Pod Insights Panic World BONUS: The Joe Rogan we need isn't so easy to create About this episode 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."
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Ryan, what do we need to make you the left's Joe Rogan?
0:04 Ryan Broderick? Oh, fuck off.
0:07 Ryan Broderick? I don't wanna be the left's Joe Rogan. You're not the first person to ask me this question this week. God damn it. I mean, I have thought about this, not for me, because like, okay.
0:18 Speaker 00 No, no, for you. I'm only interested in the answer for you.
0:21 Ryan Broderick? So, I mean, the problem is that like, I am not a particularly mainstream person. I don't have a lot of mainstream interests. I watch a lot of anime.
0:34 Speaker 00 Just Joe Rogan?
0:35 Ryan Broderick? Yeah, he does. Like, he, he, he's the host of UFC. Like, that's pretty mainstream masculine, I think. 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. Smoking weed, watching UFC, investing in crypto, being buff, you know, gains. I don't have gains.
1:02 Speaker 00 I can get you gains.
1:03 Ryan Broderick? My body type looks like Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog. I have very long legs and a very short torso and kind of a big belly. So, uh, I'm not.
1:11 Speaker 00 I don't talk about this with you at all, but, bro, let me mold you.
1:13 Ryan Broderick? I don't wanna be molded.
1:15 Speaker 00 I go to CrossFit five times a week.
1:16 Ryan Broderick? I don't wanna be molded.
1:16 Speaker 00 And that's the intro.
1:24 Speaker 00 It's been a week and change since the red wave. And every time I go on Ryan's Twitter, I see he's arguing about dumb democratic things. 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. I'm Grant Irving, Panathinaikos producer. And joining me today, everyone knows him as the Joe Rogan of the left, Ryan Broderick. Ryan, welcome to your show.
1:47 Ryan Broderick? I don't know about that intro. I think, I think, I hope the producer changes that intro later.
1:53 Speaker 00 You're doing a great job already becoming Joe Rogan by hating my.
1:57 Ryan Broderick? I just, okay, I know. So, so yeah. I think you have to start with who, like, what is Joe Rogan? That is, that is the first, that is the first thing. Like, Democrats are convinced that Joe Rogan is this political mastermind, this like Svengali of American males, you know, activating their right-wing fantasies. And that's just not really true. I mean.
2:21 Speaker 00 We, we will get there. I think all of our listeners know this. I was just putting that question in to fuck with you. Where I really want to start is, why did you think Kamala would win?
2:33 Ryan Broderick? There's a brief moment in August. I remember where I was. I was on an Amtrak train, uh, going on vacation, going off to vacation. And she had had like a particularly aggressive week. Tim Walz was in. Brat was relevant still and felt cool. She had this massive war chest. I think Swifties had just mobilized for her. White dudes for Harris was like right around the corner if it hadn't happened already. It was this moment where it just felt good. It felt really good. 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.
3:13 Ryan Broderick? But it felt really good. It felt like she had all the pieces. She was aggressive. Her internet game was strong. Her ground game seemed strong and people seemed ready to move on from Trump. And I even liked her, her sort of slogan, like, we can't go back or whatever. Like, the whole thing felt right to me. And then it soured pretty quickly. But that one couple, like, that couple of weeks in August felt really strong.
3:43 Speaker 00 So I was wrong too. Uh, I immediately accepted that her strategy of appealing to only white ladies was the only thing that could win. I now have my coping theory as to why she lost so epically. But before I share, I want to hear yours.
3:59 Ryan Broderick? Why she lost?
4:00 Speaker 00 Why do you think you were wrong?
4:03 Ryan Broderick? So I definitely think I was blinded by millennial nostalgia. Having Tim Walz be a Dreamcast guy like really fucked up my radar because I'm a Dreamcast guy. I have one in my apartment. I don't like Crazy Taxi. I think it's actually a horrible game, but I like Jack Radio. I like, I like Dreamcast. I think it was ahead of its time. We can talk all you want about the VMU. The virtual memory unit that you could play video, little video games on. Say Sonic Adventure 2, like, you know, we can go down the rabbit hole, but.
4:30 Speaker 00 I wish we were still talking about pushups.
4:32 Ryan Broderick? I mean, hell, like Tim Walz used American football in one of their TikTok videos, like the band, by the way. It was really hitting me hard.
4:41 Ryan Broderick? The major reason, though, I think they lost is quite simple, which is that Kamala had a very fuzzy platform, actually. Like gun to my head, I don't think I could really tell you what she cared about other than owning a gun. And cooking. I think she likes cooking and dancing. The other problem is that the Democrats have what they, what, well, what one politician this week referred to as a high income base. And they didn't seem particularly interested in alienating that high income base. In fact, Kamala Harris is, 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
5:22 Ryan Broderick? to be softer on big business, to coax CEOs to their side. Like just typical Democrat clown shit that I think really muddled their messaging. Which was vague and strange. And you, I think there was this idea that they could Obama it and be like, I want to be turning, turning, turning forever into the future, kind of thing. And they didn't define the future. They just said that we were gonna have one. And it's like, yeah, sure. But they didn't really say what it was gonna be. Meanwhile, Trump is at rallies in his little like anti-assassin cube, being very clear about certain things. Obviously, he's like ranting and raving about sharks, a Hannibal Lecter and stuff.
6:08 Ryan Broderick? 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. And maybe I'll keep the immigrants you do like. And Americans, I just think after four years of Biden, were tired. They were uninformed. They didn't like the Democrats because they couldn't really understand what the Democrats had done for them. And the simplest message won.
6:37 Speaker 00 Do you think she ran a better campaign than Hillary?
6:41 Ryan Broderick? That's a great question, actually. She didn't say hawk to the polls. So that is one point on her, on Kamala's side.
6:50 Speaker 00 What, or would that have done the trick?
6:52 Ryan Broderick? I think it was.
6:52 Speaker 00 Or would that have snapped in place?
6:54 Ryan Broderick? I think it was definitely a, it was a savvier campaign. I think it was, it was, it was a savvier campaign for a political era that no longer exists. 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, then it would have beaten Trump then.
7:16 Speaker 00 Exactly. That's, that's, so I thought she ran the, here, let me lay out my theory for you.
7:22 Ryan Broderick? Yeah.
7:23 Speaker 00 I think she ran the most competent campaign against Trump we've seen. And I think in either 2016 or 2020, that would have been a landslide. But when you're representing the incumbent, that doesn't hit the same way. So if I was to distill it down, I think it's about vision. Uh, my theory is that campaigns win when they offer an alternative and vision. And the longer it went on, the more it was like, she's not about anything, just like you were saying. The right's vision, they always know it. It's, it's fear mongering. It's fear mongering and taxes. So like, you know what it was about.
8:05 Speaker 00 And I think when the left lacks vision, um, 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, my life will be better. If you don't give people an adequate vision to feel good about, then they're looking for an enemy to blame. And like, broad strokes, think like, no one has job security. No one feels really like, like, no one's buying a house. Like, the lack of vision, but things are going to get better, just felt real, felt not enough. Considering that there, 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 gonna be able to afford that gift.
8:49 Ryan Broderick? 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 won reelection in 2024. 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, listened to any music I've ever scored for any of our projects or seen at Garbage Day Live Show. But I'm a big fan of the documentarian Adam Curtis out of the UK. You should go watch Hypernormalization, his three-hour horrifying documentary about the birth of the 21st century.
9:29 Ryan Broderick? 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. Tony Blair is the example he uses as this sort of like status quo manager at the end of history. 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. 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.
10:11 Ryan Broderick? The biggest takeaway for me is that the neoliberal managerial concept is not working. It cannot, it cannot hold. It could have never worked, but it certainly cannot hold now. People are mad and anyone who has power, 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. 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. These, this style of politician
10:54 Ryan Broderick? cannot win elections now and possibly never again, or at least for several generations. It's over. And so with that in mind, it's not surprising that Democrats lost. 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. They don't want a steady hand. They want, they want change, whatever it looks like for them.
11:21 Speaker 00 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. Would that be what you'd say you've experienced in the past week?
11:38 Ryan Broderick? 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, which is typically the media, right? So instead of like reckoning with very real structural problems in their political platform, they are going like, we need a Joe Rogan, because clearly that's gonna fix it. And it drives me up a goddamn wall because Joe Rogan did not win the election for Trump. 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. Like, no question.
12:24 Speaker 00 Ryan, I see that you're already annoyed and I'd like to make this day worse for you. So can I interest you in the chat column? And I would like you to pull up these tweets in order.
12:35 Ryan Broderick? This is from user PenisHertz. Good.
12:40 Ryan Broderick? And it reads, oh, this fucking thing. Yeah. So it reads, "Let's not pretend the Angry Video Game Nerd's hateful rhetoric and crude language wasn't responsible for corrupting a generation of young people." 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." So for people who are not in the know, the Angry Video Game Nerd is like a horrible YouTuber that sucks ass. You should go watch Dan Olson's short documentary about the Angry Video Game Nerd, if you want to go deeper down that rabbit hole.
13:15 Ryan Broderick? This is not anything. Like, this is like, this is a troll, right? I mean, they're called PenisHertz. Yeah, no, this is a troll. This has to be a troll.
13:24 Speaker 00 I like that you, who is very good at spotting trolls, was too angry to notice until this moment.
13:32 Speaker 00 What was not a troll was the, it was deleted because the person was getting ratioed. But there was the Democrats just like, "It's a shame that they have to deal with ignorant people" tweet. Do you know, do you know what I'm talking about?
13:45 Ryan Broderick? I yelled at them about this.
13:46 Speaker 00 Yes, yes. Can you summarize?
13:49 Ryan Broderick? I was like, wait a minute. I definitely rage quoted this.
13:51 Speaker 00 I literally, the prep for this episode is I went to your tweet.
13:54 Ryan Broderick? Okay. Yeah, so I forget who it was. It doesn't matter. They were claiming that there wasn't a messaging problem on the Democratic side. But they were saying that voters were ignorant of what the Democrats were running on. Now, I was briefly an English major in college, so like, I know what words mean. And I would say that if your job is messaging to people, and the people that you want to message to are ignorant, then you're bad at messaging. Because that's the whole game, right? Like, that's it. If you run a newspaper and your readers are uninformed, you run a bad newspaper.
14:40 Ryan Broderick? So if you have a political party and you're messaging people and they're ignorant, and they stay ignorant, then you're bad at messaging. 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." And it's like, yes, it is. It is very bad right now. And in fact, I can, here's a stat that I was looking at this morning for a piece I was working on. Almost all of the top posts about the election on Facebook in the lead up to the election were pro Harris. The ActBlue donation page was the single most viral interact with third-party link on Facebook for the last like three months.
15:16 Speaker 00 That's crazy.
15:17 Ryan Broderick? The top publisher on Facebook leading up to the election last month was the New York Times. We are not in a, in a like, like Twitter, yes, is controlled by like a psychopath who now works for Donald Trump, but like Twitter doesn't drive traffic, no one's on Twitter, it doesn't really matter. The actual people, the actual voters, we're looking at very basic stuff on Facebook and largely supportive of Kamala Harris. Now that could mean that Facebook is just like not in touch with like the culture of America anymore, possible, but this is not like a totally extraordinary thing to deal with. Yes, the media environment is fractured, sure, but that's their job. They had a billion dollars.
16:01 Ryan Broderick? 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 list or something. They mu- like, they could have give me, he could have bought an ad in garbage day if they wanted, like, like, there's a million things you could have done with a billion dollars and they didn't do any of it. So like, I, 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. Like, are you, are you crazy?
16:34 Speaker 00 Next election, we'll, we'll just make this a podcast run by the DNC. They can give us 1% of that, of that money and we can create some new media environment. It's a great strategy.
16:46 Ryan Broderick? Dude, I, I spoke to Democratic strategists about these, I, these issues. I, like, I'm, I'm, like-
16:53 Speaker 00 Did they pay you?
16:54 Ryan Broderick? No, they didn't pay me, but like, and also like, I wouldn't have taken it, but-
16:59 Ryan Broderick? I 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, like the Donald Trump dark social platform like campaign was so aggressive, their text game was out of control. They were fine, like they pretty much ignored TikTok, which I think is correct because TikTok has almost no impact on like the world. It like has an impact on how we see the world, which like can have downstream effects, sure, but like their major thing was Manosphere podcasts and aggressive texting.
17:43 Speaker 00 Why do you think the Trump campaign in 2016, I don't know about 2020, but definitely here seems to just be a step ahead. I mean, because because Kamala basically tried to do Trump 2016 strategy of extreme social spending. And I was like, oh, that's weird that Trump's not spending money on socials was like, you know, kind of everyone's reaction. What like, why do you think that they're primed to be a step ahead?
18:14 Ryan Broderick? 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. And they're much better about creating an environment where they can sort of like all experiment and then see what rises. So they, you know, you can have like a guy like Deus Volt 1488 being like, I think fluoride turns you trans. And then a Republican Senator can like retweet it and be like, hmm, interesting, looking into this. And then if enough people retweet, they're like, I guess we're looking
18:51 Ryan Broderick? into this. They've sort of completely restructured their political party to very intensely listen to signals that they're getting online, where the Democrats are not like that. They
19:07 Ryan Broderick? Weren't even like that during the first Obama election because I went back recently just to see what they were doing and like they had a MySpace, they had the Hope poster. I think Obama did an AMA on Reddit in 2011, but it wasn't like they were full viral all the time. And also the virality of like 10 years ago is totally different than it is now. So like the Republicans are much more comfortable 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. They're just trying to see what they can like, once again, Steve Bannon's timeless quote, "Flood the zone with shit." That's all they're trying to do.
19:51 Speaker 00 Okay, if you want to check out the rest of the conversation, you can head over to our Patreon at patreon.com/panicworld. And just to give you a heads up, in the next portion of the conversation, Ryan gives you all the answers you need. Not just about what the Democrats need to do and what went wrong in the election, but all of the answers you personally need. So for $5 at patreon.com/panicworld, you can get all the answers you need. All right, please give us $5. Thank you.
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