‘If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.’ When the host isn’t an expert.
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Patrik Jonsson Staff writer
The audience total for “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast at times bests TV networks like Fox News and MSNBC. For his primarily male, 18-to-25-year-old listeners, providing back-channel information on topics such as forgotten human civilizations and bodybuilding supplements hits the sweet spot.
Yet Mr. Rogan himself acknowledges that he’s no expert. In a recent comedy show, he said, “I talk [crud] for a living – that’s why this is so baffling to me. If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault?”
Why We Wrote This
Vaccine misinformation on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast has revived demands for streaming platforms to monitor their content. Who’s responsible, ultimately, for assessing truth?
The Rogan controversy comes amid a growing debate as to whether the marketplace of ideas should come with warning labels. Audiences are drawn to everyman personas rather than to experts. And Americans are clamoring for both open debate (for people they agree with) and accountability (for those they don’t) in a country where the right to speak freely is enshrined in the Constitution.
“Audiences, at least for the moment, are calling for everyone to take a stand,” says Professor Sigal Ben-Porath. “You can say it’s a mob and sometimes it is. The difference between audience and mob is in the eye of the beholder. So, who decides what merits a response?”
When controversy erupted over the edgy banter of the “Fear Factor” host-turned-podcaster Joe Rogan, Jonathan Jarry wasn’t surprised.
After all, Mr. Jarry, co-host of “The Body of Evidence” podcast, had delved into “The Joe Rogan Experience” months before the podcast and its platform, the media streamer Spotify, took heat for using racist and misogynist language and spreading misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines.
His finding: Though Mr. Rogan’s show is seductive and “delicious,” especially to young male viewers, it often sends conflicting or inaccurate messages about not just science, but how science works. The show swirls around a recurring theme: The government and its media lackeys aren’t telling the truth. Joe Rogan and his guests will.
Why We Wrote This
Vaccine misinformation on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast has revived demands for streaming platforms to monitor their content. Who’s responsible, ultimately, for assessing truth?
“You just can’t say whatever you want, wherever you want, whenever you want to,” says Mr. Jarry, a science communicator with the McGill Office of Science and Society in Montreal. Tech companies and popular podcasters “are growing into a responsibility they didn’t seek out, but that they have to meet,” he adds.
The pandemic’s large death toll, which has topped 900,000 in the United States, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate election showed many Americans the dangers posed by lies and misinformation distributed globally by algorithms and conspiracy hawkers.
The Rogan controversy comes amid a growing debate as to whether the marketplace of ideas should come with warning labels. It also comes amid efforts on the right and left to silence those with whom they disagree, whether on podcasts or in history classrooms. Free speech advocates would argue that one person’s irresponsible speech is another’s freewheeling conversation. Nor is groupthink always accurate, so silencing unpopular speech holds its own perils.
Mr. Rogan isn’t the only celebrity facing blowback for on-air remarks. ABC punished “The View” host Whoopi Goldberg with a suspension for suggesting that the Holocaust wasn’t about race, despite Ms. Goldberg having apologized. Substack, a platform for writers, has been dinged for making money from writers espousing anti-vaccination views.
At a time when attention spans are short and trust is an increasingly rare commodity, audiences are, by many measures, drawn to everyman personas rather than to experts. And Americans are clamoring for both open debate (for people they agree with) and accountability (for those they don’t) in a country where the right to speak freely is enshrined in the Constitution.
“The issue isn’t really who is undermining each other or canceling each other,” says Sigal Ben-Porath, a professor in the literacy, culture, and international education division of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. “It’s that audiences, at least for the moment, are calling for everyone to take a stand. You can say it’s a mob and sometimes it is. The difference between audience and mob is in the eye of the beholder. So, who decides what merits a response?”
What is a platform’s responsibility?
One name pops up: a Swedish guitar player and tech pioneer named Daniel Ek.
As a teenager, the now 30-something Mr. Ek built websites from his home in the Stockholm suburbs. His parents didn’t know he was on his way to becoming wealthy until they saw him carrying large-screen TVs into his room.
After founding and selling several startups, Mr. Ek co-founded Spotify as a way to combat piracy by creating a wide-open music universe, supported by ads and subscriptions.
In 2012, he told a conference in New York: “I’m just interested in building a company that doesn’t necessarily change lives but adapts people’s behavior. I’m naive enough to think things will always work out, and I don’t fully understand how hard things are.”
He is now finding out.
Mr. Ek has taken a somewhat muddled stand. Claiming he has no editorial control, he nevertheless applauded what he called Mr. Rogan’s decision to remove 113 episodes, some of which featured white nationalists and others where he used the N-word in conversation, though he maintains he intended no racist animus.
The company has vowed to add warning labels to shows that challenge scientific consensus and is investing $100 million – the reported amount it paid for exclusive rights to the show – in artists from underrepresented communities.
“I realize that some still want more,” Mr. Ek wrote earlier this week in a company memo. “And I want to make one point very clear – I do not believe that silencing Joe is the answer. We should have clear lines around content and take action when they are crossed, but canceling voices is a slippery slope. Looking at the issue more broadly, it’s critical thinking and open debate that powers real and necessary progress.”
Yet questions remain about Mr. Rogan’s show.
With an audience total that at times bests TV networks like Fox News and MSNBC, Mr. Rogan, who is in his 50s, has found a formula that Mr. Jarry has called “heroin for the adolescent mind.”
His primarily male audience hits the 18-to-25-year-old sweet spot. He provides back-channel information on topics such as forgotten human civilizations and bodybuilding supplements. He has done a show while high on the drug psilocybin. He endorsed the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. To some of his fans, Mr. Rogan is a “Galileo figure” who uncovers mind-expanding knowledge that has been kept secret.
“There is something very attractive about this kind of basement-level discussion of, like, ‘Hey, we’re away from the mainstream media, we’re having this discussion, and it’s very quiet. We sound very rational; we’ve got microphones very close to our mouths for a very intimate sound,’” says Mr. Jarry, the “Body of Evidence” podcaster. The audience is there “like a fly on the wall.”
After apologizing for his use of the N-word in the past and vowing to expand his roster of guests, Mr. Rogan addressed the controversy at a comedy show in Austin, Texas, this week.
“I talk [expletive deleted] for a living – that’s why this is so baffling to me,” Mr. Rogan said. “If you’re taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? What dumb [expletive deleted] were you about to do when my stupid idea sounded better? ... If you want my advice, don’t take my advice.”
But at least some people do. A Washington Post survey found that regular listeners of Mr. Rogan were 18% less likely to vaccinate than occasional listeners, though it’s very likely those listeners came to the show armed with views similar to Mr. Rogan’s libertarian mindset.
“Words don’t kill people”
The White House weighed in last week, urging Spotify to do more to counter misinformation, especially about vaccines.
Neil Young kicked off a protest by asking Spotify to remove his music catalog, which it did. Former bandmates David Crosby, Graham Nash, and Stephen Stills followed suit. So did musician India.Arie, citing Mr. Rogan’s usage of the N-word. Podcaster and author Roxane Gay also removed herself from the platform. Some of the artists say they are not asking for Mr. Rogan to be censored, but they do not wish their work to stand with his.
“I am not demanding his removal,” the singer Mr. Crosby wrote on Twitter. “I am removing me. Rogan has a right to spew his [junk]. Spotify has a right to choose money over truth. I have a right to not want to be associated with [jerks].”
The blowback comes as veteran recording artists are reconsidering some of their material. The Rolling Stones self-canceled “Brown Sugar” for its references to slavery. Elvis Costello removed the hit “Oliver’s Army” from his catalog for its mention of the N-word.
Winston Marshall, a British musician who quit the American band Mumford & Sons after blowback for his conservative views, called the current protest “lateral censorship – artists trying to shut down other artists.”
Indeed, defenders of Mr. Rogan may have a deeper point: The impulse to shut down uncomfortable, inappropriate, or even possibly dangerous speech can backfire.
Blaming free speech for society’s ills goes back to Socrates, who was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens. John Stuart Mill argued that citizens in a democracy must constantly hold their dearest beliefs up to scrutiny.
“The truth is that words don’t kill people,” says Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School. “In that way, the internet is a net good in that it ... allows for the most robust development of ideas and examination of ideas and debate of ideas. And that’s what’s the best test for truth. ... If you don’t do that, it’s going to become a dead dogma, and it might also be a false one. And you’re never going to persuade anybody through coercion, including censorial coercion.”
Duking it out in the marketplace of ideas
One answer is that Spotify and other tech companies are increasingly using advisories or warnings to flag potential misinformation.
One Massachusetts Institute of Technology study, however, found that such advisories may make it more likely for people to distrust information contained in articles without warnings.
But the study also showed that listeners and readers were largely open to accepting such warnings, even if they weren’t “concordant” with their political outlook.
Those results “are not consistent with the idea that our reasoning powers are hijacked by our partisanship,” David Rand, a business professor at MIT in Cambridge, told his university’s press office.
The issue in many ways boils down to the waning power of long-standing institutions – including the government, media, and political parties – even as Americans are searching for information to explain a changing society struggling to build trust across ideological lines.
“You have a really open [media] landscape where people like Joe Rogan can hustle,” says Professor Ben-Porath. “The incentive structure is built around rage rather than thoughtful engagement. At the same time, society’s values are changing” around what is acceptable and what is not. “Societies are not like atomic clocks. We change and evolve over time.”
Mr. Jarry has his own role to play in that evolution. “The Body of Evidence” shares space with “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Spotify’s servers.
Wendy Zukerman, an Australian American who hosts the show “Science Vs.,” said on her show this week that she’s not going to drop any new episodes unless they are focused on combating specific misinformation on Spotify.
But “Body of Evidence” – which uses vignettes, music, and person-on-the-street interviews to punctuate scientific debates – will go on as planned.
For one thing, says Mr. Jarry, his audience is fairly small, so it would not be much of a protest if he removed the podcast.
But he says his insights into the draw and impact of Mr. Rogan’s show have in some ways reinvigorated his own mission to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas.
The best he can do right now is not to self-cancel, he says, but “to add a bit of good information to counteract the bad.”
