Microblog Memes

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.