Bari Weiss, "Joe Rogan Is the New Mainstream Media"
David Shasha
Our Debased Idiocracy: The Tikvah Fund Welcomes Joe Rogan!
As I was calmly doing my work on Memorial Day during the Trumpdeath Pandemic, I came across Bari Weiss’ article “Joe Rogan is the New Mainstream Media” and it gave me a big headache!
The complete article and two background articles follow this note.
I must admit that I know more about Ms. Weiss than about Rogan.
For me Rogan is one of those names that acts as background noise in the Idiocracy that we now live in. Once I googled him it all started to come back to me like a waking nightmare.
He is certainly in the Don Imus-Howard Stern scumbag shock-jock tradition:
https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/radio-shock-jocks-howard-stern
But as that post indicates, the appetite for even more degenerate fare coming from even more degenerate moron talk show hosts has grown immeasurably since the Imus/Stern heyday. And the financial stakes in this brave new media world are higher than they ever were.
Rogan began with the Reality TV garbage “Fear Factor”:
https://www.nbc.com/fear-factor
“Facing Fear” is a locution meaning cheap human exploitation in the context of disgusting “entertainment.”
It is part of the new cruelty that was perfected by the MTV show “Jackass”:
http://www.mtv.com/artists/jackass
Indeed, there is a link between the two obnoxious shows:
http://www.mtv.com/video-clips/bgg3sx/fear-factor-bam-margera-has-the-jackass-advantage
http://www.mtv.com/shows/fear-factor
And, of course, we must not forget “The Apprentice”:
Humiliation is key to the genre:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/television-and-the-politics-of-humiliation
And has remained a key weapon in the Trump arsenal:
It is indeed not a very healthy thing, but it has become our new normal:
Rogan moved on to even more elevated Poptrash climes with his role as color commentator for UFC:
https://www.essentiallysports.com/ufc-news-why-is-joe-rogan-so-important-to-the-ufc/
And now he has become the biggest earner in the wacky wild world of podcasting:
https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/spotify-joe-rogan-exclusive-deal-1003773/
The “Socialist” Joe is now big with the WSJ/Forbes 1% set!
https://www.wsj.com/articles/spotify-strikes-exclusive-podcast-deal-with-joe-rogan-11589913814
His politics are of the who-cares idiot variety:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/04/04/joe_rogan_id_vote_for_trump_over_biden.html
A Bernie the Red supporter, he will be voting for Trump over Biden – because Biden is too old!
https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/24/politics/bernie-sanders-joe-rogan-endorsement/index.html
We see how Rogan’s debased ignorance has further helped to corrupt our culture and politics:
http://www.mediafiledc.com/time-end-joe-rogan-experience/
He is the epitome of Fake News writ large.
And it has earned him a hefty sum for his diligent efforts!
Ain’t Capitalism grand?
Make sure your children are paying close attention.
We have seen Bari Weiss’ Right Wing extremist New York Times colleague Ross Douthat dish out hefty servings of the Poptrash Idiocracy garbage in his role as National Review’s movie critic:
https://www.nationalreview.com/author/ross-douthat/
They used to say that youth was wasted on the wrong people.
I think we are better off saying that youth is now fully owned by the Idiocracy and its cruel and barbarous ways.
I did all this work to understand Rogan’s Trumpworld tripe specifically because of Weiss and her Tikvah Fund bona fides.
We will recall that her former Tablet magazine colleague Liel Leibovitz, another Idiocracy Millennial reactionary Jewish wingnut, praised Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” as a means to spread the HASBARAH Jewish Separatist message:
Leibovitz is a big fan of the neo-Zionist “Black Panther” and its creator Stan Lee:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/TcIDvNf1Fac/rBf_7N6iAAAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/MBv7Kkr0O4A/JrmDUBFPAQAJ
He has just published a Yale Jewish Lives biography of Lee:
https://www.jewishlives.org/books/stanlee
The Tikvah world is always on the cutting edge of the Poptrash Idiocracy.
We should read Weiss’ obsequious praise for the despicable Rogan in this wider context.
Rogan is of course all in with the Jordan Peterson anti-PC scam, as I discussed it in my article on Jonathan Haidt:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/Davidshasha/beoLJaoDawA/hCVdyG9mCwAJ
The deplorable Peterson is a go-to Rogan guest:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jordan+peterson+joe+rogan+experience
Weiss wants us to know that she is all-in with the new Idiocracy and its materialist values in the Age of Trump.
But more than this, she is showing us, as Leibovitz has done so skillfully, how Tikvah Neo-Con White Jewish Supremacy is deeply tied to cruelty and anti-intellectual values.
Rather than categorically rejecting Rogan’s debasement of the culture, Weiss extols his ignorance and brute behavior. There is of course the Hipster factor and its remunerative aspect, but I believe that at a much deeper level she is truly connected to Rogan’s brand of insolence and nihilistic malfeasance.
Looking at the Weiss/Leibovitz/Douthat troika, very proud members of the current Neo-Con Radical Religious Right, I am wondering what Ronald Reagan and Leo Strauss would have made of it.
Reagan, with the help of the Chicago Straussian cult, oversaw the 1980s Culture Wars, as indicated by books like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy:
The following passage from this excellent undergrad paper hints at the current dilemma facing the Millennial Neo-Cons:
The philosophical commonality between Bloom and the neoconservatives was, namely, a preoccupation with nihilism as an inherent danger of modern society. Bloom understood nihilism, following Nietzsche, as the distinctly modern loss of faith in transcendent sources of meaning, such as religion, reason, or anything else that can serve as a ground for commitments and beliefs. Drawing on the ideas of his mentor Strauss, as well as those of Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and Plato, Bloom wrote in Closing that nihilism was endemic to liberal democratic societies, which suffered from an inability to justify themselves based on a positive idea of the social good. Bloom and the early neoconservatives – chiefly among them Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz – agreed that nihilism, so defined, threatened democratic political life by eroding the foundations on which ordinary citizens can affirm political and economic institutions as legitimate. For all of these thinkers, the defense of modern institutions necessarily involved an awareness of their self-undermining tendencies. Unlike these writers, though, who readily accepted their roles as “intellectuals” engaged in contemporary politics, Bloom believed, at least early on, that only philosophical education could counteract the nihilism of liberal democracy by providing access to pre- and anti-modern forms of thought.
Neo-Conservatism is a movement mired in Platonic elitism and anti-democratic values. It is the antithesis of Religious Humanism with its cosmopolitanism and Liberal openness, exemplified by the Andalusian Convivencia.
It is interesting to note that its young progenitors now loudly proclaim their fidelity to vulgarity, anti-intellectualism, and barbarity – all in the name of the sacred market.
What would Allan Bloom have made of it all?
Is the record-breaking Rogan Spotify contract a validation of Reaganite Neo-Conservatism, or is the current fanatical stupidity a sign of its demise?
Indeed, as with The Tikvah Fund and traditional Torah Judaism, it is an important intervention in the ability to process and understand what our cultural-religious past is. It is a process that has been exacerbated by the advent of Trumpism and its full-throttled assault on our American values.
That Bari Weiss has embraced Joe Rogan is no surprise.
That Joe Rogan has risen to the very apex of our Idiocracy is another troubling sign that the historic cultural movement that began with Ronald Reagan and the Straussians has now devolved into a barbarous primitivism that is eroding our ability to be fully human.
David Shasha
Joe Rogan Is the New Mainstream Media
By: Bari Weiss
When I saw the news that the king of all podcasting, Joe Rogan, had inked a deal with Spotify for his widely popular show I texted to congratulate him on getting crazy rich. How rich?
“Weirdly richer,” he replied. “Like it doesn’t register. Seems fake.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal could amount to more than $100 million, a number that Rogan doesn’t want to discuss. “It feels gross,” he told me Thursday night. “Especially right now, when people can’t work.”
News of Tuesday’s deal, which gave Spotify exclusive rights to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” sent the company’s stock soaring: It added $1.7 billion to its market cap in 23 minutes. The musician and critic Ted Gioia pointed out on Twitter that “a musician would need to generate 23 billion streams on Spotify to earn what they’re paying Joe Rogan for his podcast rights.”
OK, so it’s a lot of money. But Spotify reportedly paid almost double for Bill Simmons’s podcasting company, the Ringer, earlier this year. Money is not the only reason this deal matters.
Rogan is a friend of mine, and I’ve been on his show. But I still find the extent of his popularity mind-boggling. Imagine if I had told you, a dozen years ago, that the former host of “The Fear Factor,” an MMA color commentator who loves cool cars and shooting guns and working out, a guy with a raw interview show featuring comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was more influential than the entire slate of hosts on CNN.
You’d think I was nuts. But it’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and wearing loafers at hedge funds.
Rogan’s deal comes while the mainstream press founders; the pandemic has cut the legs out from under many publications. Every day it seems another blue check mark with a degree from the right college hangs up her pixelated-shingle, while the rest of us avert our eyes, hoping we won’t be next.
The timing of Rogan’s rise and the Old Guard’s disintegration is not coincidental. His success was made possible, at least in part, by legacy media’s blind spots.
While GQ puts Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the cover of its “new masculinity” issue (introduced by the editor explaining that the men’s magazine “isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all”), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk. Men are hungry. He’s serving steak, rare. Condé Nast, GQ’s publisher, has laid off some 100 employees since the pandemic began. Meantime, “The Joe Rogan Experience” has 190 million downloads a month.
His success signals a profound shift, or several of them — a shift in what people want to talk about, how they want to hear it, and who they want to hear it from.
Does the man himself buy any of this? I called him to find out.
***
“All the answers are: I don’t think about it. And P.S. I’m dumb,” he said as a blanket reply to all my questions. I laughed.
This is both an extremely Joe Rogan thing to say and one of his most effective weapons — a rip cord he can pull whenever his show veers into tricky territory, or when he wants to distance himself from some of his interview subjects, like Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist. I’m just a comic, he’ll say. The joke’s on you if you take anything I say too seriously.
But the topic here is podcasting, an area where Rogan, like Howard Stern in radio, is the undisputed boss. He’s hosted 1,479 episodes, freewheeling conversations with everyone from Mike Tyson to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Members of Rogan Nation have tattooed his face, or that of his Golden Retriever, Marshall, (and I can’t decide which is weirder) onto their bodies.
He is not dumb.
If you want to understand why podcasting is killing, he says, you first need to appreciate the world-changing, brain-rewiring transformation in how we consume information.
Reading or watching the news is no longer immersive, as it was when you sat down with a bunch of papers or in front of a living room TV. Now it is a fragmented experience, usually done on a cellphone.
“The problem,” he told me, “is that the cellphone also has YouTube videos of the craziest things ever — babies landing on cats and animal attacks and naked people.”
Why would you read a 2,000-word story about the collapse of health care in Venezuela when you can zone out with some TikToks?
“Nobody ever thought: We need to gear our entertainment, our media, to people who cook, who jog, who hike, people who drive. Even books on tape can require too much thinking.” But a podcast, he said, “doesn’t require that much thinking at all. You get captivated by the conversation. One of the things about this medium in general is that it’s really easy to listen to while you do other stuff.”
I do. While I cook dinner I’m likely listening to Rogan, Sam Harris, “The Portal” or “Red Scare.” I go for morning walks and listen to “The Daily.” You can’t cook or walk while reading.
Journalism is one thing that podcasters are competing with: Why read a profile of Elon Musk with staid quotes when you can listen to him get high and riff for two hours in Rogan’s studio? Television is another.
“I would imagine on a show like Seth Meyers there’s a bunch of other opinions involved. Right or wrong, in podcasting you’re getting that very pure, individual perspective,” Rogan said. “On my show, it’s my opinion and the guest’s opinion. That’s it. On network, it’s a focus-group collective idea of what people are going to like or not like. You don’t get anything wild. You don’t get anything that will get you fired.”
“Podcasting is all freeballing,” he added. “It’s the opposite of polished. And because of that, it resonates.”
When you’re on MSNBC for a five-minute hit, you can control your message. When you are sucked into a conversation with Rogan, it can go sideways, fast. And you’re in the hot seat for sometimes three hours. As a guest, no show is more intimidating. But as a listener, it’s why I tune in.
That unpredictability, that willingness to take risks with topics, tone and guests, is one of the reasons podcasting is eating our lunch. The prestige press has become too delicate, worried about backlash on Twitter and thus shying away from an ever-increasing number of perceived third rails.
“There are a lot of holes that have been left by mainstream media,” Rogan said.
Think of Tara Reade. Anyone with eyes could see that her accusation against Joe Biden was treated differently by the press than the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh. Reade’s claim was largely ignored for more than two weeks. Julie Swetnick’s accusation of gang rape was printed the day it was made.
You can rely on Rogan to talk about that double standard. Indeed, you can rely on Rogan to talk about just about anything at all.
Take the minefield of gender identity. When he talks about the sensitive topic — one that has become nearly untouchable inside the institutional world — there is none of the throat-clearing I’ve become used to.
“There is no balanced perspective to say: Be free! Change your pronouns, change your name, be whoever you want,” Rogan said. “On the Fox News side they want to say ‘This is left-wing lunacy and everyone’s losing their mind.’”
At the same time, on the left, “there’s an aggressive, progressive doctrine that has to be followed, and followed with full compliance and no room for debate,” he said. “When it comes to competition, especially combat sports, with transwomen fighting biological women, people are so progressive they let that slide, to the point that biological women are getting pushed over.”
“Nobody wants to touch it because nobody wants the blowback.”
Why is he willing to? Especially when he knows that a bad joke or an ill-advised comment can generate a week’s worth of bad press?
“I’m interested in things that make me scared, that make me nervous,” he said.
Of course another reason is that this sort of thing is exactly what makes him popular with his audience.
But there is also a very practical reason Rogan can say whatever he thinks: He is an individual and not an organization. Eric Weinstein, another podcaster and a friend of Rogan, told me, “It’s the same reason that a contractor can wear a MAGA hat on a job and an employee inside Facebook headquarters cannot: There is no HR department at ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’.”
“When you have something that can’t get canceled, you can be free,” said Rogan.
The ability to be free of censorship is perhaps the thing Rogan prizes most — and he’s very concerned about censorship, especially inside the tech companies that control the most powerful forms of mass communication the world has ever seen.
He points to YouTube’s decision last month to take down a video of Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, two doctors in Bakersfield, Calif., who the company accused of spreading misinformation. “The doctors in Bakersfield were talking about statistics, but their video kept getting taken down. Why?”
YouTube said that the video violated its policies by disputing public health guidance. The American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine said the doctors’ claims were “reckless and untested” and “inconsistent with current science and epidemiology.”
YouTube is a private company and thus not bound by the First Amendment; legally, it can decide what it wants to put on its site and what it doesn’t. Rogan gets that. His show, until now, has streamed on the platform. He still thinks it’s wrong.
“What Twitter is and what YouTube is are way bigger than a social media company. There is a real good argument that they should be like public utilities,” he said.
“What has made society better today than it was hundreds of years ago is not just our prosperity. It’s the evolution of ideas. Anything that wants to limit discussion is dangerous to the evolution of ideas.”
I don’t know what to think about the Erickson video, but I tend to support keeping the Overton window as wide as possible. And I’m allergic to the faddish idea of intellectual contamination — the notion that you can somehow get skunk-sprayed by talking to another person, even a reprehensible one. If I believed that, I’d be in the wrong profession.
Yet I am deeply uncomfortable when I see Rogan laughing with Jones. I think that’s because of the show’s vibe: Rogan is laddish and generous with everyone he sits across from — and their proximity to him gives them his imprimatur, especially in the eyes of Rogan’s fiercely loyal fans.
Owning just how influential he is is something that Joe Rogan does not want to do. He says he doesn’t want to lose his bearings, and makes a bunch of self-deprecating jokes.
But perhaps the best tell of Rogan’ influence is what happened when I asked him, offhandedly, a few months back, who he was going to vote for in the Democratic primary. He said “probably” Bernie. “Him as a human being, when I was hanging out with him, I believe in him. I like him — I like him a lot,” he said. Within 48 hours, the Sanders campaign had cut that clip into an ad.
He thought that was crazy: “I gave the most lukewarm endorsement of Bernie Sanders ever. And then they took it and ran with it.” Immediately the press dove deep into his back catalog, grabbing bits from his comedy set featuring jokes about strap-ons and quoting them as if they were serious quotes. I stopped counting the number of op-eds and tweets from Bernie voters beseeching the campaign to turn his support away.
It was a moment that showed that if he wanted to, Rogan could move elections. But politics are not his bag.
“I think there’s so much manipulation and so much bullshit when it comes to politics, I’m not interested in it,” he said. He said he turned down requests from Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden to come on the show. (Though he interviewed Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders.)
But whether he wants to or not, Rogan doesn’t need to play politics to influence it. His whole ethos — curious; not particularly ideological; biased toward things that work; baffled by the state of both parties — is where so many Americans are right now. And that’s his power. He’s a mirror, when so many publications are broken glass, capable of reflecting only a shard.
The right has always insisted that the elite left controls the culture. But Rogan’s popularity shows that perhaps that’s no longer true.
The real question for Rogan Nation is whether their man will be changed by a Spotify contract.
“Why would I sell out now? You sell out to get what you want.”
From The New York Times, May 25, 2020
Joe Rogan Would 'Rather Vote for Trump than Biden' after Endorsing Sanders
By: Tom Lutz
The podcast host Joe Rogan has said he will vote for Donald Trump over Joe Biden in the presidential election, should the former vice-president be the Democratic nominee.
The comic was speaking on Friday’s edition of his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which regularly tops the iTunes chart for downloads. Rogan has nearly 6m Twitter followers, regularly appears on television as a commentator on mixed martial arts, and is seen as an influential voice with young and blue-collar male voters.
During a conversation with guest Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital, talk turned to the election. Weinstein, who works for the Trump-supporting tech mogul Peter Thiel, said he would not vote for Trump or Biden, the probable challenger in November.
Rogan, who has endorsed Bernie Sanders, said the party had made “morons” out of voters by appearing to favour Biden.
“I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden],” said Rogan. “I don’t think [Biden] can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office.
“The pressure of being president of the United States is something that no one has ever prepared for. The only one who seems to be fine with it is Trump, oddly enough.”
The president is 73 but Rogan said: “He doesn’t seem to be aging at all or in any sort of decline. Obama, almost immediately, started looking older. George W [Bush], almost immediately, started looking older.”
Biden will be 78 in November. Describing the former US senator as “very old”, Rogan said Biden’s famous verbal slip-ups were “not a normal way to communicate unless he’s high”.
Sanders, who took an early lead in the delegate race before losing a string of contests to Biden, is a year older than the former VP.
Sanders has “been insanely consistent his entire life”, Rogan said in January, unveiling his endorsement of the independent Vermont senator, a self-described democratic socialist.
“He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing for his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.”
Rogan has made many controversial statements. In January the president of the Human Rights Campaign said then Sanders should reconsider accepting Rogan’s endorsement, because the podcaster had “attacked transgender people, gay men, women, people of colour and countless marginalised groups at every opportunity”.
A Sanders spokeswoman said: “Sharing a big tent requires including those who do not share every one of our beliefs, while always making clear that we will never compromise our values.”
Writing for the Guardian, Jacobin magazine editor Bhaskar Sunkara said the Rogan endorsement was “the best endorsement Bernie Sanders could hope for”, as Rogan’s “fans are a group of people we can’t afford to cede to Trump”.
From The Guardian, April 2, 2020
The Joe Rogan Effect: How a Libertarian Pothead Became Podcasting’s $100m Man
By: Leaf Arbuthnot
On Christmas Eve in 2009, Joe Rogan – then a fringe American celebrity, best known for presenting the TV show Fear Factor – sat in front of a camera and recorded his first podcast.
The result is on YouTube. For Roganologists like me, it’s essential viewing. Rogan peers into the camera in front of a lewd poster and answers questions sent to him by those watching the live feed online. The video is grainy, and computer-generated snowflakes drift inexplicably down the screen. “Hello, world,” Rogan says raffishly, once he knows the tech is up and running.
Few watching would have imagined that this marked the first step on a journey that would lead Rogan to fame, wealth and podcast superstardom. But since 2009, The Joe Rogan Experience has become one of the most popular podcasts ever made. Now, Spotify has signed him, for a reported $100m (£82m) and exclusive rights.
The format is simple. Around three times each week, Rogan invites a person of note to his studio in California, a dimly-lit man-cave where he keeps a samurai sword. They chat, sometimes smoking marijuana and drinking whisky. (When Rogan did both with Elon Musk in 2018, it caused Tesla shares to fall by nine per cent.) After three hours or so, Rogan draws proceedings to a close, but you get the impression that he could go on and on.
Rogan’s other job is commentating on fights for the UFC, the American martial arts league, and he often weaves sporting patter into his interviews. In general, podcasts are not usually filmed, but The Joe Rogan Experience is, and it pulls in huge audiences. Rogan’s YouTube channel has nearly 8 million subscribers, and some episodes have been watched in excess of 15 million times, despite their marathon length.
The show has become more sophisticated since it kicked off in 2009, long before most of us knew what a podcast was. But what’s remarkable about that first episode is how familiar it seems. Rogan still loves to gnaw on some of its topics, a full 11 years on. He waxes lyrical about isolation tanks: baths of warm, salty water designed to deprive those who float inside them of sensory stimuli. He rues the appeal of conspiracy theories, then wonders in the same breath whether the actress Brittany Murphy was killed by her husband. And he talks enthusiastically about guns, as he would always continue to do. “What if someone breaks into your house?” he asks, reaching for a pistol and waving it about. “S--- might get ugly.”
Recently, Rogan has taken coronavirus in his stride. Despite having long voiced suspicions about “the establishment”, he has adapted to the era of enforced social distancing with good grace. A recent photo on Instagram shows him toothily embracing the “new normal”, as he calls it, with his dog Marshall Mae (who, naturally, has her own hugely popular account). Rogan’s caption is a model of pandemic positivity. “I got a nice hike in and a nice refresh of perspective,” it reads. “Love to you all!”
On a recent podcast, too, he asked thoughtful and earnest questions about the illness of Peter Hotez, a prominent scientist and virology expert. And he has distanced himself from a bonkers scheme by the UFC president, who is trying, in the midst of the pandemic, to hire a private island on which to stage its fights. “I guess someone’s gonna commentate,” Rogan remarked last month. But he was firm. “It’s not gonna be me.”
The story of how Joe Rogan and his show went supernova isn’t dramatic in itself. Much of it boils down to consistent, hard work: he got on the podcast wagon early, and pushed out episode after episode, building up an army of devoted listeners. But Rogan himself makes for a fascinating study. He looks and sounds like a meaty MAGA type, but he’s more complicated than that. He has described himself as “f-----g leftwing” and “almost a socialist”.
In fact, in an era in which masculinity has become deeply contested, Rogan has quietly established himself as an everyman icon. His online fans, many of whom are blokey men, say that he “changed their life” and “saved” them; they call him a genius and insist the show is “the real deal” (whatever that exactly means).
For those tuning in for the first time, the evangelism of these acolytes might seem hard to unpick. At the core of the show’s appeal, as I see it, is that Rogan presents himself very much as your average Joe. It helps, no doubt, that he looks like one: he’s bald, not particularly good-looking, fairly short but very muscly. (As a teenager, he was an American taekwondo champion). He’s the sort of dude you’d expect to see grilling sausages in a suburb, or at a bar, flinging darts between swigs of beer. His magician’s trick is to seem normal.
Yet “normal”, Rogan is not. Mapping his interests is exhausting. He likes to hear from everyone, from actors and fetishists to neuroscientists and Sandy Hook deniers. Born in the state of New Jersey, he had an itinerant childhood, which might go some way to explaining his gadfly approach to ideas and people. His father, a police officer, abused his mother, and they divorced when Rogan was five.
Joe and his mother eventually moved to Massachusetts, where he took up martial arts. He has said that as a kid he was “terrified of being a loser”, and that he expected other children to turn on him “at any moment”. He went to university, dropped out, became a standup comedian and an actor.
In 2001, he began presenting Fear Factor, the gross-out show that made participants confront their phobias. Off the back of that, he was asked to commentate on martial-arts fights, which he did with the passion and intuition of a true connoisseur. He had two children, then married their mother, a former waitress. And finally, in 2009, he decided to turn his hand to podcasting. That decision changed everything.
Today, The Joe Rogan Experience is enormously influential, boosting the visibility of whoever appears as a guest, from comedians like Russell Brand to thinkers such as Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. The US presidential campaigns of Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang were energised by their appearances on the show; then, when Rogan remarked idly in January that he would “probably vote for Bernie”, the Sanders team transformed the footage into an advert.
Rogan’s endorsement was a controversial move. Many on the Left were disgusted by it. But one of Rogan’s talents is baiting Left-leaning types, especially those on Twitter. He is amorphously libertarian, a free-speech advocate who’s suspicious of woke culture. “I’m part of the problem,” he admitted drolly on a recent episode. “Part of the ‘patriarchy’.” Since half-heartedly endorsing Bernie, he has said he “would rather vote for Trump” than Joe Biden, on the grounds of the candidates’ ages.
“I think I'll probably vote for Bernie... He’s been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.” -Joe Rogan pic.twitter.com/fuQP0KwGGI
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) January 23, 2020
At the core of the podcast’s offering is its guarantee of uninhibited conversation; sometimes, in the eyes of his detractors, this veers close to bigotry. He has, for instance, been accused of transphobia; he likes to bait vegetarians, and spent January eating only meat. He was condemned for racism, after he compared visiting a black neighbourhood to being in Planet of the Apes.
Some of those, and other hair-raising comments, were slips. Others were possibly not. “People are starved for controversial opinions,” Rogan has said. They are also, he thinks, famished for “an actual conversation”. It’s true that while controversy swirls around him, it never seems to stick. He’s too big to fail, or doesn’t care enough.
In fact, the resolutely conversational nature of the podcast has often elicited the greatest ire. Rogan can be blunt and domineering but in the main, he plays nice. He’s humane, a tough-guy-soft-guy. In interviews, he’s not in the market for “gotcha” moments: he seems most interested in finding material to mull over.
This approach is fine when he’s interviewing entertainers, but it doesn’t always work. After Rogan sat down with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, he was lambasted for having given him such an easy ride. The same happened when he met Elon Musk, avoiding thorny questions and allowing Musk to bang on, between stoned puffs, about engineering. (Musk, it must be said, also spoke movingly about his childhood, revealing that he had feared being thrown into an asylum).
I’ve tried summoning the righteous fury that seems to possess people when they accuse Rogan of bigotry, or of giving cruel people a free pass. But, somehow, I can’t rustle up the energy. As is obvious from the very first episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host never set out to become Andrew Neil. Rogan’s non-confrontational interview technique, however laddish and coarse it may be, clearly resonates with his listeners, and it often gets plenty out of his guests.
Nor, I think, should Rogan’s role in widening access to knowledge be understated. He isn’t the role model I would choose for the men in my life – he’s fitness-crazed, he loves a rant, he seems less interested in women than in men – but it’s hard to emerge from hours of this particular podcast anything less than better-informed.
One moment, in that 2009 debut episode, captures everything redemptive about Rogan’s style. He admits he’s been “guilty” in the past of dabbling in conspiracy theories. Then something changes in his voice. He turns the beam of his voracious curiosity onto himself. “I used to be really into UFOs and stuff like that,” he says. “Until I realised that what I’m into is... when there’s something unknown. And I figure it out... and I gain something from that.”
His listeners may be the archetypal “deplorables”. Or perhaps they’re people in search of purpose, and a model of masculinity that gives them dignity. A lot of them just like to listen to sports chat. But whoever they are, they’re benefiting from Rogan’s relentless quest to plumb the unknown, and to lay its jewels out where anyone can see them.
From The Telegraph (UK), May 20, 2020