BONUS: The Joe Rogan we need isn't so easy to create
Update: 2024-11-14
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Ryan and our producer Grant dig into the election and have some comments about whether or not we can simply create the "liberal Joe Rogan."
Full episode can be found at: https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld
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Transcript
00:00:00
- Right, what do we need to make you the left-stroke Rogan?
00:00:04
- Oh, fuck off.
00:00:05
I don't wanna be the left-stroke Rogan.
00:00:09
You're not the first person to ask you this question this week.
00:00:12
God, damn it.
00:00:14
I mean, I have thought about this, not for me, because like, okay.
00:00:18
- No, no, for you.
00:00:19
I'm only interested in the answer for you.
00:00:21
- So, I mean, the problem is that like, I am not a particularly mainstream person.
00:00:27
I don't have a lot of mainstream interests.
00:00:30
I watch a lot of anime.
00:00:34
- Just Joe Rogan?
00:00:35
- Yeah, he does.
00:00:36
Like, he's the host of UFC.
00:00:39
Like, that's pretty mainstream masculine, I think.
00:00:43
Which is kind of the problem when you talk about Joe Rogan, because like, he has sort of like, codified a set of things that men in America are supposed to care about.
00:00:53
Smoking weed, watching UFC, investing in crypto.
00:00:56
Being buff, you know, gains.
00:00:59
I don't have gains.
00:01:01
Um, I have a-- - I can get you gains.
00:01:03
- My body type looks like Dr.
00:01:05
Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog.
00:01:06
I have very long legs and a very short torso and kind of a big belly.
00:01:10
So, I'm not-- - I don't talk about this with you at all, but bro, let me mold you.
00:01:13
- I don't wanna be molded.
00:01:14
- I'm gonna cross this five times a week.
00:01:16
- I don't wanna be molded.
00:01:17
- And that's the intro.
00:01:18
(upbeat music)
00:01:20
- It's been a week and changed since the Red Wave.
00:01:26
And every time I go on Ryan's Twitter, I see he's arguing about dumb democratic things.
00:01:30
So today, I thought we'd do a little bonus about what Dems are panicking about and what we think they should actually be panicking about.
00:01:37
I'm Grant Irving, panic world producer.
00:01:40
- And joining me today, everyone knows him as the Joe Rogan of the Left.
00:01:44
Ryan Brockrick.
00:01:45
Ryan, welcome to your show.
00:01:47
- I don't know about that intro.
00:01:48
I think we-- I think I hope the producer changed that intro later.
00:01:51
- You're doing a great job already becoming Joe Rogan by hating my-- - I just, okay.
00:01:59
I know.
00:02:00
So yeah.
00:02:01
I think you have to start with who, like what is Joe Rogan?
00:02:04
That is the first thing.
00:02:06
Like Democrats are convinced that Joe Rogan is this political mastermind, this like Sven Golly of American males.
00:02:15
You know, activating their right-wing fantasies.
00:02:18
And that's just not really true.
00:02:20
I mean, we will get there.
00:02:22
I think all our listeners know this.
00:02:24
I was just putting that question into fuck with you.
00:02:27
Where I really want to start is, why did you think Kamala would win?
00:02:31
- There's a brief moment in August.
00:02:36
I remember where I was.
00:02:37
I was on an Amtrak train going on vacation, going off to vacation.
00:02:42
And she had had like a particularly aggressive week, Tim Walls was in, Brat was relevant still and felt cool.
00:02:51
She had this massive war chest.
00:02:54
I think Swifties had just mobilized for her.
00:02:56
White dudes for Harris was like right around the corner if it hadn't happened already.
00:03:00
It was this moment where it just felt good.
00:03:04
It felt really good.
00:03:06
And I look back on it now and I sort of realized that I may have been micro-targeted for millennial nostalgia and it was blinding me, but it felt really good.
00:03:15
It felt like she had all the pieces.
00:03:18
She was aggressive.
00:03:19
Her internet game was strong.
00:03:22
Her ground game seemed strong.
00:03:24
And people seemed ready to move on from Trump.
00:03:27
And I even liked her, her sort of slogan, like we can't go back or whatever.
00:03:32
The whole thing felt right to me.
00:03:35
And then it soured pretty quickly.
00:03:39
But that couple weeks in August felt really strong.
00:03:43
So I was wrong too.
00:03:46
I immediately accepted that her strategy of appealing to only white ladies was the only thing that could win.
00:03:53
I now have my coping theory as to why she lost so epically.
00:03:57
But before I share, I want to hear yours.
00:03:59
Why she lost?
00:04:00
Why do you think you were wrong?
00:04:02
So I definitely think I was blinded by millennial nostalgia.
00:04:07
Having Tim Walls be a Dreamcast guy, like really fucked up my radar because I'm a Dreamcast guy.
00:04:11
I have one in my apartment.
00:04:13
I don't like crazy taxi.
00:04:14
I think it's actually a horrible game.
00:04:16
But I like Jack Brown radio.
00:04:18
I like I like Dreamcast.
00:04:20
I think it was ahead of its time.
00:04:21
We can talk all you want about the VMU, the virtual memory unit that you could play with you little video games on.
00:04:27
Say Sonic Adventure 2, like, you know, we can go down the rabbit hole.
00:04:30
But I wish we were still talking about pushups.
00:04:32
I mean, hell, like Tim Walls used American football and one of their TikTok videos.
00:04:36
Like the bands by the way, it was really hitting me hard.
00:04:39
The major reason though, I think they lost is quite simple, which is that Kamala had a very fuzzy platform, actually.
00:04:49
Like gun to my head, I don't think I can really tell you what she cared about other than owning a gun and cooking.
00:04:57
I think she likes cooking and dancing.
00:04:59
The other problem is that the Democrats have what they, what what one politician this week referred to as a high income base.
00:05:08
And they didn't seem particularly interested in alienating that high income base.
00:05:13
In fact, Kamala Harris' I think her brother-in-law is the chief legal officer for Uber, who according to one story I was reading this week, was advising her to be softer on big business,
00:05:25
to Coke CEOs to their side.
00:05:27
Like just typical Democrat clown shit that I think really muddled their messaging, which was vague and strange.
00:05:36
And you, I think there was this idea that they could Obama and be like, I want to be turning, turning, turning, forever into the future kind of thing.
00:05:46
And they didn't define the future.
00:05:49
They just said that we were gonna have one.
00:05:51
And it's like, yeah, sure.
00:05:53
But they didn't really say what it was gonna be.
00:05:55
Meanwhile, Trump is at rallies in his little like, anti-assets and cube, being very clear about certain things.
00:06:04
Obviously he's like ranting and raving about sharks, a handful of lector and stuff.
00:06:08
But he is very clear about several things, which, you know, I'm gonna make you never have to pay taxes again and I'm going to deport every immigrant you don't like.
00:06:17
And maybe I'll keep the immigrants you do like.
00:06:20
And Americans, I just think after four years of Biden were tired, they were uninformed.
00:06:27
They didn't like the Democrats because they couldn't really understand what the Democrats had done for them.
00:06:32
And the simplest message won.
00:06:36
- Do you think she ran a better campaign than Hillary?
00:06:40
- That's a great question, actually.
00:06:43
She didn't say Hock two of the polls.
00:06:47
So that is one point on her on Kamala's side.
00:06:51
- What, what have I done the trick?
00:06:52
- I think it was a saviour campaign.
00:06:54
- I think it was definitely a, it was a saviour campaign.
00:06:57
I think it was, it was, it was a saviour campaign for a political era that no longer exists.
00:07:02
In fact, if you took Kamala Harris's campaign in 2024 and you time traveled back to 2016, and you time traveled back to 2016 and you did it,
00:07:13
then it would have beaten Trump then.
00:07:16
- Exactly, that's, that's, so I thought she ran the, here, let me lay out my theory for you.
00:07:22
- Yeah.
00:07:23
- I think she ran the most competent campaign against Trump we've seen.
00:07:28
And I think in either 2016 or 2020, that would have been a landslide.
00:07:34
But when you're representing the incumbent that doesn't hit the same way.
00:07:41
So if I was to distill it down, I think it's about vision.
00:07:45
My theory is that campaigns win when they offer an alternative and vision, and the longer went on the more it was like she's not about anything,
00:07:55
just like you were saying.
00:07:57
The rights vision, they always know it.
00:08:00
It's fear mongering, it's fear mongering in taxes.
00:08:03
So like you know what it was about.
00:08:05
And I think when the left lacks vision that is believable and actually feels like it's meeting the moment, that's when people want to go, well, maybe if we just deport them all,
00:08:17
my life will be better.
00:08:18
If you don't give people an adequate vision to feel good about, then they're looking for an enemy blame and like broad strokes think like no one has job security.
00:08:28
No one feels really like no one's buying a house.
00:08:32
Like the lack of vision, but things are going to get better.
00:08:36
Just felt real felt not enough.
00:08:39
Considering that that she hangs out with a bunch of uber CEOs and she doesn't really know that people are like, I don't think I'm going to be able to afford to get.
00:08:49
- Well, okay, so there's like one macro trend that I think you have to sort of mention in these conversations, which you're kind of swiping at, which is that not one incumbent politician in any democracy on earth,
00:09:05
one re-election in 2024.
00:09:06
And when I had read that stat, it reminded me a lot of, this should not come as a surprise to anyone who's ever at Garbage Day.
00:09:14
Listen to any music I've ever scored for any of our projects or seen at Garbage Day live show.
00:09:19
But I'm a big fan of the documentary and Adam Curtis out of the UK, you should go watch hyper-normalization, his three hour horrifying documentary about the birth of the 21st century.
00:09:29
Anywhere you can find it, he hammers this idea quite often, which is that at the end of history in the late '90s, the sort of post-World War II status quo started to morph into managers.
00:09:45
Tony Blair is the example he uses as this sort of like status quo manager at the end of history.
00:09:50
Bill Clinton is another fantastic example where it's like we are done, the conflicts of the 20th century are over and we are just going to manage until the sun burns out.
00:10:01
And I think the biggest takeaway of this year's election cycle, which was the most amount of elections in one year ever, I believe, the biggest takeaway for me is that the neoliberal managerial concept is not working.
00:10:18
It cannot hold.
00:10:21
It could have never worked, but it certainly cannot hold now.
00:10:25
People are mad and anyone who has power.
00:10:28
In fact, if you want a really good example of this, you should just go look at all the prime ministers that have been elected and then kicked out of office in the UK since the beginning of the Brexit era.
00:10:38
These managerial politicians, one of which is definitely Kamala Harris, definitely Biden, Biden's whole strategy was quietly managing the country while doing small fixes and never sort of addressing the root problems.
00:10:51
These, this style of politician cannot win elections now and possibly never again, or at least for several generations.
00:11:01
It's over.
00:11:02
And so with that in mind, it's not surprising the Democrats lost.
00:11:07
If they had run like, you know, the demonic liberal psychopath, Gavin Newsom, out of California, like maybe they would have won, but clearly people want something different.
00:11:16
They don't want to steady hand.
00:11:18
They want, they want change, whatever it looks like for them.
00:11:22
And so I think what we're seeing online and we're seeing is the entire democratic party coming to terms with that and facing reality and having a new and exciting conversation.
00:11:33
Would that be what you'd say you've experienced in the past week?
00:11:37
(sighs)
00:11:38
There's this thing that always happens, which is that instead of dealing with the thing that you should be dealing with, and thinking about the problems that you should be thinking about, Democrats in particular like to go for the thing that's the easiest to look at,
00:11:52
which is typically the media, right?
00:11:54
So instead of like reckoning with very real structural problems in their political platform, they are going like,
00:12:05
we need a Joe Rogan because clearly that's gonna fix it.
00:12:08
And it drives me up a goddamn wall because Joe Rogan did not win the election for Trump.
00:12:13
I'm going to guarantee you that 90% of Joe Rogan's audience knew who they were voting for before Trump came on that episode.
00:12:22
Like, no question.
00:12:23
- Brian, I see that you're already annoyed and I'd like to make the stay worse for you.
00:12:27
So can I interest you in the chat column?
00:12:31
And I would like you to pull up these tweets in order.
00:12:34
- Okay, this is from user, Paynes Hertz.
00:12:38
Good.
00:12:39
And it reads, oh, this fucking thing, yeah.
00:12:42
So it reads, let's not pretend the angry video game nerds hateful rhetoric and crude language wasn't responsible for corrupting a generation of young people.
00:12:50
And I believe my buddy, Gene Park over the Washington Post had a really good retort to this, which was like, we have already found the South Park as radicalizing young men of the 2020s.
00:13:02
So for people who are not in the know, the angry video game nerd is like a horrible YouTuber that sucks ass.
00:13:08
You should go watch Dan Olson's short documentary about the angry video game nerd.
00:13:12
If you wanna go deeper down that rabbit hole, this is not anything.
00:13:16
Like this is like, this is a troll, right?
00:13:19
I mean, they're called Paynes Hertz.
00:13:21
Yeah, no, this is a troll.
00:13:22
This has to be a troll.
00:13:24
- I like that.
00:13:25
You, who is very good at spotting trolls, was too angry to notice until this moment.
00:13:31
What was not a troll was the, it was deleted because the person was getting ratioed.
00:13:36
But there was the, Democrats just like, it's a shame that they have to deal with ignorant people, tweet.
00:13:42
Do you know, do you know what I'm talking about?
00:13:45
- I yelled at them about this.
00:13:46
- Yes, yes.
00:13:47
Can you summarize?
00:13:49
- I was like, wait a minute.
00:13:50
I definitely rage quotes.
00:13:51
- I literally, the prep for this episode is I went to your talk.
00:13:54
- Okay, I think I'm picking up.
00:13:55
- Yeah, so I forget who it was, it doesn't matter.
00:14:00
They were claiming that there wasn't a messaging problem on the democratic side.
00:14:06
But they were saying that voters were ignorant of what the Democrats were running on.
00:14:14
Now, I was briefly an English major in college.
00:14:18
So like, I know what words mean.
00:14:20
And I would say that if your job is messaging to people and the people that you won't want a message to are ignorant, then you're bad at messaging 'cause that's the whole game,
00:14:33
right?
00:14:33
Like, that's it.
00:14:35
If you run a newspaper and your readers are uninformed, you run a bad newspaper.
00:14:40
So if you have a political party and your messaging people and they're ignorant and they stay ignorant, then you're bad at messaging.
00:14:47
And this is like a thing that has come around a lot where the Democrats are being like, oh, the media environment is bad right now.
00:14:53
And it's like, yes, it is.
00:14:54
It is very bad right now.
00:14:55
And in fact, here's a stat that I was looking at this morning for a piece I was working on.
00:14:59
Almost all of the top posts about the election on Facebook in the lead up to the election were pro hairs.
00:15:07
The Act Blue donation page was the single most viral interact with third party link on Facebook for the last like three months.
00:15:16
The top publisher on Facebook leading up to the election last month was the New York Times.
00:15:22
We are not in a like, like Twitter, yes, is controlled by like a psychopath who now works for Donald Trump.
00:15:31
But like Twitter doesn't drive traffic.
00:15:33
No one's on Twitter.
00:15:34
It doesn't really matter.
00:15:35
The actual people, the actual voters, we're looking at very basic stuff on Facebook and largely supportive of Kamala Harris.
00:15:43
Now that could mean that Facebook is just like not in touch with like the culture of America anymore possible.
00:15:50
But this is not like a totally extraordinary thing to deal with.
00:15:54
Yes, the media environment is fractured, sure.
00:15:57
But that's their job.
00:16:00
They had a billion dollars instead of throwing out like, instead of paying a million dollars for like Oprah to come to a concert, they could have just set up a website and blasted an email or something.
00:16:10
They might like, they could have given me, he could have bought and had a garbage day if they wanted.
00:16:14
Like, like, there's a million things you could have done with a billion dollars and they didn't do any of it.
00:16:20
So like, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the messaging is hard in a fractured online media environment because like with a billion dollars, you could have just built a new media environment.
00:16:32
Like, are you crazy?
00:16:35
Next election will just make this a podcast run by the DNC that can give us 1% of that of that money and we can create something to the media environment.
00:16:45
It's a great strategy.
00:16:46
Dude, I spoke to Democratic strategists about these issues.
00:16:51
I'm like, I'm like, do they pay you?
00:16:54
No, they didn't pay me.
00:16:55
But like, and also like, I want to take it.
00:16:57
But if you want to say that Democrats are out of touch and like they are, but the biggest way that they're out of touch is their total misunderstanding of what it takes to campaign in 2024 from a media standpoint.
00:17:13
Like, the Donald Trump dark social platform, like campaign was so aggressive.
00:17:19
Their tech scheme was out of control.
00:17:21
They were fighting like, they pretty much ignored TikTok, which I think is correct because TikTok has almost no impact on like, the world.
00:17:31
It like has an impact on how we see the world, which like can have downstream effects, sure.
00:17:35
But like, their major thing was Manosphere podcasts and aggressive texting.
00:17:41
Why do you think the Trump campaign in 2016, and I don't know about 2020, but definitely here, seems to just be a step ahead.
00:17:53
I mean, because Kamala basically tried to do Trump 2016 strategy of extreme social spending.
00:18:03
I know it's like, oh, that's weird.
00:18:05
That Trump's not spending money on socials.
00:18:06
It was like, you know, kind of everyone's reaction.
00:18:09
Why do you think that they're primed to be a step ahead?
00:18:14
I think one thing is that by going through 2016, the Republicans realized that they can throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks.
00:18:25
And they're much better about creating an environment where they can sort of like all experiment and then see what rises.
00:18:34
So they, you know, you can have like a guy like Deus Volt 1488 being like, I think fluoride turns you trans.
00:18:43
And then a Republican Senator can like, retweet it and be like, hmm, interesting, looking into this.
00:18:49
And then if enough people retweet, they're like, I guess we're looking into this.
00:18:52
They've sort of completely re-structured their political party to very intensely listen to signals that they're getting online where the Democrats are not like that.
00:19:05
They weren't even like that during the first Obama election because I went back recently just to see what they were doing.
00:19:13
And like they had on my space, they had the hope poster.
00:19:17
I think they're, I think Obama did an AMA on Reddit in 2011.
00:19:22
But it wasn't like they were full viral all the time.
00:19:26
And also the virality of like 10 years ago is totally different than it is now.
00:19:29
So like the Republicans are much more comfortable.
00:19:31
And this is why they're constantly lying, constantly making stuff up and constantly saying stuff that doesn't make any sense because they don't really care.
00:19:38
They're just trying to see what they can like, once again, Steve, you know, Steve Bannon's timeless quote, "Flood the Zone with Shit."
00:19:44
That's all they're trying to do.
00:19:46
(upbeat music)
00:19:48
Okay, if you wanna check out the rest of the conversation, you can head over to our Patreon at patreon.com/panicworld.
00:19:59
And just to give you a heads up in the next portion of the conversation, Ryan gives you all the answers you need.
00:20:05
Not just about what the Democrats need to do and what went wrong in the election, but all of the answers you personally need.
00:20:12
So for $5 at patreon.com/panicworld, you can get all the answers you need.
00:20:18
All right, please give us $5.
00:20:20
