Breaking the Attention Economy

You know what we should talk about? You know what no one has talked about ever on the internet lately. Josephine Robinette Rogan. Oh, I've never heard of him. What does he do? Well? He has a podcast. If you heard a podcast, Garrison, I'm unfamiliar, but just I'll just go with it. Yeah. Well, it's like the radio, but easier to spread disinformation. Um and also sexier for reasons

that are hard to explain. Uh. And Joe Rogan gets on his podcast and he says a lot of stuff that people think is bad, and then everybody gets angry at him, and then he makes more money. And today we're going to talk about how maybe we could handle this problem differently. Maybe we could not do the same

thing over and over. There'spech a different results. Yeah, and upfront, obviously we're talking about him, We're trying to talk less about specifically what he's said and more about kind of the problem he represents in the ways in which the responses people have aren't having the results they desire. We're gonna avoid using his name in the title of the episode or the description because that doesn't feed into the algorithm kind of in the same way. But yeah, Garrison,

you want to kick us off here. Yeah, I've been watching the Rogan thing online be getting kind of frustrated because of the way the discourse is going, and it's just repeating the same loops we see every few months and nothing really changes and Realgan just gets more popular. So earlier this month or like a middle of I guess it was closer to like January. UM, there was like a group of like two d seventy doctors, healthcare workers, UM, and scientists who are campaigning for Spotify to adopt a

miss information policy. UM. This was prompted by a few episodes of the Joe Rogan podcast that we've already actually talked about. UM about Dr Robert Malone and someone else

who said some stupid things about the pandemic. Um, So I write what when when I when we talked about these episodes this last time, I tried to actually talk about what these doctors were doing, and let not focus on Rogan himself, but specifically what these doctors were doing and their ideology, because I didn't want to add to

the whole Rogan side of the discourse. Um and you know, for for this, for this, like a letter that that these doctors sent to Spotify if they were not really advocating Rogan to be removed from the platform, um or even for episodes to be removed, just to have Spotify clarify their guidelines regarding medical misinformation, because you know, and it's important to note that Joe Rogan has a exclusivity contract with Spotify. He does not work for them, but Rogan gets paid a lot of money to get his

podcast only published on Spotify's feed. So it's it's not it's it's it's it's like a it's a it's a weird kind of set up, and it can give a lot of like gray area for like does Spotify count that's as publisher or not? You're like, well, not really because they could. He could also just end that contract and post his podcast everywhere. Um, I mean I think it would take there. There's probably some sort of exclusive

time limit on the exclusivity agreement, etcetera. Um, because it it is, it is mixed, because they did recently when it came out that he said the N word a whole bunch of times, Spotify removed those episodes. So there's

a degree to which they have acted as a publisher. Yeah, there's a whole of stuff to kind of talk about this on the So the letter gwent kind of viral and it prompted this whole kind of thing in the middle of January, but like deleting your Spotify subscription, and then we had musicians, most uh, most popularly Neil Young decided to remove all their music from the Spotify platform, um as like a performative thing, being like, Okay, if

Spotify is gonna host all this medical misinformation, we're going to remove this as protest. Now. Of course, Neil Young then just signed an exclusivity deal with Amazon, so oh great, cool. We yes, Amazon, the bastion of moral purity. Yeah, and they're not I mean I think they are probably pay a better rate because Spotify is pretty much at the

bottom to musicians. But I don't think it's good. Um, I think Napster actually has the best rate, doesn't the best rate, which I mean also like if you want to be actually moral, just just just use band camp. But I mean I use Spotify because it's really easy. And that's why Spotify works. It's because it's super it is it is a well made product. That does not mean it's an ethical product, but it does. It does

the thing that it's supposed to do quite well. So so yeah, it basically we've had endless discourse since then about Joe Rogan about Spotify is the platform, talking about how bad Spotify is, which yes, it is bad, talking about how you know how bad Joe Rogan is, and you know, the thing is, Joe Rogan already had the most popular podcast in the world his exclusivity deal with Spotify, and he's currently estimated to bring in eleven million listeners

per episode of his podcast. Yeah. For for some reference, um, Behind the Bastards is one of the largest podcasts out there. Um, and he's on average something like ten times our traffic. Uh, like it's and it's not He's not He's not just the most popular podcast. He helped invent what podcasting is. Podcast He was one of the first, and like he had a foundational role in how the entire industry works.

Since this letter and since the's episodes, there's been a whole lot of discourse around if Spotify should remove Joe Rogan from the platform, um, if they should cancel his deal. You know, a lot of people calling on Spotify to do that, a lot of people calling on Spotify to remove certain episodes, and Spotify has not been keen to so. Like, but let's and I know, Joe Rogan himself did actually authorize the removal of a certain amount of episodes, which

for reasons we'll talk about later. Um, but what's all this discourse and outrage and articles and tweets actually doing to Spotify into Rogan? Okay? In my opinion, kind of the end result is actually very similar to all of the free advertising that companies get whenever they make awoke statement that infuriate, that infuriates the actionary right, you know, resulting in throwing your kel out your window, flushing your

Gillette blade down the toilet, and burning your nikes. Um. And it's even widely speculated and kind of like a known fact that companies will use progressive statements and policies to drum up this outrage um to give their company and product tons of free advertising and just to get a brand name itself inside consumers heads. And this is definitely happening. Was was Roken and Spotify in terms of outrage being used as advertising. It may not be intentional,

but that is what the result is. Yeah, and it's I mean, it's very uh, it's it's both sides like to make fun of the other for doing this, like folks on the left like to make funt of their right when they're when they're breaking their carriggs or whatever. Um. But you know, it happens. It's equally profitable for both sides. You just do the opposite. You know, you have someone come on and talk about how they're a truth teller being canceled, and they get a bunch of attention money,

and and it works equally well both ways. Pretty much. Yeah, So with Spotify and Rogan in the news every day for the past like three weeks, the the the end is that like the fact that it's just that people are hearing these names in their head more often, and they're probably subconsciously going to use Spotify more often because you know, despite a few people that might canceled their subscriptions, the net effect will be more listeners who seemed to

Spotify because there because the name is in my subconscious

it's it's it's in there. And all the effect that's going to have on Rogan is giving him away more publicity to attract new listeners, and and it's listeners who themselves are like attracted to unconventional ideas outside the mainstream, and his more passive listeners are gonna like double down on him because there's gonna be like the backfire effect, so they will like feel defensive and then become more of a fan of his because he's seen as a

cultural outsider, even though he's not an outsider. He is the mainstream, he's the biggest podcaster in the world, but he's seen as a cultural outsider. So you know, he like brings on guests who say things that they're not supposed to say. You know, so who's actually going to be convinced by all this outrage to not listen to Rogan via pointing out all the wrong things he's said and all the slurs he's used, Like, is that really going to stop fans from listening to Joe Rogan's time?

Really pointing out that Donald Trump illegally took classified documents, It's like, yeah, I mean that's fucked up and ship, but like he's never gonna get charged with crimes and none of his supporters care. You're the only people who are angry about this, and it doesn't matter because the people you vote for aren't going to punish him. So like just yeah, you know, chill out a little bit. It's like all of the outrage is simply inflating the

importance of Jarrogan on like an entire cultural level. It's that he's becoming He's becoming more important to his fans, more important to his haters, and more important to himself and Spotify as an asset because he generates a lot of exclusive listeners and news coverage and buzz around the Spotify brand. And it's important to talk about. Like, so you have, broadly speaking within the field of entertainment, like digital entertainment in particular, you have like two ways that

you can grow your audience. One of them is organic growth, which is you know, I listened to Garrison's podcast. I like it. I tell a friend about Garrison's podcast. They like it. They tell a friend about Garrett that that's like organic, you know, it's very natural. That's purely the kind of quality of the content UM reaching people. And then there is in organic growth, which is can be the result of like ad campaigns can be the result

of UM an algorithm. Often in today we're talking about like oh, Twitter or Facebook prioritizes this kind of content. So like something article on bright Barred about black on white crime that would have been read ten thousand times ten years ago gets read a million times because it spreads well on this platform for reasons that aren't organic. UM And with Joe Rogan, one of the reasons why

because we can talk about like d platforming. If you want to talk about like Alex Jones for example, or Meloianopolis, good case that D platforming really reduced both of their reaches. Now, Milo uh pretty much wiped out as a person who mattered in terms of the discourse, thank christ. Alex Jones less so. UM it definitely hurt his business and it

reduced his reach. But by the time Facebook and Twitter and whatnot started throttling him, he'd he had already inorganically increased his reach enough that like he's able to he had he had a large a large enough audios to stay somewhat relevant and keep going. The thing about Joe Rogan is he did not get famous and popular and organically. I'm sure there was some degree of that on like social media, but most of his growth before that, Like people like him, Like whatever you think of him, he's

a good broadcaster. That's that's the thing. Even though, like you know, for all this research, I don't like him. He says horrible things, but you know, I was watching I watched all of like Rogan's like, um, like Instagram videos he made like a few ten minute things talking about the outrage, and it's it sucks because when you listen to him, he's like a really good talker. He's

very good at what he does. He's very good at like generating sympathy and generating like good Like it's it sucks because yeah, I wanted to like hate this person, but I'm like listening to him talking about this issue like oh wow, yeah, like you actually have a decent grasp on what's going on here. Um, And that's that's horrible. He is not part of He gets some of his money from playing like a dumb, chill, stoner dude, but he's not dumb. He's definitely a stoner. He's not a

dumb man. He's very intell. He's very good at what he does. UM. One of the things we don't kind of talk about enough when we talk about media that I think is important to note is that UM being likable in a professional sense is a skill. And it's a skill like any technical skill. It's like knowing how to how to how to farm or weld. UM. It is a thing that you build on over time. It is a thing that UM takes a lot of trial

and error and a lot of education to get right. Uh. It is a thing that Joe Rogan has been doing for longer than a significant chunk of the people on this show, including Garrison, have been alive. Uh. It's like like I've been like this is this is more or less been my job for like thirteen or fourteen years. And it is like a skill that you build. And the thing that he is really good at is making people want to listen to him. And so if you

were to say kick him out of Spotify, tomorrow. It's it's entirely possible that his that that would increase the number of people who who listen to the podcast. There's there's a case to be made that Spotify has limited his maximum adi and limiting him to Spotify as opposed to if he was just any app he wanted to be on, maybe it'd be twenty million you know, listening

to every exactly. Yes, Like even if did even a Spotify did drop him because of all these you know, outrage you know, and all the tweets and they're all of the petitions, even if they did drop him, he would probably not only gain more listeners due to the outrage porn and and free speech advocates, but also with his exclusivity ending help his podcast will just be available in more platforms and more people who will to listen to him, like really easily. So yeah, he's only going

to grow if people get what they want. And like that makes you think, like this, this outrage isn't actually meant to get the Joe Rogan Joe Rogan problem taking care of it, Like it's this, this actually isn't about stopping misinformation. It's this this isn't actually about having they're

being less fans of Joe Rogan. All of his outrage is about making you feel better because you feel like you're doing something right, Like bad thing is happening in the world, and it's easier to pretend like your actions are hurting it than it is to accept that, like maybe there's nothing I can do about this right now. Yeah, it would be a really nice world if the Tarrogan problem could be solved so easily by Spotify dropping his exclusivity deal, right that would that would be great, But

that's not the world we live in. And tricking yourself into thinking that is just kind of delusional. Um, and like yeah, it makes you feel better, but like that's not actually helping because like, yeah, we can obviously compare this to other like D platform and campaigns with people for like Alex Jones, but you know, Jones was way more niche and way more extreme around the time of his like D platforming campaign, and his campaign wasn't about

ending exclusivity deals. It was about getting him off of popular platforms altogether. And that's not happening with Joe Rogan because Joe Rogan isn't saying the things that are going to get him booted from platforms. He's smart, he knows what he can and cannot say. He's not He's not dumb enough to get banned from these platforms, right, and also, you know, he's a giant financial asset, so they wouldn't

ben him anyway. But like he's he's What he's doing is it's bringing on people who say horrible things to continue a cultural conversation, which gives him in the headlines and gives a platform like Spotify a whole bunch of room to cry free speech and get away with it. Removing Alex Jones could be seen as like a monetary decision in and of itself, because it is actually removing liability. But this is this isn't really the case for Rogan. Yeah,

and he's um, yeah, it's just not. One of the problems is that this kind of does fly in the face of a lot of what people want to think. And I don't want to be making the case that it's as black and white as it is, because, for example, I'm not saying that it was bad for someone to go through the effort of finding and pointing out, Hey, there's like seventy episodes where Joe Rogan drops the N

word um and getting those pulls. I don't think that I think that that was broadly speaking, a productive thing. But keeping Joe Rogan at the forefront of the outrage cycle is doing nothing but printing money for the guy. And that's that's not an easy thing to deal with because it's like, do you want me to just like stay quiet in the face of injustice? And it's like, no,

that's not what I want you to do. But I do want you to recognize that there are times in ways of speaking up that are just yes, putting putting gasoline on an injustice fire. It's it's important to remember that d platform ng is just a tactic and and single tactics aren't always effective in every situation. That's what makes them a tactic, right, Like, in order for a tactic to work, you need to understand the scenario that's are applying the tactic to and seeing if that tactic

achieves the goal. And if it doesn't, great, but if it doesn't, you need to choose other tactic and stop doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a new result. And this is one of those situations where like when you bring up, hey, maybe nothing might be the best thing, at least for for most people specifically to do. Like, the thing that gets brought up is like, well do you not want me to uh?

Or like, well, what do you suggest I do? Like you know, you're saying I shouldn't do this, but you're not telling me what to do. It's like, well, it's like if somebody gets shot in the leg and one person has a tourniquet and the other person has a bunch of razor blades that they want to throw in their eyes, and it's like, well, what do you want me to do? All I have is these razor blades. This is the only other thing I can do? Then

just stand by and do nothing. And it's like, well, in this case, doing nothing is the best thing to do, because it's it's not that's not going to help the problem.

Boycotts of this scale kind of only tend to benefit brands and businesses right like, because if if if the brand of business is a person is smaller in more niche like and say like Alex Jones or Richard Spencer, right then yes, these tactics about boycotts can really work to push things out of the cultural like market and also in some cases in terms of businesses like the literal market, but when you're dealing with things like Target, Nike, and Joe Rogan, that's not the case because those brands

are way too big. Any any you know, any conservative boycott against Target isn't going to have that effect. It will probably make weird liberals be like, Oh, I'm gonna go to Target now because the conservative still want me to. It's so like it's I don't it's not it's it's like, it's the problem is. It's like Joe Rogan himself isn't really the problem either. You know. A lot of the problem can be seen more as like content algorithms that

boost and reward misinformation and disinformation and conspiracism. And that's more of like an actual issue at hand here. Joe Rogan is just a business. That's how he hears about a lot of these people. Yeah, I go viral somewhere else. And in a lot of cases, it's an inorganic thing that brings them in front of them. It's some fucking algorithm that and and that is a case where you can target and work on deep exacting and it can be more productive that that. That was That was what

that was what I was getting at. It's like Joe Joe Rogan himself was just a visible outgrowth of the core problem. And the core problem is these things getting onto his show in the first place. So yeah, we can't stop his show, but maybe we should do more work to prevent to like figure out ways to do you know, start using these tactics to prevent algorithms from boosting these things so that Joe Roken sees them and then and then invites them on. And yeah, that's a

lot more work than just being angry at Spotify. And yet maybe it will actually do something. And one thing that can do something is with spot and it won't work if it's just Spotify. But I am one of those people who thinks that maybe it's not the worst thing if things like Spotify are seen as publishers and thus when they spread misinformation that leads to disaster as health consequences, um, they can be held liable. Right. Uh, that's not the worst possible change, although it is a

problematic one. I don't want to like boil that down to a simple question, but I think that's an avenue that should be explored because I don't see that there's a lot of difference in Spotify choosing to let something go to air or the New York Times printing misinformation. UM. And in fact, Spotify is going to reach more people because nobody cares what the New York Times says anymore. Yeah,

so Spotify. The Spotify CEO did kind of address the ongoing controversy around the you know, internal publishing stuff and how they view medical misinformation. UM. They do adopt a clarified policy that prohibits content that promotes dangerous, false, or dangerous deceptive medical information which may cause offline harm or

pose a direct threat to public health. UM. And then the Post also announced that the Spotify would add content advisories to any content related to COVID on the platform, Twitter and Instagram have no, it's not, it's not, it's not actually it's but but if you have the operation, if you can again, if there is like an actual dollar consequence to companies that aired massive disinformation, UM, then you're not without sort of making Joe Rogan the focus.

You can make it so that the people that he actually is accountable to, which is the people who make him give him the money that he gets. UH, have a vested interest in tamping down on the worst excesses that he's responsible for, Like that might have an impact. I don't know, Like part of the problem is that and one thing we should acknowledge here when we're talking about like what would work better than what's being done.

This is a pretty new problem. Versions of it have existed before, but without the Internet and without podcasts being what they are, this is a pretty new thing to be dealing with. And I'm not I don't I'm not saying like this is here's the obvious solution to this, but I think we are trying to point out, like what folks are doing doesn't work. The tactics being applied are not effective, and we should be exploring other opportunities

to mitigate this harm that are not well. I guess it's time to delete another app and post about it on Twitter. Yeah. I think I think this is especially a thing with like it's like one of the other things that that's been popping up as broken's like weapons grade transphobia. Yes, oh yeah, jeez, yeah, and that's that stuff us is horrifying. Like the racism is also like really bad. He's extremely sexist. But it's like I think misogynist, racist,

all there's a lot of money and being that dude. Yeah, well, and I think this is sort of you know, this, this is you know, this is an inherent problem for the left because fighting like this, this kind of sort of like shock jockey information stuff works better like that that rage economy works better for the right thing does for the left. And I think in some ways that means like you have to fight them in other spaces, you like, you know, you you you can't just like

keep throwing yourself. It's the same thing with like so why why why you don't have just like one line where you just run into a bunch of cops over and over again in one spot, right, like, but we try. Yeah. Yeah, it's like some folks gave that one the old College, the old College. Yeah, it's like you know, like in some in some sense, yeah, like it's it's it's it's it's hard to be too hard on these on people

who doing this. And it's like if I think they're doing the right thing, but it's like you have to you have to pick your battles. And you know, if if you're taking a fight that's fair, like that's a that's a bad fight that is a bad fight for you. You you need you need to be finding them in

different spheres. You need to be you know, I mean, working for example, on stuff like tech regulation, like you like working on you know, unionizing these places, right like fighting purely finding them in information space, we will lose every time. The advantage that we have is that we also do other things, and it's it's you know, we're we're going to keep losing hearing if you know, if we keep fighting them in exactly the same way here,

we're going to keep losing. So we have to you know, like we we we we we have to fight in other places. And that's hard and it sucks because you know, this is such a mispart of just what reality is now is you know, yelling at people online. But like you have to stop doing that because the problem is that we've all gotten fucking caught for quite some time

in this escalating culture war. And it's not it's not a battle ground that can be entirely ignored because when you kind of seed ground them, they create conspiracy theories about trans people attacking kids that lead to them murdering people in the streets, or they spread conspiracy theories about masks that lead to them occupying Ottawa. Um. So it can't.

The culture war battleground cannot be ignored. But at the end of the day, what we should rather than just like seeking new ways to engage with it, because the more you engage with it, and it is sometimes necessary to engage with but the more you engage with it, the stronger you make this whole thing and the heavier

it lies on all of us like a cloud. And in the only real way to actually win in the long run is to find a way to get off of that, to get out of this, like this fucking treadmill of bullshit that has become everything all consuming, and it's it's in a lot of people's best interest for

it to stay all consuming. Um And I there's a there's a lot that's going on here because it's not I think sometimes when you criticize people for the actions they take in situation is like this, they kind of interpreted as you saying, well, like you're stupid and you fucked up and you never should have liked done this, And and the way I think of it is more like this is a we have found ourselves trapped in a really messy situation and no one has figured out

how to get out. So it's not a situation of like, people are are dumb for having done something that's not effective.

It's a situation of we are all trying to figure out what works in this new world we have kind of somewhat accidentally somewhat purposefully built for ourselves, and it is important to have humility and be willing to accept it, like, you know what, that's not working and we have to stop doing the thing that's not working, rather than you know, treat it as if it's sort of a moral failing

that something we we we tried was not effective. The last thing is it's like, really, it's not just the non effectiveness, but also so the idea that the fact that this outrage is said just a constant is just a constant free bannerad for Spotify every everywhere online is like also not great. So it's not it's not even not not even just not effective, but you're just giving

a corporation tons of free press. And maybe we can reframe the way we approach these things so that we don't do that, because in the end, that's just kind of adding to promoting the misinformation that's kind of that's all that's kind of really doing. And it's not that's not nearly as you know, impactful, as you know, just Rogan doing it himself, but it's still is it still is a contributing factor and and and it it does contribute to the backfire effect of people who listen to

his podcast. Maybe people who like don't even but they're still gonna get defensive over him because they're seeing this attack on him. And even though he's even though he is a huge figure, he's seen as an outsider. So that that really does contribute to that back backfire effect thing of getting people more and more vested in him

as a content creator. But yeah, it's really dumb. But the thing we need to deal with it, it's it's a version of the lesson people still didn't learn with Trump, which is that like, you can't you can't beat these people by dunking on them. It doesn't matter that Joe rogan said something dumb. It doesn't matter that Joe Rogan's inconsistent, It doesn't matter that like Joe Rogan has tell tells lies or whatever. That's not going to change anybody's mind

about the dude, because it's not about Joe Rogan. They don't support him because they love They support him as much as any of the people who are at least engaging primarily online about it. Most of his fans are just don't think about any of this because they're not as online as the rest of us. But the people who are kind of engaging with this and helping to fuel the culture war side of this thing, they don't care. There this This isn't about his inherent characteristics. This is

about it's a chance to dunk on the enemy. Um so, like you, you're not going to convince them of anything. Ever. That's all I had to say on this. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, because I again, I really I really resisted writing this episode for a long time because I didn't want to add to the Rogan discourse. But after a while, the Rogan discourse itself became worth talking about. How we talk so because it is more of a meta angle, like okay, that is actually worth talking about.

But yeah, I am so tired of hearing, watching, and seeing the words still Rogan. Yeah, I'm exhausted by it. I hate that, Like it's a bigger story in the United States than the gigantic war that might break out in Eastern Europe. Um, it's it's just just a very frustrating time and the only way to win this particular game is not to play um. So that's that's why we're doing this. We're not going to stick his name in the description or the episode title. Um yeah it is.

You know, the title we were working with this under that we're not going to use so as to not feed into the algorithm was Joe Rogan the Egregor. And that is really how I think about it. If you if you haven't listened to our episode on the book about the Flat Earth, book on Behind the Bastards that talks about as Um and eggs, it's basically a god that is made up by the kind of directed thoughts

of a population of people. Yeah, it's like a distalt deity that exists like this thought form that if people put energy into it, it almost gains its own it's it's own like um um independence from the people that that like burst it, even though it is just like a thought form and it because it was just an idea or presence, and now it basically is its own

god that's self sustaining and it can impact the world. Yeah, global capital is an egregor And and the more that people kind of feed into the discourse around Joe Rogan, the more he turns into one kind of outside of his own actions, he this idea of him has an influence on everything around us. And boy, we don't need that, do we certainly did not just said we just put that one down, right, try something else. Yeah, let's throw a brick at your sheriff instead. This will go better

for you. I mean sure, sure, Chris, Yeah, Chris, Chris said it, not me. Yeah, I mean obviously in Minecraft he said bricks. It's fine. Robert Robert, Robert Robert. It's not Minecraft anymore. It's a roadblocks the feds cracked in Minecraft. Yeah, you're right. It's going to take peks for them, for them to their computers to realize what roadblocks is them.

Was a story I think I saw on Twitter about like like some yeah, so some some kids who actually legitimately got arrested in Brushford, like blowing up a building in Minecraft, so like like literally so we uh yeah, and instead again again it's roadblocks where nothing bad happens, nothing bad happens, all right, Everybody get on Roadblocks, um and don't talk about Joe Rogan and don't talk about Joe Rogan. It Could Happen Here is a production of

cool Zone Media. Or more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.