I listen occasionally. I generally find his conversations interesting, and sometimes even enlightening. But it can be frustrating to hear 3 hours of unchallenged straw man beatdowns from his more polemic guests. There's an argument that it's actually not noble to let bullshit go unchallenged. That it's a tacit endorsement.
>But it can be frustrating to hear 3 hours of unchallenged straw man beatdowns from his more polemic guests.
This is a philosophical position: do you see the interview as a way to learn or understand how someone else thinks on specific topics, or do you want to use the interview as a club to tell them why they are wrong (and virtue signal to your audience how right you are).
I find it much worse for a biased, or uninformed interviewer challenging a guest on every point they make (usually by relying on slogans, talking-points or simply a strawman of their position) - making the entire conversation an exercise in frustration for the interviewee and the listener.
>There's an argument that it's actually not noble to let bullshit go unchallenged.
Bullshit according to whom? Joe Rogan had Bernie Sanders on recently, I can tell you right now, a good half of what Bernie was saying was pure bullshit. I'm pretty sure Bernie supporters would disagree with that.
>Something ironically the adversarial 1min sound bytes hadn’t achieved
My take on this is that some journalists just parrot the talking points of the party or some faction from the political party they are affiliated with. So when they interview Bernie, they will pepper Bernie with questions that, for example, the Warren or Biden campaigns provided them with. And those questions will always be leading questions of the form "Have you stopped beating your wife".
do you see the interview as a way to learn or understand how someone else thinks on specific topics
Except Rogan isn't necessarily even good at that. All you'll really learn about are the talking points they want to present to the world. Without pushing them on some issues or asking them to argue or defend those points it's impossible to understand how they actually think about the issues. Or as someone else in this thread put it, if you're not pushing back at any point then it's just an infomercial.
>Except Rogan isn't necessarily even good at that.
That's a subjective assessment. I think Rogan is very good actually, and there was circumstances when he skewered the interviewee by simply asking them to clarify their position. The recent example of this was his interview with Bari Weiss, who had the self-inflicted misfortune to simply assert that Tulsi Gabbard is an "Assad Toadie" and Joe Rogan, politely, asked her to clarify - and Bari fell over herself and couldn't even define what 'toadie' meant in context. I've never seen that kind of politie (and unintended) evisceration on network TV.
>All you'll really learn about are the talking points they want to present to the world.
It's actually quite hard to delegate to talking points in a 3 hour freeform conversation. I would argue that the alternative, the 60 Minutes-style interview format which wholly consists of talking points and sharp edits to fit a narrative. Those kinds of interviews are much more prone to simply generic speech as the interviewee tries as hard as they can to be uncontroversial because they know the interviewer is actively trying to catch them buggle some phrase, and then push this sound bite in every preview of the interview.
>Without pushing them on some issues or asking them to argue or defend those points it's impossible to understand how they actually think about the issues.
That's what makes him great. He's humble about his level of knowledge. He knows he's ignorant about many things. Referencing the Bari Weiss interview, how many interviewers would ever admit to not understanding a word or a concept and genuinely asking for a definition. This is in sharp contrast to "mainstream" interviewers pretending they are experts, when it is painfully obvious they are not.
>Or as someone else in this thread put it, if you're not pushing back at any point then it's just an infomercial.
You say that and maybe it feels that this should be true, but if you actually listen to his interviews, it just doesn't come of as an infomercial. I keep going back to contrasting mainstream interviews which in fact, do come off fake, wooden and infomercial-like.
> There's an argument that it's actually not noble to let bullshit go unchallenged.
I like that he leaves it up to me to challenge the bullshit in my own mind. Sometimes I need to parse information with only one set of external biases influencing my cognitive process, instead of factoring in the interviewer's biases as well. They are likely both full of shit to some degree.
> That it's a tacit endorsement.
This is like thinking everyone should stand up for everything all the time. It's just silly.
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