It's been frustrating watching the Spotify (and general movement) with podcasts fragmenting and going exclusive. Spotify won with music because it improved upon the existing state of listening to music and offered a free or cheap solution that was even a compelling alternative to piracy.
Podcasts for the most part were in the ideal state for consumers, almost always free and mostly client independent distributed w/ RSS. I don't think there is much of any argument that Spotify can improve that state for consumers by taking a podcast exclusive. These deals are just payouts for the hosts not investments that make the shows better. Most even very successful podcasts likely have low opex (some exceptions like NYT Daily) and don't benefit from a big pile of cash.
On a different note regarding the Rogan Deal, Spotify took ages to add video streaming support on Apple TV (main way I would catch Rogan) which basically caused me to quit casual watching. They also only recently added offline playback for Apple Watch and even then it's premium exclusive and requires manual downloading of eps. I don't understand at all why an enormous company like Spotify is so neglectful of the entire apple ecosystem.
It's all competition for monopoly. No one "owned" podcasting, like itunes own streaming music and youtube own free-to-air TV. Spotify is trying to be the one that owns it.
They bought exclusivity to as many top podcasts as they could in order to start centralizing podcasting on their platform. Eventually enough momentum shifts, and all the other podcasters have to go where users go, spotify. They may or may not succeed. Either way, it's not just "buying premium content." It's an attempt to seed a monopoly. I doubt that what they spent is even theoretically justifiable as a self contained business proposition.
The whole thing is quite sad. Podcasts are/were one the the free digital medias. No mediation. Standard protocol. The client is just a client. No one tells you what to say, or controls who listens to what. I wish FB and youtube were that.
We the geeks have done a terrible job of defining and promoting digital freedom. Failed to find a way that doesn't sound like a paranoid eff rant. I don't think Joe really understood that RSS is a Free (as in freedom) media, perhaps the last. He probably thought about it as Youtube-vs-Spotify, with Apple and other RSS clients being more of the same.
Yeah, I’m a paying spotify customer and I hate this. And I also hate that the spotify client seamlessly mixes podcasts with music in its recommendations. It’s like a PM somewhere at spotify was offered a cash bonus based on how many podcast listens happen, and they decided that making the app trick people into playing podcasts was a profitable idea.
It breaks trust, and makes the spotify app feel adversarial. Like I have to be vigilant when I play music in case I get tricked. In a paid product I don’t want that at all and if it isn’t resolved, I’ll probably cancel my subscription over it and move to Apple Music or something.
Spotify had been my go to for music, but the combination of podcast and music has absolutely killed my experience.
I love both, but when I’m listening to music, I don’t want to listen to podcasts and vice versa. They serve different purposes for me, all audio is not the same.
I’ve recently switched to YouTube Music. I will occasionally use Spotify for podcasts.
Yep. I've been listening to podcasts since Twitter was the podcast directory Odeo. Also, have been djing for much longer so mixing these worlds in Spotify's ever-changing UI is just a mess. I pay for Spotify premium, but now get ads what seems like every ten minutes in the "premium ad free experience" during his podcast. Often, skipping back 15 seconds to hear something again will trigger ads.
You have described it well. The force feeding of podcasts is unwanted. No one ever went to Spotify to listen to a podcast before, so forcing them at us from the UI is shit. I also don’t go there for recipes, movies or TV, they are a different thing and belong somewhere else.
I’m unhappy that Spotify distributes my subscription cash to artists I don’t listen too, I’m even less happy that a large proportion goes towards podcasters I don’t even want as part of the app, and am unable to even hide from the screen.
Hey Spotify: since I haven’t found a good alternative to your service, if I can’t stop your monopoly giving my money to Joe Rogan, can I at least have a ‘hide podcasts’ option?
ive come to the same conclusion lately; that i mostly listen to a handful of artists on repeat 80% of the time. i used to think that i couldnt afford to buy all the music i listen to, but looking at what i have paid spotify over the last 10 years i dont think that anymore. im slowly buying all my favourite stuff where i can and all probably cancel spotify soon and just put up with the annoying ads when i listen to discover weekly on a monday
Realizing that spotify was trying to "steal" podcasting in order to challenge youtube was a depressing thought to me. I always hoped that podcasting, as a free medium, would evolve to the point where it can usurp youtube... but not like this.
Luckily, perhaps, I don't think they're succeeding. I was a semi-loyal listener of most of Spotify's now exclusive content. Besides a select JRE episode that peaks my interest, I don't follow any of them currently.
It's not because Spotify's play is dirty. I'm just using different podcast apps, don't love spotify for podcasting and other such trivialities. As this article mentions, this is probably common. I guess a diverse selection of clients still counts for something.
I got the impression it was a lump sum payout, or at least came with golden handcuffs that were purely in terms of "exclusivity and X-podcasts-per-week for X weeks", rather than subscriber count.
Yep. They were suckers for putting their podcasts on "RSS Feeds". All media is becoming the Netflix model. Spotify saw that as the new goldrush and was first to act. Now they all are.
It's not great for the customer... Yet. Maybe podcasting will continue to explode and we'll see a jump in quality, like we did with podcasts like Serial.
Podcasts follow a predictable trend, almost always. Someone really interesting and very well-informed has a lot of stuff to say that they've been stewing over for a decade or more. 100-200 episodes in, they've gotten it off their chest and you have to find someone else.
Another free medium is email newsletters, which are seeing a resurgence. Yes, you need to manage CAN-SPAM compliance and the actual protocols are a mess, but you can cobble something together with on-prem campaign software and AWS SNS for not too much money.
The infrastructure and compliance requirements of running a newsletter is very different from personal email (mostly to stay on the good side of antispam)
Ironic-not-ironic maybe. Back then, Apple wanted content to exist. Podcasts were content.
Also, 15 20 years ago, smart people (me being the smartest of all) genuinely believed that "information wanted to be free." The explosive success of WWW demonstrated that open platforms and protocols are far more powerful than companies. Trying to control a medium was a recipe for failure.
That was before reality cracked her whip, and the borders separating one media from another became defined by the monopoly owning it.
I don't understand at all why an enormous company like Spotify is so neglectful of the entire apple ecosystem.
Part of this might be the legal friction between Spotify and Apple in the past. Here's an article that describes a coalition that Epic Games, Spotify, and others formed just last year to counter Apple's platform cut. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/epic-spotify-and-oth...
I think the model of giving away Joe Rogan to all users of Spotify (even if not paying subscribers) is worst of all worlds from a business POV.
Think how many people still subscribe and pay over ten dollars a month to listen to Howard Stern. I subscribe to a few podcasts on patreon at $5 just for the few bonus episodes. And I have trouble believing the ad revenue Spotify gets for this is anywhere close to what paying customers could be for them.
Well, maybe it's more strategic than just short-term dollars and cents.
For example, there must be a lot of value in training people to use Spotify for podcasts at all, starting with the biggest podcast in the world. As more people use Spotify for podcasts, Spotify gets more and more power for future exclusivity negotiations.
Spotify was certainly just a music app for me until I had to start using it to listen to Joe Rogan, and it seems reasonable that the Joe Rogan move was to create this transition in Spotify users. They clearly don't just want to be a music app.
Then again, I haven't been able to understand his success.
I cringe when he calls himself a Comedian.
I cringe when he talks science. (Always felt someone should sit down with him and explain The Placebo Effect, and The Scientific Method, and what goes into a good Clinical study. I would be shocked if he ever even took Psy 101.)
Is it the upfront pot use that garners so many admirers?
He does know his MMA though.
I have enjoyed his interviews, but it's the guests I find interesting.
The fact you find his guests interesting is in part due to Joe's success as a podcaster. He's able to get the best out of his guests by the way he questions them and keeps the conversation going. He doesn't pretend to be knowledgeable but knows enough about the topics to be able to prompt the guests for more info.
In saying that, I've stopped listening to him since he went onto Spotify. The only episode I've listened to in full since he switched was the recent Tarantino interview, which was great.
> I've stopped listening to him since he went onto Spotify.
You haven't missed much. 9 out of 10 of his podcasts have him spouting the same one rant about covid responses. He does this no matter the guest or their field of interest.
He's honest, curious, talks to interesting people, and uncensored. He's a great window into perspectives on life I don't have, and doesn't feel coercive or pushy when I disagree. I've learned a lot from him, and don't honestly have much of a substitute. Mind you, with the Spotify transition, I don't really trust some of those points anymore and haven't really listened since.
He had good production for a free podcast, and managed to interview interesting subject experts on trending undercurrent of various online communities, and he did so at a time where podcast were taking off, and people already knew his name.
Eh, his relationship to MMA has been far more casual for years now, maybe in the aughts or early last decade, when he was more engaged by the sport this was true. His pod is still the highest honor media appearance for most MMA fighters though.
For Spotify JRE is just legitimacy and market leadership, I don’t think they expect to make the $100m back from ads or people paying to hear Joe Rogan. It was just an acquisition to try to get podcast distribution synonymous with Spotify.
For Rogan, he could have tried to monetise his audience directly but probably couldn’t be arsed, or maybe thought people wouldn’t pay. Easier to take the $100m and keep focusing on content instead of commerce
If they want to get in, they need the big names. If they bring the Michael Jordan, then it guarantees millions listening to podcasts on SPY and then other podcasters all haul over as well to make the critical mass.
Spotify is not powerful enough otherwise.
Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't aka Microsoft with their Twitch challenger and ninja, but every circumstance is different.
The head of podcasting for Spotify published a medium article[0] earlier this year. If you read it you'll see every drawback of rss he lists is actually power in the hands on the consumer. They are actively opposed to openness and most certainly don't want to "improve that state for consumers."
> These deals are just payouts for the hosts not investments that make the shows better
Honestly I don't think Spotify bought podcasts to make money from it, they just want people to associate the word "podcast" with the app Spotify. And so far that works because no other app gained significant momentum.
The fact that less people watch the show is almost irrelevant
Interesting way of looking at it. I don't know if the marketing value alone could justify the $100m price, but when you think about a 30 second Super Bowl ad being $6m and compare that to all the discussion and news coverage generated by the Rogan deal... yeah I guess it was a pretty effective way of letting the public know they can listen to podcasts on Spotify.
I can not stand Spotify for Podcasts, I am premium member for Music, but I listen to Zero Podcasts on Spotify and do not plan to
PocketCasts is FAR FAR better for Podcasts than the spotify app. The Spotify App has been getting worse for music as well, to the point where I am looking at other services.
Spotify is trying to be everything to everyone, and instead will end up being nothing to no one.
Spotify sucks on Android too - so idk what they think they're doing. I think iOS (specifically just iPhone) is the only place where they appear to work on improving their app.
I don't think so, least in part. Spotify is continuously petty against apple (for good reason) but their users always have to pay the price and not have features or get them super late. The Spotify app on an Android is pretty good and can't really notice too much difference upon switching back. They've really downsized their app a lot across all three platforms.
It's odd, though, that Rogan's podcast only started doing mid-episode ads after the move to Spotify. Prior to the move the only ads were at the beginning of the episode.
Maybe analytics indicated that people were skipping the first chunk of the show to avoid the ads. I know that is a common feature of other podcast players.
It does seem like double-dipping. But I imagine they will continue to include more and more advertising until they reached the threshold where people unsubscribe.
The whole album was supposed to be a play on a pirate radio station if memory serves, and a damn good one at that. Probably my favorite Who album honestly (besides Live at Leeds, of course).
Uhhhh I'd have to take Quadraphenia in any best Who album list...I think I've bought it at least 6 times in like 4 formats and I can still listen to it end-to-end without effort.
I'm assuming for the privilege of fast forwarding them, but I'm not sure, it's probably the biggest reason I can't feel any affinity for the platform at all. I'm happy to chip in for the service like i do with Youtube Premium, but come on. They're not short ads either, and I think most of them are put in place by Joe Rogan himself because they're often him going on for 2-3 minutes.
When playing podcasts, Spotify skips 15 seconds forwards or backwards. When playing music, it skips to the next track or the start of the current track. But you still have to actively skip ads, which is annoying.
These long ads are actually separate tracks, so you can just skip to the end. The pain in the ass aspect comes mostly from the fact that not everyone has the app open in front of them.
yeah, I was thinking about that in my own podcast listening. For me I guess the reason why I don't care as much is I'm always using headphones with controls or in the car where it's a simple steering wheel button press.
Resisting having everything pulled back into the advertising maelstrom that consumed Cable TV, even dented NPR, means ignoring their never-ending moves to drag everything into their gutter. Sorry, f*kers, calling something a podcast doesn't make it so.
I quit Cable because of the ads. Great films chopped into mincemeat! Never going back. No RSS, no subscription. Requests for Patreon donations, no problemo.
Podcasts were nice and free because it wasn't a big industry. It's like the Internet before ads. Nice, cozy, but hardly a place to make a living. Spotify wanted to do for podcasts what YouTube did for videos. I understand it's more complicated, since the growth of YouTube correlated with growing connection speeds that made watching videos online possible at all.
Hearing "Exclusively on Spotify" on any podcast ad is a sure-fire way to make sure I never listen to an episode. One of the great features of podcasts is the flexibility in listening platform and I'd really rather not switch to Spotify's substandard user experience.
+1 I actively avoid listening to podcasts on Spotify because I strongly disagree with them trying to take over the one type of content that remains fairly open and not locked in to any particular platform
I assume "Sod", used in more British influenced cultures. Short for sodomy/sodomize. Usually a stand in for "F**" but a bit more cavalier/dismissive than angry.
I listen to a lot of podcasts and cram as much content into a small amount of time as possible. I've also been listening to podcasts since about 2006. It sounds absurd, but I have a "podcast workflow" that centers around Castro (highly recommend it).
I'm a long time (since Startup) listener of Gimlet podcasts. Slowly Gimlet podcasts are moving to Spotify exclusives. When that happens, I just stop listening. I'm 100% not interested in using Spotify. In a crowded market it just makes room for something else.
Can you say more about your "podcast workflow" with Castro?
I've been using Castro for around a year now and loving it. It reminds me of my favourite Android podcast app, Podcast Addict, with the reams of customization options, but packages it up in an Apple-y design.
Spotify is just not set up for long-form video content. The discovery aspect of YouTube is one reason why it reels you in. You're scrolling through your feed, you see an interesting clip, and you click on it. Another big part of YouTube is the comment section. Spotify lacks on both fronts. I also think the JRE clips were a big part of what sucked people into watch full epsiodes. If a 5-7 minute JRE clip were interesting I might jump in and watch the whole episode. I don't think they've done that or done it as well on Spotify.
This. The flexibility to search for a video coupled with YT's spontaneous recommendations is something unique to YouTube. So many times I have seen a clip about PBS Newshour episode on YT and then end up watching whole Newshour episode or most of it. Having all videos on varied lengths in same platform makes it easy to consume based on the time available.
JRE clips still get posted on YouTube but not the full recordings, which is annoying. I haven’t listened to many recently as a result. Just giving people the freedom to listen/watch wherever they like would be best. I usually prefer YouTube for podcasts - video, easy access and sharing, timeline sections, comments, recommendations, no ads and background audio with YouTube premium)
I stopped watching purely due to the Spotify deal. I was willing to give it a try until I saw that they were memoryholing episodes. I might be in the minority here but it felt like a betrayal. If he wanted more money he could’ve invested in his own platform like many others and people would’ve followed. There’s plenty of other content in the sea.
Some episodes are no longer available, as if Spotify wants everyone to forget that they even exist.
Episodes featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, Alex Jones etc. In other words, guests that offend the progressive attitudes of Silicon Valley
Rejecting people that promote the "Sandy Hook was fake!" conspiracy theory and even harassing the parents of murdered children isn't a way to avoid offending the "progressive attitudes of Silicon Valley". It's just common decency. ... Can we at least set the bar at that level -- that we _don't_ harass the parents of murdered children for clicks?
"We must remove that stuff because those ideas are dangerous/offensive, and if you disagree with removing it then you must agree with that filth!" is extremely helpful to the sorts of people who do edgy stuff to attract attention and then try to memoryhole it once they get a big audience.
I think the truth is the opposite: there are no dangerous ideas. "Sandy Hook was fake!" is stupid and wrong, but the way to defeat it is exposure, not erasure. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
What's "naïve" is you or anyone else thinking they have the power to "nudge people into better patterns", which is exactly what the kind of behavior you're promoting attempts to accomplish.
You can't, and you never will. Culture evolves slowly, and humans even slower.
> What's "naïve" is you or anyone else thinking they have the power to "nudge people into better patterns"
> You can't, and you never will. Culture evolves slowly, and humans even slower.
There is ample evidence since at least World War I, that both 'positive' PSA type information and 'negative' propaganda/counter information/psy ops absolutely have an effect.
Reminder that the Wakefield fraud in 1998, on M.M.R. vaccines and autism, started a negative sentiment towards vaccination and is directly attributed to the measles outbreaks (and deaths) across the developed world (Amplified by Oprah's platform). [1]
Reminder that still today many people will claim carrots give you better vision (they are indeed healthy). This was a counter-info operation from the British, claiming they were providing Air Control with carrots, in order to hide the existing of newly invented RADAR technology against German Bombers. [2]
The argument isn't that false information doesn't have an effect. It's that your attempts to manipulate people through censorship has the opposite effect.
And keeping Jones off of Rogan would've accomplished what? Someone who thinks the gummint is out to git 'em would believe a different 'gummint is out to gitcha' conspiracy theory instead?
I don't think you can win that battle. The 'Proctor & Gamble are satan worshipers' meme spread across the country before the internet existed. You can't stop people from spreading nonsense, but engaging with and ridiculing nonsense at least makes sure the counter-memes exist, when someone is ready to hear them.
>You can't stop people from spreading nonsense, but engaging with and ridiculing nonsense at least makes sure the counter-memes exist, when someone is ready to hear them.
You can do both. There is evidence that deplatforming works. It isn't perfectly effective, but not giving cranks access to the biggest megaphones and most virulent information-spreading engines in human history does in fact seem to inhibit their ability to spread. Doing so doesn't stop anyone from engaging with or ridiculing them.
But, point of order, we've been "engaging and ridiculing" for years now, it hasn't worked yet. Everyone says sunlight is the best disinfectant, but as far as I can see, this particular strain of infection feeds on sunlight.
"Deplatforming" works, because what you just did is use a nicer sounding euphemism for censorship. Obviously with censorship you can hinder the spread of information, regimes like the CCP do this very successfully. The question is at what cost, and who decides what is misinformation? Does it actually result in a net positive for society over time?
The most livable societies I know are all open societies. Once you start censoring this you might also want to censor that and the misinformation here, and this doesn't sound right either... Maybe your own comment is misinformation. Maybe saying we need more restrictions on speech is a dangerous idea. Should I lobby for your speech to be deplatformed, as you call it?
>The most livable societies I know are all open societies.
If by "open" societies you mean societies in which no form of "censorship" is practiced by any entity, at any level, then no, you do not, because such societies do not exist. Even the United States has limits placed on speech at the Federal level (the level limited by the First Amendment) and elsewhere. Even public squares are regulated. And on top of everything else, society itself imposes "censorship" through cultural and social norms.
Certainly speech on private property can be regulated. You can't go into a restaurant and start campaigning or venting about the government. Platforms on the web, which are also private property, have always been likewise regulated by their owners. I guarantee this is the case in whatever livable societies you're referring to.
>Once you start censoring this you might also want to censor that and the misinformation here, and this doesn't sound right either... Maybe your own comment is misinformation.
Yes, the slippery slope argument, all forms of censorship must inevitably lead to arbitrary censorship something something Orwell something Stalinist purges. At this point it's been invoked so often that it's become something of a thought-terminating cliche. All I can say is I don't believe that the ability of site owners and moderators to police and control content - an ability they've had forever mind you - will somehow inevitably lead to the boot stomping on our heads forever. If you disagree we'll have to agree to disagree.
After all, as stated earlier, there are no societies in which no form of censorship occurs. If the slippery slope argument were valid, all societies would currently be dictatorships. That societies exist which you consider "open" suggests that
>Should I lobby for your speech to be deplatformed, as you call it?
Lobby whom? We're talking about the policies of specific private entities, you're the one who predictably brought up CCP style authoritarianism despite no one actually arguing for governments to "deplatform" anyone from society. But sure - if you think my speech is doing real world harm in the same way as Alex Jones or anti-vaxxers, feel free to "lobby" the mods about it. That would, after all, be your free speech right would it not?
And yet increasing cases of such censorship are exactly what we observe. A recent extreme example was an Oxford professor of epidemiology who had his post removed for 'false information'. They're also outright banning all News in Australia now: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/02/18/exper...
>feel free to "lobby" the mods about it.
Sure, we both know they won't remove you. If I were an elite and actually had the power to have your voice removed from all popular platforms, as well as access to Visa transactions and banking etc. like it happened to Jones, you'd still support it, right?
It's of course known these Silicon Valley corporations aren't really multi-billion dollar businesses, but collectivized people who have personhood and free speech rights. By creating oligopolies and controlling what information we view, they only exercise their rights as citizens the world.
'Works' in what sense? Does it make the sort of people who believe this stuff less credulous? Or does it just make them less likely to listen to the specific blowhard being deplatformed, and less likely to believe the specific conspiracy theory being peddled? It's not like there's a shortage; both conspiracy theories and con-men are fungible.
(And it goes without saying, that any deplatforming/censorship argument sounds strongest against something patently ridiculous like Sandy Hook not having happened, weaker against something controversial, and positively diabolical against something you personally believe to be true. If you assume the person in charge of the deplatforming is someone you politically disagree with, are you still as big a fan?)
Let me ask you this - if deplatforming doesn't work, what are all of the people concerned about it worried about?
It works in the sense that it deprives people of the power-multiplying capabilities of large platforms to spread disinformation. It doesn't stop the spread, but it does slow the spread. Yes, Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists would still exist without Alex Jones egging them on, but there would have been fewer of them, and they might not have been so invested in the meme that they decided to harass victims of the shooting.
>And it goes without saying, that any deplatforming/censorship argument sounds strongest against something patently ridiculous like Sandy Hook not having happened, weaker against something controversial, and positively diabolical against something you personally believe to be true.
Yes, that's why I'm making it against the first group, and not the second or third. I'm saying if you're spreading patently ridiculous nonsense like "Sandy Hook was a hoax," and that ridiculous nonsense is doing actual societal harm, it's perfectly legitimate for platforms to decide that you should take your big breadboard and tinfoil hat elsewhere.
>If you assume the person in charge of the deplatforming is someone you politically disagree with, are you still as big a fan?
I'm not supporting deplatforming in the case of simple political disagreement, so in that case, no.
I think the main thing we disagree on is: I don't think Alex Jones has any power, or changes anyone's mind. He doesn't have a silver tongue, a deft wit, or evidence on his side. He's just a schmuck who tosses out bullshit to see what sticks.
What you're dancing around, though, is that you can't talk about why this particular piece of bullshit sticks if you're pretending it's apolitical. The Sandy Hook hoax idea, as I understand it, is the theory that there are forces within the US government plotting to restrict gun rights, and they staged a fake school shooting to gain support. Right?
Well, you can pin the second bit on Alex Jones, at least partly, but the other part, the "there are forces within the US government plotting to restrict gun rights" part, that's a meme that the mainstream right has been pushing relentlessly for something like two generations. And it is not a conspiracy theory; it's literally true (albeit often exaggerated).
So my point, the reason I think deplatforming Jones would be ineffectual, is that the damage is already done. A generation has been convinced that the anti-gun brigade is so powerful and pernicious that faking a school shooting is something they might realistically do. That is the problem. I don't know if that problem is solveable, but I don't think deplatforming people like Alex Jones really affects it.
This description of Alex Jones doesn't sit well with the fact that Jones was a friend of a sitting POTUS and has thousands of fanatical listeners driving around with 'InfoWars' bumperstickers. He may be a blithering loon but he's also powerful and influential.
Looking at things through a consequentialist soda straw like that is a terrible way to make decisions -- it is like trying to decide if I will drive or walk solely based on the number of birds I might kill. Decisions are much larger than this single aspect.
Some people hearing a crazy idea might adopt it. Some might criticize it. Some might learn how crazy ideas work. Some might adopt it for a little while, then reject it, and be wiser through the experience. Someone who goes on a crusade to fix this one falsehood might be exposed to it. You cannot know what all effects the sum of a discussion has.
But I can certainly tell you this: censorship doesn't work. It didn't work in ancient Rome. It didn't work in the Holy Roman Empire. It didn't work in Soviet Russia. It doesn't work in Communist China. It's not working right now for vaccine disinformation. Driving crazy ideas underground does not make them disappear, and it does not make them unpopular -- it makes them spread without criticism. And in fact, telling people they can't do something generally makes them want to do it. It appears to work for a little while, but I cannot think of a single historical case in which this actually worked out. Somehow the banned ideas always seem to survive beyond the death of the regime that banned them.
We will always have crazy ideas. We will always have crazy people that buy them. Depriving them of respectability is perhaps a little helpful, but opens up a different danger: just who gets to decide what and who is crazy? I didn't vote for you, and I didn't vote for Spotify either.
1. Is that all publicity is equivalent. Rogan is no James Randi. He's much more likely to nod along with anything a guest says than debunk it. His podcast is entertainment, not a crucible for the truth.
2. Is that every time we broadcast nonsense that fewer people believe it and society as a whole becomes wiser. If this were true, then when the ex-President talked about drinking bleach you'd expect bleach ingestion calls to 911 to decrease. In reality they increased at least on a short timescale. On a long enough timescale, maybe the anti vaccination population will fall below the level it was when Dr. Wakefield published his infamous anti vaccination paper. Given the last few decades of suffering, I'd guess there are better ways to educate the public.
I think you've misunderstood which direction I imagine the sunlight going here.
1. You seem to think that Joe Rogan is not very reliable or trustworthy. How do you know that? Because of past interviews where he nodded along with a crackpot, right? Isn't that valuable information? Doesn't that help you evaluate new information you get from him?
2. The choice we are faced with is not, "Should we allow nonsense to be broadcasted"; it is "What should we do in response to it." In each of these cases, I think it's pretty important to be aware of what happened.
If you could time travel back to, say, 2000, and you had a choice of either trying to "bury" Wakefield's work to keep people from hearing about it or to promote the idea that his work was bunk, which would you choose? I think the latter would be more effective, wouldn't it?
Because there’s so little cross pollination today everyone lives in a bubble. If your Facebook is full of right-wing stuff, you only watch Fox News and only listen to Larry Elder, you’ve got an echo chamber, breeding ground for radicalization.
Having a wide variety of guests actually fights that. You listen to Bernie Sanders, then Alex Jones, then Ben Shapiro, then Edward Snowden. Rogan breaks the echo chamber. People who might only listen to Alex Jones have a chance at listening to Bernie.
Why? Why do I suddenly need to know everyone's take about everything? Why is it important that we know what our favourite actor thinks about Trump?
Everything is publicity. It's not achieving some important social need, its driving people towards new products. Interviewing Alex Jones isn't doing anything except making more people know what an Alex Jones is.
Is that why the kardashians are so famous, because their continued media presence is our opportunity to see if they make sense? No, they are just crap and giving them more sunlight just gives them more undue fame, money, and power.
Surely a company choosing not to publish certain material falls under the umbrella of their free speech rights? Or are we all for compelled speech now? If someone has a podcast that Spotify carries and then say they think the Holocaust was a good thing, is Spotify committing a sin by removing that episode or kicking that person off their platform?
Pro tip: needing to make up a scenario of Nazis usually means you're creating a straw man.
Spotify is well within their rights to pick and choose who to platform. I, personally, think de-platforming is counterproductive. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones may be trash human beings, but I don't think Spotify having Rogan's interview with him -- which by the way is a lot of Jones looking insane, and Joe challenging him every step of the way -- is in any way equivalent to "Spotify supports Alex Jones." Censoring people just pushes them to echo chambers.
People are not morally monolithic -- having been awful in one moment doesn't mean they can't be helpful or insightful in the next. I wouldn't listen in to someone harassing grieving parents, but I might listen to someone who haddone that, if they were talking about something else.
This sort of hyperventilating moralistic fear of certain people makes me laugh, in its similarity to Victorian or conservative Christian communities. You cannot possibly want anything to do with that vagabond! I don't know, he has some vices, but he also has some perspective I am enriched by hearing. You don't have to fear sinners. Don't imitate them, but your life will be richer if you're less of a prude.
Milo is a gadfly. He offends me sometimes, too. And sometimes he has stinging observations I don't hear anywhere else. I don't want to listen to him every day, but I would be poorer for having never made the acquaintance. Alex Jones is energetic and occasionally unhinged, and when he says something completely insane that also happens to be true, I find it a comedy experience like no other. But he can also be a wakeup call to some of the naive views I hold. I don't want to listen to him every day, either, but I would again be poorer if I never had.
But at the end of the day, I really resent gatekeepers who want to make these sorts of decisions for me. I read history -- which means I read lots of things lots of very evil people have written. I would actually rather have the opportunity to read and study Hitler's words than have them banned on the assumption that they are too dangerous for me. I would like to think I am wise enough to judge evil for what it is, and I would like to be able to prove that to myself against real villians of history. The versions I was given in elementary school hardly illustrate the dangers. Goodness knows I can't avoid encountering dangerous ideas in the real world anyway, so what is the point of trying to protect me? I would rather be strong than safe.
People are not children. They can handle reading history's dangerous ideas, and they can handle hearing society's dangerous ideas. It is better to encounter those ideas on Joe Rogan with thoughtful and open questioning and discussion, than to encounter them quiet and unopposed in private. Strong people are better than safe ones. Victorian moralizing and shunning didn't really work out for them either.
Which is funny to me because JRE is the reason we are rid of Milo. The JRE also didn’t do any favors for Candace Owens or Dave Rubin. I don’t see why they would memory hole those episodes but at least they’re on YouTube.
Yeh LOL sandy hook denial is for progressive silicon Valley types who aren't progressive. Maybe Spotify doesn't want to be the 'dive bar' of web platforms.
If you aren't offended by Alex Jones you got deeper issues, or perhaps are just ignorant to his white nationalist messaging.
I am offended by him and at the same time don't mind him having a platform to express his "opinions" which apparently is an unpopular opinion on this site.
>Milo Yiannopoulos is a self-proclaimed white supremacist
I think Milo is a scumbag, personally, but where did he self-proclaim that he's a white supremacist?
>Alex Jones testified to being a performance artist
No, he didn't. His lawyer attempted to argue that he was during a lawsuit, as a defense against full culpability for his actions. Lawyers (understandably) try to pull out everything they can to help their client. There's no evidence Jones himself has ever said this or thinks this.
Although most of his non-watchers seem to think he's just a con artist, after watching a cumulative dozens of hours of him on camera over the years, I'm convinced it's not an act and that he genuinely believes pretty much everything he's saying (except for cases where he's attempting to do a comedy bit). Unfortunately, a lot of people in the US believe all of the things he believes - and not necessarily because they're hearing it from him. They all drink from the same watering holes. In my opinion, this is why it's actually a lot more frightening than con artistry or performance art.
On episode #1682 he talks about both figures. He was saying he does feel a responsibility to vet his guests so that he doesn’t just have crazies using his platform to spew vile, but ultimately that neither figure harms anyone just by being a guest on a podcast. He talked about how even if you hate Alex or Milo, you can still gain something from listening to them speak. Maybe you can figure out why you hate them, or maybe listening to them directly will make you understand them in a different light.
Maybe this is a 1990s George Carlin thing to say, but so what if Milo offends people? Should we only be allowed to hear things that don’t offend us?
I also like being able to justify intolerance towards anyone I want by labeling them "intolerant". Same as only caring about those I want to care about and only supporting free speech that I agree with. Makes everything much easier.
It can often be challenging to determine intent in written form, and more so in a forum context, but that reads as incredibly passive aggressive.
I'd be happy to debate this further if you were willing to do so in good faith rather than intentionally twisting my words. Otherwise, you can label me as "anti-free speech" and call it a day having won the war for freedom on the internet.
Also how do you know that either of those people are what others have told you they are? If you're unable to listen to them because they've been depersoned everywhere, you have no way of knowing if they're truly as represented or have been character assassinated. I'm not trying to convince you that either of them aren't who you think they are (from what I've seen, you're not far off) but rather have you see that you could be wrong about them (or others in the future) if you are not allowed to hear them first hand and only get views of them filtered through others.
I would be thrilled if both of those people simply ceased to exist, but I think it's dishonest to delete and "forget" old episodes of a show because you later decide that the guests on those episodes were terrible people.
(I don't consider it material that presumably Spotify required deleting them as part of the deal. Rogan agreed to those terms, so clearly the money was more important to him.)
Right, so don't listen to those episodes. I, on the other hand, like hearing both sides so I can make an informed decision on why I disagree with whomever.
'So and so is bad, I heard it from X' has never been good for any human society.
Pretending the episodes don't exist is rewriting history.
'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'
Personal point- if I saw Alex Jones personally I would not want to be him. He has, for his own enrichment, destroyed personal relationships, caused me endless arguments with friends/family and is a walking detrament to society. I hate with a passion the garbage he spews to sell some garbage fake pills. But I still believe he has a right to be heard.
Nobody has a right to be heard. He has a right to speak. People like Rogan have a megaphone and are choosing who to give it to. Would you choose Alex Jones?
Sure, Alex Jones is a crackpot but why should you, or anyone for that matter, be allowed to prevent others from speaking to an audience that has decided to listen?
What do you expect to happen when the balance of power, majority opinion, etc inevitably shifts and we find ourselves on the other side?
What happened? Liberalism used to have a solid footing on the essentials of the constitution. If your enemies or people you don't like don't have rights, you don't either. The ACLU used to understand this probably better than most organizations and today, like much of CA and NY, they're lost.
> The ACLU used to understand this probably better than most organizations and today, like much of CA and NY, they're lost
This is a line I've read from texts dating back to at least 1973 by conservative authors, nearly verbatim.
I think cultural mores change and conservatives have a hard time adapting.
Alternatively, they've simply been dishonest with themselves since just after WWII -- start with the nonsense about FDR allowing Pearl Harbor to happen -- because they believe the ends justify the means.
I didn't like them banning episodes too. There were internal movements from Spotify employees (liberal Silicon Valley workers) who wanted episodes completely censored and removed. Joe talked about it a few times and I read some articles.
The irony is that by moving to these liberal employees' platform, he's losing influence :)
By creating a crappy podcast platform they've ensured they get what they want and he ends up diminished.
Unless Spotify publicly disclosed which employees said something along with their political beliefs, I think the best we can do here is describe them as Spotify employees.
Arguably there are reasons to dislike Joe's podcast for people all over the political spectrum.
They don't burn books, they just remove them. Those episodes happened, and removing them is a form of gaslighting. If they find the content objectionable then putting a disclaimer, if it is objectionable enough then removing the entire series from the platform could be an option, but it is lost history. In this case the artist doesn't care, and probably is happy to sweep those episodes under the rug. It is like how Disney wishes they hadn't made "Song of the South".
The problem, as with every memory-holed episode ever, is that people watching/listening for the first time (or say they only use X platform to consume whatever) will never know they existed.
In other words, lying by omission is still lying.
Edit to add- just to show how unbelievably petty the reasoning can be- Tyler Perry threw a bitch-fit about an episode of Boondocks and had it pulled (as was an episode ripping on BET when they screamed). For something that was pure satire and a cartoon they not only had it pulled from airing, they now no longer list the episodes at all on Hulu/HBOMax, pretending they never existed at all, even re-numbering the episodes.
All because of Tyler Perry/Some BET exec's ego? GTFO.
We have Holocaust deniers while still having people alive that survived it. We have people constantly denying proven, recent history and some people think it's ok to censor shit and pretend it never happened and it'll be all roses and sunshine.
That isn't what we are speaking about here. If youtube buys the rights to a show and uploads 'their version' of it with episodes missing and re-numbered so no one will notice any are missing, they are controlling a narrative.
They should at least have a disclaimer about the missing episodes.
I'm not particularly a "fan", but I do enjoy listening to some JRE episodes when he has interesting guests like Andrew Huberman. I don't care about losing access to old podcasts any more than I care about Netflix pulling certain movies. That's just the reality of all streaming services. Content gets removed all the time for all sorts of reasons. If you want to maintain access to something then you'll have to make a local copy on hardware you own.
Shame. Not to condone these people, but since getting along with everyone was Joe Rogan's thing, I think they should've embraced it. But Joe was most likely not glad to preserve that part of his career either, otherwise I assume he would protest.
$100 million is a lot of incentive to not protest. The line between actually important and kinda important gets really well defined when you throw that much money on the table.
> A memory hole is any mechanism for the deliberate alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.
He left a void which is now being filled by Lex Friedman and others. Rogan doesn't even bother placing something about the podcast in title - he just names the guest which doesn't say anything to me so I dropped his show long time ago. Even went that far and send him an email regarding how frustrating it is to just listen to show after show until you find a subject that you like.
What he lost with YouTube is their algorithm which kept recommending bits and pieces aligned to what the user was already watching. With Spotify he's just there as an author/podcaster - nothing on the subject of what I am currently listening - he lost the context.
I placing his growth on YouTube and its recommendation engine more than anything else.
Yup. We thought digital distribution would eliminate the editorial middlemen, but we just replaced them with algorithms. Being favored by the algorithm is a big part of most social media stars' success nowadays and it is not guaranteed if you follow their guidelines. And despite that, there are still human editors in the background who can push a button to make the algorithm ignore you from now henceforth, so the old boss is the same as the new boss in the end.
I've always been wondering why niche 2-people shows put elegant titles and detailed notes with chapter markets and the largest shows ever with huge production teams don't even bother.
I used to google "reddit best Joe rogan episodes" to figure out what to listen to, but it's mostly MMA fighters and comedians. I hate wasting 30m of my time fast forwarding through ads and drawn out banter to find that the two people on the show are halfwits that I don't want to hear for another 2 hours.
Didn't follow Rogan but have experienced a similar thing with other podcasts. I like a majority of the episodes, but I wouldn't go listening week after week powering through meh bits in hope to find the interesting nuggets.
Having an algorithm filtering the feed is a god send, hopefully both for me and for the author, who in theory gets more leeway to try different kind of stuff and see what sticks.
While I love Lex Friedman -- jeasus christ does that guy talk so slow - I have to watch his podcasts on like 1.5x just to get his speech upto the speed which I can listen.
wow, I never heard that figure, that is staggering IMO, I've never understood why Joe was famous, never got his appeal. Per WSJ, "The deal with Mr. Rogan is a multiyear licensing agreement for an amount of time that couldn’t be learned. It will likely be worth more than $100 million based on milestones and performance metrics, according to the person familiar." Wonder what those milestones are like and how important they are to Joe. https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-strikes-exclusive-podca...
say what you want about rogan, but he is a good listener. Period. He knows when to shut the fuck up and let the guest speak.
He also can talk to people he disagrees with without going into petty word fights. Despite his image he has a lot of humility, he knows and openly admits not to be the smartest man in the room. And to me comes across as a person eager to learn and hear new ideas.
I have learnt quite a lot about being good conversationalist by studying what and how he deals with guests.
He has casual (friends) episodes that are pretty repetitive but he also invites experts from all over. Those episodes are very entertaining.
(I dont use spotify so havent been following his podcast since the move)
I don’t like Joe Rogan but his earlier episodes were my first introduction to real long form, off the cuff conversations that have become pretty common now. Even relatively recently, I watched the Bernie Sanders one and felt like I hadn’t really heard Bernie Sanders just have a conversation like that for a long period. Among others I know, that, at least used to, be the appeal.
Well, I'm sure he was making pretty good movie before and yet he was independent, people talked about him, reporters wrote stories more often – in the long-term he could have monetized that even better.
> in the long-term he could have monetized that even better.
Could being the operative word. We're talking about "blow a million dollars on random shit every year until you die and still have multiple millions left over" amounts of money. Why would anyone who doesn't already have hundreds of millions of dollars opt for that? The whole point of this tangent in the discussion is that he probably realized his time in the spotlight was limited, so any plan that assumes longevity is statistically unlikely to come to fruition.
But you also have to assess risks. Joe is a prime candidate for getting canceled. Being on YouTube carries this risk for him.
On Spotify not only he got some cash upfront, but also significantly mitigated this risk, since platform is way more aligned (i.e. it's important business for Spotify and a footnote for YouTube).
Is Spotify the only source of revenue from his podcast? I don't listen to JRE, but this thread suggests he's still running third-party ads on the show. Presumably then he's still getting some portion of that $30M/year on top of what Spotify pays him.
> Spotify doesn’t play or include ads that interrupt the listening experience of Premium subscribers. However, some podcast creators may include third-party advertising, host-read endorsements, or sponsorship messages in their episodes.
Not only does he run the ads (though I suspect spotify reaps those benefits), they're randomly inserting them in the podcast now and it's annoying. Sometimes it's mid sentence.
Annoying to both pay for spotify and get hammered with ads. Granted I pay for the music, but it's still annoying as all.
Its even worse, up until a few weeks ago, you could rip his podcasts using youtube-dl. I am paying for a subscription to support him but ripping his podcasts and throwing away their garbage app in favor of Jellyfin. Now they have begun encrypting his podcasts with Widevine. :/
Since I still have to listen to ads, i'm thinking of just dropping the subscription and hoping there becomes a method to break this Widevine trash. I encounter a bug with their app on a daily basis and I am tired of it. From what I gather, there are different levels of Widevine encryption that limit video quality but the lower levels are crackable. I hope someone smarter than me tries the crack on the JRE podcast.
When this happened to me I assumed Spotify had become logged out of my account somehow. Nope, they’re injecting adverts randomly into paying customers podcasts. I cancelled Spotify that moment. I never really agreed with their attempted land grab on podcasts, this, however, I felt had really crossed a line. There are plenty of other podcasts I listen to, some without ads, supported only by Patreon, etc. so the money I spent on Spotify will get redistributed to them.
You can retire with a high standard of living for the rest of your life with that amount as a lump sum. It's not clear to me that the decision was wrong.
He said not to long ago that he was actually hoping to be less famous and relevant by moving to Spotify. He wanted less lime light. However to him it backfired as more people are talking about him although less are probably actually listening.
The discussions about Rogans social responsibility are just silly. He's an entertainer. People need to understand that.
But his influence dropping, I'm not at all surprised. I used to follow him until he moved to Spotify. Now I only catch the occasional clip on Youtube. And I've actually forced myself to endure the awful spotify UI for some special episodes like Dave Chappelle.
But otherwise I'd rather avoid that mess. It's truly awful.
I don't see how Spotify won anything, as some in this thread are saying. Youtube still gives you maximum exposure, and for just a little more than what Spotify charges you get essentially the same music catalogue, AND youtube premium ad free. I can't deny that's a good deal to me. I haven't watched TV since 2010, Youtube has way too much content in truth.
He has an incredible amount of influence but he at times has for example insane conspiracy theorists on with absolutely zero considerations about how him "appearing" like a good friend to them will influence his audience. He always ponders to his guests, which makes sure that they trust him and open up.
That might appear to be a good thing but it becomes a problem when you have people with insanely irrational and unscientific ideas on and don't put up disclaimers about their redderick. I'm not saying "cancel him", but I can totally understand why Spotify would want to remove some episodes...
Personally I think it's sad, because he does have the conversational and interview skills to really get a lot of information out of his guests but he let his platform become a stage for insanity.
Let's not get into a debate here. I'm just criticizing him, which I'm allowed to do. I'm not enforcing anything on anyone, I guess me criticizing him is my self expression. :)
>I'm paying Spotify Premium and still have to listen ads during the show.
I have Spotify and don't listen to podcasts much at all. When I have, it hasn't been on Spotify and I've always been able to skip through the recording to get past the ad (either with a "skip fwd 15 secs" button or by grabbing the slider and moving it manually). Does Spotify not offer that capability?
They’ve made it simple to skip ads because each ad pops up as a track that you can scrobble to the end of. I assume they’re satisfied with this because my dragging my finger across the name of the advertiser is probably a better signal of impression than hoping I was actually present during the ad roll.
But Apple podcasts “skip 15sec” is still easier, I can do it without looking while driving.
>each ad pops up as a track that you can scrobble to the end of
The first time this happened to me (while loading up a Joe Rogan podcast), I legitimately thought Spotify was glitching out. There's no visual indication in the app that it's a temporary ad, or of how many ads you have to listen to before the episode starts. I made it to the beginning of the third ad track before giving up.
There's a setting to disable video podcasts and only get the audio. I don't want to watch a podcast via Spotify, and I hate that it's hidden away in settings, but it is there.
The guys who rip it to YouTube cut out the commercials, and NewPipe delivers the audio feed ad free. I'm not a big Rogan guy but even if I paid for Spotify I'd probably watch it that way.
Is there some reliable source of his podcasts on Youtube? Like a hidden channel or something that won't be taken down by copyright requests every 5 seconds?
A search for "Joe Rogan Full Podcast" (Full is a magic word on YouTube for this sort of thing, "Full Movie" "Full Episode" etc) typically works for me, but you may have to warm up the recommendation algorithm so it recommends similar channels to what you have watched before (ie. fly by night channels hosting ripped podcasts).
Not a single-video-file like solution, but you might think e.g. Youtube, Spotify etc could sync a separate audio file and stop the video streaming when a tab is hidden. Such a predictable waste of bandwidth, as you observe, that it might even merit browser support.
8m not sure how his podcasts were distributed previously, but I would have thought a more multiplatform approach would work better long term. A lot of people don't have Spotify, I'm one of those, for the same price as Spotify I can get YouTube premium for me and the extended family, kill all ads, allow downloads and access to a decent music streaming catalog. Last time I checked the prices were not to dissimilar.
I think it was more than 100MM, he was making ~30MM per year on his own, and he signed a 3 year deal with Spotify. Im not sure why you'd sell for the exact amount you'd make if you just kept doing what you are doing with the exception of having to handle all advertising yourself and possible delisting/banning from YouTube.
So he was a unicorn? A startup valued at a billion dollars was supposed to be so rare that it’s a unicorn, and now people are doing that with a microphone in a cave ;) (or little more, but technically he’s one voice).
Spotify has invested heavily in podcasts, not just Joe Rogan but a whole range of them at high costs. It baffles me that they would spend so much money on content and not invest in app development and design. Some businesses seem to have a major hate boner against paying for an appropriate number of high quality developers and designers. It's very penny proud and pound foolish.
I actually like Spotify. For music, though. Listening to podcasts in a music app – makes no sense to me. I have Overcast for that purpose and I see no reason to switch. I can understand that it was a good deal for Rogan personally if he got 100 million USD for exclusivity but for the average podcast host I believe that an open platform is much better.
Spotify works absolutely fine for me in Airplane mode. The reason I pay for Spotify is because it is the nest solution I have found for easily curating music for offline playback since I don't have unlimited data and I'm often outside of good coverage areas.
It certainly isn't perfect and there are aspects of the UI I find frustrating, but offline access and playback are the features that seem to work the best.
Edit: I also don't use Spotify for any podcasts and use other software since there are lots of great options for offline podcast listening that are way better than Spotify.
I don't doubt that there are phones out there for which airplane mode works with Spotify. It's often the case in software that the bug is just not encountered, for some.
But it was also just an example of the many ways the app is broken here and there. Freezes up, crashes, etc...
And this I've gotten across phones.
But that's just the bugs. As others have said the whole thing is not even close to designed for podcasts.
Podcasts are an entirely different use case, that needs to be RSS-shaped, not like music.
But you make it sound like it's a widespread problem. For me their app is just great and much faster than Apple Music that may randomly fail at playing some track. And it works on airplanes just fine.
Pretty much haven't listened at all since his move to spotify. I don't blame him for selling out at all, but spotify is garbage for podcasts. If he went back to youtube I'd probably watch again
I have a Spotify subscription. I used to watch Joe on YouTube. I haven't since he moved. I use Spotify at work to have something to drown out the noise around me. I watch YouTube to relax. My habits mean I don't even think of going to Spotify for a podcast.
They are are allowed to upload snippets but are limited in length and number of clips they are permitted to upload per episode. I assume they provide the allowance for purely promotional reasons. Personally, I find the clips too short to be particularly interesting
The ones with Carmack and an ex-pilot (regarding UFO) were interesting. Other than that I really didn't have any knowledge of. It's more of the people he interviewed then his channel.
Lex did one [1] with the same pilot that saw the ufo (commander fravor). I went from "no friggin way do they exist" to "shit... it actually sounds plausible".
yes, to some extent Rogan is a modern day Larry King. i.e. he's a very easy interview in that he allows his guests to say pretty much what they want without too much push back.
In general the easiest to way to make any one like you is to let them to all the talking, and sound like you ask interesting questions about their experiences, which make them and listening audience feel they are intelligent.
There are these anecdotes about Benjamin Disraeli that anybody who ever talked to him felt like they were the most intelligent person in Britain, and at times if there were a bunch people around him, they felt like they took turns being the most intelligent people in Britain.
Yeah I know I stopped listening since the show went exclusive. I didn't listen to every single episode he did, but I did listen pretty regularly. I have not seen a single one since and don't really care to.
I won't get an account with a company just to hear what you have to say. If you require that, as far as I'm concerned your influence just waned a little. I'm steadfast and unflinching in this, it is a firm rule I have.
At first I thought he would be ok. His original gripe with Youtube was the censorship of controversial guests. Either he or Spotify prevented most of the controversial videos from being imported into Spotify so I guess the problem remains. Is there a platform that allows any/all controversial guests?
Advertisers don’t want to advertise next to controversial guests, so if there’s another platform they don’t have 100 megabucks to buy content with (I mean, podcasting is the most open platform of all before “exclusive podcasts” became a thing)
I don't understand why people who seek freedom from enclosed and proprietary platforms are not bigger advocates of ActivityPub and software that relies on it.
After Trump got banned from Twitter & Facebook, the right wing decided to "build" their own platforms and went to Parler or stuff like that, which wasn't a big success.
But why not using awesome tools build by the FOSS community to support their need of freedom ?
I don't share their ideas, sure, but if they used those tools, it will sure make them popular enough so other people would turn to it and start leaving Twitter, Facebook...
It looks like crypto currencies : built by geeks wanting to build a better system, and mostly used by ill intended people.
What don't we see the same thing for social networking ? Because at the end all they care about is money so they need to control everything and build their copy of Twitter or Facebook ?
> Because at the end all they care about is money so they need to control everything and build their copy of Twitter or Facebook ?
Correct, and that was the point of my post. Rogan had the platform to freely distribute his thoughts, but in exchange for money, he chose to give up control of their distribution.
Money aside, I personally feel the Spotify deal was terrible for Rogan. He does more for Spotify than they do for him. Not least of which because Spotify, while pretty great for music, is terrible as a podcast player.
And, yeah, he has gone off the deep end since the Spotify deal. Somebody dumping a giant basket of cash on your doorstep probably does the ego no favors.
Spotify is terrible for podcasts, but 100mil $ is enough (on top of $$$ he already has) to not care about nuances of does he gives them more than they gave him.
I think 100 million isn't much considering the amount of influence he has. I guess getting an upfront 100 million is better than over the years though. Does anyone know how long his contract is with Spotify? It's it's longer than 2-3 years then he's losing money imo.
I haven't listened in awhile because Spotify is such a terrible place for podcasts but, when I did, for about a month or two after he moved to Spotify, it seemed like all he was talking about were UFO's, other conspiracy theories, and how much he hated the COVID measures.
Frankly, I don't care that he talks about those things--some I agree with him on, some I don't--but, in the past he did a good job of balancing those things out with guests who offered a different perspective. After he made the Spotify deal, it seemed like he went all in on his beliefs and didn't seem interested in exposing himself or his audience to opposing views anymore.
This is less a problem for Joe than it is for his advertisers. I wonder about the effectiveness of pre-roll ads vs extremely annoying mid-sentence ad breaks scattered through the episode. Use to be joe was one of the more enjoyable blocks of 3 hour content to listen to because there were no commercial breaks.
Spotify video leaves a lot to be desired as compared to youtube. They should stick to audio and improve on it. I dont understand, why do I need to go through ads for JR show even though I pay for spotify premium.
The best part of youtube is that one could search through and get excerpts of the video. I could easily find JRs tidbits without the need of going through the entire interview. I still see some of the older excerpts in youtube, but less so in spotify.
I think anyone would take that deal for $100 million. Joe's the real winner while people argue in the comments about this or that about his podcast. Clearly, having controversial guests on is fantastic for his podcast's influence.
I don't think Spotify is good for podcasts in general. I much prefer to consume podcasts with my own clients and workflows. Even youtube is better since it actually works well unlike the spotify app in my experience.
Exactly. I used to enjoy Joe Rogan, but I have my podcast system and I'm unwilling to change. I'm absolutely not going to change from a working federated system via RSS/atom xml to a centralized system where the employees throw a hissy fit about crime-think. I'm sure Spotify converted many customers and at $100 million, Joe Rogan won regardless.
At some point most of his listeners will realize just how terrible he is. MMA is supposed to be his bread and butter but his takes are absolutely trash. Every fighter is a killer, every champion is the GOAT, etc.
Same thing happened to Howard Stern when he moved to XM (or Sirrus, which ever one won that war I have no idea what's going on in the satellite radio space), moving from an open broadcast to a pay to listen will always cut you off from all but your most devoted fans and prevent a lot of organic discovery.
I was gonna say the same thing. It's a gilded ghetto. He's a lot richer but a lot less people know or care what he says. Rogan's going the same way. And I have to wonder whether that's really what guys like that, who built their lives around gaining fame, actually want.
It is hard to make an argument against YT having the highest reach among vloging platforms. However, repeated guests not gaining as many Twitter followers as they did after first visit might be an indication of diminishing returns
I mean, Rogan is a tool and we're better off without him having an outsized voice, but "podcasts" to me mean "platform independent." I listen to very few (no commute), but none of the ones I do listen to or seek out for long drives are confined to a single service. That seems goofy and weird, and the very act of going that route would put me off.
I was looking for who these listeners were switching to, or what the change was relative to overall podcast listenership, and was totally surprised the authors didn't include a base rate in their analysis. Not including base rates in references to anything quantitative is like writing spam emails with spelling mistakes because being dumb enough not to notice is a good proxy for being dumb enough to buy what you are selling. Though I doubt whether the people at the Verge have the sophistication to be intentionally fraudulent. They just need enough noise or to craft a conflict around. However it's a good example of data-horoscope journalism, where you backfit your narrative to points on a line.
Rogan is probably the most successful podcaster in the world by a variety of possible metrics, and I'm not sure what a reasonable expectation of how that plays out would be. Does he transform into a being of pure light and ascend into space, or, does he just do a job he likes until he doesn't anymore, and moves on to something else?
The Verge should just say what they mean, which is that Rogan talks to off-brand people and you shouldn't be tempted by how good the conversations are because it will not align you with crumbling mainstream narratives, and instead you should spend your time engaged with their clickbait talking points factory deciphering their adolescent purple sophistry.
I listened to Joe a lot when I was doing manual labor in 2013-2014ish. Like almost every single episode. I was always able to intake the things I thought were interesting and laugh off stuff I thought was dumb or unconvincing, but I do remember thinking that one day the greater internet will realize that his podcast is littered with content that people could easily misconstrue and start a real uproar about with sufficient motivation. Based on this, I think people shining a light on some of the dumber things that a self proclaimed dumb guy says while recording himself talking for 10 hours a week, and becoming a bit of an internet meme in the process was inevitable - and that's before he started saying whatever the hell he's been saying about vaccines and masks.
I've thought about the balance between "I don't know and I'm going to think out loud here." and doing that as entertainment and ... where that leads to some responsibility for saying some stuff that you really don't know that is dead wrong and ...
yeah, i think he kind of peaked shortly before the period where he was so obsessive with his attempts to outrage people over pronouns. i seemed to stop hearing about him around that time other than the headlines surrounding the spotify deal of course.
What a shame. Not really. The man did a thing that was entertaining, but it hasn't been worth the flirtation with evil and the dancing around with absurd, vapid "ideas".
I agree with everything that's already been said in this thread, but I've noticed one thing that hasn't been discussed at all.
I live in a rural area where network connectivity is poor at worst and intermittent at best. I spent years watching Rogan on YouTube with nothing but network problems. Watching Rogan was a chore in the previous scenario, and YouTube did not make it easy.
Once Rogan moved to Spotify, I never had a single problem with network connectivity. I could use the app to seamlessly switch between audio and video, and it was easy to both find and browse previous podcasts and quickly queue them up to play or watch. I could never do this before in a poor connectivity environment, but Spotify made all of this possible.
Youtube automatically switches to the lowest bitrate if it detects a slow network. Was it still too slow at 360p?
I used NewPipe to download the YT vids ahead of time. It has the option to download only the audio streams, so a lot of bandwidth can be saved that way as well.
I should note, I was not using the YouTube app, I was using the Safari browser on my iPhone all these years. To me, it seemed like a buffering problem, even at 360p. For whatever reason, Spotify loads immediately (or at worst, within five seconds) and gives me the best experience. Thanks for the tip about NewPipe.
When he moved to Spotify I suppose I'll get his podcasts from torrents, but then I end up finding far more interesting podcasts to replace him. After all if any of his episodes are interesting I can just listen them two years later.
As already mentioned there is Lex Fridman. Some people including me dislike the way he speaks, but listening on x2+ speed fixes that. I also enjoyed The Tim Ferris Show and he generally have more guests who are not related to tech.
Though I mostly went deeper into podcasts related to software engineering and since most of them include a lot of off-topic some are quite fun: Soft Skills Engineering, The Bike Shed, Indie Hackers Podcast, Talk Python to Me, Unnamed RE Podcast.
So there is always more interesting podcasts than time I have for listening. Might be you can't replace Rogan with one show, but you can always diversify.
I thought this at first, but now think the opposite is true. His viewpoints were more diluted previously. A smaller base is of regular listeners paradoxically makes his messages stronger.
Censorship is worse on YouTube. Think of how many affiliates YouTube/google/nbc has. I’d say more than Spotify. There’s a reason AM radio has more “extreme” content than FM radio. A wider audience means more people to appease; have to cater to the common denominator.
> There’s a reason AM radio has more “extreme” content than FM radio. A wider audience means more people to appease; have to cater to the common denominator.
What? AM stations tend to have larger ranges (FM is limited by line-of-sight). There tends to be more talk on AM because the audio quality is lower (and more susceptible to interference); I would assume that talk radio (where opinions are actually being discussed) would naturally have more "extreme" content than music, where the opinions are diluted by the presence of other content.
Its a vicious cycle: he got a bit crazy and anti-vax, hes in Austin so its 10 times harder to get good guests, and that makes it all the easier to lean into being antivax etc.
I discovered JRE shortly before the move to Spotify, and I'm still an avid listener, but honestly Spotify just freaking sucks compared to YouTube, and I would never actively search for more podcasts to watch on the platform. The load times and video display are worse, there's no ability to read or leave comments (Joe did say he asked them to work on that), I often have to refresh the page just to get it to respond again, it loses my spot and I have to scroll through 1,000 episodes to find what I was watching again, it's clunky and slow to skip forward and backward within an episode, and possibly the most egregious issue is the lack of search for episodes within a single channel.
That said, Spotify gave Joe written guarantee of creative freedom and dollar amount up front. With YouTube, every episode was subjected to demonetization or down-rank roulette, which understandably made him really nervous to be on the platform. As long as Spotify respects this creative freedom (despite complaints of some Spotify employees), I can respect Joe's choice to move.
I'm even a little happy that he left YouTube for this reason. A media platform should be accountable to consequences for its repression of speech.
I enjoyed listening to Joe's podcast quite a bit, and had been since around the hundredth episode, but to me podcasts always equaled audio files indexed in an RSS feed. So as far as I'm concerned Spotify does not have podcasts, and that they tout otherwise is enough for me to avoid them out of spite, Joe or no Joe.
Haven't heard Joe's voice in my ear since mid 2020.
This is worth a closer look at the material mechanics of the Spotify UI and all of the issues, because it seems from the comments this is a big deal.
I wonder how much just the discoverability of content on YouTube, and pictures of people, lends to actionable interaction. How about merely just the audience size, bringing in both new listeners, but also those of us who might have thought we were 'listeners' but really we just consistently came across the content, and listened to it, more like interested random action than conscientious 'following' of a podcast.
Or the various other issues with Spotify UI, or even just it's more or less audio vs. video focus (maybe people really do like seeing Joe and guests).
Or the visual snippets that made nice tweets.
Or possibly just a natural change in popularity not driven by anything other than a decline of a big meme.
It'd really be interesting to see more comprehensive breakdown it would tell us a lot about content in 2021.
In the podcasting world, reach == dollars. With a declining audience, his show will generate declining revenue for Spotify, and eventually he will receive less money because of it.
Keep in mind, Rogan said multiple times on his show he would never sell out because he wanted to do whatever he wanted to do... then he sold out to a platform that immediately cut off a large portion of his viewership.
Yeah I'm sure he and howard stern both really regret limiting their audience. He didn't sell out in the traditional sense (product placements, no-go topics, etc)
The people in this thread that think Joe cares about what the viewers think. He publicly said he doesn't care about deleted episodes and censorship, just there to collect Spotify money. Good for him, he has a goal and he is executing it.
Yes, of course he's losing influence seeing as how he's haemorrhaging listeners - like me - who do not want to get Spotify only to listen to Rogan. He often has interesting guests, he has no problems trampling all over the boundaries of correctness (which I deem to be a good thing) but he should have realised that there is a large overlap between the group of people who might be interested in listening to such conversations and the group of people who do not want to feed the Big Data Beast by installing and running apps like Spotify. I listen to a lot of netcasts using my own aggregator (based on Airsonic) which can handle anything which is available through an RSS feed. Spotify does not integrate with this system which means that Spotify-only content simply will be ignored - there is enough competition on the netcast market after all.
I used to listen to Joe Rogan podcasts almost exclusively when it was on Apple podcasts.
Not anymore. Shopify experience is so inferior. The thing pauses for couple of seconds every time you open it as it switches from audio to video even if you don’t want to. The new studio looks claustrophobic - not Spotify fault though. To get back to Spotify, even if you pay for premium to get rid of ads, it doesn’t! I thought something wrong with my account and never looked into it for months until I reached out to Spotify support and been told that Joe Rogan is not included! Very disappointing. Spotify also started removing controversial old podcasts from the before time! Now I have switched my routine to listen to audio books which is more random in term of content quality but at least you don’t fight the platform.
I noticed a similar trend with Howard Stern and others once signing on with SiriusXM.
My unsubstantiated take: audio has to be ubiquitous to work. It’s somehow more commoditized than video or other mediums.
If it’s a radio show / podcast, you already have your “player” of choice (AM/FM radio, or a particular mobile app) and you expect the audio to work like tuning a radio station to your syndicated show, or putting in a CD, and the player just plays it.
For some reason with video streaming, we equate services like Netflix with TV networks, so exclusivity is ok.
But audio apps and services don’t feel like different stations or CDs, they feel like different mediums entirely. So while Netflix is to Hulu as NBC is to HGTV, Spotify is to Apple Music as CDs are to MiniDisc.
I find myself listening to Lex much more, and Joe much less. Overall, I'm very glad that the format exists, and we're able to hear from experts / academics who otherwise wouldn't have a platform to really get into the details of their work.
I stopped listening to him around the time that he signed to spotify. But I think that was coincidental. I just got sick of how he's such a nutter and a dummy -- even though I like many things about who he is and what he does.
The only Joe Rogan episodes worth watching are the Tim Dillon ones. If you know, you know. Otherwise, I stopped watching when he moved to Spotify. It's just a terrible platform all-around. He destroyed his brand for $150M.
Tim Dillon episodes are my favorites, but IMO he hasn't totally run out of good guests since the Spotify move. The Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino ones were pretty interesting to watch.
There was a big podcast I really liked and listend 200+ episodes of. I stopped listening the day it moved to spotify exclusively and never looked back.
I understand if content creators want to earn money, but podcasts are made for RSS and musicians didn't really exactly gain from the move. If you are on spotify in addition to the RSS feed: great. If you are on spotify only: You are going to regret this.
What I like about the German podcasting scene is that they recognized this for the most part, and yet they live quite well from donations. They don't need spotify and this is fine.
Joe Rogan would be losing influence regardless if he was confined to Spotify, simply due to the competition. There is just so much more podcasting done today than there was two years ago, when he took the deal.
There is a simple way to explain why going to Spotify was not good for Joe Rogan: It doesn't solve a problem.
If Joe wanted to make more money and build influence, he would be much better off doing that by staying on YouTube; he'd have infinitely more options. Now, all he can do is Spotify. "Exclusive", in this case, is not a good thing.
The other dilemma is that the short clips still shared on YouTube (to entice you to come over to Spotify) are by definition already the best parts of the interviews. They wouldn't use the worst bits for that.
>To do this, we pulled data from the analytics tool Social Blade to track the Twitter following of every guest who went on Rogan’s podcast between December 2019 and July 2021. Guests generally see a surge of new followers after appearing on the show, with some gaining as many as 18,000 new followers in the week following their chat, and that effect has grown over time as The Joe Rogan Experience gained popularity.
This is based on post show Twitter following of the guests. What if his loyal listeners are not into Twitter and are leaving.
All regular media consumption is down, ratings for all news is down, I think we're all suffering from social media consumption fatigue, and there's is also an explosion of podcasts to listen to now.
The Economist has daily 45 minutes, Conan O'Brien is on audio only etc..
And he might actually have a broader audience than before, does it matter that much that guests 'new follower' metrics are down?
I think there's a broader context to consider here.
Most online influencers are there to convert their influence into money. (That's why I personally don't interested in influencers, it is like being interested in ads.)
I heard that Joe Rogan got a serious money for his exclusive from Spotify, so his mission is accomplished, deal is done and all he has to do is to follow the letter of contract.
When he needs more money - he will figure something out. Until then this is what his audience got.
I listen to the Rachman Review on geo-politics and China Talk. But i dont think anyone else has as wide a range as Joe. Tim Ferris is ok but he's way more niche.
I'm not sure the article's method of measuring influence is valid.
- It assumes Twitter use is constant and its not losing users (I've deactivated my account, even though I hardly used it).
- It assumes Twitter hasn't improved bot detection since before
- It assumes that the issue is with Rogan rather than the guest (maybe it could be argued that Rogan is getting 'uninteresting' guests because of a waning influence)
Spotify is no longer the only kid in town.
First I had moved to tidal because of supposedly better audio. Then one day I figured out that I already pay for prime and get prime music with it, already pay Apple’s one iCloud bundle and get Apple Music with it, so tidal also went to the cancellation hole with Spotify.
Not going to have an Spotify account just to listen to Joe Rogan.
It's a mistake for someone with a massive audience and their own platform to give that up.
There's a reason Spotify paid him one hundred million dollars (or whatever it was) - he thought he was getting the better side of that deal, but he was wrong.
What Spotify is doing is worse for users, but also worse for content creators in the long run. Giving up control of your distribution is a mistake.
Podcasts on Spotify still aren't available in every country. What's even weirder, there are countries where Spotify is officially present but still has podcasts disable for local users in the app.
For me there's no legal way to listen to Joe Rogan. Not that I care too much. But I'm sure there's a lot of people out there who simply can't.
Whatevs. Joe Rogan, as far as I could tell is some sort of loud macho redneck type that does not have anything interesting to say.
On another note, Spotify is so buggy an application I am surprised how/why anybody is using it. The most common thing is that it crashes on my iPhone. I was considering buying it, but not after discovering how bad/buggy it was.
It's obvious that ratings are down, but it's still enough to make money. Here are Some recent changes I can think of that cause lower ratings, all but one are related to Spotify.
Spotify is awful to use.
Not live anymore.
Haven't done the fight companion since the Brian Callen allegations.
Too afraid to be cancelled.
So many more podcasts now. Especially Tim Dillon and Flagrant2.
The drop after switch makes sense. There's gotta to be significant number of people won't switch to Spotify just because of Joe Rogan's show. Half of them is about right.
His show is just one of many in my queue. I won't go through the troubleshoot of using two apps for podcast just because of him.
Hold up. While I don't doubt the general conclusions of the article and most of the top comments here, the data they are using to back up their conclusions come from Social Blade which is notoriously inaccurate. Using Twitter followers growth as a proxy for influence is tenuous at best.
Comedian Bill Burr said it best: "I'm not gonna sit here with no medical degree, listening to you with no medical degree, with an American flag behind you smoking a cigar acting like we know what's up better than the CDC." [0]
This. I just wish he'd take his enormous reach a little more seriously when he entertains quack pseudoscience as if it's an equally valid POV to real peer-reviewed science.
Being a comedian does not magically relieve a person from their responsibility to not credulously spread around dangerous pseudoscience during a pandemic. Plus, that's simply not very funny. By the way, GP did not say "be more serious", as you likely know. They said he should take his enormous reach more seriously.
That metaphor doesn't work though because Joe Rogan is a person, not a monkey. Give a person a machine gun and if they shoot someone you do blame them.
"Being a comedian does not magically relieve a person from their responsibility to not credulously spread around dangerous pseudoscience during a pandemic."
Yeah, I think it does. Has he been cancelled? Nope. Does he stop making jokes about almost anything? Nope. Do you listen to his podcast? Nope.
You know how he became so popular? From talking and being open minded. That's _all_ he does. He ain't doing it to be an influencer yet "journalists" actually waste time writing articles like this. I guess the haters need something to read too?
Sure experts can make mistakes. Which is why it makes an enormous amount of sense to avoid taking the opinions seriously from people that are not even experts because they are significantly more likely to make mistakes based on incomplete knowledge or poor understanding of it.
Imagine drowning: If we were talking about expert lifeguards vs. some random beach goer and you had to choose which would try & save you, would you choose the expert lifeguard or the random person?
And sure, Lao Tzu may be right about compassion. It's also irrelevant in this discussion.
Every influential social network already has disclaimers with links to authoritative information about C-19 for those who choose to inform themselves.
"Visit the covid 19 information center to learn more"
These are all over and post on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc whenever certain keywords trigger it.
I think this is not enough. We need to replace all right of center entertainment with videos of Dr Fauci reminding us to wash our hands, wear masks, get our shots and do the right thing by staying home. Not enough people are getting this message.
Yeah that's Joe's classic defense. He's part of the "Intellectual Dark Web" (lol...) and he tries to have serious discussions and opinions on important matters. But as soon as someone points out how stupid and misleading some of his takes are, he falls back on the "I'm just a comedian" excuse.
Like someone else pointed out, Bill Burr is exactly what you describe. He's a comedian that discusses these topics but never gives the illusion that he is somehow qualified and someone that should be listened to. Joe does.
It's fair that the 'just a comedian' excuse should not work - but - it's fair to say 'he's just an podcaster with discussions of varying seriousness mostly for the purposes of entertainment'.
The overwhelming majority of his content is along those lines, to the point wherein you really have to scrape to find scare quotes. I mean, it's easy to Google because of supposed controversy, but really disagreeable stuff would be hard to find lest you to have to actually sit down and listen to him.
I wish he took a slightly different tact on vaccines (i.e, at the end of every show say 'Folks, it's 100% choice, but vaccines are safe, I've taken, everyone I know has, make the choice for you, your family and community, that's all, goodnight' kind of sign-off), but I don't think he's in condemnation territory either.
All of this said, I'm not sure how he is received in different cultures around the world where he might have influence we're not aware of.
> but - it's fair to say 'he's just an podcaster with discussions of varying seriousness mostly for the purposes of entertainment'.
I think that would be fair, if he didn't constantly insert himself into these culture battles and debates we are having as a society. If he just hosted guests to get their perspective, that would be one thing. But he actively pushes his own ideas. He's established himself as not only a source of news, but also a "voice of reason" for many of his followers.
Saying that he gets a pass because he's just there for entertainment is a cop-out. That's the same excuse Fox News uses for their "opinion" segments (most of what they air).
I also think you might be underestimating how many people base their opinions off of Joe.
I've listened to 4-5 Joe Rogan episodes and not once got the impression that he was trying to be a comedian. Now I may be an idiot, but I don't think I'm _exceptionally_ idiotic compared to most folks who might come across his content.
Comedy is a profession. Professionals should take their job seriously. Just because the product is fun and games doesn’t mean social responsibility ends.
Comedy is an occupation, not a profession. Actual professions have specialized training, a defined body of knowledge, ethical standards, and a formal certification process. For example: law, medicine, teaching, architecture, accountancy. Comedians have no more social responsibility than any other random person. There's no comedian's guild that's going to kick out a comic for being irresponsible.
Yeah he's not making a comedy podcast and often for his wilder guests like Alex Jones when confronted will say he's "fact checked" a claim. The fact check only extends to skin deep, one claim about coronavirus the fact check was that the article Jones was referencing existed nothing beyond that because it was a misinterpretation of a misinterpretation and completely wrong.
That's what Joe Rogan's show is all about. It's pretty much him talking about the same nonsense that anyone else would talk about when hanging out with their friends. He never pretended to be anything else, and it's why his show is so popular. That said, since he moved to Spotify I've hardly seen anything other than the occasional clip on AdTube.
If you want high-brow stuff there's Lex Fridman's channel.
Fridman is slowly going down the same route with more and more comedians and nutritionists and ufo people on his channel. I wish he just had sticked to interview scientists because nowadays I probably archive 2/3 of his episodes.
There's an effect to that effect called Gell-Mann amnesia. Nutshell by Michael Crichton:
> “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
I was cringing during his discussion with Rogan because of this.
It’s a common pitfall for a certain type of nerd to think that expertise in one area allows them to make claims in completely unrelated fields.
That and he didn’t challenge Rogan’s mostly unfounded claims about the COVID vaccine among other things. I understand that it must be difficult I do so as a guest, but for someone who fancies himself “rational” it was disappointing to say the least.
The shtick is not limited to covid matters either. Most of his non-MMA takes start with him not saying he's an expert followed by a very naïve and unnuanced summation of a problem. Lex Fridman does the same thing for non-robotics/AI issues.
I don't care about Rogan but that's an argument from authority and he avoids answering what he knows/thinks. Using his same logic, you would have to immediately dismiss anything he says regarding this because he's a comedian, not an expert in epistemology and natural science. It's a self-refuting idea, one would have to be a religious believer in the CDC to fall for that.
For it to be the schtick that'd have to be sort of the pont of the show, but it's only a topic of discussion so long as it's made relevant by those in our society, and even then that ignores the large diversity of guests and topics in his show.
There's nothing wrong with listening to two regular people have a conversation regardless of their qualifications for the topics they're discussing. They don't pretend to be professionals. (Hence why that quote can be said and why they can laugh about it.)
I think we all know JRE is not about two people having shit conversation. I used to listen to it since 2016. In the past couple of years, JRE is all about let's bring out what triggers the other side; no matter what the other side is all about.
I have friends I have lost because of this, whom I have no idea how to respond to their messages anymore; Intelligent and educated ones.
I agree. He used to have interesting guest, and I felt the conversations were more organic. I quit watching a few years back because I did not enjoy the direction the podcast was going in.
Joe is "regular people"? He's a sitcom actor. He makes a couple hundred million a year on podcast ad revenue alone. He only presents himself as a "regular" person because that's the demographic he's targeting.
He does not make "hundreds of millions a year" on podcast ad revenue, that's a ridiculously high number. The entire podcast ad market is barely $1B total.
I don't agree with you guys at all. I like Joe a lot - but I do not always agree with him, nor his guests - but here is why he is one of the best interviewers I have witnessed:
He doesnt talk over his guests - he never pontificates to them, and lets them have their piece...
Additionally - he is actually really well read, and has a great memory and can recall how things he had read in the past relate to the conversations at hand.
You put joe rogan up against literally any television "interviewer" in the history of television, and you will see they are all hacks. Soundbyte driven hacks.
Ill take joe over ANYONE on television today.
Also - there are far too many podcasts, and its great to have very interesting people on his show - where they talk openly about anything for 3 hours.
as opposed to a 1 minute sound byte on complex world affairs where reporters are interviewing reporters about what some other reporter said and then claiming that "experts" "officials" and "sources close to the matter" say... and then every single person on their cast is "Senior correspondent this or that" - with zero creds shown as to why they are senior...
News is FAKE.
At least the interviews on JRE are uncut, there is only ONE other staff member in the room whos only job is to switch cams and look up something if either the guest or joe have doubts about what they are saying.
I find it funny how people can bitch about someone if there is something they dont agree with, as if one must have a 100% ideological map to anything they watch/see/listen to or else its all 100% fake.
Says people who don’t watch joe rogan. Joe rogan has two kinds of guests: experts/scientists and show biz people. The former are why I watch the podcast. And I think it’s important because it gives a platform to people are being ignored by the mainstream. Take for example Paul Saladino. Watch that podcast and tell me it’s pseudo science. You can’t because he’s meticulously citing a paper and bringing up that paper to the screen practically every five minutes. And he’s an MD. And he’s been proven right by CAC score. And he’s planning an angiogram which if it comes out clean will be incontrovertible… he was right. It annoys me that people want to shut down joe rogan for harmless speculation he makes. If you think of Galileo and his conflict with the church, he’s very much like a joe rogan guest. Has a controversial but correct scientific insight, clashes with authority and the old dogma. There’s definitely been a handful of people like that. The MAPS guy comes to mind. His vindication was massive and joe rogans contribution to that was probably not insignificant.
I came across a very thorough analysis of the Paul Saladino episode [0] the other day when I was researching him after a friend recommended his book. Seemed like he was cherry picking evidence pretty hard and that the majority of the evidence doesn't agree with his stance at all
Was going to link this exact article, but you beat me to it. :) My biggest problem with Saladino's episode was that early in it became clear that he is a zealot, and almost by definition zealots are rarely generally "right" or "not pseudoscience" as GP claims in this specific case. Especially when their object of zealotry is an extremely complex field that we're only just beginning to understand. It's difficult to trust anything a zealot says. I surely don't have time to dig into all the ways in which they're using the "science" to support their perspective.
Saladino isn't so much a zealot as he is a salesman. He's building a personal brand and business around being the contrarian carnivore guy. He wants you to buy his books, buy his supplements (which cost as much as $68 per bottle for trivially cheap ingredients), and sign up for his newsletter so he can pitch you more stuff.
He may actually believe what he's pitching, but he's so drowning in financial conflicts of interest and personal brand-building that I don't think he could accept contradictory evidence from anyone. He only sees what he wants to see because that's how he makes his money and builds his fame.
It's fascinating to see him cited by the grandparent comment because Saladino is a notorious quack among the actual nutrition communities, including keto communities. He presents himself as a doctor but conveniently forgets to mention that he's a psychiatrist. He cherry-picks citations from papers that he knows listeners won't actually read and then presents them out of context.
And most of all, he sells his brand and products hard, which should be a huge red flag for anyone being delivered this uniquely contrarian information that defies mainstream medical science. It's fascinating that this person concluded he's an expert in the field simply because he was on the Joe Rogan podcast. I suppose that is the problem with the JRE podcast: Too many of the listeners think they're equipped to identify the real truth, while Joe Rogan serves up a steady diet of convincing quacks interleaved with actual experts.
I’ve reviewed that link as well as the debate that they had on YouTube and I think you should apologize for wasting so much of my time. The guy hit his vape pen in the middle of the debate — I think that pretty much sums it up. He doesn’t know chemistry or biochemistry, but Paul clearly is very well educated medically. There isn’t a single argument this guy makes that stands up. And Paul isn’t a zealot by any stretch of the imagination. Not yielding to arguments that are demonstrably false is not zealotry… zealotry is what you are doing: not yielding to inconvenient yet incontrovertible facts. And by the way, nature agrees with me, not you.
This is the problem with misinformation nowadays. Everything is "backed by studies." The problem is, the same study can be interpreted to support two opposing views.
Hell, I'm sure if this Saladino guy just completely made up a study and presented it as fact, the vast majority of the users will never bother to check if that study even exists, let alone verify the claims. Most listeners are just there to reaffirm their preexisting beliefs.
Personally, I just don't trust people that push such narrow solutions to complex systems (nutrition in this case).
I was commenting on the state of public debate, not his specific claims. I have no idea the accuracy of his claims. I do know that in most cases, such narrow solutions can't be applied to the population at large.
As far as trying it, I have no need. I eat a balanced diet and I feel, and look, great. Glad it worked for you, but I've heard the same about dozens of other diets.
I will read the full thing later but I find it hard to believe when you see this
“Moreover, the current western lifestyle is characterized by high fat intake”
Which is stated as fact when it’s not even true. Fat has been stripped out of everything. Even milk has the fat taken out of it. Look anywhere and you will see “fat free”
And while I agree that a lot of what saladino says doesn’t have enough evidence to be totally sure, what everyone always ignores is when saladino points out that there isn’t enough evidence to be sure of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease. There has never been a randomized, interventional study that proves anything anyone says about meat, fat, heart disease and health. Not one proper study. Meanwhile, him and other people have zero CAC on a diet that should have killed him according to the current model. And there are many other people who have done this. I can’t dig into the “debunk” right now but that’s the value I take out of saladino
> And while I agree that a lot of what saladino says doesn’t have enough evidence to be totally sure, what everyone always ignores is when saladino points out that there isn’t enough evidence to be sure of the lipid hypothesis of heart disease.
This is a common, but lazy, trope trotted out by people like Saladino. It's the same "It's just a theory" argument that climate change deniers use.
There is a lot of evidence showing that things like elevated LDL cholesterol has a cumulative (area under the curve) negative effect on heart health, and that saturated fat consumption is directionally negative for heart health. You'd be hard pressed to find an actual cardiologist or researcher who believes these things aren't true. So why do you choose to believe a known salesman with a conflict of interest in promoting his expensive supplements and books on the topic?
You seem to be assuming a specific conclusion is true and cherry-picking the single person who wants to sell that conclusion to you. There are plenty of citations to the contrary, many of which are in the article linked above.
These are extremely valid points. Even Shawn baker doesn’t like the fact that Paul directly profits from promoting carnivore.
It’s funny you say there’s a lot of evidence showing LDL is bad etc, ok then show me the randomized interventional study regarding animal fat. Regarding carnivore. You can’t and so whenever you say “there’s lots of evidence” you also have to say “but it’s still unproven.” And yes, there is a difference between me and people who deny gravity or global warming because in my case, the study is absolutely trivial to perform! But it never happens because the academic community refuses to put people in (hypothetical!) danger by feeding them animal fat. It would be immoral and most importantly very unfashionable to perform a study like that.
Here’s the rub: nobody I know or have seen has experienced a decline in their health from carnivore. There’s no hard evidence that it’s bad for you. That guy from the grateful dead did it for 40 years and never had a heart problem. I want a randomized controlled and interventional study that simply shows us what difference it makes to be carnivore rather than something else. I will happily shut up forever if we did that and I was wrong.
It's very disingenuous to declare that "there's no hard evidence that it's bad for you" when the vast majority of experimenters have barely been doing this for about 3-4% of their expected lifespan.
And I disagree anyway. Heart disease might take a long time but your CAC score wouldn’t stay 0 for a long time. Two years in two cases and CAC of zero. That’s not anecdotal, that’s two clearly measured examples of something that shouldn’t exist under the current model. And you continue to keep your head in the sand. All you have to do is openly support some kind of real interventional study. Not agree with me, but just acknowledge that fact that it isn’t settled and that something so fundamental should be settled. The study will cost a pittance. So are you in favor of that or not?
The carnivore diet was a thing for the Comanche people for centuries until they were massacred and confined to reservations. We obviously don't have data on their rates of heart disease but overall they were healthier than others living at the same time.
> Which is stated as fact when it’s not even true. Fat has been stripped out of everything. Even milk has the fat taken out of it. Look anywhere and you will see “fat free”
Stripped of everything including pizza, burgers and fries?
So I watched the debate that they had which I think is better than reading this guy snipe Paul from his blog. It’s pretty clear to me who won. This guy was super childish during the debate and was pulling stunts with vegetables. And it’s also clear that paradoxically he doesn’t seem to have deep knowledge of chemistry or biology. But Paul’s medical background really shines in places. I’ve seen a lot of Paul’s content and, as a person with a Background in biology, I have never detected intellectual dishonesty let alone BS.
> Joe rogan has two kinds of guests: experts/scientists and show biz people. The former are why I watch the podcast.
Many of us have tried to listen to Joe Rogan for the former category. When I catch an interview with someone I already know and respect (e.g. John Carmack), it's not bad.
But Rogan is also notorious for bringing on over-confident "experts" who present their pet theories as done deal research. Saladino is a perfect example of this over-confidence. Citing papers and having a medical degree doesn't automatically make someone infallible or even correct.
> And he’s an MD.
Saladino has a medical degree, but did you know he's a psychiatrist? Perhaps a good degree to have for manipulating people, but I prefer to get my nutrition research from nutrition researchers, not psychiatrists who have webstores selling $60 supplements.
Saladino profits by building his brand: He sells books. He sells coaching. He sells extremely overpriced supplements. He has a branded web page with his Joe Rogan interview as the background and a "Join my Tribe" link at the top.
Saladino is a salesperson who is pitching you on his theories to sell you products and extract money from you. Joe Rogan is unqualified to push back on it, so he gives these people a huge audience with which to push their agendas.
And it works! Here you are, completely convinced that everything he said is true and accurate, while it's trivially easy to find fact checkers showing how he made incorrect claims all through that podcast ( https://www.biolayne.com/articles/research/paul-saladino-on-... ).
>Says people who don’t watch joe rogan. Joe rogan has two kinds of guests: experts/scientists and show biz people.
As someone who has been listening to Joe (on and off) for ~5 years, it's hard to believe that you haven't noticed a trend in the type of guests Joe has on in past year. I really feel it used to be that Joe would have on a wide range of people but now it seems that he's created an echo chamber. For example, at the start of the pandemic, in March, he had Michael Osterholm on his show - a top epidemiologist. He took it seriously at first, but once he was tired of lock downs, he has had several more "alternative" scientists to appease his world view and is pretty much antagonistic to anyone else.
I was listening him talk to Rhonda Patrick this morning (who's been on the show multiple times) and I was completely flabbergasted about how incredulous he seemed to be then Rhonda talked about vaccines. Think about that - this is one of his most credentialed friends and now he's incredibly skeptical as he's gotten even more dogmatic in his views.
And I'm sorry, diet fads are as old as America. You can pull up medical papers justifying almost anything when it comes to gastronomy. I hate this idea that has creeped further into the American psyche that people are pushed out of the mainstream because of the liberal boogeyman. You have quacks that are backed up by as much data as Saladino saying that going vegan will give you super powers. Some people are just wrong, and I'd be critical of the praise Joe gives a guy like Saladino given that Joe also has a vested interest in Saladino being correct as well.
Dogmatic... really? It's hard for me to think of a less dogmatic public figure. His views are all over the place, change frequently, and aren't at all consistent with each other. His critics (on both right and left) generally seem to want him to be more dogmatic, not less; they want him to be consistent with their own preferred dogma.
To me Joe comes across as someone who's figuring it out as they go and doesn't have a filter. I personally find this refreshing compared to zealots who are certain they have all the right answers on very nuanced and complex topics.
Edit: Ok downvoters, what is Joe Rogan's "dogma"? Honest question.
His views are only all over the place if you try to bucket him in the American "Democrat/Republican" binary bucket. If you listen to him for a long time he is surprisingly consistent a number of issues. For example, Joe is a huge supporter of public welfare. He grew up, temporarily, on food stamps and has always pushed back when even the most right of guests would call people on welfare lazy. Likewise I feel he has an incredibly poor track record on trans rights and can be very transphobic. That said, it's very difficult for people to communicate outside the "Democrat/Republican" playing field and people seem to love team sports more than discussion. Now that said, Joe is a human being and is welcome to his own beliefs, but whereas before I felt like Joe would have a mix of people on, his newer guests tend to be people who reaffirm his beliefs.
I don't see how any of that would make him dogmatic. Dogma implies a shared set of principles that are followed without question. His beliefs seem to be an idiosyncratic patchwork stitched together from personal experience and a diverse set of influences. And while he is attached to certain beliefs, as you say, he'll also change his mind easily in other areas. Whether or not you agree or disagree with his specific opinions, that's just about the polar opposite of dogma.
>Dogma implies a shared set of principles that are followed without question.
FWIW, Merriam Webster defines dogma as a point of view or tenet put forth as authoritative without adequate grounds. That's the definition I was using, that I thought was more colloquial. Simply holding a strongly help opinion on shaky grounds is dogmatic. I don't believe that definition is at odds with what I'm describing.
Even if I cherry picked the one I thought was most clearest, none of them are even imply a shared set of principles that are followed without question, nor do any of the definitions under (1) contradict what I was saying.
>Also, when has Joe Rogan ever claimed, or even implied, that his beliefs are "authoritative"?
If you literally watch JRE today he does with regards to keto.
He can speak with legitimate authority on diet, exercise, martial arts, and other similar topics. He knows more about those things than 99% of people. The point is he doesn't claim authority on topics related to politics and science where he's out of his depth, or at least does it a lot less often than typical partisan commentators.
You seem to be reading a different definition than I am, but ok /shrug.
The various health authorities told people not to use masks at first because:
Hospitals were in danger of running out of protective equipment.
The public was panic buying anything and everything. Remember empty grocery store shelves? Price gouging people who were hoarding all the hand sanitizer?
When those circumstances changed, so did the advice.
There's no one on earth who gets everything right first time, and thus never needs to change their mind. Not one single person.
Why do you value an opinion or advice that never changes?
> The various health authorities told people not to use masks at first because: Hospitals were in danger of running out of protective equipment.
We pay the CDC. Not the reverse. And we don’t pay them to give us socially engineered advices depending of the politics or economics of the day. We have other federal organizations to screw up that part of our life already. And it always ends up badly when you don’t tell the truth to people. Never in history we never came to conclusions “What a relieve we lie to the people.”
> The various health authorities told people not to use masks at first because:
> Hospitals were in danger of running out of protective equipment.
They said: "We need the masks for hospitals. Please don't use masks, because they don't work for you, they only work for us in the hospitals".
Why would anyone take from that that masks don't work? How/why did people believe that? They literally say that masks work. This is one of the greatest mysteries for me.
Could you maybe also pull this off in some other context, too? "We want the good stuff. But it doesn't work, so please don't buy it. Leave it for us"? Could it be made to work?
I don't recall them saying 'hospitals need them more,' but rather 'masks have no proven effect' while people inside the CDC later admitted the concern was the first bit. I'm pretty sure that's a lie; while maybe they can argue about foment size effects etc. meant it technically wasn't a lie, I think we can all agree the public heard none of that nuance.
The CDC did not say "don't buy masks because healthcare professionals need them". The CDC falsely claimed they were not effective.
This false narrative persists even today.
How many thousands died because they were told by an authority masks don't work?
Your point of view seems to suggest that the ends justify the means. I ask you how many deaths are an acceptable amount of collateral damage to protect the health system's access to masks. 1,000? 5,000? 50,000?
It persists, because procedure/surgical masks do virtually nothing to stop SARS2. [0] I won't even mention cloth masks.
In sum, of the 14 RCTs that have tested the effectiveness of masks in preventing the transmission of respiratory viruses, three suggest, but do not provide any statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis, that masks might be useful. The other eleven suggest that masks are either useless—whether compared with no masks or because they appear not to add to good hand hygiene alone—or actually counterproductive. Of the three studies that provided statistically significant evidence in intention-to-treat analysis that was not contradicted within the same study, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than hand hygiene alone, one found that the combination of surgical masks and hand hygiene was less effective than nothing, and one found that cloth masks were less effective than surgical masks.
N95 are better, but those are not generally available to civilians.
Umm, perhaps I'm mistaken, but I'm fairly certain that, at least in the US, it's always been fairly easy to obtain N95 masks, up until the pandemic. I realized I had a box of them lying around which my ex-girlfriend had purchased for painting.
Yeah, so did I. I use them for sanding and sweeping.
But early in 2020, they disappeared off the shelves. Amazon, in particular, only sold them to medical professionals. Same thing, if you went directly to 3M.
I was able to buy a few more at about ten times the usual price.
A few are available at reasonable prices now, but it's still very limited. When I wear a mask, it's an N95. You can dry them out and reuse them - SARS2 is very fragile.
CDC is working with limited information on a novel virus. As they are learning more they are shifting their guidance to match the current understanding about how the virus spreads.
During that episode I have came to conclusion that Bill Burr is who Joe Rogan sees as himself. Eloquent, humorous, says-he's-stupid-but-he-is-actually-smart, able to step back and look at all the stupid stuff everyone does (including himself).
> During that episode I have came to conclusion that Bill Burr is who ~~Joe Rogan~~ people on the internet see~~s~~ themselves as~~himself~~. Eloquent, humorous, says-he's-stupid-but-he-is-actually-smart, able to step back and look at all the stupid stuff everyone does (including himself).
FTFY
Side note, on /r/Math the other day I saw a great joke.
People in real life: Ops, I'm bad at math. I need a calculator to calculate a tip.
People on the internet: Allow me to demonstrate to you why I'm bad at statistics but confident I'm right and all the scientists are wrong.
I've noticed that a lot of overly-confident people do this. They essentially have a list of preferred topics and always try to bring the conversation to those topics.
> What's your rap these days? Most of us have one. Is it a disquisition on the stupidity of television, the rapacity of multinational corporations, how the Yuppies had it coming to them, the thrills of motorcycling, the perils of tuna fish? Some people are always ready to mount the soapbox. (It's the twelfth time you've heard this guy's tirade and it was already boring the second time around.)
> The worst sort of rap is the pet peeve. Pet peeves manage to smuggle their way into every conversation, no matter what the topic. Marty is hung up on America's foolishness in not imposing tariffs against the Japanese. It's not clear why he takes this so personally, but he's definitely obsessed with the problem. The topic of conversation is Monday-night football? Marty contrives a quick segue to the state of television in America, orchestrates a smooth turn to the subject of the future Japanese control of the entertainment business, and— presto— tariffs. Marty's rap is boring for the same reason the preacher's is— it's predictable— but it's also an imposition. He uses friends as a sounding board for his venting.
- From the book Everyday Ethics by Joshua Halberstam
Everyone wants to climb to the top of the nearest hill and scream and shout that he has The Truth, but more often than not we'd be better off just shutting up: striving to understand rather than trying to preach, remaining curious rather than telling others what to think.
"In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world."
I don't mind this as much. At least they are talking about things that they are knowledgeable about. What I don't like is when people are overly confident about their YouTube degree. The armchair experts that need to prove how smart they are, even if you're an expert in the field they're talking about. It is excruciatingly painful.
Wow, that is a classic example of an "internet researcher" who read some articles and then told the people trying to correct to "do research."
I just looked up this story and the apes in question were regular eastern chimps with some regional variation. They've been studied for nearly two decades. The whole 6 foot lion killer thing was a few sensationalized articles from 2003 or 2004 due to a member of the research group making excited claims. The member wasnt even a primatologist and was kicked out.
Joe Rogan's research was literally some popular articles from a decade and a half ago... And he dares tell the person on the phone they aren't "current" and to do research.
(EDIT: I mean there are link to reddit caricature / joke lists etc. since when do we do this here?)
I don't think Joe Rogan is very interesting ... but the 'haters' say more about themselves than anything, it's a bad look on them.
Rogan is what is he is. He has a variety of guests, he entertains them and let's them speak, he popularized a fairly new format where people can come on and actually make their case for as long as they like. Turns out it's very refreshing and frankly 'important' thing.
All of these podcast/celebrity etc. people take themselves probably a tad to seriously, but I don't think Rogan lacks the self awareness to not recgonise he's not an intellect, that seems apparent.
For those screaming about his subtle wavering on vaccines, first, he hasn't really, and second, our beloved Lex Friedman has gone a bit into the weeds on that one as well so you'll have to throw him into the cauldron as well.
The possibility of a 'dude bro' who's broken the mould and is more influential, and in most ways legitimately so, than many others who are supposed to be more deserving ... seems to bother a lot of people. I don't care that much one way the other about Joe, but I'm annoyed by those people.
Some of the criticisms of Rogan are legit, a lot of it seems to me like something else going on under the surface.
I have listened to quite a lot of his podcasts. There are times where he is straight up wrong and hiding behind the "I am just a guy asking questions" facade. You know what's even more tiring than "haters"? Fanbois who refuse to admit their idol might have a few flaws...
This is the most frustrating thing about Rogan for me... if he were talking to people as an uniformed layman and sharing his opinion in an effort to weed through his thoughts and become more informed, that would be great! We need more people who are willing to be wrong and learn from that. This is often how Bill Burr comes across (to me, anyway).
But Rogan's not that. He likes to hear himself talk, throws his opinions at experts as if they're equally valid, invites charlatans on and equates them with experts, rarely changes his mind, and comes out of it just as dumb as he came into it. Then people emulate him and end up in a state where they're less able to learn, and frankly, bigger assholes.
It's barely even a shtick, it's the same old pseudo-intellectual machismo that has always plagued society.
The problem people have with Joe Rogan, and everyone else like him, is that they're spreading misinformation without having an ounce of education in the subject at hand. People should be listening to the CDC, the FDA, getting vaccinated, wearing masks, and washing their hands. That is best solution we have to the problem, end of story. No amount of agreeable platitudes will make any difference if this disease continues to mutate among the unvaccinated population. Arm chair commentators are not more capable at understanding virology and immunology than the CDC, and their beliefs are completely irrelevant when it comes to fighting this disease.
The best solution is not a vaccine that works for a few months requiring multiple booster shots meanwhile the rest of the world cannot get enough for one shot. And then allowing the rest of the world to fly in.
Putting all your faith in the CDC and choosing not to allow yourself to form your own opinions is an interesting strategy. It absolves you of any responsibility. Do you vote? Choosing someone to make decisions on things you are not an expert on would seem like a huge responsibility you wouldn't be qualified for. Do you leave those decisions for others?
That's the thing, opinions are not science. No amount of bike-shedding will be useful in this situation. Your "own research" does not outweigh the clinical trials that have gone into developing these vaccines.
the health experts a year ago said vaccines would make this go away, and before that they predicted that masks and social distancing would flatten the curve. With the exception of a few countries, none of that happened. At this ponit, I don't think anyone knows anything.
due to rampant downvoting, I will respond to individual replies here:
"This worked perfectly basically anywhere people actually complied. "
Italy had among the strictest lockdowns in April but saw a huge resurgence at the end of2020
" Largely it did happen, we just don't see the counterfactual. It could have been a lot worse. "
That is moving the goalposts. The claim by the experts was that the vaccines were 95% effective at stopping the spread. It seemd that way until a few months ago when Deltacame along.
> The claim by the experts was that the vaccines were 95% effective at stopping the spread.
No, vaccines are not expected to prevent infection or spread, and almost none do. For example, flu vaccines don't keep you from from getting infected, and the virus still spreads successfully even when vaccination rates are high. What the flu shot does is (hopefully) cause you to have less severe symptoms.
Vaccines are designed and tested to prevent disease in spite of infection. This is a universally understood principle in the field of immunology, regardless of the CDC's confusing messaging.
The current evidence indicates that the vaccines are doing a good job of preventing hospitalizations due to covid.
If that is such an universally understood principle then a lot of people are badly misinformed. I can’t count how often I hear “if everybody just took the vaccine the virus would be gone within insert timespan” even in academic circles.
> if everybody just took the vaccine the virus would be gone within insert timespan
No, the expectation is that a successful vaccination campaign will end the pandemic, by making the burden on healthcare systems manageable. Nobody serious thinks we can eradicate the virus like we did with smallpox. It will always be with us, causing infection.
This is how all vaccines work, with the exception of HPV and possibly measles. Vaccines are not expected to provide sterilizing immunity, and they don't need to as long as they prevent serious disease due to the infection.
Within the field of immunology this is common knowledge, and I wish the CDC would message it more clearly.
First, places with high vaccination rates are crushing it. There basically isn't a fourth wave in Waterloo Region [1], and we have 85% one dose, 78% two doses at present.
Second, those predictions were made ahead of a year of mutation— delta in particular.
> First, places with high vaccination rates are crushing it.
Israel has an epic Delta outbreak and Britain's Delta outbreak keeps rolling on. So no, they're not crushing it at all.
Israel's weekly Covid counts have soared back near record highs.
Britain's weekly Covid counts are not dropping. They're at 200,000+ weekly cases and sustaining. They've been up there for about a month now.
The vaccines are primarily changing the mortality rate, which is of course critical. The current vaccines can't entirely stop Delta even if you vaccinate 100% of the population.
Vaccines, masks, and restrictions did all work to "flatten the curve". Your assertion that they did not is a very minority opinion and the onus is on you to back that up with data.
It should be fully intuitive that anything that reduces the r0 value for spreading the disease flattens the curve compared to what it could have been. That somehow it is not obvious to you suggests your sense making apparatus has been hijacked by something. Take a good hard look at yourself.
It's not enough for vaccines to exist. People have get vaccinated. That has not happened (enough).
How do you know the curve wasn't flattened? I don't know whether it was or not. It seems the only way to find out for sure is to compare the curve to what it would have been in an alternate timeline.
Bill Burr might be right, but there are, for example, people who think satirical news shows are actual credible news. I don't think what Joe Rogan does is much above a step beyond that sort of entertainment.
Fox news has news in its name and the daily show got emmy's every single time, not to mention that time The colbert report tried getting a super pac and managed to get it.
I think 2nd guest appearances are not going to see as big of a spike in followers than the 1st in general since it's likely that the same audience who were going to follow the guest have already done so, so not sure how much of this decrease can be attributed to a platform change.
It's unfortunate. Some of his guests are quite interesting. I appreciated him having Abby Martin on the show.
I have no idea why covid is such a popular topic on podcasts. Do people actually like hearing more about it, don't they already hear about it every day?
Sorry, Joe, but that was a bad move. Let me know when you start podcasting again.
The turf war over the commercialization of podcasting reminds me of the Internet - designed to be free and open, destined to be walled off from free use and exploited to death.
Spotify and Rogan is a key example of how centralization into walled gardens is detrimental. I enjoyed easy, uncensored access to Joe Rogan's interviews and clips from them previously. But without that ease of access, I basically forgot about him. This is despite me being a paying customer of Spotify.
Spotify has also demonstrated that they cannot be trusted, neutral stewards of information ecosystems like podcasts. They've censored/deleted lots of Joe Rogan's interviews, and their left-biased progressive employees have repeatedly protested against Rogan and asked for him to be booted off the platform. There is absolutely no way I will patronize podcasts on Spotify since I don't want to hand such a group the keys to the castle.
Maybe all good things simply need to come to an end. I feel like he basically has boomer politics now and the same predictable opinion over and over can get old. My brother said something that I think is true; Joe seems like the kind of guy who believes whatever the last person he spoke to said, so after moving to Austin he's become more conservative.
Anecdotally, for me I didn't watch it religiously, but I would watch anytime there was a guest that I liked or found interesting. I haven't watched a single show since he moved to Spotify.
its too bad the app for youtube music is so horrible. How does it still not have a horizontal mode? How many goldfish are they paying to develop that app?
I don’t see how this is a bad thing. Rogan is a self-certified moron, and all the more power to anything that is degrading populism in today’s age of empowered morons.
I have definitely enjoyed parts of his show a lot, but I genuinely think him becoming less influential (which I don't quite buy) is a good thing societally.
Lately it is getting harder to get an episode I want to listen to. 70-80% are comedian friend episodes which I have 0% inclination to listen to (I wonder how many people listen to them compared to other episodes) and then there are 10-20% guests either from MMA or boring 20x already told story about gender/vaccines/masks/invermectin/etc. And then there are 10% of interesting guests. Previously on youtube it was much better. I even enjoy listening to some quacks, like Graham Hanckok because he has interesting stories, but he does not even has that lately.
ironically think his popularity exploded right before switching to spotify as articles got spread about his big payday. as well as the election. so it’s a bit unfair to compare that time period. wonder how it compares to 2018z
also wonder if podcast listening could be down if people aren’t commuting
JRE has never been quite the same since YouTube stopped them from live streaming or whatever exactly went down when they switched to pre-tapes. Many episodes are evergreen but any discussion of current events is a few days behind the news now.
I know we're supposed to only contribute commentary that productively advances the conversation, but the thought that keeps bubbling back to the top for me is "lol noob, you sold out; you got what you asked for"
This is the weakest analysis I have ever seen for an article. It's just noise. The sample size is too small to make any inference. A combination of people quarantined due to covid , the election, and BLM hype is why 2020 was such a big year. Joe Rogan is still hugely influential. His comments in 2021 about vaccines made headlines everywhere.
Maybe it's just me, but I have always felt most conversations at JRE are very shallow. I think it's because he doesn't push the guests enough or provide counter arguments to their statements. I have instead liked the podcasts of Sam Harris, Lex Friedman and more recently that of Jordan Peterson.
I have to say this seems utterly un-noteworthy. "Person whose content was free now reaching a smaller audience now that their content is behind a paywall".
The transition over to the Spotify platform was a decrease in user experience.
Downgrade with video integration.
Downgrade with search ability on audio.
Buggy resume feature for both AV.
I get why he did it. YouTube was doing some weird speech shit at the height of Trump and COVID. It's wasn't like the minions at Spotify didn't try. Seems like the higher ups at Spotify is giving Joe more freedom.
I definitely consume less of Rogan's podcasts since the switch. But I do seek him out whenever a clip on YouTube pops up and strikes my interest.
The more he embraces conspiracy theories, the less I find him persuasive. At this point, with his embrace of anti-vaccination ideas and being completely mostly to medical science and the scientific community out of contrarianism, I find him more annoying than interesting.
That's fine. An uneducated guy bringing on other uneducated guys that talk about something as if they're experts. Joe is an "average dude" who loves his disinformation and nodding his head to whatever BS someone says. People like words, personalities, hand waving. That's not where truth comes from. Truth is a hard fought battle that doesn't come to you in a podcast. It comes in written words, proofs, and is filled with uncertainty. Actual experts dont give black and white answers, they provide the information and context. People don't like that because it's complicated.
His move to Spotify isn't why he sucked, but Joe really has gone off the ego end. If you listen to his early ustream podcasts, he was just funny stoner. Now he's just lost touch.
To be fair... his move to Spotify coincided with him spewing more and more anti-vax and anti-mask drivel that I don't have any interest in listening to.
If anyone wants a datapoint, I stop listening to podcasts once they go to Spotify. I use Overcast, and generally don't have the wherewithal to chase content. I'm guessing there are more like me. I was an infrequent listener to Joe Rogan, but now I am not a listener at all (because it moved to Spotify).
Also, there seems to be a lot of judgement of the kind of person Joe Rogan is (conspiracy, etc) in the comments. I have never once listened to Joe Rogan to listen to Joe Rogan. The fact of the matter is he gets fantastic guests doing long form conversations. I only ever showed up for the guests. Generally also the case for many other podcasts, Lex Friedman, Tim Ferris, etc.... the value they bring is more the guests they attract and the space they create for the guest.
I guess it would be interesting to deep fake the voice of the host and see how many people actually cared about the host.
You basically explained my view and feelings on the matter. I watched maybe 10 episodes per year on YT but once it went to Spotify, I don't watch at all.
Coincidentally, around the same time he went to Spotify, I started getting really annoyed at his butting in and his opinions on matters that his guests know a lot more about. I've caught a clip or two on YT in recent months and I skip over any parts where the camera is on Joe, so I can just hear the guest.
> I guess it would be interesting to deep fake the voice of the host and see how many people actually cared about the host.
I wonder how good GPT would be at generating questions to a guest based on their work and interests. Having a GPT driven interviewer could be quite interesting as a gimmick.
I'm the same way. I used to listen to Stern on the radio for my morning drive but never considered for a second going satellite when he did. There were plenty of options.
I was also an idle subscriber: I'd start listening to perhaps one in five episodes, with guests who interest me (think of people like Elon Musk or Jonathan Haidt). When Rogan left Apple podcasts/Stitcher, I stopped listening. Your statement echoes how I feel: "I only ever showed up for the guests. Generally also the case for many other podcasts, Lex Friedman, Tim Ferris, etc.... the value they bring is more the guests they attract and the space they create for the guest."
> his move to Spotify coincided with him spewing more and more anti-vax and anti-mask drivel that I don't have any interest in listening to
I listen to his show sometimes, and while I've heard him have guests on from all sides of these issues, at no point have I heard him be anything less than a thoughtful, critical interviewer.
If that's "drivel", we need more drivel. I'll certainly take it over everything I see on cable news, which is laser-focused on advancing a particular narrative, and demonizing anything and anyone who might deviate from that narrative.
When you have extremists on and don't challenge what they're saying, that _is_ pushing a narrative.
The whole "both sides" thing is the _worst_ of cable news and why I signed off years ago. Does the Sun orbit the Earth? Let's get a crazy person on and see. It's okay because we'll give an expert a few minutes too.
He's had plenty of prominent leftist guests like Bernie Sanders, and most of his comedian and artist friends are left-leaning, and he leans left himself. How is this a gateway to the alt-right? At some point these accusations just become meaningless.
The claim isn't that he was a gateway to the alt-right _by having only a certain kind of guest_, or anything like that, so that's not really a counterargument.
Yeah, you can be so open-minded that every piece of drivel just slides easily through your mind. That isn't being well informed. You actually need good filters and know what they're based upon.
Props to Bernie for taking the battle to the middle ground though and not preaching only to the choir. He kind of got shit on for that as well.
Joe will be the first to say he isn't well informed at all and that's yet another reason why he likes having long conversations with all kinds of people. He's incredibly transparent and authentic, and that's what people seek more than anything. It's the reason for his rise along with many others building independent followings now.
Whether you like him or not, or agree with his views, is entirely subjective. But it's interesting to see how much control people want over others by the topics and conversation they want to prevent and suppress, and those actions speak far louder than words.
No, that's fine, it's probably true, but that's not a bad thing that we're condemning.
You are evidently very unwilling to accept the claim, so I don't think anything said here will convince you otherwise, but perhaps it is meaningful that so many people are convinced of it.
The point is that he exposes the entire spectrum and even leans left himself, however the original commenter only mentioned the alt-right. Clearly they're implying one side is worse and somehow going to unleash terrible things, however these claims are vague, misleading, and usually made by those who just happen to be on the other extreme.
Very few people have such trouble with his massive variety of guests, topics and politics; otherwise it wouldn't be the most popular podcast in the world.
It's pretty straight-forward. The left can't stand Rogan because he allows the non-left (not just the alt-right; the non-left) to have a platform. They don't actually care what the material is, what the issue is, they can't tolerate anything that isn't their own bubble, their own world views. The left controls ~95% of all media and it still isn't enough. Any platform that gives a voice to anything other than their own views, is fundamentally bad and is not to be tolerated. That's why most of the censorship push is coming from the left today, they're the party of intolerance and it's not just about the alt-right or far-right. Comedians broadly are terrified of the left's crazy censorship push, they're speaking out about it on a constant basis; comedians are almost always the canaries in the speech coal mine.
An obvious example of this in action, is Jordan Peterson, who the left almost universally detests. He's neither alt-right nor far-right, and yet the left tries to slander and control him with that label constantly (bury him under fake labels). If you're not in total agreement with them, you're the enemy; that's widely the ethos of the intolerant left today. Rogan has given people like Peterson a large platform to speak through. That's the sort of thing the left hates Rogan for.
Joe Rogan leans left in the same way someone that starts their sentences with “I’m not rasist, but …” aren’t racists. It’s just a rhetorical device to convince you that they don’t believe in labels, and then they immediately use their actions and words to demonstrate that they fit the textbook description of the label.
> They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.
It's the labels that are the problem, used by unreasonable people to create even more division. Most do not identify with a single side across all issues, or even all facets of a single issue.
It used to be the best when there was regulation that made sure equal amounts of attention were devoted to both sides of an issue with proper research.
What we have today are ideological echo chambers with some caricature of an opposing side, not actual debate.
Not in any normal way; the geocentricists tried to build mechanical models but the increasing number of epicycles was a big clue that the system was in fact heliocentric.
I well understand the history of this topic, after all, I have two years of Caltech physics :-) Nevertheless, as Einstein demonstrated, things look very different depending on the frame of reference.
There's no such thing as a "normal" frame of reference.
> the geocentricists tried to build mechanical models but the increasing number of epicycles was a big clue that the system was in fact heliocentric.
Not exactly, it was a big clue that the planets did not move in perfect circles. The mechanical models did not provide any evidence of heliocentrism. It was Galileo's observations of Venus that torpedoed the geocentric theory.
Galileo didn't really do a good job of proving the heliocentric view though. His advocacy of it was based more on aesthetics than observations. There was a great look at this in an article called "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" in the Jan/Feb 2013 issue of Analog. The author has an expanded version on his blog here [1].
NIST Technical Note 1385 "GPS Receivers and Relativity" by Ashby and Weiss discusses how to solve the GPS positioning equations in a relativistically correct way. It turns out that since the frame of reference (Earth-Centered/Earth-Fixed) is rotating, it is non-inertial and you have to apply some corrections to do the job right.
I mean the principle of relativity (not the theory of relativity), i.e. the fact that the laws of physics are exactly the same in any (inertial) frame of reference and you cannot tell at which speed you're moving except relative to something.
A rotating reference frame is different. A local experiment can tell you whether you're rotating and how fast you're rotating.
Is which object orbits which actually relative to a reference frame though? Does not seem like it should be.
The Sun has a certain mass, the Earth has a certain mass, the center of the point of orbit of both (barycenter? That seems to be the right term) is inside of the Sun no matter what frame you hang out in. What am I missing?
You can set up whatever frame of reference works best for a situation. We do it all the time. It's very convenient for us earthers to use a geocentric framing of the universe for our daily life, where the skies revolve around the Earth. We do it every day.
Such as the word "sunrise" is very geocentric. We don't even have a word for the heliocentric term for the same thing. We also use geocentric phrases like "jets chasing the Sun" and "sundials track the movement of the Sun", etc.
You can use whatever frame of reference you want, sure. Does there exist one in which the Sun orbits the Earth though? I don't think so. Those examples sound either metaphorical or about angular position/velocity, not orbit.
> Does there exist one in which the Sun orbits the Earth though?
Yes. It's what I've been talking about in this thread. You could always, of course, demand that the local TV station change the word "sunrise" to "when the Earth rotates until the Sun shines on the TV station", but I suspect that won't be successful.
For the naysayers: have you ever said "The Sun rises in the east?"?
I bet you have. From your frame of reference, the Sun revolves around the Earth.
I also bet if I asked you "which direction should be a rocket be launched into earth orbit to minimize fuel consumption" you'll have to stop and think about it.
That's a hell of a lot better than what we get now which is "we'll pick a single expert and nobody is allowed to question him because we know that his truth is the right truth."
It's a plausible enough mistake to have happened before. Which to me, is good enough reason to not outright dismiss it as "obviously false".
Some Polio vaccines were contaminated with SV40 for years, and it does, in fact, alter human DNA.
For COVID-19, there have been at least 2 major cases of live virus vaccine contamination and recall. In the case of the Sputnik vaccine in Brazil and South Africa, there are claims that at least some made it into patients.
And then the "Baltimore Factory" testimony before Congress included company executives admitting to making ~100 million contaminated doses, more than the number of safe doses they had produced.
So this "don't mind him, he does conspiracies" attitude isn't doing anything except getting nods from those that don't need convincing, and proving to skeptics that you have a knowledge gap, whether it's ultimately relevant or true (or not).
I don't think it's currently happening happening here (at a minimum, adenovirus doesn't alter your DNA), but I also think it's just as reckless to imply that any concerns aren't legitimate or that it's impossible.
>antivax talking point (and for the most part a load of nonsense
>>polio vaccine administered from 1955–1963 was contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40). The virus came from the monkey kidney cell cultures used to produce the vaccine. Most, but not all, of the contamination was in the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Once the contamination was recognized, steps were taken to eliminate it from future vaccines. There have been many questions as to the effects on people who received the contaminated vaccine. SV40 has biological properties consistent with a cancer-causing virus, but researchers have not conclusively established whether or not it could cause cancer in humans. Studies of groups of people who received polio vaccine during 1955–1963 provide evidence of no increased cancer risk.
>>However, because these epidemiologic studies are sufficiently flawed, the Institute of Medicine's Immunization Safety Review Committee concluded that the evidence was inadequate to conclude whether or not the contaminated polio vaccine caused cancer. In light of the biological evidence supporting the theory that SV40-contamination of polio vaccines could contribute to human cancers, the committee recommends continued public health attention in the form of policy analysis, communication, and targeted biological research.
"Based on these limitations, the committee concludes that the evidence is inadequate to accept or reject a causal relationship between SV40-containing polio vaccines and cancer."
There is literally no reason to bring this up in relation to COVID vaccines. First, this was a contamination issue with polio vaccines between 1955 and 1961, long since fixed (and unlikely to happen again, as it is now much easier to detect this kind of contamination). Second, there has never been any good evidence that the 'contaminated' vaccines ever did anyone any harm.
>In light of the biological evidence supporting the theory that SV40-contamination of polio vaccines could contribute to human cancers, the committee recommends continued public health attention in the form of policy analysis, communication, and targeted biological research.
>long since fixed (and unlikely to happen again, as it is now much easier to detect this kind of contamination)
Multiple vaccines have already been recalled due to contamination, after they passed initial qaqc.
How does that make it unlikely that contaminated products don't go undetected?
My point isn't that vaccine's shouldn't be taken.
It's that the same people that constantly complain about pharmaceutical companies taking shortcuts and behaving unethically, suddenly decide the same companies are infallible when it comes to a rushed development of a product, from which they are fully shielded from liability.
>There is literally no reason to bring this up in relation to COVID vaccines
When someone suggests a concern is scifi conspiracy theory nonsense, and that concern has actually historically happened, then it's absolutely relevant.
The scare tactics are bad enough, but don't try to trick people with lies and outright manipulation, and there won't be anything to call out.
>In light of the biological evidence supporting the theory that SV40-contamination of polio vaccines could contribute to human cancers, the committee recommends continued public health attention in the form of policy analysis, communication, and targeted biological research.
Come on – this is just the standard ass-covering language in a scientific paper. "Further research is needed." By the nature of the case it's very hard to conclusively show that no-one has ever had a cancer caused by a 1960s Polio vaccine. But at present there is no good evidence that this has happened, as the paper that you linked to states very clearly.
Any medication can contain contaminants. I do not understand why you think that the mere abstract possibility that any given vaccine might contain contaminants is relevant to COVID vaccination efforts. This is like cautioning against people taking Aspirin because any given Aspirin pill might contain contaminants.
You posted a lot of evidence that SV40, a virus, causes cancer. You are using that to argue against a vaccine that targets a virus (the COVID-19 vaccine), because that vaccine might be contaminated with a virus? This is absolutely ridiculous. Viruses cause cancer, not vaccines.
> Some Polio vaccines were contaminated with SV40 for years
Right, and the Harvard Mark II had a moth that caused it to malfunction, therefore we can't trust the Apple M1.
This is the level of reasoning that anti-vaxers have sunk to. It's deliberate ignorance and sophistry.
Anti-vaxers aren't "asking questions". They aren't curious about actual reality. They are very confused people who want to maintain a simplistic (maybe naturalistic, who knows?) worldview and are increasingly twisted in knots and therefore filled with cognitive dissonance.
I personally don't like hunting down morons, but when they step on stage and refuse to yield, the should absolutely be mocked, shamed, and embarrassed, maybe even more so that they risk the health and safety of others with their idiocy. They didn't reason themselves into their positions, so I see no reason why we should try to reason them out.
OP doesn’t claim Rogan should be de-platofrmed. Just that pushing batshit theories is an explanation for his declining influence. I enjoy watching flat earthers from time to time. But I’m not going to make it a part of my information diet.
No, he's become much more narrative/agenda/propaganda propagating and conspiracy theory fueling in recent years.
I used to listen when there were an interesting guest just to hear them talk at length about their profession/passions, but it's no longer worth it if the cost is giving rogan a podium for his self-proclaimed-moron-disclaimed pot-stirring efforts.
I don't think accusations of spewing anti-vax and anti-mask drivel have anything to do with his interviewing skills. They're certainly not mutually exclusive. The parent commenter didn't make any accusations about his interviewing skills.
Giving a platform to crackpots isn't always dangerous, but in the case of vaccines it's a public health concern. It's definitely not a good idea to give legitimacy to antivaxers during a pandemic when people dying. Save that conversation for another time.
Say I'm an interviewer running a podcast about SaaS startups. Which is more useful?
1. I interview a handful of people who have differing opinions on what it takes to lead a SaaS startup who have all had successful exist, but have differing opinions on key issues. Maybe throw in a few people who have experience working in that type of environment, but maybe not leading, if you want a little more variety.
2. I interview someone who has led a successful exit like in (1), but I also interview a full time commission visual artist who has never worked at a SaaS startup. I give both their ideas on how to run a SaaS startup equal weight, even when the visual artist isn't making any sense in the context of the conversation or is spewing nonsense in the context of the conversation.
Joe does (2). They are both "free speech", but only one is actually useful.
I'm not… not anymore… after observing stuff like this. Like Joe, like some of his guests, like the results of how things have shaken out.
Notably, free speech absolutism is impossible to refute if everyone is arguing in good faith. Since quite a few influential political actors are demonstrably not, and are following well-defined tactics dating back to various fascist regimes such as those who produced WWII, it is insane to pretend everyone is arguing in good faith.
And it is both instructive and dismaying to see that the people most obviously arguing in bad faith have a tendency to insist, and get others to insist, that free speech must be absolute and that everyone must be taken with the assumption that they're arguing in good faith.
Tactically, it makes perfect sense, but it's a hell of an exploit.
Please don't spread confusion about what "free speech" means. I'm sure you are not actually confused about this, so please do not pretend to be.
Having some people not appear on a given podcast is not a "free speech" issue. Choosing to not be a dangerous idiot by having dangerous idiots on your show during a pandemic is not "censorship" or anything remotely close to censorship as it is commonly, and correctly, understood.
> Please don't spread confusion about what "free speech" means.
I'm not confused.
> Choosing to not be a dangerous idiot by having dangerous idiots on your show during a pandemic is not "censorship" or anything remotely close to censorship as it is commonly, and correctly, understood.
When someone decides for me that "dangerous idiots" should not have a voice -- for whatever justification -- I'm against them having the ability to act on that impulse. The wonderful thing about free speech is that if you don't like it, you're free not to listen to it.
Every censor has started from the premise that they're doing good. I don't agree with your opinions, and I'm not so feeble-minded as to be unable to decide for myself what I see.
They weren't opinions. I stated facts about what "free speech" applies to, and what it doesn't. You pretending to not understand it does not change those facts. Neither does your repeating your contrary-to-fact, silly assertions, which have nothing to do with actual government restrictions on speech.
Let me just reiterate this, on the one-in-a-million chance that you actually don't get it: Joe Rogan can restrict the speech of whomever he fucking wants, for ANY reason, and that does NOT constitute any actual restraint on anyone's "free speech" rights.
I'm all for free speech in the sense that you have the right to say what you want without retribution from the government. Free speech doesn't mean you have the right to an audience.
There's a vast gulf between "Rogan should be more careful about bringing on and platforming people especially if he's going to support or validate what they say" and "Joe Rogan shouldn't be allowed to do his podcast."
Also the absolutist position ignores the limited capacity both in raw time and cognitively to take in information and that pushing people to do better about not spewing out or supporting bullshit is also free speech..
Equating any criticism of the strategies pushed by the medical establishment as "antivaxx" is just as counterproductive as calling everything "racist" or "transphobic" or "homophobic" or any of the other epithets being bandied around by the new puritans. Words have meanings, these meanings can change over time (language evolves) but forcing them to change to fit a given narrative leads to an unhealthy political and social climate. It is what Orwell wrote about in "1984", what Solzhenitsyn wrote about in "The First Circle", what Bradbury wrote about in "Fahrenheit 451", none of which were meant as user manuals for a healthy society.
> I heard him be anything less than a thoughtful, critical interviewer.
He is the least critical interviewer you can imagine. Being uncritical and hyped up is his trademark. He is Mr. Softball to the extent he is made of fun for it.
He is not thoughtful. He has talent of speaking endlessly and keeping it going endlessly.
Sometimes the point of a talkshow is to get the guest to do the majority of the talking. Other talk shows take the opposite approach and the guest is just a vehicle to let the host pontificate. Neither is superior.
He’s always been up and down that road. I don’t agree with Joe on a lot of things but I don’t know that is his goal. If there is one thing that I think Joe does reasonably well- its to have you consider your stance and reasons for feeling that way. I think it’s healthy to reflect on why you take stances on things like politics, culture and religion. Joe admits that he is “a cage fighting commentator” and while I think he self labels that way to sometimes get away with fringe viewpoints I do think he genuinely is looking for the best ideas. He’s definitely not infallible and he gets on my nerves to the point I stop listening for periods of time I do think that on balance his hearts in the right place and he is much less apt to blindly follow political doctrine a’la Fox News or CNBC.
I suppose that is possible, but I dont really find him overly contrarian and a lot of his views are relatively centrist to slight libertarian. I will say I think he looks for folks that he jives with more than most qualified for the subject. But really Im not here to defend Joe and honestly have not found a lot of compelling guests of late on his show. I just dont think he is as bad as he is sometimes made out to be.
You can pull it off if you've got integrity. John Stewart surely has plenty of integrity in my eyes. Joe's definitely also going for integrity, but maybe he's also liable to be pulled into the views of his guests. He certainly keeps an open mind, but if you surround yourself with a certain kind of people at some point you'll develop a bias no matter how open you're trying to be.
What's scarier are the persons who for the law are considered entertainment, but conduct themselves on Fox as if they're real journalists, and lie and deceive with impunity. If Joe Rogan could disrupt the right media with that, the same way John and maybe Stephen did on the left side, the world would be a better place for sure.
There is no real legal distinction between entertainers and journalists. The separation of news and editorial content is purely a matter of ethics and not law. Journalists don't have any special statutory privileges.
Nope. US courts have consistently held that the first amendment applies equally to everyone regardless of occupation. There is no special legal test to determine if someone is a member of the press. There are centuries of case law on this issue.
Journalists have (some) protection against being forced to testify about sources. I guess it becomes a philosophical question at that point whether being a journalist is an occupation or an action.
I actually think Rogan's approach is exactly the opposite of Stewart and Colbert (S&C). S&C would critique news organizations for failing to provide counterpoints. They would also earnestly advocate for their own views without feeling the need to provide counterpoints. Their justification was that they were entertainment - they believed what they were saying and didn't feel like they needed to properly inform on every element.
Rogan feels like he wants it both ways. He wants to pick the people for his show and get credit when he picks well, but if people dislike one of his picks he would suddenly like to be seen as 'mixing it up' or a "cage fight commentator." He won't really own a view (or the idea of wanting to expose people to particular thinkers), but he would rather bring people on in a way where he's seen as minimally responsible for the uncomfortable content he produces.
For a long time he thought the moon landing was fake. That's not a position you arrive at with reasoned science and understanding how the world works. He's stated he thinks Bigfoot could be real. He does the same thing on a myriad of other topics. He presents some random quack as just as valid as real science.
If he was just some random dude none of this would matter. But with 11 million followers, sometimes this "my youtube research is just as valid as your scientific research" attitude can do real harm, as it did with vaccines.
He's quite literally the "average Joe" (at least when he started). The reason he no longer thinks the moon landing is fake is because of reasoned science and understanding which he learned through the course of the show by talking to guests like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
If you invite me for dinner at your house and I spend 4 hours forcing you to convince me the Earth is round, even if I emerge with changed views, are we really going to be good friends after that?
That's up to you whether you can be friends with people who change your mind. I don't see why that's so hard but Rogan's changed opinion should be seen as a success story about learning.
Rogan changes his mind every time he talks to a guess with a different opinion. The opinion of someone who thinks the moon landing could be fake, or bigfoot could be real, should not be taken seriously by 11 million people when it comes to anything scientific. But sadly it is.
Rogan doesn't think either of those things, and really never the latter. It seems like you're basing all this on some outdated 2nd-hand source rather than actually listening to his podcast. And yes he's also fluid on views but stable on his values, like most people. That's how you can have hours of conversation instead of devolving into a heated debate, and maybe even share some knowledge by the end.
The more you claim to be the one to take seriously, the less serious anyone will want to take you. Especially if you do it in a negative fashion blocking others rather than putting out your own message. There's far more to influence, trust, and authenticity than claiming you're right or deducing everything to some rational puzzle, and perhaps that's the biggest lesson of all.
A fake moon landing would take a conspiracy of 1000s of people, all of whom have kept their mouths shut, even on their deathbeds. That's just one of many things which have had to happen that defy all common sense.
He was always into the conspiracy stuff, and it was usually pretty light and interesting. The tone and guests definitely changed around the time he moved to Austin (no knock on Austin, I love that place). Politics and stuff I guess.
Me too. I think his friend circle became almost entirely right leaning since the move and his viewpoints are no longer balanced. I listen to a few other podcasters who definitely can't called lefties, yet they manage to present things in nuanced and less biased ways. It doesn't seem like a very difficult thing to do, yet he fails at it miserably.
This has been my experience as well. Another commenter mentioned this but I also feel like guests have been less interesting since the move to Austin. I used to be a daily listener now I feel like it can be months between interesting episodes.
I think he's generally a good interviewer, and I like that he invites people from all sides of the spectrum, if anything, it helps me challenging my own ideas. Also, as a non-american, I feel this is entertaining and give me a glimpse of American culture.
That being said, I've lost interested mostly because his guests have been less interesting (lately, mostly his comedian/fighter friends).
BTW, anyone has good podcasts in the same vein to recommend?
I don't think that's accurate. Do you have some links or anything to back that up? Like actual transcripts, not some media interpretation.
"People say, do you think it's safe to get vaccinated? I've said, yeah, I think for the most part it's safe to get vaccinated. I do. I do," Rogan said on the podcast. "But if you're like 21 years old, and you say to me, should I get vaccinated? I'll go no. Are you healthy? Are you a healthy person?"
"If you're a healthy person, and you're exercising all the time, and you're young, and you're eating well," Rogan continued, "like, I don't think you need to worry about this."
If this is what you are referring to, is that really anti-vax?
> He's flat-out wrong; if you're 21, generally healthy, exercising, etc., you absolutely should get the vaccine.
While I generally agree with you, this is an opinion, not an unquestionable fact. Especially as we're seeing elevated risk of myocarditis in young men, there's absolutely a legitimate debate here.
I don't necessarily think Rogan is the one advancing that debate, but presenting opinions as facts is not helping anyone.
> Everyone who is eligible and medically able needs to get vaccinated. I'm getting super tired of all this garbage; the US has had the vaccine supply and capability to be out of the pandemic by now
That's a rather polarized position... what facts or experienced led you to this conclusion you stated? Specifically "the unvaccinated are screwing over the rest of us who are doing the right thing".
> That's a rather polarized position... what facts or experienced led you to this conclusion you stated? Specifically "the unvaccinated are screwing over the rest of us who are doing the right thing".
The fact that the unvaccinated are taking up all of the hospital beds in certain areas of the country..?
"Specifically "the unvaccinated are screwing over the rest of us who are doing the right thing"."
They're disproportionately taking up resources in hospitals for example, which do not have unlimited resources. We could be having a much better response right now [here in the U.S.] with less load on hospitals, but we're not, because of selfish and/or gullible people.
They're also making the pandemic & related economic measures last longer than necessary. I can't wait for the next shutdown(s) as more variants evolve then spread and hospitals become even more inundated. Meanwhile I look at places like South Korea which have had life continue relatively normal because people actually wear masks there instead of politicizing them.
Interesting. I'm not pro/anti vax or anything else, but I imagined unhealthy people were taking up hospital beds disproportionally. I was interested in why you felt the way you do; thanks for sharing your opinion.
The entire raison d'être of hospitals is to treat unhealthy people when they get sick and lessen or prevent healthy individuals from getting sick. So that statement is tautological.
Unvaccinated/maskless people [by choice] who then get sick with COVID and go to the hospital anyways are unnecessarily draining hospitals of their limited resources. Hospitals were already understaffed before COVID, and now unvaccinated/maskless people want the workers at hospitals to risk their lives and work around the clock to benefit people who basically flipped them (and science) off until they got sick and changed their tune. It's so hypocritical.
The highly infectious aspect of the disease makes it different from e.g. poor lifestyle habits or one off decisions. Every single COVID patient is taking up a bed/resources that could have gone to people who are unhealthy for reasons outside of their control, and there are hospitals completely at capacity due to COVID.
And not making a choice to be pro or anti-vax is a choice in itself. Choosing to not have an opinion means implicitly supporting the status quo, which where I am would mean implicitly supporting a bunch of unvaccinated, maskless people by choice draining our resources and having a flagrant disregard for their fellow citizens. That statement makes about as much sense as saying "I'm not pro or anti -science-".
There needs to be a very good reason(s) why one would be "neutral" about vaccines or science. Internet conspiracies don't count as good reasons, and the other side has has actual research and facts backing it up. Saying that one is just "neutral" about science or vaccines is semantically exactly the same as saying that one is anti-science or vaccines.
>Choosing to not have an opinion means implicitly supporting the status quo, which where I am would mean implicitly supporting a bunch of unvaccinated, maskless people
It most certainly does not, at least to a rational person. That's very cultish thinking.
The main purpose of getting the vaccine isn't just to protect yourself -- it's to reduce the chances of you transmitting it to others. It's about herd immunity, not personal immunity. Whether you're young and healthy is irrelevant.
> The main purpose of getting the vaccine isn't just to protect yourself -- it's to reduce the chances of you transmitting it to others. It's about herd immunity, not personal immunity.
Not about personal immunity? Why did we roll it out by age group then?
Older people as a group require more care when they get sick. Additionally, elderly group living was being hit the hardest by the pandemic, especially early on.
It wasn't about saving the most lives per se. It was about reducing the load on the medical system. I suspect those outcomes are strongly correlated.
How can you think it was about anything but saving lives? The cognitive dissonance and mental gymnastics in this thread is incredible. The vaccine offers personal immunity thats why we gave it to the most at risk groups first.
Herd immunity is not possible with our current vaccines[1], which means that coronavirus will continue to propagate through society whether you decide to get vaccinated or not.
You can make the argument that getting vaccinated reduces the risk of you being hospitalized, which keeps a bed and a nurse available for someone else.
Thats a much more valid argument to make.
>Herd immunity is not possible with our current vaccines, which means that coronavirus will continue to propagate through society
This is my understanding as well, which was why I decided to get vaccinated. If avoiding infection is impossible in the long run, I should help my immune system prepare for it.
I wonder how differently things would be going if the campaign was "Covid is here to stay. You will get it. Get vaccinated."
>I wonder how differently things would be going if the campaign was "Covid is here to stay. You will get it. Get vaccinated."
I actually heard someone say that today, but I don't remember where. Maybe Breaking Points, but not sure.
I was certainly rattled when I saw amateur video of hospital workers stacking bodies in a freezer truck in NYC. They should do more like that. As morbid as it is, it gets the point across.
Yes that's anti-vax. We get vaccinated not just to protect ourselves from death, but also to protect those around us by reducing the transmission of disease.
Except that all the existing evidence suggests your argument is backwards. Whilst Covid-19 vaccination doesn't provide full protection for either the vaccinated or those around them, it seems to be much more effective at protecting the person being vaccinated against severe symptoms, hospitalization and death than it does at stopping them catching and spreading the virus to others. As far as I can tell, literally the only reason vaccination is primarily framed as a way of protecting others is because that framing fits better into left-wing politics; it has nothing to do with the actual evidence.
According to the CDC, each vaccine efficacy at preventing the recipient from catching the virus. To your point they also reduces severity of symptoms. Looks like the J&J one ain't that great at prevention.
Based on evidence from clinical trials in people 16 years and older, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was 95% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed infection with the virus that causes COVID-19 in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
Based on evidence from clinical trials, in people aged 18 years and older, the Moderna vaccine was 94.1% effective at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received two doses and had no evidence of being previously infected.
The J&J/Janssen COVID-19 Vaccine was 66.3% effective in clinical trials (efficacy) at preventing laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection in people who received the vaccine and had no evidence of being previously infected. People had the most protection 2 weeks after getting vaccinated.
That's from the clinical trials, which are like two variants behind what people are actually being exposed to in the wild right now. The vaccines are much less effective at preventing people from catching and spreading the currently-circulating Delta variant than the original one which those numbers were based on. Firstly, they don't stop people from catching the virus nearly as well, and secondly vaccinated people who do catch the virus seem to have comparable viral load and spread it just as well as the unvaccinated. Also, the Delta variant is just better at spreading in general, which itself means a more effective vaccine would be needed in order to prevent everyone from inevitably catching it.
It's more nuanced than that. Prior to the delta variant, there was strong evidence that the vaccines also prevented you from being a carrier of the virus in most cases.
The calculus with delta is different, as it does seem that vaccinated people can spread delta. But the severity of that spread, as well as the amount of time a vaccinated person can spread it, is certainly lower than that of an unvaccinated person.
Yeah, it is! People thinking they don't need the vaccine are contracting COVID and acting like human petri dishes for new variants to arise from. It's also ignoring the reality of COVID aftereffects (like parosmia) that affect young people who recover too.
How do you come to that conclusion? Specifically your conflusion that Joe Rogan is "anti-vax" from your sample of him replying "I'll go no". If that's all it takes for you to label someone, is someone saying "I'll go no" to a homosexual encounter also anti-gay? Is someone who doesn't agree with their governments policy anti-government? Might want to relax a bit...I hear opinions are like certain body parts. We've all got them, including Joe Rogan, and getting up in arms about it doesn't help you or anyone else.
I like his choice of guests (high percentage of scientists and interesting people, even if some of them are conspiracy theorists) and that he mostly lets people talk. But I lost a lot of respect for him after his recent MMA commentary. I've never seen such biased commentary in any sport as his in Adesanya vs Blachowicz. It was absurd.
Yeah, to be fair, that never happened. What did happen is him saying that if you're older you should stay home and if you're younger you should be alright with masks, which at the time was the same message that you'd hear in the media.
> He recently pointed to a 5 year old paper to suggest that vaccinations are bad because they allow more virulent strains to come about.
Papers from the 1900s are still our best description of some physical phenomena. A paper's age, taken on its own, has nothing to do with truth or untruth.
Yeah, that's about exactly when I stopped listening to him. Listening to him talk shop with other comedians was always entertaining. But "serious" Joe is a whackjob, yes-man, and meat-head.
It's hard to listen to recently, he's suggesting working out and eating vitamins instead of a vaccine. He still has an influence on people and he's spreading misinformation.
Rogan is against wearing masks but demands all of his guests to be tested for COVID-19 before going on his show which is kind of contradictory.
All of us are right and wrong to varying degrees. I don't think Joe Rogan cares much for people that stop listening because he doesn't reinforce their politics. He never has.
He's also spoken about the whole point of him having FU money is that he is able to say whatever he wants and not care about the blowback.
I'm not anti-vax, but ultimately, my body, my choice. People who are risk averse are free to self-quarantine for any duration they please. Us, the unvaccinated, are happy to live freely and face any associated risks - just like people who decide to ride motorcycles, play combat sports, or eat homegrown food.
I think that's OK, as long as you accept the consequence of being outcast from society - ie not allowed to interact or go into a public place where you are a threat. "Not making other people sick during a pandemic" is a pretty reasonable prerequisite for social interaction.
I don't know what you are referring to. Homegrown food? It can have parasites bro. If that's not what you're referring to, no need to play guessing games. Be specific.
> Us, the unvaccinated, are happy to live freely and face any associated risks
So I assume you agree to not come running to the hospital when you get infected, taking away beds for other patients who shouldn't have to suffer because of your ignorance?
Uhh, no -- although your politics have driven you to salivate at the sight of an unvaccinated person in a deathbead so you can scream, "I told you so!", no -- I will happily go to the hospital if I need to. Why? Because "I'm willing to take the risk" does not mean that accepting death is a requirement (unfortunately for you).
Oh, and getting COVID and needing hospitalization absolutely does not mean that I will be taking away a bed from someone who needs it. You're so desperate to spew your hate that you actually made that strawman assumption; that's laughable. If you were actually honest, you would know that after the shortage of beds and ventilators, hospitals are now much, much better prepared to handle spikes in hospitalizations.
It appears the only ignorance here is yours, buddy.
> Us, the unvaccinated, are happy to live freely and face any associated risks - just like people who decide to ride motorcycles, play combat sports, or eat homegrown food.
I think you've got the wrong analogies going there. You, the unvaccinated, are principally putting yourselves at risk but you are also, and more importantly, putting others at increased risk of transmission from yourself.
Adjusting your content for accuracy: you, the unvaccinated, are not allowed by society to do anything you want. Just like you cannot drive drunk, shoot firearms inside city limits, urinate on the street, sell poop sandwiches as a food product, etc.
I know. We, the vaccinated, are also not free to do whatever we want. If the chance of transmission between vaccinated & unvaccinated ever equalizes, there would obviously be no reason for different treatment. But just because vaccinated people can transmit doesn't mean they are as likely to.
Because he's anti-vax. This is the future where everyone says they're not aligned with whatever idea then does everything they can to promote and propagate that idea. They'll even deny that the idea exists while spreading it as far as they can.
There are plenty of situations in which we as a society have decided that freedoms are curbed to protect the masses. Drunk driving laws for instance. If you are putting people around you at risk, it seems perfectly reasonable to me to require you to stay home, not all the other people who have taken the easy trivial precautions (vaccines and masks) necessary to protect those around them.
You are not wrong, you are just incredibly selfish. If it was not for selfish people, we would not have to worry about deciding things at the society-level.
Covid vaccinations have only been proven to protect the vaccinated from severe outcomes. They don't prevent infection or re-transmission. There's no valid claim to pushing this on those that don't want them.
Of course I agree that those who do not want vaccines should not be forced. But they also should not get to ruin everything for the rest of us. The r coefficient for vaccinated people is drastically lower leading to protecting those that can not get vaccinated (whom, I guess, unvaccinated people do not mind screwing over). And vaccinated people are not taking away ICU beds from people suffering from non-prevetable diseases.
This is nonsense. The causal feature of the people saturating ICU capacities is that they are unvaccinated, not obese. It also matters that getting vaccinated is a cheap safe triviality, while getting into a healthy BMI range is an expensive long process (but I would agree that it should be encouraged).
It's the calories that count for obesity, not the "healthiness". It's perfectly possible to maintain a healthy body weight eating chips and drinking soda. Time isn't a factor here, personal responsibility is.
Yes, I am on the same page that all you need is a bit of discipline (and some baseline amount of crucial nutrients not present in cheap calory sources). But we all have about the same "discipline reserve", and some have harder life circumstances that expend that reserve on more urgent things than lunch. And this snowballs after it happens once. But to be fair, I do not really know what is the percentage of "well-off cushy fat people without a modicum of health discipline" vs "money-poor and time-poor stressed depressed fat people". I do suspect the latter group is bigger, and just yapping about "personal responsibility" kinda misses the point in that case.
You don't need to be money-poor to be time-poor and stressed. Just as with other vices, it's a matter of priorities - do you prioritize your near-term comfort or your long-term wellbeing? People can make either choice, but I expect them to take responsibility for the outcome.
They both reduce infections and reduce transmission.
The VE is reduced with delta, but its still nonzero (most of the studies of what it really is are still incredibly poor though, but nothing has show it to be below 50% VE against infection).
The initial comparable viral load studies are also all bad. All they did was compare Ct of RNA loads. We now know that there is less infectious virus in vaccinated individuals, and that Ct values themselves decline faster, which indicates they're producing more viral debris -- we expect studies of transmission to show that they transmit less. Older studies from earlier this year against Alpha found that 80% of vaccinated breakthrough infections produced zero transmitted secondary infections with the other 20% only infecting 1-3 other people.
That is sufficient enough impact on infection and transmission to end the pandemic if everyone was vaccinated.
Unfortunately, everyone, including many scientists are panicking in the face of uncertainty over the delta variant and assuming the absolute worst and spreading worst-case messages which are portraying vaccines as not being worthwhile, when they're still effective enough.
Calling people anti-vax and anti-mask when they clearly aren't is no different from bullying. By the way, there are plenty of scientists from top institutions like Stanford and even Nobel Prize winners who have spoken against many of the mainstream Covid narratives. Not sure how people like you with no medical domain expertise and experience have the gall to question valid concerns from respected doctors and scientists.
EDIT: Downvoted for pointing out smearing/bullying and dropping factual information. @dang - is this what HN is about? This has got to change.
Maybe it's for the best. He's a comedian who doesn't know anything about anything (and freely admits this to be the case), he shouldn't really have that much "influence". $100M in the bank sure is nice, I bet.
I still listen to JRE for free on Spotify and I have had complete strangers strike up a conversation with me about recent episodes. I love that you can listen to episodes while the app is minimized on iOS unlike Youtube.
Not surprised this degenerated immediately into a mass ranting session about pandemic science with pretty much the entire catalog of cognitive biases and logical fallacies on display.
I guess that's interesting to some, from a sociological standpoint, but for me, there's more than enough of this on literally every other social media platform.
I'm interested in a discussion about the actual dynamic of spotify vs youtube dissemination and whether the claims made in the article are valid. Because the entire premise is backed by the "secondary metric" of how many Twitter followers a guest's account grew by -- this seems pretty ripe for confounding variables, like the appeal of the guest, auxiliary appearances elsewhere, the news cycle at the time overlapping with the guest's subject matter, and other things.
If you took Rogan's podcast and transported it back to, say, 2014, there would be no controversy. He would simply be seen as a liberal comedian having casual, friendly conversations with a wide variety of people.
It's just that we're currently in the middle of a moral panic and the self righteous authoritarian hall monitor types are having their day in the sun. Just as we saw in the 80s/90s with Howard Stern who was offending similarly delicate sensibilities. Although today's empowered puritans are not the same group that went after Howard, they are of the same cloth, merely rebranded to the time. It's an unfortunate recurring bug of America.
Frankly I find it incredibly boring, anti-intellectual, anti-curious and absolutely stifling. The sooner we all get back to ignoring them the better.
The problem is that the self-righteous authoritarian hall monitors now seem to comprise the majority of the U.S. population and nearly everyone I have a professional interaction with.
Maybe it's the time of day, but HN is usually good at cutting through the usual politicised stuff, and just discussing the issue at hand.
At the end of the day, Spotify isn't a Podcasts platform, and nobody I know associates Spotify with podcasts. Surely somebody on Rogan's team knew this, but I suspect the money was simply too good to pass up. Imagine starting a FinTech SaaS with the sole purpose of being acquired, and then being offered $100m by a Biotech company. I'd probably take it.
There is probably something to this analysis, particularly for new listeners. (Rogan might be big enough that new listeners are less important?) Spotify has chosen not to use these other platforms to the extent that it could use them. This is an example (perhaps the canonical one?) of Ben Thompson's "strategy tax". For an individual podcast, it would be better to have something on all platforms/protocols/modalities. They want to attract Youtube viewers as well as RSS subscribers as well as everyone else. A capitalist firm like Spotify that wants to make a little money every time anyone ever listens to anything is comfortable losing a bit on every show it produces, if it can convince investors that doing so could bring about their favored apocalypse of rent-seeking. Each show is taxed to benefit the firm's long-term strategy.
Spofity seems to have modeled its Rogan acquisition as a platform crossover event. Lots of loyal Rogan listeners had never installed a Spotify app, and now a certain percentage of those people have. However, the way Spofity have structured this, as a one-time thing in which Rogan no longer reaches other platforms in comparable ways, seems to limit the potential benefit of this maneuver.
The reason I no longer listen to Rogan's podcast is that it is no longer an actual podcast. My players are still pointed at his RSS feed, but that thing is dead. I have no interest in using special apps published by Spotify to listen to something that used to be available in the normal way. I realize that is a fairly odd preference, but it satisfies the categorical imperative. I'm not the only person who strongly prefers to listen in a particular way. Spofity's strategy is different from that of many patronage-supported podcasts, which publish e.g. half of their episodes publicly, with ads encouraging people who would like more episodes to send money. Those podcasts are marketed in a more open way than Rogan's.
This sounds right to me. Big tech is very eager to deplatform anyone who holds contrarian views against the status quo, and this is especially true with regards to vaccine and politics.
In some ways being on Spotify with a multimillion dollar contract actually offers some decent protection. Hopefully he's got a good contract.
I like listening to Joe. And I always wonder what everyone complains about.
But then I heard an anti-vax rant he did that was completely ill-informed. Made me a bit sad. https://youtu.be/tiwsv51Il4k I think he gets a bit too high sometimes.
Echochamber effect here I presume. Joe Rogan is doing just fine on Spotify. He can choose not to extend at the end of his contract, go back to YouTube and continue just where he left off.
No, it asks for any specific example of how one might suggest he is doing "just fine". I would just like to see why someone thinks this article is incorrect, not simply that they think so. I would be fine with someone suggesting an alternative to constant growth as an example.
Just like Howard Stern (note, SiriusXM also owns Spotify). They traded a broader audience and greater influence for stability and gigantic paychecks. E.g., in Howard's case, even though his personal influence shrunk, his importance to Sirius/Spotify grew as a fraction of the subscriber base is dedicated to one talent and would otherwise unsubscribe. Howard's deal has been renewed a number of times now. I can't blame anyone involved.
Stern tried to adapt, and with a degree of success. He came from the "Shock Jock", Andrew Dice Clay era, but shifted in recent years to become much softer and "woke".
this makes more sense for Stern because his audience is much narrower than Rogan's. Stern moving from terrestrial radio gave him more "freedom," whereas the same can't be said for Rogan. also, Stern took the deal when he had been established voice in radio for decades, whereas Rogan was (to my understanding) just reaching his height of popularity before the exclusivity deal began.
> this makes more sense for Stern because his audience is much narrower than Rogan's.
In what way was Stern's audience narrower at all than Rogan's? Stern narrowed his audience when he moved to Sirius, but so did Rogan, apparently. When Stern was in syndication and on E!, he had as general an audience as any radio personality (back when people listened to the radio.) Rogan has a very narrow demographic as far as I can see, and virtually that entire demo is a subset of who listened to or watched Stern during what was something like a 15 year long peak.
> Rogan has a very narrow demographic as far as I can see, and virtually that entire demo is a subset of who listened to or watched Stern during what was something like a 15 year long peak.
really? I was under the impression that Rogan skewed much younger. (at least compared to the Stern audience when he made his platform jump.) and sure Stern narrowed his audience when he moved to satellite, but wasn't he already a bit past his prime at that point?
It's questionable whether online 'influencers' actually influence anyone beyond getting them to watch or listen to their show. What they definitely have is an audience, and that is valuable to the advertisers and marketers who do influence people, as well as prospective guests who want to promote themselves or a cause. I think influencers' main value for advertisers is acting as a magnet for certain demographics, providing another way to do targeted marketing.
Maybe Joe's viewers will all start doing stand-up. :-)
There was a marketing study of influencers from Rakuten Marketing that indicates that advertising through influencer channels produces positive sales results. But again, it's not clear that the influencer actually drove the purchases, versus just drawing an audience that was predisposed to make those purchases in the first place.
Which is an absolutely fascinating case-study! It's easy to just write it off as "kids mimicking content creator for attention" but it goes so much deeper than this because it's a learned subconscious reaction to stress. It's like tapping your feet or biting your nails but interesting because it's verbal. It's kinda like if you say "like" or "um" to fill space when talking you never really have to think about it but you can stop if you practice.
Not true. The owner of a TV station gets paid, and they aren't influencing anyone. They're simply brokering advertising. I'm open to evidence that influencers actually exert personal influence on their audience, I just haven't seen any yet.
Podcasts for the most part were in the ideal state for consumers, almost always free and mostly client independent distributed w/ RSS. I don't think there is much of any argument that Spotify can improve that state for consumers by taking a podcast exclusive. These deals are just payouts for the hosts not investments that make the shows better. Most even very successful podcasts likely have low opex (some exceptions like NYT Daily) and don't benefit from a big pile of cash.
On a different note regarding the Rogan Deal, Spotify took ages to add video streaming support on Apple TV (main way I would catch Rogan) which basically caused me to quit casual watching. They also only recently added offline playback for Apple Watch and even then it's premium exclusive and requires manual downloading of eps. I don't understand at all why an enormous company like Spotify is so neglectful of the entire apple ecosystem.