Donald! Trump!

I think the issue with a podcast is it’s the softest of interviews – if I had a podcast & managed to get him on, I would do my best to piss him & get him to walk out in a strop.

But no one would want to come on ultimately because I wouldn’t tolerate guest bullshit.

Rogan knows exactly what he’s doing in order to stay top of the podcast tree.

Trump is really quite exceptional at changing hats to speak to whichever demographic he’s lasered in on isn’t he, you have to give him credit for that.  Those people he’s speaking to care about as much about politics as the average UK voter, so they don’t see or hear any of the contradictions and just lap up all of the rhetoric. It’s no different over here.

He, and his team, have done brilliantly since he hit the scene at finding those people and giving them what they want to hear.  The fact that he keeps their loyalty after everything he says and does says a lot more about them, than him.

Rogan just gave him the perfect platform to mobilise all the young male voters who don’t ordinarily vote, and they’ll have heard nothing that makes them vote for Harris. Another clever move by the campaign team. The fact that he kept the rally goers waiting too, so much contempt, but he knew what he had to do – and they are all in the bag already.

Harris is doing really well speaking to the moderate voter, but there might not enough of them.  I really, really hope that what increasingly feels like his election to lose mobilises more moderate non-voters somewhere.

Rogan knows exactly what he’s doing in order to stay top of the podcast tree.

I think it’s more nuanced than that. Rogan knows how to make guests feel comfortable and get a decent conversation out of them, which is why he’s top of the podcast tree in the first place. You don’t do it from any kind of adversarial stance.

He does however, have a penchant for conspiracy theories and overly simplistic narratives that explain things in black and white, which is exactly Trump’s brand.

The psychology in that means they can talk like buddies for hours on topics they are both enthused by. I wouldn’t surprised if Trump’s advisors gave him a list of discussion points to go in with that they know Rogan buys into.

There’ll be other factors too, but on the whole, I find it depressing how normalised Trump’s behaviour has become, and the idea that ‘the left’ is controlling the media and acting unfairly against him, to me is frightening. The only thing acting against Trump are moral standards.

You don’t do it from any kind of adversarial stance.

Entirely depends who he chooses to interview though. Having a conversation with Brian Cox, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Alex Honnald or Adam Sandler is fine, those people aren’t grifting. You’re failing if you take that same approach with people who’s whole shtick is their controversy. – Jordan Peterson, Alex Jones Andrew Tate and so on. If you’re going to have these chancers on your program (although Christ knows why you’d entertain the idea) then at least use to opportunity to push back otherwise Alex Jones is just gong to come on and lie to your face, while you nod along looking stupid.

Rogan has had some interesting guests on over the years, and he had a bit of the “Louis Theroux” technique where he just makes the guest comfortable and lets them speak. But due to his propensity for conspiracy theories and promoting toxic masculinity, even just cherry picking an episode with an interesting guest leads to my youtube feed filling up with shiiite and spending days or weeks just clicking on not interested or “don’t recommend channel” to clean it up.

Youtubes algorithm is largely responsible, and I can see how people can be sucked into that online world because of it, but he is part of that toxic ecosystem so it isn’t all on youtube.