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He does? Always found him uninteresting most of the time. I remember one of the times he had Jocko Willink on his podcast and in the first few minutes of the discussion Jocko said he doesn’t like talking to people who talk a lot without saying anything. He evidently caught amnesia momentarily and forgot where he was.
Joe’s a guy who’s a mile wide and an inch deep. Along with Jocko. A lot of his conversations feel like 3 hours of a 30 second attention span. I like the complexity that often builds in difficult conversation that feels like it has the opportunity to yield breakthroughs and new insights into things. Boring and bland conversation leaves very little that’s new to be said. The takedown videos of some of his guests were always far more entertaining and informative than the discussions he’s ever had with them. That’s also why I like Theo Von more than Rogan. Especially where he interviews people like the NYC garbage man and the New York firefighter. You actually learn things from those people, and you find yourself hanging on the next spoken sentence of his guest throughout the whole interview.
Same thing is true with personalities like Michael Franzese. Guy talks a lot. Says very little. Unless he’s going to directly divulge information about where Hoffa’s buried, most of his content is boring. I think anticipation brings in his viewers more than anything he’s ever said. People are wanting him to deliver the answers on things he can’t reveal. And I get it. There’s no statute of limitations on murder. You can be sure law enforcement is watching every one of his videos for clues of past activities he may have been involved in. But to me he’s never had any appeal, specifically for reasons like that.
Joe Rogan has always been mid, and I will fite anyone who disagrees.
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I mean, relative to his guest here.
Joe offers him: "Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau's real father" and he doesn't want to go there. Obviously it's not true, but you could at least have some fun with it. Okay. Maybe it's a bad look for a prime ministerial candidate to be engaging in that kind of conspiracy talk, fine. Joe offers him: "hey, how'd you lose that election you were supposed to win? wtf happened there?" Doesn't engage with that either. A human response would have been something like: "yeah, that really stung. I have no idea. Trump warped politics. The NDP collapsed and our multi-party country does that sometimes." I dunno. That would have been real conversation.
Instead we got Pierre waxing philosophical about the Westminster system and being the leader of the opposition. Boooooring.
It's irritating how 'conservatives' haven't figured out how to call themselves 'reform' yet. To a degree, the under-40s have figured that out anyway (and the label's just for the benefit of the Boomers, much like 'liberal's are the enemy of classical liberalism these days no matter what the old think), but I'd rather have someone intelligent talk frankly about it than just jacking off in the corner Politics 1.0 style.
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Well to me the whole entire discussion seems boring. I’d be much more stimulated arguing about the mechanics of flushing a toilet than that.
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My impression of Rogan has always been a variant of that old joke about D&D: "twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours".
Every time Rogan has ever been recommended to me, my impression has been that it's 15-20 minutes of interesting conversation spread throughout hours of dull, meandering small-talk. I do not think that Rogan respects my time as a potential listener, and so I do not give it to him.
I don't think you can get those nuggets of value without the meandering.
Rogan needs to create an environment where the person is drawn in, talks about a bunch of off topic stuff, gets relaxed, and gets to to share some of their "texture."
If he had a 15-20 interview the person would just stay on message and do the press junket thing.
But the ratio feels disrespectful to listeners who aren't already invested fans willing to sift through hours of filler for 15 good minutes. The meandering is the main event, loaded with Rogan specific easter eggs that his guest had clearly rehearsed for. I'll take the press junket thing.
Sure! Some people go to Rogan so that they get to have the "access," if that's not for you well that's that clips are for.
A lot of podcasts have variable model where some people watch the whole thing, some people watch the sound bytes, some watch clips that vary in size from a few minutes to big ass chunks.
In order to get all of those you need the base thing though.
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I don’t criticize him for failing to live up to my preferences given that his show isn’t targeted at people like me. But it’s a staple of his podcast unlike say Dan Carlin’s, in that you have to wade through 1 or 2 or sometimes 3 hours just to find a valuable nugget in it. That’s something I’m less willing to do. Podcasts are a useful stepping stone to kicking it up a notch, but I’m still someone who prefers to read a book or listen to it in audio format when I have free time.
If you listen to Mike Duncan’s History of Rome podcast, it’s amateur history done well. The conversational format that summarized his work was done well, even though it still caters more to junk food intellectualism. His work hasn’t been received well by historians. Academics that have read The Storm Before the Storm for instance have reviewed it and said “… he’s just aping what Appian and Plutarch have said…” “Pop” history isn’t “history.” In fact, actual “history” is very boring IMO. It’s learning foreign languages, academics debating dry, arcane details that are inaccessible to the understanding of a lay audience. So even then, it’d be unfair and biased for me to knock on Rogan, because I also enjoy people like Duncan, despite knowing much of what he’s done is flawed.
Are you sure about this or just convinced by their argument? I think academics are arguing in bad faith here. I think they’re insanely jealously of people like Duncan. These “amateurs” that are able to get an audience and minor celebrity while they toil away. I sense extreme resentment. I don’t know if Mike Duncan’s history is good or bad from a technical perspective. I do know I don’t trust an academic to assess it fairly.
I don’t get the vibe that many historians are simply failed fame diggers. And even if some secretly harbored envy for the notoriety of someone like Duncan, they’ve given intellectual reasons and made the case for why his work is not historically reliable. And I’ve read enough about the period to detect when Duncan is simply repeating the classics and isn’t aware of critical scholarship surrounding the reliability of the conclusions he draws. So in that sense whatever historians feel about him is still irrelevant to the merits of the case they make. “They just hate us cause they anus,” is a personal judgment, not a scholarly conclusion.
People have said the same about Carlin. And that’s why Carlin calls himself a “fan” of history and is careful not to make himself out to be a historian. He’s fully aware that he’s doing much the same thing Duncan is, whenever he’s doing a podcast.
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"Pop" history isn't "history" if it gets stuff seriously wrong. But history as a discipline isn't just an arcane hobby for a gaggle of ivory-tower academics - a huge part of the point of those academics' existence is to inform (or to write) works that educate the public about history. And Mike Duncan pretty much gives you the background you need to read academic Roman history without getting lost. Papers can be abstruse and difficult but academic books are generally written with enough background to be readable outside a specialist niche, even if you need to have some experience in the discipline. Just as an example, I recently read Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes. Mostly a very dry read going through the details of Roman tombs and houses and making arguments from there about the existence of a Roman "middle class", but the book contains enough background that someone generally familiar with Roman history can read it all - after all, an academic writing a book like that will expect it to be used by scholars in other aspects of ancient history, or economic historians studying class throughout history, or historians working on urbanization, etc. etc.
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