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by hersko 1613 days ago
The Joe Rogan podcast. Listening to long-form, multi-hour conversation is so refreshing compared to what traditional news shows have become.
4 comments

What do you think of the signal to noise ratio of the JRE podcast? It seems like he does minimal prep and just wings it with the idea that his natural curiosity will make up for it.

yes, they are 2.5hrs+ long, but IMO at least half of it is chit-chat and irrelevant to the guests knowledge often about fitness/hunting/deer/monkeys. I prefer much more focused podcasts, where the interview has prepared a series of well targeted questions.

The magic is that it’s like you’re listening to two friends have an interesting conversation and you’re the third person listening in.. particularly in this pandemic when so many suffered severe social isolation, this form of podcast is almost therapeutic.
I feel like he intentionally does no research. It would be so easy for him to pull up the Wikipedia page for his guests and read it before interviewing them.

I think that he believes that by not researching before the interview, he will be better able to represent and empathize with his viewers, who also won’t have done any research before watching. I’m not sure if this is good interviewing technique, but it certainly gives the interviews their characteristic disorganized feel.

It's certainly 'long-form' and certainly 'content'.
Funny that I interpreted the original "long-form content" as being writing. Rogan's podcasts are certainly long, multi-hour sessions, but tend to wander fairly aimlessly and don't really have a central thesis or topic that they stick to. This is unlike most traditional "long form" writing that I assumed OP was looking for.

Try some of William F. Buckley's old Firing Line episodes, available on YouTube.

I really only listen to Rogan for two types of guests: comedians I like and physicists. The episodes for the latter are always fantastic. Brian Cox, Sean Carroll, Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson, plus a couple more. He's even had Roger Penrose on.
Roger Penrose is a legend.

Some of the episodes of JRE with Bill Burr I've watched more than once.