Incongruous

~ Clarissa

I listened to a clip of Joe Rogan’s Trump podcast. I’d never heard Rogan before, so I don’t get it. He’s supposed to be this really manly dude? With that voice? What’s with the voice, people?

Matt Walsh, for example, has a voice that jives with the persona. Rogan, on the other hand, has the voice of that man-bun wokester Walsh tries to play in his movie.

It’s totally like when the very unhealthy looking and sounding RFK turned out to be some people’s health guru. Or when people confused the overdosing Jordan Peterson for an effective psychologist (“paraplegic ballerinas are completely normal!” was their argument.)

I apologize to the fans in advance but I hope they understand that nobody outside the fandom feels anything of what they feel inside it.

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Published by Clarissa

10 thoughts on “Incongruous”

  3. The appeal isn’t that he’s super manly (though if you want to see that, he did used to be involved in MMA, which I guess gives him street cred? He got his start doing podcasts about MMA), it’s that he has interesting guests, and he sits back and lets them talk for three hours, and doesn’t edit them.

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  4. for example:

    This one’s been making the rounds lately, and JR hardly talks *at all*. It’s not JR that people are tuning in for here. It’s the biggest broadcast out there that just has people on, and keeps them talking. And talking. And talking. JR’s brilliance is largely in not stealing the spotlight, but also being able to avoid dead air if his guest fumbles.

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          1. Yeah. I really think the main draw here (and the reason I listen to the occasional JRE episode) is, long, in-depth, unscripted interview with interesting people. I’m no there for JR. I listen in when there’s a guest on that I’m curious about. There’s nothing like hours of unstructured time to get people to say what they really think.

            Beyond that, I expect a lot of people like JR personally because he seems like kind of an everyman. Not a capital-J Journalist. Not a PhD. Doesn’t seem to have an agenda to push. He comes off as some dude who wasn’t the smartest kid in the classroom, who smokes pot, who asks the kinds of questions regular people want to ask but don’t have the access for, and the whole laid-back, casual, half-baked thing seems, weirdly, to be very conducive to getting people to talk. I don’t have to like him as a person, or find him attractive, to understand that the show itself is brilliant.

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  5. “He’s supposed to be this really manly dude?”

    No… not really. He’s a curious normie.

    Methylethyl describes his appeal a lot better than I could.

    I’m also wondering about cultural expectations… for Americans he doesn’t sound… unmanly (for lack of a better word) but he’s not into making a big deal of being a man (unlike Matt Walsh, for example).

    Or let’s put it this way… some years ago I had a student who was both very tall and very much into the gym. The result was that at first glance he looked really intimidating (could have passed for a muscle guy in the mob). But… he was actually extremely polite and…. gentle (for lack of a better word) in interactions with others. He was fully under the control of the class boss… a diminutive female (no more than 5 feet tall but a BIG personality). I assumed it was a persona he’d adopted to counteract his intimidating looks.

    I think something similar might be going on with Rogan… everyone knows he was in MMA and to counteract that he has a kind of very polite, non-macho persona.

    I’ve never heard anything close to a full episode but I see the appeal to middle America.

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