Who Is Joe Rogan?

Joe Rogan might well be the most popular podcaster on the planet. He also has large muscles. The two observations may be equally relevant.

Rogan has also, this past week, fallen foul of both Twitter and Youtube, who have removed a much-shared interview he did with Dr Robert Malone, a noted scientist accused of spreading misinformation about COVID-19. This is not the first time that Rogan had been suppressed, censored, or if you prefer, “cancelled”. He has in the past advised young people not to get the vaccine and then when he caught the virus, he made headlines when he went against the advice of the FDA and took ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug which was created to treat livestock but which is still being investigation for its effectiveness against Covid-19.

Whether another victim of a culture seeking to cancel dissenting voices or a dangerous purveyor of disinformation, the US podcaster has the kind of divisive appeal that works as if by design, presented as a series of contradictions. 

Rogan practised martial arts from the age of 14 and was a US Taekwondo champion at the age of 19. Yet then he transferred to the usually quite nerdish world of stand-up comedy where his tightly cropped hair, muscular physique, and aggressive posture was ready-made for an audience looking for comedy that would reflect a free-spirited, hazy, weed-infused, white, hetero “normality”. If the mainly liberal comedy circuit leaned into modern life by highlighting absurdities within family, marriage, and relationships, Rogan pushed back, offering the counter-absurdity to the progressive movement in the form of loosely moderate, somewhat left-of-centre libertarian rants. And if that messy description sounds like a bit of everything, that’s precisely Rogan’s schtick.

“If you ever start taking things too seriously,” he is credited with saying, “just remember that we are talking monkeys on an organic spaceship flying through the universe”. It’s more nihilism than policy position; anarchic or perhaps a kind of ego-liberalism in which it’s just Joe shooting the breeze. 

“Some of these are jokes…” he would scream to his stand-up audience.

The difficulty has always been spotting where the “some” begins or ends.

Rogan’s background, image, and personality made him a perfect fit for the next stage of his evolution, as a commentator for the emergent sport of cage fighting. Cleverly remarketed as the “Ultimate Fighting Championship”, UFC was a response to the increased safety concerns around traditional boxing (and the growth of the anodyne wrestling franchises) just as Rogan’s popularity appears to be a response to a perceived weakening of the male role in US culture. It was a perfect match.

He launched his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in 2009. By 2015 it was being downloaded an estimated 16 million times per month, and then, in 2020, he signed a $100 million deal with Spotify. Much of that success certainly comes down to how he looks. Unlike other podcasters, clips of Rogan’s show are disseminated in video form, making his exchanges with big names in culture, science, and politics widely disseminated across social platforms. Rogan’s big arms and even bigger tattoos caught the eye as the embodiment of how many men in American would like to look. He also smoked weed with Elon Musk and interviewed Mike Tyson where the former boxer described hurting people as being sometimes “orgasmic”. 

Something was clearly liberating about the format, with guests open to discussing anything even if the discussion was grounded in ignorance or, on occasion, borderline lunacy. Rogan himself articulates views that many younger men like to hear espoused. He has a gift for lifestyle aphorisms (something he shares with Jordan Peterson), and his identity further coalesced around that of the populist whose voice is broadly indicative of the male blue-collar. “Reality really is theatre,” he has said. “There’s no other way to describe it. It’s all so nonsensical, ridiculous and chaotic.”

The unregulated medium seemed suited to Rogan and the freewheeling way he engaged with hard topics with all the subtlety of a roundhouse kick to the temple. He was the fighter-thinker/warrior-poet who didn’t do a great deal of either. He continues to position himself in an ideological space as the non-ideological truth seeker. At times he speaks considerable sense. At other times he is the moderate expressing immoderate views (in a sense, personifying the “classical liberal” who is neither of those terms). Yet one only need to go back to watch Rogan’s stand-up routine from 2012 to see why the mix has proved so popular. It’s useful, not only to experience Roganism in its purest form (the vulgarity goes missing in too much polite analysis), but also to see how he plays loose with politicised topics. We can also see how his claim (perhaps accurate) to be socially liberal is balanced by an essentially chaotic infantilism. 

“I support gay marriage…” he announces, speaking slowly to draw his audience into this confession… “Because I’m in a regular marriage and it’s gay as fuck!”

[Audience laughs.]

“I don’t mean it’s negative,” he assures us. “A lot of people get mad […]  ‘cos you’re associating something they can’t change – their sexuality – with something negative. And that is not when I mean when I say marriage is ‘gay’…”

There’s a long pause.

“What I mean is that it’s like two dudes fucking each other…”

It’s crude, probably offensive to many on both the Left and Right, and certainly not for everybody’s tastes, but if you want to understand the appeal of Joe Rogan and, indeed, the entire industry built up around him, then one does well to understand this moment. At its essence, it means nothing. An even cruder subsequent rant doesn’t explain this simile, which in retrospect is simply a provocation by a compassionate liberal who enjoys the homophobic slur; the good guy who enjoys playing around with bad ideas; the thinker who doesn’t have many original or good thoughts. He instead exploits the tensions he sets up by placing himself in a politically tense space and then pulling it apart in a chaotic way.

As he told listeners recently about the alleged censorship of comedy: “[i]t keeps going further and further and further down the line, and if you get to the point where you capitulate, where you agree to all these demands, it’ll eventually get to straight white men are not allowed to talk.” It is a glib, absurd, and inflammatory conclusion but that is the Joe Rogan experience.

Joe isn’t in the business of shaping opinions. He is in the business of grinding away at cultural frictions and seeing the sparks fly. No mind is given to where those sparks land or the fires that spread. Some of these comments are, after all, jokes, unless you’re among that increasing number of straight white men who see them as wisdom.