Blog/2026-01-03/Why I Like Joe Rogan

Amusingly accurate

I don't listen to too many podcasts, but a few times I've put the Joe Rogan Experience on while I'm driving down to the South Bay. The most typical two complaints about Joe Rogan are that he platforms terrible people and that he doesn't challenge them on their views.

I'm somewhat philosophically opposed to the idea that people with reprehensible views should have their views hidden. I think that strong and able societies are able to survive the expression and analysis of reprehensible views without collapsing. In fact, I'd say that such societies are probably strong and able because of the underlying property that they can encounter reprehensible views safely. So the platforming argument never made any sense to me.

I think part of what we're doing as a species or civilization is seeking pathways to better existence through the universe of possibilities, and I think we are fortunate to have the mental capacity to not usually persist in Thought-action fusion, i.e. we can think of things and consider them without ever having to act on them. So it's good that people see more ideas because we're pretty good about dismissing the bad ones.

I understand the motivation for the other side of things but I also can't relate to it much because I'd sometimes just like to hear someone put forth their ideas in their own words. Let them steelman their own views so I have a nice gauge for what they are saying. Too often people are not described objectively and sadly the only way to find out what they're about and what their ideas are is to listen to them. Often they are nonsense, but the listeners seem to misunderstand them and describe a different kind of nonsense. Other times they make sense but the listeners who wish to describe them misunderstand them and write meaningless stuff.

First party information or as close to it as possible is the only way to get anything valuable in such an informational environment, and the Joe Rogan Experience is pretty much "you tell me what you think your ideas are".

The ones I've liked the most are John Carmack and the various Elon Musk ones. jrelibrary.com is a handy website to find the guests you care about.