Malcolm Gladwell Has an, Uh, Interesting Perspective on Joe Rogan's Podcast

By Dustin Rowles | News | September 26, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | News | September 26, 2024 |

I don’t read a lot of trendy academic-ish non-fiction because I know I’m susceptible to “expert” opinion. If it’s a field I’m not familiar with, I’m easily persuaded. Take, for instance, the Anxious Generation, the book about how dangerous cell phone use is for kids. I fell under its spell, but our readers offered many reasons to be skeptical. Then I listened to the “If Books Could Kill” podcast episode on Anxious Generation. Jonathan Haidt’s science is not sound! It’s cherry-picked to support conclusions he’s already made.

“If Books Could Kill” is actually a very useful podcast for those who read a lot of trendy non-fiction. It provides a healthy counterpoint, and that highlights the problem with Joe Rogan bringing on “experts” to speak for an hour or two on various subjects: Joe Rogan is incapable of providing a counterpoint.

But Malcolm Gladwell — who I know has been the subject of at least one episode of “If Books Could Kill” — doesn’t seem to think that’s an issue.

“I’m not a regular Joe Rogan listener,” he told the NYTimes this week. “I actually committed to listening to an episode with Andrew Huberman. [Mr. Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford who hosts a popular podcast.] I guess he’s controversial, I have no idea.”

I thought it was a great episode. Rogan let someone who knows about the brain and human development come on his show and talk for two hours. That is the opposite of anti-expertise. And Rogan does this week in and week out — he invites people who know something on his show and lets them talk. Sometimes I don’t agree with the person he has on his show, but other times I learn a lot. It’s a different consumption model for encountering expertise, but it’s not anti-expertise.

OK, but what about experts who are full of shit?

People increasingly want uncurated expertise. Now, does that sometimes create problems? Yeah, a lot of people didn’t take the Covid vaccine who should have and died as a result. That’s really unfortunate. I am fully aware of what happens when you let a thousand flowers bloom… But I’m also aware that there is, at times, something beautiful about the fact that we are opening up access to people in a way we never did before.

My knee-jerk reaction is to disagree with everything Malcolm Gladwell is saying. But then I remember that our gatekeepers — the folks who curate so much of our news — have also had shit for brains lately. So no, I won’t trust an “expert” on a podcast where Jordan Peterson is considered an “expert,” but there is something to be said for not having our media consumption curated by corporations and tech bros with profit motives.

(For what it’s worth, Gladwell did retract a lot of what he wrote about policing 25 years ago, although the damage has already been done.)

Source: NYTimes