Let me say up front that I wouldn’t recognize Joe Rogan if he happened to be sitting right next to me while I’m typing this. I don’t have any idea what his background is or why an apparently large number of people seem to listen to his podcast and believe whatever it is he says. I’m not even intrigued enough about him to bother doing the Google search that would inevitably provide me with that information. 

So, with my understanding that Joe is “some guy with a podcast,” let me dive in with some basic thoughts:

1. Celebrity =/= Knowledgeable. I don’t get my medical advice from Kylie Jenner or my financial advice from random TicTokers. I’m not at all sure why there seems to be a popular correlation between someone being well known and the need to give their opinion any more weight than that given to any other random stranger from the internet.

2. The “Lincoln” Principle. One of the quotes most often attributed to Abraham Lincoln (without, interestingly, any supporting contemporary evidence) is, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” If people, in mass, are fool enough to be taken in by whatever internet huckster happens to be popular in the moment, there’s really not much to be done to protect them from themselves. In this country, we’re generally free to be just as stupid as we want to be.

3. There is no “standard” standard for responding to bad behavior. Whoopi Goldberg got suspended by her parent corporation over making a decidedly ill-advised comment about the Holocaust. Joe Rogan, in contrast, is free to pump out buckets full of misinformation to an apparently gullible audience with little or no oversight or consequence from his corporate host. 

Is one worse than the other? That’s hard to say since what the standard of what constitutes bad behavior is nearly impossible to define in a way that’s universally acceptable.

I use to watch Fox News back when they were just the outlet that reported news from a right of center perspective. As their content shifted increasingly away from news towards commentary and hyper-partisan propaganda, I switched them off in favor of other news sources. I think, perhaps, our individual ability to choose is the real point here. None of us are under any personal obligation to watch or listen to content from any specific source. Expecting “big business” to protect our delicate eyes and ears from words and images we don’t personally agree with doesn’t feel like a solution that goes anywhere we’d really want to be by the time it’s finished.

The wild west of podcast, blogs, and electronic media overall has given us an embarrassing wealth of resources representing every political and social stripe. The catch is, this degree of choice means that every individual has to make a choice about what media they consume – and what sources they believe. We can collectively encourage listening or watching content into which some academic rigor has been put, but we can’t, in the end, fix stupid.