Joe Rogan, Everyman, and why we need anti-establishment talk shows

The Joe Rogan Experience needs no introduction for anyone active in social media. But it should be open to analysis, criticism, and some measure of apologia.

I mean every one of those. Rogan has been attacked for using racial slurs, for promoting anti-vaxxer claims, for a lack of ideological commitment, for a too wide openness to crackpot ideas — all of which and more are easy to assert and are in part true, and I will get to this sort of thing in a bit. First, though, I want to use two other programs as an illustration of why we need someone like Joe Rogan in public discourse.

From 1991 to 2013, NPR ran a program called Talk of the Nation whose format consisted of a host who interviewed guests about their work or the events — political, scientific, artistic, whatnot — of the day, then allowed members of the audience to telephone in to ask their own questions or raise their own objections. Talk of the Nation, other than its associated Science Friday, was canceled by NPR with a lot of public relations Babbleonian in line with the rest of the network’s surrender to its perception of what the market wanted.

A similar program on television, The Charlie Rose Show, ran from 1991 to 2017, though without the call-in feature possible in the live airings of Talk of the Nation. Rose, the…