Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact. I used to think of myself as pretty pan-curious—it comes with the job—but my Joe Rogan experience was humbling. His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.
One of the downsides of total human optimization is that you’re always coming up short, and in the wrong stew of testosterone and serotonin, it can turn into a poison of self-loathing and trigger-cocked rage. And a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it. Jones’s recent appearance on the podcast came after he was sued by families of children and educators murdered in the Sandy Hook massacre—a mass shooting that Jones falsely claimed was a hoax, which families of the victims say prompted his gang of fans to harass them. (Jones has since acknowledged that the Sandy Hook massacre occurred.) So is Joe really nurturing a generation of smarter, healthier, more worldly men, or an army of conspiracy theorists and alt-right super soldiers? At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.
In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump. During a podcast episode in March, he described himself as “fucking left wing” and “almost a socialist,” then ticked off a list of progressive issues he backs, including universal basic income and free college. In early August, Bernie Sanders came on for a pithy hour-long episode. He tends to assert his progressive credentials, though, only when he gets accused of being a far-right mouthpiece, and it always has a ring of “Some of my best friends voted for Hillary.” More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
Rogan’s most recent Netflix special is often funny because Joe Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these? “I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he says during the special, which is something all comedians say, and is sort of true but also sort of not. People reveal their deepest selves in the subjects they keep revisiting, and the hills they choose to die on. With Rogan, you can often see and hear the tension between what he knows he’s supposed to believe and what he really thinks. Joe Rogan may be all about love, but beneath the surface he’s seething.
Onstage, Rogan tends to wear the familiar uniform of chiseled men everywhere enjoying a night on the town: jeans, shiny button-down shirt, untucked, with a spread collar and unbuttoned cuffs, like his torso is a wine that needs to breathe. He stomps around as he performs, and his voice often rises to a shout, like Sam Kinison. In Strange Times, he complained that his critics believe he “hates gays and cats,” but he also seems ambivalent about women, especially Clinton, whom he described as “a lying old lady who faints a lot.”
And speaking of a lot: He uses the word lady a lot. “Ladies,” he went on, “you make people. You make all the people. And you want to be president, too, you fucking greedy bitches? What else do you want? You want bigger dicks than us?” “Ladies,” he went on some more, “I love you … but let’s be honest, you don’t invent a lot of shit.”
Joe’s choice of profession is a key to understanding why The Joe Rogan Experience can seem like a safe space for retrograde assholes: Among comics, radical free speech is a first principle. Every comedian believes that all people should be able to say pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want. This is partly because their careers depend on it, and not in some theoretical way. Just ask comics how nervous they get trying out new material in front of a live audience now versus a decade ago.
All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time. You just don’t hear about it because it’s buried under 300,000 hours of conversation with Anthony Jeselnik. Many of these episodes are a mixed bag. If you don’t think it’s possible to be insightful and obtuse at the same time, just listen to an hour of his podcast with the author and neuroscientist Sam Harris, who raised some fraught but worthwhile questions about how forgiveness works in the age of the #MeToo movement and MAGA.
“We need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society,” Harris argued. “What are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness?” Rogan agreed, hard, and they discussed the case of Liam Neeson, who may have done lasting damage to his career by confessing to racist thoughts in his youth that he is ashamed of now. “They just wanna see him burned alive,” Harris said with real alarm. “And yet … these same people on the left are people who have as a genuine ethical norm the rehabilitation of murderers … There’s no way to square those two things.” These are both good, if imperfect, points to raise, but neither of them seems to grasp that a good point coming out of the wrong mouth doesn’t count for squat.
Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble. Especially when he talks about Twitter, a company that brings together Joe’s two biggest blind spots: his basic misunderstanding of the concept of censorship and his tendency to see the world through a thick cloud of Axe Body Spray. (No, Joe, Twitter banning white nationalists from its privately held publishing platform is not censorship—it might be a risky corporate policy, but it is not censorship.)
Last winter, Rogan had the Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on his show and the episode was a bust, resulting in a kind of blowback from fans that he’d never experienced before. It wasn’t that Joe was insufficiently hard-assed; it was simply that he failed at the most basic task of a host: forcing his guest to say something, anything, meaningful. A few of Joe’s more conspiracy-minded fans, meanwhile—the Joe Rogan experience is a deeply paranoid one—accused him of letting Dorsey off easy because Dorsey’s Cash app sponsors the podcast. But I don’t think that was the issue. I think that’s just how Dorsey talks, and Rogan couldn’t crack it. He’s not the first person Dorsey has bullshitted to death, and he won’t be the last.
What happened next, though, was a demonstration of one of Joe’s strengths, and something folks in traditional journalism could learn from: He fessed up. He began an episode the following week by apologizing for how lousy the Dorsey interview had gone, and though he insisted he wasn’t covering for a buddy, he acknowledged the bad optics. He sounded beat up about it. He vowed to make it right. During my entire Joe Rogan experience, I never liked him more.
But then he immediately went out and bungled the “making it right” part, inviting on a journalist named Tim Pool, a frequent commentator on social-media issues, who seemed to know less about Twitter, and in particular the details of notable not-censorship incidents, than Joe himself—two men talking unironically about what constitutes abuse on a social-media platform. Then he brought back Dorsey and Pool, and Dorsey brought along Twitter’s global lead for legal, policy, and trust and safety, Vijaya Gadde, for a four-way deep dive that was so circular and confusing it reminded me of Twitter itself.
Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good. It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.
Iput off listening to what Joe billed as “Alex Jones Returns!” (episode No. 1255) for three weeks, and then another week once I saw the running time: nearly five hours. Two windbags gusting for so long they could’ve powered a desert of turbines. Rogan and Jones have been offline friends for years and share a fondness for conspiracy theories, though Jones takes them somewhat more seriously. Jones’s first appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was two years ago (episode No. 911), but this one was fraught because he and Joe had recently fallen out over Jones’s insistence that the Sandy Hook massacre had been a hoax. For Rogan, this was a banishment-worthy sin. Until it wasn’t.
His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”
Even before Jones sat down, Rogan seemed unpierced by the genuine anguish that Jones had caused the parents of murdered first graders. I won’t quote anything Alex Jones said on the podcast, so just picture a walrus with a persecution complex, or a talking pile of gravel. They got the Sandy Hook stuff out of the way first—Jones evaded responsibility, Joe grumbled about the media—and then they got into what Jones was really there to talk about: aliens, suicidal grasshoppers, Chinese robot workers, that kind of thing. My breaking point was at the 21-minute mark, when Jones apologized for “ranting” and Rogan replied, “It’s okay—I want you to rant.”
My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.
And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite. We’re just different. Joe Rogan lives every day like it’s his last. I live every day like I’m going to have to do most of this crap again tomorrow. I like naps. I can’t seem to get in the habit of taking vitamins and I just need to accept that I never will. I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron. Whatever gets the job done. It might unsettle some of us that we must rely on his fans to separate the good stuff from the bad, but that’s the hard work of being a responsible adult in the modern era—knowing what you should consume and what you shouldn’t. We all need to decide for ourselves, but trust me on this one: You can skip the mushroom coffee.