Twitter Doesn’t Seem To Understand Joe Rogan’s Podcast

Bernie Sanders has officially embraced the endorsement of podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan, sparking an amusing backlash on Twitter, in which commentators grappled with Rogan’s philosophical flexibility.  

Twitter, with its restrictive character limit, incentivizes angry, simplistic statements, stripping the nuance out of discussion. Users often behave like schools of fish, swimming in unison from target to target, attacking opponents based on out-of-context soundbites and poorly worded tweets, reducing the infinite spectrum of human opinion to a binary of right and wrong. 

This is why celebrities undergo meaningless “cancellations,” in which a swarm of commentators declare war on a problematic opinion, sparking a media frenzy and likely an apology, until the crowd grows bored and swims away, searching for the next controversy.  

Now that the frenzied discourse has descended on Rogan, the aim of the game is to neatly define Rogan’s podcast, to condemn its position on the political spectrum with one snappy sentence. But The Joe Rogan Experience doesn’t really fit anywhere, and in the rush to condemn the podcast as problematic, many commentators are missing the point. 

It’s easy to define late night talk show hosts, whose interviews feel rigidly scripted, where controversy is planned in advance, and opinions never stray far from the norm. But Rogan’s interviews are different - they’re conversations, where the guests are encouraged to loosen up, get intoxicated, to say how they really feel. Rogan’s non-judgmental attitude allows his guests to be themselves, in a way that simply doesn't happen on Ellen’s sterile couch. 

While Rogan has (rightly) been criticised for allowing hate-mongers like Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Ben Shapiro to spread their poison, unchallenged, he also takes the time to listen to fascinating figures like Edward Snowden, Brian Cox, Dan Carlin, Cornel West, Paul Stamets, and countless others. 

Ironically, high-profile guests such as Edward Norton and Robert Downey Jr. aren’t nearly as entertaining as the more obscure figures who appear on the podcast, because actors simply aren’t used to such a casual format; they’re accustomed to the publicity circuit, of pretending that everyone they work with is amazing and that nothing ever goes wrong behind the scenes. 

Undoubtedly, Rogan has allowed misinformation to spread on his massively popular platform, but he’s also exposed his gargantuan audience to a vast range of perspectives. Ultimately, it’s up to his listeners to do their own research, if they so choose, and to decide if a guest is being honest, deceptive, eccentric, or outright hateful, without the framing of the interview skewing their perspective.  

It’s not always ideal - unchallenged misinformation can fuel conspiracy theories and hateful prejudices, but it’s a refreshing change from the rather patronizing notion that audiences always need to be protected from unorthodox ideas. 

There’s also something amusingly unqualified about Rogan himself; he rarely seems to read up on the subjects he’s discussing, asking intelligent people some very silly questions. But there’s something very real, very relatable about that uninformed curiosity; these are questions that the listeners would likely ask, if they found themselves talking to a physicist, a Hollywood actor, or smoking a joint with Elon Musk.  

This hysterical pearl-clutching that Twitter encourages simply doesn’t translate to the real world; contrary to popular belief, listening to people you strongly disagree with isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Passive media consumption is harmful, but listening to a range of perspectives and considering them critically, is surely more healthy than having one’s opinions endlessly validated inside a social media bubble.

Twitter, in its narrow-minded simplicity, doesn’t seem to understand a podcast that doesn’t tell its listeners what to think.

Perhaps someone should tell us what to make of it all.