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Review: Pierre Poilievre on Joe Rogan 2h23m
We begin with an extended gift giving segment. It's hard not to interpret this as a minor lord begging a king's aid and presenting a gift from his lands to curry favour. It's a heavy kettlebell (fitness, manliness), made in Calgary (Poilievre's birthplace), by a gunsmith (conservatism, gun rights) with a maple leaf (Canada), and several things designed to flatter Joe specifically: UFC motto, Musashi quote, UFO.
Already, we see a few examples of what will become a running theme in this podcast. Pierre pretends to be uncertain about something, and in a calculated gamble, gets his facts just slightly wrong, so that Joe can be impressed with his knowledge but still score points by correcting him. "the first UFC that you were the commentator for. I think it was number 13?". Joe: "12. Number 12". "right. and then we've got here your favourite quote from um.. what's his name? The Japanese martial artist?" Bullshit, Pierre. You come to present this offering absolutely laden with symbolism, every square cm of it covered in meticulously chosen references, and you can't remember the numbers or names? Very interesting.
Poilievre's origin story is boring, but honest. He doesn't dwell on parts that another politician might play up - e.g. being adopted. Maybe he knows it'd come off badly. Maybe he's told the story so many times it doesn't occur to him. Moves through it quickly. One thing that sticks out is that after he has a sports injury, his recreational outlet is to .. attend his mother's social-political meetings? If I were Joe, I'd have dug in on that.
Moving on to Canada, Covid, and MAID. Joe has rants to go off on, and Pierre mostly lets him - does a good job of threading the needle on MAID, defending it while denouncing its excesses in a way that Joe can get behind.
Another recurring theme is that Joe has a great sense for what makes fun conversation, and tries to steer towards it. Pierre has the opposite sense. Joe knows it'd be hilarious to go into the "Castro is Trudeau's dad" conspiracy theory. Pierre won't touch it. Pierre launches into a prepared talking point about Biden not understanding Canadian politics (easy points), but then goes off explaining the Canadian parlimentary system. As someone who did ~5 years of mandatory Canadian social studies classes, I can confidently say that no one in the history of the country has ever been excited by learning about the Canadian parliament. The best part of that was the "two and a half sword-lengths" bit. Didn't even manage the old "it's called question period, not answer period" joke.
He does do one of the things he evidently came to do: denounce the 51st state rhetoric and swear on camera. Good for a memorable, punchy soundbyte. Curious that Joe leaks that he'd talked to Trump about it and that it was initially a joke, but then Trump doubled down (as he does). Is that new info? I didn't know about it.
Poilievre gets some talking points in about the economy, permits, tarrifs, etc. Joe tries to steer toward conflict re: oil sands. Poilievre ironically goes into Trump-mode. "No, no no no". We have the best oil sands. Best in the world. "they love it". "incredible". Pristine forests like you wouldn't believe.
Joe goes off on his usual food/health rant. Pierre mostly doesn't contest it, but agrees enough to keep the conversation going. In my head, I picture the gears turning in Pierre's mind trying to figure out if Canada produces more preserved goods or meat/fresh produce. When Joe gets on to glyphosate, Pierre keeps saying "okay". "okay". "okay". like an animal backed into a corner, and finally has to squirm out of it with "I don't know anything about it". This is not even bullshit. This is almost certainly a lie. Pierre is from Western Canada, and you're telling me he doesn't know anything about the most common and contentious agricultural chemicals in North America? I mean, there's no winning this discussion so it's a smart play. He either disagrees with Joe and starts an argument, or he sells out the agricultural base and looks anti-science, but he's clearly lying.
Joe and Pierre connect over the opioid crisis. We're just playing the hits at this point, and I kind of fell asleep. Though, Pierre leans a bit harder into the Big Pharma conspiracy angle than I'd expect for a politician. I guess there's no constituency for that, so they're a safe target. Poilievre is annoyingly incurious about ibogaine/psychadelics. Probably doesn't fit with his conservative abstinence-only treatment ideology, but it's jarring in the conversation. For a guy who just professed to care deeply about this problem, I'd expect more interest.
Then we get almost a half hour of MMA talk. Ugh. The worst part of this is that Pierre is doing the thing where he clearly has done his homework, but plays dumb to let Joe be the expert. Pierre: "did you ever see <some obscure fight>?", or goes off talking about some specific technique that's far beyond intermediate knowledge of the sport. Followed up with: "is the spinning back kick typically a body kick?", or "do these guys hate each other sometimes?" or "is Conor ever going to come back?". No one with his apparent level of knowledge would ever need to ask those questions, so it comes off as fake, and undercuts the whole point of this extended MMA chat - to make Pierre look like someone who likes combat sports.
You can tell Pierre's focus is slipping by this point because his questions get more robotic. "who do you cheer for?" is such a non-sports-fan way of asking that question. Not "who's your team?" or "Cowboys or Texans?" or similar.
Anyway, that goes on a while and eventually wraps up with a prepared closer. Joe gives him a conditional endorsement (the other thing he came to get), and we get a reminder that this was supposed to be about tariffs, not MMA.
Notable: In the entire episode, Pierre does not name Mark Carney once. He is "the Prime Minister", and he is mostly an afterthought. Trudeau gets name-dropped all over the place, but not Carney. Pierre even refuses to condemn Carney "on foreign soil" played off like it's just being polite. Obviously a deliberate strategy, with Carney being popular, it suits Poilievre to be the "loyal" opposition, on his team, almost, with the Prime Minister stealing his ideas, and he's just fine with it.
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.
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.
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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