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Notes -
Apologies if this has already been covered, but is everyone aware that Trump is recording an interview with Joe Rogan this Friday?
There's bound to be some zingers to fill the news cycle coming out during an interview this big. We have no idea if the questions are vetted, but Rogan is normally pretty adamant about having freeform interviews where he can ask anything.
Some other points:
I really think that the deal for this interview was sealed anytime in the last couple of months and its timing was coordinated for maximum effect. You couldn't drop this interview at a better time to affect the election.
I wonder if Rohan has agreed to interview Trump, because like a bewildering variety of other people, he has concluded that Harris Is That Bad.
Gondor calls for aid!
Oh, yeah?! Well, Rohan calls for Trump!! Make Middle Earth Great Again!
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“Gandalf says I am not fit to be King of Gondor but is fine with Broken-Toe Aragorn. Truth is Dopey Gandalf is just a Second-Rate wizard who couldn’t even defeat a Balrog! Should lay off the Longbottom Leaf. SAD!”
Low effort, but this bit from one of my favorite comedians, Brennan Lee Mulligan, is too good and too relevant not to share.
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I think this is an awful move on Trump's part.
Long form is Trump's kryptonite, Rogan doesn't like him. Unless Kamala does it too and does worse it's a net loss.
Rogan's viewers are largely Trump fans but - say what you will about them - they listen to these whole interviews and will downgrade their opinion on someone who exposes themselves and doesn't perform well.
Ride the McDonald's fries to the White House bro, this is not difficult.
All the podcasts I've seen him on have been great. Bryce DeChambeau probably the best, though that's not so much a podcast, but is unscripted. Theo aughn was also great.
I think his big weakness is speaking solo. He'll start with a script and then just ad-libs and sometimes it's gold and sometimes it's foot-in-mouth, but it's mostly just red meat riffs and people aren't going to stick around to see if there's any good stuff unless they already like him.
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I don't think this is true actually. He was the best I've ever heard him (not a high bar admittedly) when he was on the All In podcast.
He'll do great on Rogan, IMO, and likely charm the pants of Rogan as well which will create the feeling of an endorsement, even if we don't get an actual endorsement.
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There is risk but…I think Trump generally comes across really well in long form interviews that aren’t overly adversarial because while he doesn’t go deep into topics his charisma shines through
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Trump has been riding the podcast circuit recently (Theo Vaugh, Logan Paul, Andrew Schultz, Lex Friedman). They're all very, very soft, but he comes out looking decent from what I have seen. Rogan is usually a bit longer, but he is likewise in business of making his guests look good and to show them a good time. They'll probably have a lighthearted chat about things Rogan is interested in: corona, wokeness, men in womens sports, aliens, pot, veterans, the UFC. Rogan won't offer any pushback when Trump makes asides into how everything he did was the best ever; everything his critics do is the worst ever.
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Trump's internal polling/perception of the state of the race might range from "We're fucked, throw a hail Mary" to "We've already won."
I also doubt Rogan is going on the attack. I've never seen him take a hard line with a guest outside of Covid stuff. They're going to bro out for five hours, maybe get in some cheap shots about trans kids, and call it a day.
Why would Trump have internal polling that is superior to Nate Silver or Polymarket?
Trump has the same data as the rest of us, but given it's Trump he probably has a delusional faith in his own chances. He's going on Joe Rogan not because of 4d chess, but because he likes to be maximally present to the public and Rogan has the biggest podcast.
It doesn't have to be superior to be what he believes.
In sports we've been seeing thirty years of coaches, even very objectively successful ones, believing totally irrational and disproven things that a Nate Silver running PECOTA could tell you.
They also have access to door to door canvasing data, which public polling rarely has.
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The general mood in Republican spaces seems to be "our opponents' position is weak, time to press the attack" combined with concern over the possibility of some sort of last minute manuever by the Democrats/media to "fortify" the election. Sentiments like "Beat the cheat" being reasonably common.
This is an improvement over "Let's hope they keep a literal corpse in the race and cross our fingers" which seemed to be the approach a few months ago, so I get it.
In fairness, that strategy probably was working...right up until it wasn't.
You guys are still doing the "he wasn't ready for Kamala" thing?
I wouldn't quite call it "believable" even at the peak of the media offensive, but at least it's with all the media being on-message they managed to generate enough hype that I could see where that statement could come from. Now? Trying to frame Trump's strategy as hoping the decrepit Biden stays in the race is bizarre (not in the least because everybody sneering at the supposed strategy was swearing up and down that Biden is perfectly fine). Are you personally hyped up for Kamala? If not, what on Earth are you talking about?
I was personally just stating a hindsight assessment on what is now the old strategy, as the parent comment implied. Again, "let Biden self-destruct the Dem campaign" was actually kind of working, and Trump seemed to be somewhat dismayed at the switch.
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Got to say, I find this one puzzling. Does Trump not already have Rogan’s core audience — MMA fans, online young men, etc — already locked down? It seems like he has few supporters to gain but many to lose if he has a gaffe.
Does a majority of online young men even support Trump?
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Young men, particularly the Rogan type, don't turn out to vote. If Trump can actually get a decent fraction of Trump-leaning Rogan fans to vote, it could make a huge difference - I don't think the timing within most states' early voting period is coincidental.
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I think Trump support levels with young male minorities- a major Rogan demographic- are not a sure thing.
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How many supporters would Trump really lose from a gaffe? Doesn't Trump do pretty much nothing but gaffes and his supporters love him for it?
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Trump is going on Rogan because it's Trump on Rogan. CNN and the New York Times can only dream of having the sort of veiwership, and cross-cultural appeal that The Joe Rogan Experience enjoys. Trump is going on JRE for the same reason that Obama went on Oprah, unless he completely stuffs it (which he is presumably confident that he wont) there is little to lose and a great deal to gain.
What you're effectively saying is that you find it "puzzling" that a reality TV star would participate in what is likely to be the media event of the season. Think about that for a bit.
Events like this are just another nail in the coffin for the mainstream media. Could you imagine a single man having more political influence and ability to be a 'kingmaker' than an entire news network a couple of decades ago? Just amazing.
But society does need genuinely trustworthy, credible institutions. Trumps has been going on mostly comedy podcasts. They might be bigger and better than the dying MSM, but they're not a solution for what is needed.
I'm not so sure about that. Most millennials and zoomers grew up on 'comedy politics' as their primary method of political indoctrination in high school through college, be it "last week tonight" with John Oliver, 'The Colbert Report' with Stephan Colbert, 'The Daily Show' with John Stewart, etc. Political comedy has been around for the past 70 years and has been an important part of at least informing, if not indoctrinating, the past few generations.
Those were comedy politics shows written and produced by teams of people that covered politics. These are podcasts hosted by stand up comics who just talk to people extemporaneously about whatever. It'd still be a valuable cultural commodity if people could open the NYT, or WaPo, or watch CNN or Fox News, and go "yeah, that's probably true enough".
Where do comedy podcasters get their discussion topics? When Joe Rogan goes 'Jamie, look that up' where do you think Jamie gets his links? All podcasters did is eliminate the middlemen of a team of writers between the personality and the news.
As I said, its clearly an extemporaneous conversation. They shoot the shit with their guests. They warn listeners repeated not to get their info from them. They have no pretense about being news or doing research. Its just stand up comics shooting the shit and occasionally googling things, often for as little as 30 seconds. This is what makes them enjoyable. I like the format. I listen to them all the time. The real novelty (and value add imo) is the long format and lack of editing. Its awesome. In some ways I find them more illuminating and informational than short news segments. But they're distinct from comedy news shows which have production budgets and teams given at least a week to craft a narrative and write a (hopefully) comedic script.
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JRE is so large that, even if the core audience were all MMA fans and young men, the non-core audience would dwarf the size of the audience of the next largest non-core creator / space. Eg, 32% of JRE listeners are parents, which is low, yet it’s still probably the most popular podcast among parents.
I second that his gaffes will be bad though.
Has he gaffed on the other podcast appearances? I figure if he had I would have heard it about many times from mainstream media sources.
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This really is Trump's to lose. He should prepare for it as much as he did for the debate. Good or bad, anything coming out of this interview will be signal boosted to the heavens.
That's the Trump strategy in a nutshell.
When it comes to politics, more exposure is almost always good, even mostly negative exposure. Every time that woke scolds is the media attack Trump he just gets bigger. The whole Trump movement could have been avoided if the media just ignored him, but they can't help themselves.
Trump will reach tens of millions of people with the podcast and tens of millions of more when his critics try (and mostly fail) to dunk on him. Trump is probably going to win despite spending a third of what Harris does on media.
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Rogan is a very deferential interviewer. Both Trump and Harris would do fine on it, assuming they don't find a way to hang themselves on their own.
Rogan's fans are diverse and not ideological, and any candidate going on has the opportunity both to sway their vote and to increase the likelihood of existing supporters to actually vote.
Harris recorded that cringey video for the Al Smith dinner(seriously, if you skip a charity dinner because you don’t like the influential hosts how hard is it to realize that the optimal political move is to shut up), and Trump is Trump, so that’s a big assumption.
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