often come in with the “it must be natural”. They can’t define natural. So I ask them, which is more natural, arsenic or Pepsi? These days I have to tell them what arsenic is, unfortunately, but they are able to figure out that arsenic is natural and Pepsi is man made. I ask them which they would choose if I offered them a Big Gulp cup of each and they wanted to live to see tomorrow. They get the picture pretty quickly.
As for age…there are numerous football cancellations right now because of players sick with COVID. Get a certain number of players out, they call off the game. (I think they should call off the season; I’m sorry, football is not more important than the health of a country.) How sick are they? I don’t really know, but I do know some are reporting problems with myocarditis. It would be hard to think that these football players were older or had that many comorbidities. I think it is foolish for a young person to think they are immune. While there are fewer young people dying with COVID, and fewer people who have been in good health, the number is not zero. Plus there is the risk of giving it to your grandmother and grandfather, who are no doubt not particularly young and may have some comorbidities.
I don’t remember being so stupid when I was young. Oh, I was plenty stupid and did stupid things, but not get vaccinated in the middle of a pandemic? I certainly didn’t conceive of myself as immortal. Our school has been giving students the vaccine at vaccine clinics, but most of our students remain unvaccinated. Some of them are rabid Trumpistas, but some of them are liberal kids, even woke, who believe Big Pharma is more dangerous than COViD.
Just found this Twitter thread (by chance), which is a deep dive on the recent “controversial” Rogan episodes which largely prompted the letter mentioned in the original post. I found the thread fair and comprehensive enough, and it is much quicker than sitting through six hours of Rogan talking to the doctors in question.
ikn @25 I tend to divide what is natural or not by *found in nature* (devoid of human manipulation) as a guideline, but the problem is that humanity and all it’s artifacts can also technically be found in nature. There are a lot of food products labelled ‘natural’ that really aren’t by the division I would use, so it’s an ill defined concept for me, but I do tend to overcomplicate things sometimes. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I tend to oversimplify sometimes too, I guess finding a happy medium is half the fun? :D
Durchwanderer@26
I just read the Unherd article linked in the first post in the thread, and I think it’s excellent. (Also easier to read than the Twitter thread.) Thanks for the link.
Dredging up this thread.
I’ve been getting into entirely too many arguments about the Joe Rogan situation and Spotify. I think the Unherd article I linked to earlier (brought to my attention by Durchwanderer’s comment) covers a number of useful points: that Rogan’s show is being mischaracterized, and that misinformation is best handled through correction and refutation. Another point, not in that article, is that this situation seems very much like a mob making demands of Spotify, and I have problems with mobs making demands like that. Censorship of the mob is something we’re all familiar with.
The positive actions that have come out of the dust-up are that Rogan has apologized and is making some changes to how he conducts his show, and Spotify is going to flag misinformation. That’s a reasonable way to handle things, except: Spotify has removed podcast episodes before, many of them, they claim. What episodes? Why were they removed? Whose shows? No information is available. Not that I was honestly expecting anything different, plenty of social media sites are secretive about their rules, but perhaps Spotify is more so.
I just today came across this New York Magazine article: The Spotify Backlash Never Had a Chance. I think it makes a number of good points about Spotify’s user base and business model, as well as about the nature of Rogan’s show. It also makes the very reasonable point that large companies are similar in many ways, and people jumping ship from Spotify don’t really have a choice that suits their interests much better.
I don’t think corporations should be relied on to make moral decisions in general; they do whatever they do to improve their financial situation. Similarly, I don’t hold corporations responsible for failing to take a stance on some moral issue or other. There are a lot of moral issues, and what these are will fluctuate depending on who you are asking.
It is intensely frustrating to try to make argument points about censorship and mob manufactured outrage (“heckler’s veto”, perhaps) in an environment where people assume that you must be supporting the dissemination of misinformation. I’m glad to have this alcove of people capable of discussing nuanced points here.