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Joe Rogan is fantastically meat headed about so many things, but really he's a jack of all trades, master of none, and he majors in cardio kickboxing. The thing is, he often operates pretty engaging interviews, and the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia is in full effect for all of them. He's basically talk radio, and despite the subject matter, he refrains from sophomoric shock jock goofing off, unlike Howard Stern. He is willing to meet most guests in the middle, and he's got the gift of gab, but infrequently waxing blow hard, with a few exceptions. Most notably: gender identity politics. But other than that, he's plays pretty fair with everyone across the political spectrum (he's had more than a few gay/lesbian gender bending guests on), even if head count favors hypermasculine tropes, and satellite ideologies. But while having serious pop-science guests on the show, fringe UFO theories are bread and butter among pro-wrestling enthusiasts that enjoy the art of kayfabe. And if you think it's all in good fun, hey that's fine, but Joe Rogan certainly seems to eat up junk science all the time. His recent show with Bob Lazar, discussing Area 51 was filled with "what-if" tales of anti-gravity and synthetic Element 115, which was futuristic when it emerged in the 1980's but hasn't withstood the test of time. He talks of cyclotrons shooting anti-matter at government synthetsized Moscovium fuel pellets to produce free energy and, then by turns, anti-gravity, concluding in time travel and teleportation. Joe just gobbles it up like a wide-eyed Joe The Plumber, and the rest of the bullshit artistry piles up. Now, faster than light travel across megaparsecs is an open, probable reality, and so too, alien races from Zeta Reticuli. The Grays are really androids. They're at war with The Reptilians, which is why an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Riiiiight... But it's all faces and heels in an MMA match, nothing more. Unless you're not in on the joke. Most people don't grok particle physics enough to be dismissive of the premise of magical (or rather, unstable) element 115. They don't get that it's just another blob of the usual nucleons that we're all so familiar with, no free gravity, no free lunch. That lights in the sky do not, a spaceship, make. Oh well... |
There’s also an argument to be made about his “platforming” of arguable kooks and so on, though it’s clearly preferable to entertain unconventional ideas than to dismiss them out of hand, the cumulative payoff of an unconventional idea being so very great.
Flying saucers are always good entertainment, though not good enough to paper over the fact that half of that Bob Lazar “documentary” was footage of a tattooed guy shouting into his smartphone for the benefit of like three different GoPros.
The open secret of physics is that nobody really knows WTF is going on. Particle theory is obviously a rough approximation, and string theory and quantum theory have been effectively stalled for long enough that it’s increasingly apparent that the complexity of the Universe has more moving parts than the working memory of the human brain. Humility is called for. “We know” ... yeah, okay.