Joe Rogan is the 21st Century’s Plato
By: Nico Deluca
Tags: Opinion, Writing, Podcasting, Plato, Joe Rogan

Joe Rogan is the 21st Century’s Plato

Reflections on writing in the podcast era.

Fresh off signing a $100m contract granting Spotify exclusive rights to stream “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the eponymous Joe Rogan appears to be at the peak of his worldly powers. Bari Weiss of The New York Times went so far as to proclaim him “the New Mainstream Media” in an article that affords us the rare privilege of hearing from Rogan qua interviewee. Throughout the interview, Rogan’s responses center on the idea of “free-balling,” which he identifies as the essence of podcasting. The free-balling approach, he says, is “the opposite of polished. And because of that, it resonates.”

The implication here is that polish corresponds to conceit and dissimulation — as indeed it does to a great many Americans in a time of open war between the President and the implied “old” mainstream media. Polish is the hallmark of erudite, paywalled, left-leaning publications like the Times, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, which today find themselves in an uphill battle against decentralized platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Spotify in the endless scrimmage for our attention.

Where these newer platforms accommodate everyone (as Rogan notes, some argue social media are now public utilities), polished publications cater to a highly-educated, readerly audience, one that now appears increasingly niche. While The Atlantic can still afford to publish articles that take upwards of a half-hour to read, it can do so only because it has spent decades amassing a base of readers armed with long attention spans. Alas, long attention spans are precisely what today’s broader public lacks — particularly where the Internet is concerned (i.e. virtually everywhere). Per Rogan, digital content today has to compete with “YouTube videos of the craziest things ever — babies landing on cats and animal attacks and naked people.” Writing, the erstwhile king of print formats, is today just another subspecies of the aforementioned “digital content” — and it must scratch, claw, and perhaps most significantly, contract in order to claim our attention.

Rogan’s podcasts aren’t exactly concise (they run anywhere from an hour-half to over five hours in length), but they are hands-free and perfectly immersive — at least in the sense that immersion in a podcast “doesn’t require that much thinking at all.” Immersion occurs automatically, as Rogan explains: “You get captivated by the conversation. One of the things about this medium in general is that it’s really easy to listen to while you do other stuff.”

I recall reading somewhere that the trademark of the 21st century knowledge worker is a proclivity for multitasking — the ability to perform multiple tasks poorly instead of one task well. Multitasking fits podcasting hand-in-glove, and this may well explain why listening to a podcast, though in truth far more passive an activity than reading, can nonetheless feel more active.

Podcasts automate the legwork of attention. Where readers must pan their eyes back and forth across the page over and over again, podcasts exact no such toll on our physical energies (this panning motion is evidently so exhausting that we have no choice but to disrupt it, whether by converting to audio or by streaming the entire text through a single point onscreen, as this speed-reading company aims to do). This automation provides an invaluable assist to the average consumer of information in our hyper-saturated, multi-mediated world. People today are simply busier than they were in the past. We have a lot on our plates, and even more on our minds. We don’t have time for dithering, purple prose, or tap-dancing around thorny issues. We need real talk, and we need it to come in easily-digestible formats.

In the past, life was slower. We had time to sit down and read long-form writings, and no reason to doubt the value inherent in doing so. As Rogan puts it, “Nobody ever thought: We need to gear our entertainment, our media, to people who cook, who jog, who hike, people who drive.” By “nobody,” Rogan really means: nobody in the recent past. Extend the timeline a few millennia, and you come across multiple examples of other thinkers fixating on the transmissibility of information as the ultimate stamp of quality.

One such thinker: Plato.

Plato was famously suspicious of the written word, which he considered an inadequate tool for transmitting real knowledge. Indeed, he went so far as to suggest that writing actually interfered with learning: “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” These so-called “external marks” (written words) do not offer true wisdom, “but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.”

There is no reason to believe Rogan is as hostile to the written word as Plato purportedly was, and some of Plato’s arguments against writing could apply just as easily to podcasting. In one famous passage, Plato remarks, “You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.”

Like long-form writings, podcast episodes are mastered works which, once published, do not change. But contrast the written work’s “majestic silence” to the majestic loudness of a Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan’s dialogues are pure movement, rarely stalling or equivocating. “I’m interested in things that make me scared, that make me nervous,” says Rogan — and in Weiss’s view, it is precisely “that unpredictability, that willingness to take risks with topics” that distinguishes the Joe Rogan Experience from the mainstream media. Whereas long-form writings are in the control of their authors and editors, Rogan’s interviews are liable to veer off into uncharted territory at any moment.

Like Rogan, Plato preferred less polished, more free-balling modes of discourse. Hence why he structured his own oeuvre in the form of dialogues between imaginary interlocutors. Plato was following the lead of his mentor Socrates, who himself neglected to write anything down, and whose ideas were preserved for posterity only because his students (like Plato) had the foresight to record them. This is one of the great ironies of Socrates’s work, corresponding to a great irony of Plato’s: Plato’s dialogues are not actually interactive, but merely present the appearance of interaction within a closed system. The same is true of Rogan’s podcasts. That this irony fails to register is likely due to the fact that Rogan never assumes the role of instructor or sage himself, but instead acts as a surrogate for the audience. He self-presents as a “dumb” person who doesn’t know the truth but is eager to learn. Rogan is to whomsoever he happens to be hosting as Plato’s Socrates is to his various counterparts.

Rogan is a canny interviewer with a Socratic knack for coaxing ideas out of his guests. Whether smoking out Elon Musk or humoring Alex Jones while he rants about psychic vampires and AI-powered hive minds, Rogan reveals his guests as people — living, breathing people, in the same room as him (and by extension his listeners) — as opposed to Twitter accounts, or soundbites, or mere “external marks.” Rogan seems to believe that in doing so he is revealing something fundamental about these people. By chatting up Alex Jones for almost five hours, Rogan wants to prove to us that Jones is not, in fact, scum of the earth, a one-in-a-trillion imbecile, an embodiment of pure evil. Jones is just a dude up on his soapbox, spewing weird opinions, playing his part in the evolution of ideas. And it’s worth hearing him out, if only because “anything that wants to limit discussion is dangerous to the evolution of ideas.”

Plato was even more indiscriminate in choosing his interlocutors. Socrates (as Plato’s favorite puppet) interrogates men from all walks of life, albeit not always with the most sympathetic of intentions. While Rogan doesn’t scoop interviewees off the streets, he is very careful to avoid ideological pigeonholing, and attracts listeners across political and socioeconomic barriers. Rogan observes a sort of “Roganic Method” founded in a pair of refusals. On the one hand, he refuses to take offense or let his ego enter into the conversation; on the other hand, he refuses to steer his guests into the weeds of abstract concepts.

Like Plato, Rogan could justly be accused of putting excessive stock in the power of dialogue — or at least of putting too much stock in the power of his own dialogues. But the two men’s failings in this regard are opposite: where Plato is guilty of couching his own monologues in dialogue format, Rogan is deferential to a fault. By refusing to “limit discussion” or enforce boundaries of any kind, Rogan becomes a sieve through which his guests‘ opinions flow largely unhindered. No topic is so heated that it can’t be laughed off, and Rogan sometimes seems more concerned with being liked than being right.

Rogan himself might find this comparison to Plato unbecoming. After all, Plato was a proponent of aristocracy and philosopher-kings, whereas Rogan presents himself as anti-elitist, a man of the people, plugging the gaps left by the mainstream media. The podcast’s logo depicts a grinning Rogan with a third eye beaming out of his forehead, and indeed its DMT-enthusiastic host is decidedly Eastern in his tastes. Perhaps he would prefer that, in seeking his philosophical lookalike, we venture even further back in time — to Vedic India, whose “philosopher-kings,” the Brahmins, were even more convinced of the supremacy of oral transmission than Plato.

The holy Sanskrit texts that are the precursors to Hinduism and Buddhism alike were written primarily in verse, with the express intention of maximizing transmissibility from teachers to pupils. The word Upanishads translates to “sit down beside me,” and mastering the meditative practice at the core of the Vedic religion required apprenticing with a guru. Theoretical knowledge was meant to supplement this practice, without which initiates had no hope of ever reaching the unitive state and escaping the karmic cycle of reincarnation.

Today, meditation apps enable us to engage in practice without foraging around in search of a willing guru. But the apps (with the exception of Waking Up) are rather light on theory, and podcasts like Rogan’s don’t offer much help. The issue with listening to podcasts is that it isn’t actually more immersive than reading; it’s just a lot easier. Passive listening demands far less of our critical faculties. We can outsource the questioning to Rogan, while we focus on driving or getting our reps in.

Ultimately, good, polished writing is still indispensable (and irreplaceable) as a means of transmitting truly challenging ideas. We live in a time when Plato’s fears have been realized: we rely on external marks to learn things (and re-learn them, and remind ourselves of what we’ve learned); nobody goes around memorizing intricate philosophical verses that can be found via Google search, or purchased on Kindle for under ten dollars.

But that’s okay. Reading enables us to sit down beside teachers of diverse backgrounds, traditions, and dispositions — teachers who are intent on delving deeply into ideas, rather than just skimming over the surface. I for one tend to tire of Rogan for the same reason I tend to tire of Plato: for me, the broadcast dialogue is the conceit, and not the polished writing. The former offers only the outline of ideas, while the latter offers sustained immersion in a single sensibility at a time — a real face-to-face encounter, and not an encounter mediated by a third party, one who not only picks up my slack, but slyly creates it.