There’s a really big problem going on that I don’t think many people realize, and it’s pretty scary. I don’t mean to be an alarmist, and hopefully I don’t come across that way. But during a time where bias blind spots have led to the worst polarization in history, we have to discuss this illusion of knowledge. Podcasts have become the platform that intellectuals turn to, and in turn, podcast hosts have created a self-image of being some of the top intellectuals. The issue is that when you think you’re in the top percentile of intelligence, it’s a lot easier to be duped.
This last week there have been two podcasts episodes from two of the largest shows that should make us all take a step back and realize what’s going on. Recently, Joe Rogan hosted controversial doctor Peter McCullough to discuss his issues with COVID vaccines and treatment of COVID. Then, Lex Fridman had the Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla, to discuss vaccines as well. Both hosts believed they “pushed back” on their guests, but when you’re unaware of your own ignorance, you think you did a good job challenging the guest when you really let them BS their way through the interview.
Podcast analytics are extremely difficult to come by, but it’s estimated that Lex gets hundreds of thousands of listens per episode and Rogan is in the millions. As a podcaster myself, I can tell you that in these are massive numbers. Obviously, Joe Rogan is the largest podcast out there, but Lex is definitely up in the most-listened realm as well. Both hosts believe they have intellectual humility, and when you tell yourself that, it’s much harder to know when stuff is slipping through the cracks.
Intellectual humility is probably the most important characteristic any of us can have, and it’s difficult to develop because of our ego. Personally, I always have a book or two in my rotation that reminds me that I’m not as smart as I think I am or reminds me of all of the cognitive errors, biases, and heuristics we humans face on a daily basis. I’m by no means immune to these errors, and nobody is, but they have to stay at the forefront of our mind if we hope to think a bit more clearly and make better decisions.
When you think that you’ve mastered all of these biases, you’re in a dangerous place. This is one of the reasons I laughed so hard that I almost busted my gut when I saw this tweet from Elon Musk:
Elon has reached a place of self-deception where he believes he should preach to others about teaching kids these biases when he puts his, along with his ego, on public display regularly.
The problem with podcasts start with the hosts, and when you’re some of the biggest podcasters out there, you have an even bigger responsibility.
I empathize with Joe Rogan and have thought a lot about what the responsibility is of anyone with a platform. When I was canceled on YouTube in 2019 and attacked by the mob, the mob would then accuse me of sending my loyal fans after people. I’ve watched a ton of YouTubers tell their audience not to go attack people after making an hour-long video our multi-part series about how horrible someone is, but then they toss in a disclaimer saying, “Don’t harass this person.” Although we may not directly tell our audience to do something, we have to take some responsibility.
There’s always going to be plausible deniability, and a great example is Donald Trump on January 6th. Trump and his defenders argue that he never told the people to storm the capital even though there’s plenty of footage showing that it was highly inferred as well as evidence that he knew it was a possibility. But even then, there’s the argument that people have human agency, so technically, he can’t force anyone to do anything. Those who are aware of Milgrim’s obedience to authority research know otherwise.
With Joe Rogan, he often falls back on the defense that he’s just some comedian MMA guy with a podcast who doesn’t know anything. When he started his podcast, he never thought in a million years he’d be signing $100 million contracts and would be the largest podcast out there. And I get it. One of my best friends has been listening to Joe Rogan since the beginning, so I know about Joe’s humble beginnings. But at a certain point, we have to realize that we crossed an invisible line and have a ton of influence, even if we didn’t ask for it.
The other day, the Decoding the Gurus podcast did an episode on Joe Rogan, and I highly recommend it. Self-deception is really interesting, and it seems like there’s a possibility that Joe Rogan doesn’t even realize his own biases and political leanings. On top of that, for as much as Joe says he’s just some random schmuck, he really does believe he’s an expert on things that he has little knowledge about.
A lot of people toss around the Dunning-Kruger effect as a way to call someone dumb, but Joe’s conversation that Decording the Gurus takes clips from is actually a really good example. Throughout Rogan’s conversation with Jocko Willink, Joe talks about how much he knows about COVID, the vaccines, antibodies, and everything in-between. He even brags about this folder he keeps on his phone with go-to links for on-the-fly debates he may have to have at any given moment. When I learned about this phone folder, I instantly thought, “Oh no, Joe.”
There are a lot of great books out there about how we’re fooled into thinking we’re more intelligent than we are. They discuss how we believe we can spot the biases in others but think we’re immune. More importantly, this has all become worse in the age of the internet. There are studies that show that just by giving someone access to Google, they believe they’re smarter than they are. Yes, you can find a lot of information via Google, but due to how the algorithms work, you can find a lot of bad information. When it comes to Joe, you can make all the phone folders you want, but if you’re putting bad and biased information in there, it doesn’t make you smart.
I personally listened to Joe’s entire episode with Peter McCullough, and I didn’t know anything about McCullough prior to the episode. Recently, I’ve been skeptical of some of the COVID stuff going on even though I’m vaxxed and am one of the so-called sheeple who wear my mask everywhere. My skepticism has come from Big Pharma billionaires telling us we may need more and more boosters and how there’s been a lack of nuance in the COVID conversations. COVID zero doesn’t sound possible, but many government officials and news outlets are acting as though it’s something we have to strive for or live in perpetual fear, and I’m not a fan of that.
So, I wanted to see what this Peter McCullough guy had to say, and God damn he was convincing. Throughout his three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan, he cites study after study after study. He has them on hand, and it’s actually impressive. Not only that, but he boasts about all of his credentials and how many research papers he’s written.
During those three hours, there are maybe three or four times Joe Rogan “pushes back” on McCullough’s claims, but Rogan quickly backs down, and that’s the first main issue.
Remember, Joe Rogan believes that without any formal education, he believes he’s an expert on COVID. So, when he “pushes back” and gets an answer, his ego tells him that it’s okay to back down because if he felt there was an issue with the response, he’d push more. But when you believe you know it all, you lack intellectual humility. In fact, more research shows that intelligent people (or those who believe themselves to be intelligent) are even more likely to get duped or have biases.
As a listener, Peter McCullough was convincing. But something I’ve learned interviewing a wide range of experts on my podcast is that when the topic is important, you need to do some more research. As a listener, I knew that since Peter McCullough made so much sense, I had to ask some more questions. He made some really big claims that bordered on conspiracies like covering up deaths from vaccines or profit motives for pushing vaccines instead of treatment. At one point, he even said that something like 85% of lives could have been saved if we used treatments instead of vaccines.
While listening to the episode and immediately after, I started going on Twitter and asking around for the best counter-arguments to Peter McCullough. During COVID, we’ve seen a lot of smart, credentialed people go off the deep end, so I needed to see if Peter was one of them. Like Joe, I’m no disease expert, so I had to turn to some people who know a lot more than I do.
Within minutes, I had a ton of people sending me resources of the scientific community debunking Peter’s claims for the last year. First was this video from YouTuber Debunk the Funk with Dr. Wilson, and he has a B.S. in Biotechnology and Molecular Biology from Clarion University and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University. Clearly, he knows more than myself and Joe combined, so I watched his video titled Debunking Peter McCullough in less than 10 minutes.
Then, doctor and YouTuber ZDoggMD made an hour-long video going claim by claim from the Joe Rogan interview in his video Joe Rogan's Interview With Dr. Peter McCullough | A Doctor Explains. And this video put the nail in the coffin for McCullough’s interview. He goes through and explains how some of the studies Peter cites have been debunked, how some of the organizations are shams or extremely biased, as well as some points he agrees with Peter on. ZDoggMD showcases great characteristics of intellectual humility, and that makes me trust him a bit more.
Another great interview was Sam Harris’ conversation with Nicholas Christakis. While they don’t name Joe Rogan specifically, you can tell they have issues with some of the guests Joe is platforming to spread COVID misinformation and nonsense. Christakis is another person I trust, and he does an incredible job breaking down the pandemic in this interview as well as in his most recent book Apollo’s Arrow.
Then, we come to Lex Fridman. I know a lot of very smart people who love the Lex Fridman podcast. I’ve only listened to a few of his episodes, and there’s no doubt he’s an extremely smart guy, but his specialty is in AI, and he can hold his own in conversations about the blockchain and crypto. You can tell that from his love of philosophy, he tries to stay intellectually humble, but in his interview with the Pfizer CEO, I had to question if he knows when he’s being BSed.
I saw Katherine Brodsky tweet this out, and I respect the hell out of her:
But as soon as I saw this, I knew I had to listen because I doubted a CEO for Big Pharma would go on Lex’s podcast and be honest. And when I saw that Lex said he covered challenging topics, I had to find out if he really challenged this guy.
It didn’t take long to realize that Lex was being taken for a ride this entire interview. Although Lex is humble, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.
As a recovering opioid addict who also does advocacy, I’m much more knowledgeable about Big Pharma, the FDA, and those topics. By no means am I an expert, but I’m well-versed in a lot of the shady stuff that goes on. So, as I listened, I was blown away at how Lex believed he was putting pressure on the CEO but then backing off with answers that were complete nonsense.
Toward the beginning of the interview, Lex asks the CEO if the vaccine research can be biased, and the CEO almost finds it laughable. He says it can’t be biased because there’s so much regulation, and Lex simply accepts that answer. This is 1000% false. Many of the government agencies, including the FDA have biased research pass through all of the time. There are lot of tricks that researchers can do to make research look legitimate when it’s not, such as p-hacking. When research is done internally, they can also eliminate bad results and only submit the studies that gave them the results that they wanted.
This whole thing is covered in-depth in the fantastic book The Emperor’s New Drugs. But if Lex is unaware of how this system works in the pharmaceutical industry, he doesn’t even know what questions to ask. When you don’t know what you don’t know, you can’t conduct a hard-hitting interview to ask the right questions.
Next, Lex asks about some of the criticisms of corruption between Big Pharma and agencies like the FDA. Once again, the CEO dismisses this as some sort of myth and explains that there are waiting periods before someone can serve on committees or be involved in aspects of a pharmaceutical company if they left a government agency.
Again, this is laughable.
Corruption like this is in just about every major industry you can imagine. Politicians help pass bills while receiving large campaign donations. Then, when they leave, they go work for these companies for insane amounts of money. This is exactly what Purdue Pharma did to learn tricky ways to market Oxycontin as non-addictive. The people moving from agencies to pharmaceutical companies don’t give a damn about what department they’re put in or what they can work on, it’s just about the money.
So yes, in Lex’s mind he thought he was asking the right questions, but when you don’t know the details, you don’t know how to follow up and catch the person in their bullshit. Instead, Lex spends an hour with the Pfizer CEO just selling him a bill of goods.
Then, Lex gives the CEO the opportunity to act as though he’s this altruist we should all admire by asking about the funding of the research. The CEO says that they weren’t even concerned about the money. They simply wanted to help the world. The CEO goes on to discuss how much they invested in this research just to help humanity.
Now, I won’t claim that this had nothing to do with the research, but I will say that at best, it’s only partially true. While Pfizer didn’t receive funding for the research, they’re making bank from the government for the doses. Pfizer is able to turn around and make a massive profit for the doses, and the common argument you hear is, “The vaccines are free!”. No. If the government is paying for it, that means our tax dollars are paying for it. Economics 101 is that there are no free meals.
These are just a few issues from these episodes that a college dropout like myself spotted, but I hope it’s opened your eyes a little bit.
The primary issue is that we have people with large platforms who have deceived themselves into thinking they’re more intelligent than they are. It’s not just them. It’s all of us listeners too. If we believe they’re smarter than they are, we don’t think we need to do any additional research because we’re fooled by our own intelligence as well. We’re being BSed while listening to a host be BSed. Meanwhile, we’re gathering bad information that feeds our confirmation bias.
What’s the solution? Be more skeptical and be aware of your own ignorance and biases. Hopefully, these podcast hosts can start doing the same. If you watch Joe Rogan carefully, you’ll notice he never has Jamie fact-check information that agrees with his beliefs. He has the tools, but he’s only skeptical of information that conflicts with what he already believes. That alone should make listeners skeptical of how he conducts interviews with experts and who he brings on.
I’m no master of this tuff, but if you liked what you read here, I highly recommend you try my strategy. Always have a book you’re reading that reminds you how dumb you are and how many thinking errors we all deal with. It’ll help you navigate the world a lot better and do just a little bit more investigating after you finish listening to a podcast.
I’m currently writing a book about how we’re manipulated by the news, social media, technology, advertisers, and each other. It dives into the psychological history of manipulation, our biases, tribalism, and more.
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