The Joe Rogan Experience: 'You don't know when to stop,' with Douglas Murray

Almost from the first minute of the The Joe Rogan Experience, Episode #1538, I could understand why it was so urgent for thinkfluencers at major media outlets to warn people against listening to it, to find something in it that could be called “dangerous” and warn audiences away. Late in the episode, Rogan accused leftists of starting fires around the Portland area. It’s an aside, not dwelled upon, in a litany of complaints about extremists in the protest scene, but he does say it and he later apologized for falling for misinformation.

Rune Soup / Hermitix: The Anarch

So I used to make fun of Thoreau for all the reasons everybody else does, but a new episode of “Rune Soup” and “Hermitix” convinced me I had the guy wrong. You know: people joke about how he went out to Walden and he didn’t completely separate from society. Not really. He hung out with the Emerson’s. He walked into town. Etcetra. I used to feel that way too. I was stuck in this fiction of rigid definitions.

Relationships Drive Ideology

Before I get into my essay below, I just want to (futilely, quixotically) make a quick point: this essay is about any situation in which someone makes a sharp and incongruent move in ideology. It’s not just people who are joining the identity left these days, but that’s the story right now, so that’s what I’m writing about. But I think this applies any time someone’s current talk stops squaring up with their prior talk.

Sowing Discourse: The Argument From Trepidation

So there was this show in the 1990s that was a bit of surprise hit and ran for five seasons (though it is largely forgotten now) called *Northern Exposure.* Like a lot of shows of that era, much of the drama was driven by a “will they or won’t they” thing between two of the characters. Rob Morrow plays Joel Fleischman a young doctor from New York City who has to practice in an underserved area for four years in order to cover his medical school debts, which lands him in a tiny fictional town of Cicely, Alaska.

Pseudodoxology: Memes are advertisers' market research

This is one of those podcast episodes you listen to and say to yourself: “That was interesting.” Then another part of you says, “Oh really? Why’s that?” So that first part of you says, “I don’t know exactly…” Kantbot and Logo Daedalus (his buddy who I don’t really understand yet) just have a long conversation. It didn’t seem to have any intent as it opened. They just put the mic on and started talking.

EconTalk: A Philosopher and an Economist walk into a podcast...

Here’s all I really have to say about the June 22nd episode of EconTalk: go listen to it. Seriously: Russ Roberts, the show’s creator and host, is a gem — and I hardly agree with him about anything. A libertarian ex-professor, he’s a person with a very strong worldview and yet he has the gift of somehow using that worldview to make himself more open. Roberts uses his bias as a springboard to dig into issues with people.

Joe Rogan Experience: Is Bari Weiss really taking Rogan to Israel?

Let me blow your mind right now: that thing with the kids wearing the MAGA hats and the Native American activist and the Black Israelites during the March for Life? That was more than 18 months ago. How is that possible? Forced to guess, I would have told you that that happened like last Fall. How else are you going to blow my mind? Are you going to try and tell me that people don’t like that song “Blurred Lines” any more?

LessWrong: The word 'academic' is synonymous with 'irrelevant'

Do you think Sid Vicious would have told Keith Richards to fuck off if they met backstage one night and the Rolling Stones guitarist told the punk rocker he liked his show? Maybe these would be better cases: Would Vicious tell Pete Townshend of The Who to fuck off or David Freiberg of Jefferson Starship? Punk was a rebellion against what rock-and-roll had become, but it was still rock. So if you think the music industry sucks because it has wrecked music you love, do you still flip the bird to that music’s paragons?

Joe Rogan Experience: Always bowing

There’s a joke in my family. When we see an extremely imposing man, one of us will nudge another and whisper. “I’m gonna go whip that guy.” Pregnant pause. “I’m sick of his shit.” Joe Rogan is the kind of dude one of us might make that joke about, provided we were sure he couldn’t hear. Bill Burr showed up on the Joe Rogan Experience #228, all the way back in June 2012 and it opened up facets of each that I hadn’t appreciated relative to each other’s net tough guy’ness.

The Streisand Effect and the Intellectual Black List

Confession: The whole Sam Harris / Jordan Peterson thing was largely a boat I missed until the woketernet started galvanizing against them. Before the two had really become lightning rods, I remember listening to one or two really long Sam Harris discussions because a friend recommended the specific conversations. It was the kind of thing I listened to and thought: “Some nice zingers in there!” But I didn’t come back to it.