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Notes -
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 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.
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