We resume our divinely ordained crusade to recover our rationality and dispel the darkness that is online influencers who broadcast their stillborn thoughts to the masses. We’ve retaken Constantinople (Candace Owens), laid siege to Alexandria (Dave Smith), razed Acre (Hasan Piker), and sacked Tyre (Nick Fuentes).
We now approach Jerusalem where a single belligerent awaits. A man of cranial bounty. From humble origins making people eat bugs and charcuteries of animal testicles, to affecting national elections and moving markets. The king of podcasting himself: Joe Rogan.
Rogan hosts “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which is one of the most streamed podcasts ever. The podcast’s YouTube channel alone has over 20 million subscribers and has been viewed 6.3 billion times. An audience of that size makes Rogan one of the most influential figures in America.
He hosts a wide range of guests including fighters, comedians, conspiracy theorists, politicians, and a variety of experts. An appearance on Rogan’s podcast is typically followed by success in whatever endeavor the guest is involved in. Politicians see massive surges in popularity and fundraising after appearing on the show.
What has Rogan chosen to do with all of that power? Does he use it as a force for good? Does he recognize his intellectual limits and recognize that his flaws as an interlocutor necessitate a careful curation of guests and topics?
If you guessed “smashes his power into critical thinking like a disgruntled wrecking ball operator,” you are correct.
Rogan promotes skepticism about vaccines and medical science including during the COVID-19 pandemic where it could cause the most damage, and endorses conspiracy theories about extraterrestrials, 9/11, and an ancient globe-spanning civilization. He amplifies the voices of individuals that rewrite history, sometimes painting figures like Hitler in a slightly more flattering light. He’s “just asking questions.”
For many young men, Rogan’s podcast is their first introduction to conspiratorial thinking and a catalyst for dangerous trends like vaccine skepticism. It will also be their first exposure to the distrust of experts and doctors. While Rogan does have some actual experts on his show, if you actually watch, he has a strong tendency to approach expert opinion with skepticism and accept non-expert opinion without rational scrutiny or fact-checking. I will provide evidence for this shortly.
One may be satisfied that a host has fulfilled their duty if they give equal platform to both sides of an argument. As an example, he hosted an episode where he had archeologist Flint Dibble, and sparsely-brained conspiracy theorist Graham Hancock, side by side. They gathered to discuss the merits of Hancock’s preposterous theory that there was a highly advanced civilization that spanned the globe during the last ice age. This advanced civilization then transferred knowledge to our hunter-gatherer ancestors before disappearing without a trace.
As you may have predicted, the person who has dedicated his life to studying the minutiae of archeological records and the sophisticated methodology of gathering and appraising evidence completely dismantled Hancock’s silly little, popsicle-stick and non-toxic glue diorama of a theory. That’s what being an expert affords you – you can immediately recognize where someone that doesn’t know what they’re talking about has gone tragically wrong.
Even with Dibble effortlessly laying waste to every point and argument made by his benighted co-guest, Joe Rogan remained unconvinced. Even though Hancock was presenting a ridiculous fable supported by nothing in the archaeological record, Rogan’s default was to blindly trust the uneducated person chasing ghosts in ancient ruins and to dismiss the expert as part of an archeological conspiracy to hide those wise old Atlantians from us.
After the debate, Rogan had Hancock back on alone to trash the archeologist and reject all of his evidence based merely on the fact that he got a couple of numbers wrong (the podcast was four and a half hours long and the mistakes were inconsequential to the overall veracity of Hancock’s theory).
In a later episode Rogan inadvertently demonstrated the contempt he has for experts and academics. He said of Dibble, “That guy embodies what you don’t like about academia. You see him physically, he embodies it. It’s like that’s what it is, it’s these weak men. These weird kind of b— weak men.” Dibble was suffering from stage 4 cancer.
The praiseworthyness of having both sides of the debate evaporates when the host actively discredits the expert and reflexively enhances the legitimacy of the conspiracy theorist.
Rogan’s attitude toward outlandish claims is unscrupulous and scrutiny is the last thing on his mind when he finds something interesting. This sort of attitude where one is simply a recipient of information without a filtering mechanism to discern the truth from the falsehoods is one that is instilled in his audience. Rogan enjoys a position of authority to many in his audience, and whether Rogan likes it or not, when viewers watch him accept claims without critique, it signals to them that they may do so as well.
The way many of his podcasts go is that he has a guest on that he allows to speak at length about all manner of topics including history and science. Rogan listens intently as these guests make claim after claim, the audience no wiser about whether these claims are true. But they don’t always sound obviously false either. They sound like someone reciting historical or scientific facts and there’s no one there to counter or fact-check anything.
He hosted both Donald Trump and RFK Jr. and was happy to stand aside as they used his platform to spread dangerous misinformation without challenge, including RFK Jr.’s claim that WiFi “opens up your blood-brain barrier so all these toxins that are in your body can now go into your brain” He initially praised RFK Jr.’s run for president and later endorsed Trump.
If you listen to Joe Rogan, you will be treated to a carousel of pseudointellectuals, licensed by Rogan’s platform, calmly spouting torrents of fake facts. If you allow yourself to do as you are naturally disposed to do and take things at face value, you will become the brand new owner of a suite of falsehoods that you can then recite to your friends – yourself becoming a cog in this wheel of misinformation.
Witnessing the hopelessly ignorant Joe Rogan “just ask questions”, a generation of men are being taught that it is acceptable to go through life without even the weakest of standards for belief formation.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.