The New Experts: Reproducing and Recasting Health Expertise during COVID-19 on the Joe Rogan Podcast

Science is essential to everyday life, informing the way we move through the world and allowing us to make monumental decisions about our government, our safety, and our health. Perhaps no moment illustrated this more urgently than the COVID-19 pandemic, where engagement with the science of vaccines had profound consequences for public health. Yet engaging with scientific claims is incredibly difficult; as Philosopher of Science Elizabeth Anderson recognizes, laypersons cannot directly evaluate scientific claims and so are left "judg[ing] what to believe by judging whom to believe." During COVID-19, a new class of alternative-experts espoused claims about vaccine safety that ran counter to mainstream science yet commanded enormous credibility with lay audiences. One can understand their rise in our fractured epistemological landscape that, as Baier and Lyotard theorize, produces distinct epistemic spheres each with their own experts and forms of truth. Using the tools of rhetorical analysis, I draw out the rhetorical moves through which these figures generate credibility. Analyzing a case study of guests on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast who appeared in the second half of 2021, I argue that the guests generated expert credibility by reproducing and recasting the cultural imaginaries of insider biomedical expertise. Chapter One draws on Bourdieu's theory of symbolic capital to examine how alternative-experts reproduce academic credentials, embodied experience, and communal validation to construct insider status. Chapter Two argues that this insider status is recast through populist and democratic appeals, creating a dual positionality uniquely persuasive to Rogan's viewership. Ultimately, this demonstrates the rhetorical nature of expertise, and the importance of using rhetoric to understand health communication strategies moving forward.