If we want to understand the current crisis of disinformation plaguing our society, then we need to understand how Joe Rogan is the patron saint of it, having made a career of promoting harmful pseudoscience and conspiratorial thinking to one of the largest podcast audiences in the world.
Luckily, two long-time skeptic podcasters, Cecil Cicirello of Cognitive Dissonance and Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society, have started a new podcast for exactly this purpose, entitled The Know Rogan Experience. I asked Cecil and Marsh some questions through email about the project.
Aaron Rabinowitz: First of all, for folks who aren’t familiar with the source material, why focus on Joe Rogan?
Cecil Cicirello: He’s the most listened to person on the planet. For many years he was the number one podcast in the world, he has a YouTube [channel] that routinely has millions of views for each video. As much as he rails against mainstream media, Joe is as mainstream as you can get. His ideas and positions on controversial topics are sent out via podcast and video to millions each week and his show has a recurring arsenal of bad ideas and conspiracy theories. Joe has guests that also promote bad ideas and misinformation, his show launders those ideas to a large audience every week.
Michael Marshall: Obviously, Joe Rogan also receives a lot of criticism — fairly, in my opinion — but he and his fans can deflect some of that criticism because it often comes from people who have never listened to an episode of his show. I was one of those people, I’d criticized the pseudoscience featured on his show for years, but I’d never actually stopped to listen for myself, I relied on the clips I’d see on social media. He is a hugely influential figure, shaping the narrative, defining for his fans what it means to be a man, and reaching more people than most newspapers could dream of, so it’s really important that we listen, and that our criticisms are well-informed and fair.
AR: What is your goal with the show, who are you trying to reach, and what are you trying to convey to them?
CC: We want to provide a counterpoint to the ideas that Joe presents and promotes. Often these ideas go unchecked and unchallenged by his guests and his listeners. Our plan is to listen to one of his shows and then see if there are any places for us to correct the record.
MM: We want to help skeptics understand what the Rogan fan in their life might believe, and where they got it from, without them having to sit down and listen to 12 hours of Joe Rogan every week. We’ll listen, so you don’t have to. However, this isn’t a roast of Rogan. We also want to be a place where Rogan listeners who are curious enough and open-minded enough to hear fair, reasonable criticism can come to hear the kind of counter-arguments and pushbacks that they won’t find on his show.
AR: What do you think is the appeal of Rogan, particularly to men?
CC: Joe spends a lot of his time talking about things that were traditionally categorized as masculine pursuits. I think there are people that are drawn to the talk of shooting, and fighting, the parade of ex-special forces members and professional fighters. His conversation style is easy to understand and also easy to jump back into when you lose your concentration, so it would probably be great to listen to while doing something else.
I also think Joe espouses some pretty simple ideals that appeal to men, especially those faced with an ever growing world of equality. He has positive messages about trying hard and not backing away from doing difficult things that appeal to lots of young people in the masculine space. He drinks coffee and bourbon, and smokes pot and cigars with his guests, so it doesn’t feel like an overproduced green screen news set, it feels like a clubhouse with a “No Girlz Allowed” sign on the front.
MM: I think he offers a kind of simplistic vision of what it is to be a man. He speaks like he knows how the world really works, he talks about big manly pursuits like hunting and fighting, he isn’t troubled by having to avoid offending anyone or really navigating any complex social relationship, he sits in his man cave having long, shoot-the-sh*t conversations with figures young men might be expected to see as role models — billionaires, celebrities, veterans, tech bros. It’s easy to look at it and think, “there: that’s what a man should be.”
Of course, all of it is only possible because Joe has built himself an artificial bubble — he invites guests that agree with him, so the conversations have almost none of the jeopardy and compromise of real social interactions; his show affords him an enormous income which insulates him from having to worry about work and career and making rent; he’s trained his audience to accept what they like of the show as true, and to write anything they dislike off as just Joe being Joe.
AR: Are there any parts of the content you find genuinely enjoyable?
MM: There are, and we make a point every episode of including something we enjoyed. Sometimes that’s a moment of comic riff, or sometimes it’s that Joe has genuinely asked a good question or raised a good point. I think it’s important not just to point out all of the failures and the places where nonsense is allowed to flourish — this show is hugely popular, and to pretend that it has zero moments that are even a little redeeming would be disingenuous and counterproductive.
CC: I think he is sometimes a good interviewer when he has convictions about what he is talking about; he pushed back hard on a guest that did not think evolution was true for example. I think he is empathetic to many different kinds of people, so far I’ve heard veterans, people who suffer from addiction, and immigrants. I have heard from many people that I might like a lot more of his conversations from earlier in his career because he talked less right wing talking points. I will say, so far the ratio of things I like to things I very much dislike is low.
AR: What’s the most harmful thing you’ve heard on Rogan so far?
CC: So far the most harmful things are about COVID denial and the use of ivermectin for COVID and other treatments like cancer. Medical misinformation was at an all time high during the pandemic and Joe has latched on to many COVID denial narratives and misinformation about medications.
MM: It’s so clear, even from the first half dozen shows we’ve broken down and analyzed, that Joe is all in on the alternative “therapeutics” train. Every other show he seems to recommend ivermectin, monoclonal antibodies, peptides, intravenous stem cell therapy, hyperbaric oxygen chambers, infrared saunas … the list seems endless. And perhaps the most harmful thing is his absolute certainty when he talks about all that stuff — while his fans might say they know better than to take everything he says as true, the bits they’re likely to listen to are the lines he delivers with cast-iron confidence, and unfortunately those are often the places where he’s most wrong.
AR: What’s the weirdest thing you’ve heard on Rogan so far?
CC: So far, a thought that has come up multiple times is that Joe thinks plants can feel pain. His argument is mostly just anti-vegan, presenting a world where plants feel what animals do so no matter what when you eat food you are creating suffering. It’s just a bizarre knot he has to twist his mind into just to say “I like eating meat.”
MM: He’s absolutely convinced that plants are actually sentient, and that therefore we shouldn’t consider vegetarianism to be more moral than meat-eating. But, weirdly, he thinks that the morality-conscious consumer should just eat mollusks, because he thinks they’re less evolved and less intelligent than plants. No idea where he gets any of that from, it’s just weird. That said, it’s still early days, so there’s plenty of weirder things to come I’m sure!
AR: Cecil, you co-authored The Grand Unified Theory of Bullsh*t with your co-host Tom Curry from the Cognitive Dissonance podcast. Do you see themes and tropes from that material showing up on Rogan?
CC: Yes, absolutely. Joe delves into conspiracy theories and alternative medicine quite often. We cover those topics extensively in the book. We also cover how we can try to be good consumers of media and I think this show is directly tied to that section of the book.
AR: Marsh, you have a long track record of interviewing people with fringe views on your podcast Be Reasonable. Given the opportunity, would you interview Rogan, and what would you want to ask him?
MM: I would absolutely jump at the chance to interview Rogan, 100%. I remember first hearing him in an interview with Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, where they were debating whether the Moon landing was faked. Rogan spent the whole conversation yelling over Plait, and trying to essentially assert dominance — in my opinion, particularly where he had no good counter to what Plait was saying. He’s since said that he’s changed his mind and is no longer a Moon landing denier — assuming he hasn’t rowed back on that.
I’d be fascinated to get into what made him change his mind, but also how he looks back on his time as a Moon landing denier. Particularly, can he identify why he was drawn to a belief that he now accepts isn’t true, because he continues to make claims that are just as off the mark on topics like vaccines, ivermectin, the JFK assassination, and more. I’d love to drill down on why he thinks his old self was so convinced by misinformation on the Moon landing, but why he doesn’t think his current non-mainstream views could suffer from the same flaws.
Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF* pop culture.
AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.
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