A while before I saw Joe Rogan do stand-up in Denver, I organized a bachelor party in nearby Boulder. The area was chosen in part for its rugged, outdoorsy quality, a quality most members of our crew personally lacked. Our quasi-ironic male-bonding activity was shooting clay pigeons, and even then, one of the guys wore a “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” t-shirt to the range, in protest. Another thing Colorado had going for it was legal pot, which was still a rarity at the time. I drove with my buddy Doug, a marijuana and wine buff from California’s northern coast, to a dispensary called Helping Hands Cannabis. We bought a container of gummies to eat in the party van on the way to Red Rocks, where we were seeing Chromeo. A few of the guys might have eaten a half but I, inexperienced with gummies, popped the whole thing and within an hour was immobile. At some point I tried to walk up the steps of the amphitheater to find a pulled-pork sandwich and felt like one of the dinosaurs in Fantasia that gets trapped in sludge on the path to extinction.
About five years later, already out west for a wedding, I noticed that Rogan was performing in Colorado. By that time, his podcast was so popular that he categorically denied interview requests, not needing the publicity—and also, possibly with good reason, not trusting journalists like me. I’d been wanting to write about him, and it seemed to me I could at least get physically closer than other writers simply by watching him do stand-up, which happened to be his original medium, even before he hosted Fear Factor on NBC in the early 2000s. Rogan’s also a huge stoner, and he would be performing in America’s stoner capital, not far from where I myself had been impaired by Helping Hands.
This felt kind of salient. The Joe Rogan Experience is likely the most listened-to podcast in the medium’s short history, but Rogan remains difficult to categorize. A workout obsessive and porn connoisseur who calls UFC bouts, he scans as a masculine caricature. His politics, however, are not conservative or even “fratty” but anti-establishment, often to the point of paranoia: he’s a skeptic of the U.S. intelligence community, of the pharmaceutical industry, of Big Ag, of the media, of whoever is pulling the strings at Davos, you name it. Even before the Denver show, I had been nursing various hypotheses about Rogan, one of which was that he started to make more sense when seen through the lens of all the weed and psychedelic drugs he took. I felt that if there was a place for me to see him, it was under a cloud of pot smoke in Colorado.
Doug, my friend from the bachelor party, was now living in Fort Collins, and he agreed to drive down to Denver for the show. Having not seen each other since before COVID, we could make a weekend out of it. A bachelor party will let a guy enjoy macho stuff like shooting guns, under the pretense that he is doing it for ritualistic purposes. Going to a Rogan show for “work” might function similarly, giving us cover in case we accidentally enjoyed it.
It was an interesting time to be seeing Rogan. The vaccines had been in circulation for about a year, and Rogan, following his homeopathic tendencies, was skeptical of them. He had been controversial before the pandemic, for hosting Alex Jones, or promoting off-kilter supplements, or being un-woke, or conversing with Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey in ways deemed insufficiently critical. But his COVID politics inflamed liberal antipathy toward him. A few months earlier, Neil Young and others had pulled their catalogs from Spotify, where Rogan had recently signed a nine-figure deal. To many on the left, Rogan was seen as a public-health menace unto himself, the trademark super-spreader of the misinformation era.
Denver’s downtown was still COVID-dead, yet the chain hotels near the theater were expensive, maybe because of Rogan. Doug and I ended up at a roach motel on the nightlight strip of East Colfax Avenue. We ate at a diner then Ubered to the show, which took place in a five-thousand-seat theater within the city’s convention center, a disappointingly pot-free environment. The crowd, obviously, was heavily male. At security you had to put your phone in a little sealed pouch that was impossible to open, to prevent you from checking your phone or filming the show—in theory a wonderful innovation, favored by many performers. But my trip would have been pointless if I couldn’t later listen back to what I heard, and I managed to press record. (If you think about it, it’s relatively easy to circumvent the system.)
Rogan appeared, following three openers, around 11 p.m., wearing tapered jeans and a pink sweatshirt with the name of a boxing club on it. (Like many American men, Rogan seemed to transition into tight pants the moment they went out of fashion.) The energy on The Joe Rogan Experience is famously weed-infused, laid-back and discursive. His stand-up set feels different: shouty and high-energy, as if it’s Red Bull that he pregames with backstage. He seemed to sense that the draw was not his comedy per se, but his public persona. “I got canceled so many times I had to find out by accident,” he began one bit, about turning on the TV and hearing Prince Harry denounce him for “giving out dangerous vaccine misinformation.” “My first thought was, fuck, did I? I might have! My position on that is, if you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, was that really my fault?” Who, he asked—ostensibly, some people here—was taking medical advice from “that dude who made people eat animals’ dicks on TV?”
Rogan leans into this bonehead persona. And while he’s smarter than he presents, it’s also true that his observational comedy probably falls within an average range of American opinions. On stage, his COVID material felt taboo not because it was so shocking on its own terms, but because he was frankly articulating what, in more sanitized media environments, had been judged off limits to say. “I was scared in March of 2020,” he began one bit. “I was fucking legitimately nervous. No bullshit. I’m not lying.” The crowd seemed wary. “I was like, what if the government is lying, what if it’s worse than they say? … You heard about people that got it. Who got it? Where’d they get it?” Then, the punchline. “By December of 2021, I was like, Was your grandpa fat?” The audience loved it, and on the recording, I’m pretty sure I heard myself and Doug laughing too. (Oops!) “He was 94, man! That’s older than you’re supposed to die. Are you sure COVID killed him? I could have killed him with a fucking balloon!”
I don’t know what people in Denver were expecting from the show, given Rogan’s ecumenical interests. Podcast guests from the past year include Dr. Phil, Sam Altman, the Rock, Bill Maher, Christopher Rufo, Tulsi Gabbard, Post Malone, Ice Cube, Oliver Stone, Hulk Hogan, Ray Kurzweil, Jonathan Haidt and Aaron Rodgers, plus the usual smattering of MMA fighters and minor comics, so you could envision people coming to the show based on any number of niche obsessions. One guy kept ripping Howard Dean-style yells at unpredictable moments, like he was seeking something primal. On the other end of the spectrum, a father and a too-young tween son were sitting near us, and I felt for them as they watched the vulgar bits in uncomfortable silence.
Rogan’s jokes followed a pattern, often starting with a provocation about sex or gender, meant to set up an unexpectedly “enlightened” punchline. “Men don’t really believe in gay women,” he began one bit. If a man’s girlfriend revealed she had recently exited a decade-long relationship with a woman, he’d think it was hot and shrug it off, whereas a woman whose boyfriend had only dated men would be suspicious. “You’re not as progressive as men, you’re not open-minded,” he chided whatever women might be in the audience. He used a similar setup in a bit about casual sex in retirement homes. Guys didn’t mind the idea of their horny grandpas getting a few final rolls in the hay, perhaps dying of glorious heart attacks in the process. Yet we were mortified at the image of our grandmothers’ geriatric hookups with virtual strangers—“not my nana!”—thereby implicating us in a sexist double standard. I silently applauded Joe Rogan for being a Trojan horse for sexual equality.
What were Doug and I expecting? I’m not exactly sure, but there was a subtext to Rogan’s act that was, I think, more appealing to us than any of the individual jokes. The performance seemed intended as a defense of comedy, or even just of talking out loud, which for Rogan couldn’t happen freely if people like me were publishing his jokes out of context on the internet, instead of chilling out and laughing at inappropriate stuff like normal people. “I was on a podcast, and I was high, which is normal. They were asking me who I was going to vote for for president,” he said at one point, referring to what had become another viral media cycle. “I was like, ah, I’ll probably vote for Bernie. That’s the kind of shit you say when you’re high. When you’re high, you’re like, Man… college should be free. Everyone should make fifty bucks an hour, minimum. That’s high talk! But then the people who thought that Bernie Sanders might actually get elected, they started finding shit that I said drunk, high as fuck, on podcasts. And they put it in quotes!”
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In 2005, Jonathan Lethem published an essay called “Defending The Searchers.” It was about his irrepressible need to rebut critics of the classic John Ford Western, wherever they appeared. He first defended The Searchers in 1982 while screening it for the film society of Bennington College, where he was a freshman. He’d never seen the film but, knowing its importance to the canon, approached it respectfully. His classmates, in all their “precocious cynicism,” began groaning almost immediately. Perhaps they were responding to the depiction of the Indians, or to the corny spectacle of a “melodrama in blazing Technicolor,” or maybe just to Wayne himself, that overdetermined emblem of American masculinity. When the projector broke down Lethem took the opportunity to yell at his classmates.
I called them idiots and told them to shut up. What I didn’t do, couldn’t do, was defend The Searchers itself. I hadn’t seen more than a third of the film, after all, and what I’d seen I hadn’t understood. My schoolmates might be wrong to condescend to this film, but I couldn’t tell them why.
Strangely, at some point, I started to feel this way about Joe Rogan. The more controversial he grew in my social world, the more eager I was for him to come up in conversation, so that I could patiently explain that he wasn’t in fact the scourge he was made out to be. When the Neil Young fracas hit, I found myself texting friends about Young’s hypocrisy. Oh, so the guy who once organized something called The Freedom of Speech Tour suddenly wants to shut down discourse? Neil Young! One of my favorite artists! And here I was taking Joe Rogan’s side. Recently, I went back and watched Rogan’s 2016 and 2018 Netflix specials while my wife was in the room. They weren’t very funny. She looked pained. None of which stopped me from trying to defend the jokes that weren’t landing. Besides, I swore to her, Rogan was better live…
Why was I doing this? Even Rogan’s biggest fans probably don’t see him as a great stand-up comic, let alone an artist like John Ford. Aside from my own journalistic research into Rogan, I never listen to his podcast. Nor am I drawn to any of his fixations: not mixed-martial-arts fighting, not protein-heavy natural-diet stuff, not drugs, not conspiracy culture. I don’t own guns, I don’t lift weights, I’m fully vaccinated. I am a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes for a publication literally named New York. By any measure, I have more in common with Rogan’s antagonists than his typical listener. In fact, other liberal journalists like myself have occasionally written sympathetically about him—there was a pretty good piece in the Atlantic five whole years ago! Nobody’s begging for my defense, certainly not Rogan, who’s as popular as ever with the general public. Plus, as the pandemic waned, other manosphere villains emerged to eclipse him in notoriety. Everyone could agree it was worse for their sons or brothers to be listening to the alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. As if to declare the matter resolved, Neil Young recently returned to Spotify.
Yet I remained fixated on him. Like Lethem, I instinctively felt I was defending something of value beyond the grasp of a certain type of know-it-all elite—but what? During the pandemic Rogan moved from California to Austin, Texas. Somehow a false memory was implanted in my mind that he showed up in Richard Linklater’s Austin masterpiece Slacker. The rambling conspiracists who populate that movie come across as romantic figures, bards or oracles. In fact, Rogan is not in it. I may have been transposing an image of a more malignant spiritual predecessor, Alex Jones, raving from a bullhorn in Linklater’s Waking Life. Still, this seemed like a clue.
Rogan embodies a curiosity that in recent years has eroded within the media, often replaced by a kind of haughty self-certainty. This curiosity can lead Rogan to weird places. Recently he’s been on a kick about whether artificial intelligence could be a vehicle for, or maybe a manifestation of, angel-like space aliens, whose arrival seems to have been prophesied by a passage in the Book of Ezekiel that in turn reminded him of tripping on drugs. “When you experience dimethyltryptamine, which we know is produced by the brain, which is the key component of ayahuasca, you experience entities,” he said in February, on an episode with Aaron Rodgers, the football star and infamous psychedelic-conspiracy theorist. “You experience exactly what they’re talking about there. So what is that? Do we just dismiss that as a hallucination?”
I can’t actually relate to this kind of open-endedness—I feel quite certain in my convictions about what is real and what isn’t. Yet I find myself sympathetic to people who aren’t, whether the QAnon devotees I once profiled for New York, or gnostic-seeker types like NBA star and anti-vaxxer/flat-earther Kyrie Irving, whom I also wrote about. They strike me, almost, as bizarro investigative journalists, armed with all the inquisitiveness and none of the rigor of the profession, motivated less by the prospect of finding the truth than by the endless Easter egg hunt for it.
By contrast, many liberals in the long Trump era have gotten less weird and more vigilant about policing outré content. This rigidity has inevitably caused journalists to make mistakes, hastily labeling as false what is merely contested or unknown. For instance: the “lab leak theory” on COVID’s origins, which was initially tagged as right-wing misinformation, is now generally accepted as plausible. But even when the vigilance was warranted, there was collateral damage: it was joyless, moralizing, and sapped already dwindling cultural reserves of eccentricity and adventure.
Rogan is frank about the opportunity this presented to comics, especially those who did not mind pissing off the reigning cultural arbiters. “Comedy didn’t used to be dangerous for a long time,” he observes. “There were a lot of shock comics that were kind of, they were saying things just to be shocking, you know, and I certainly did that earlier in my career. And now, like, you have a position to defend—if you’re going to go out on a limb, you’re going to make fun of something that’s dangerous, you’ve got to have that shit tight.” As a side note, compared to true shock jocks like Don Imus or Howard Stern in their 1990s heyday, Joe Rogan is practically Terry Gross. Or maybe it’s not a side note. Rogan’s ascension is probably impossible to fully understand without accounting for how few of the anti-institutionalists in his generational cohort survived the Trump presidency with their contrarian tendencies intact. In 2022 Stern, having reinvented himself as a progressive, admonished Rogan for spreading misinformation about COVID and encouraged him to publicly endorse the vaccines.
Rogan is so popular that it feels wrong to call him countercultural. But in liberal circles, he is certainly not somebody you’re supposed to like. Doug and I treated the trip to see him accordingly, as something of a gag. And yet the gag of doing meathead male bonding at a Rogan show also opened up space for a more earnest kind of connection. Doug and I had lost track of each other during the pandemic, and the day after the performance, tried to make up for lost time. We hiked the Flatirons, near Boulder, then I met his girlfriend, and the three of us drank wine and ate roast chicken at her place. I’m sure we tried to convince her that Rogan was in fact not as bad as people said. We had a great time. Doug dropped me off at the airport, and I haven’t seen him since.
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In a podcast conversation earlier this year with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, another popular cultural impresario spurned by critics, Rogan bemoaned the way that modern life, cities in particular, had eroded our connection to our physical selves and surroundings. “We lit the streets, but we cut off the majesty of the heavens,” Rogan mused. His rural romanticism dovetails with his critical perspective on pesticides, processed foods, sedentary lifestyles and other threats to what he sees as vigorous living. If you had to distill this aspect of his ideology, it’d probably be in his antipathy to a weight-loss drug like Ozempic—in his eyes, a corporate-backed shortcut to health and flourishing. (Despite Rogan’s flirtations with Bernie Sanders, it’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s environmentally inflected brand of alienation that tracks most closely with Rogan’s politics.)
Fixated on the “natural,” Rogan insists unfashionably on the biological imperative, against the modern idea that gender is a socialized phenomenon. Like his friend Dave Chappelle, Rogan is habitually criticized for being insensitive about transgender issues. With Sheridan, he expressed tolerance for trans people, but in a way that was, characteristically, guaranteed to offend. “If you want me to call you a girl, I’ll call you a girl! But this is confusing,” he said, about accidentally misgendering someone. “You’re a fucking guy in a dress and it’s confusing.” Elsewhere in the episode, he connected the majesty of the great outdoors to our sexual impulses. “I think nature has a way of getting us attracted to places that are fertile and places that would hold life … just like fertile people are beautiful to us,” he said. “You’re like, oh, narrow waist and big hips. You’re like, oh, she could give birth.”
An irony of Rogan’s retro presentation on gender is that his trademark conversational style is not conventionally “male” at all: he is, famously, a great listener. And for all his tough-guy looks, he’s not intellectually rigid or polemical but malleable, and relatively egoless about what he does and doesn’t know. Rogan has sometimes been lumped with figures from an ever-expanding cultural rogues’ gallery. Not just alpha male gurus like Andrew Tate and Andrew Huberman but other opponents of political correctness, like Bill Maher and Bari Weiss. Or to manhood-in-crisis thought-leaders like Jordan Peterson. But Rogan is not an ideologue or advice-giver; more than any of these figures, his appeal is rooted in his inquisitive, free-associative tendencies.
In an era in which Democrats continue to bleed less educated men from the party, you could do worse than a Rogan bro who inhales half-baked ideas about ChatGPT aliens while absorbing Lawrence Lessig’s spiel on campaign finance along the way. As the Atlantic piece put it, “Don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? … Don’t we want more Joes?” Even so, when I defend Rogan against his critics, real or imagined, I’m not motivated by political strategy, or by sympathy for the right of ordinary Americans to enjoy their podcasts in peace. (Though, yes, I suppose they should have that right.) Rather, I think, his digressive style reminds me of aspects of my own intellectual formation about which I’ve grown protective.
Rogan’s openness to unofficial knowledge, his unguarded vernacular, his naïve wonder at cool stuff, his desire to play devil’s advocate and mix it up with politically risqué commentators; whatever the “gender” of this mode of conversation, I associate it with a kind of male bonding I do less and less of the further I get from high school and college, notwithstanding the occasional bachelor party. Against the idea of the “shoulder-to-shoulder” male friendship, in which guys won’t hang unless they’re watching some event, I grew up on hours of boundary-testing banter in which various hormonal impulses were channeled into language. I can’t say this aimless banter left me with any essential knowledge, but that hardly means it was useless. As with Rogan’s comedy act, there was always a subtext: that trash talking or pretentiously theorizing or offloading our feelings, without fact-checks or intellectual guardrails, was good and right and one of the whole points of life.
After Aaron Rodgers and Rogan discussed alien life, they moved on to the notion of utopia. Maybe humans couldn’t achieve it, but hey actually, what if they could? Rogan remembered a story about a group of baboons eating garbage at a resort. The alpha males, being vicious, ate the food first, which wound up poisoning and killing them. “The only ones that survived were the beta males,” Rogan told Rodgers. “The beta males created this really peaceful society and it lasted for a long time.” Don’t read too much into this, though. He probably forgot he said it. It’s just guys talking.
Image credit: John Wayne in The Searchers, 1956. Cinematography by Winton C. Hoch. Allstar Picture Library Limited / Alamy Stock Photo, © Warner Brothers.
A while before I saw Joe Rogan do stand-up in Denver, I organized a bachelor party in nearby Boulder. The area was chosen in part for its rugged, outdoorsy quality, a quality most members of our crew personally lacked. Our quasi-ironic male-bonding activity was shooting clay pigeons, and even then, one of the guys wore a “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America” t-shirt to the range, in protest. Another thing Colorado had going for it was legal pot, which was still a rarity at the time. I drove with my buddy Doug, a marijuana and wine buff from California’s northern coast, to a dispensary called Helping Hands Cannabis. We bought a container of gummies to eat in the party van on the way to Red Rocks, where we were seeing Chromeo. A few of the guys might have eaten a half but I, inexperienced with gummies, popped the whole thing and within an hour was immobile. At some point I tried to walk up the steps of the amphitheater to find a pulled-pork sandwich and felt like one of the dinosaurs in Fantasia that gets trapped in sludge on the path to extinction.
About five years later, already out west for a wedding, I noticed that Rogan was performing in Colorado. By that time, his podcast was so popular that he categorically denied interview requests, not needing the publicity—and also, possibly with good reason, not trusting journalists like me. I’d been wanting to write about him, and it seemed to me I could at least get physically closer than other writers simply by watching him do stand-up, which happened to be his original medium, even before he hosted Fear Factor on NBC in the early 2000s. Rogan’s also a huge stoner, and he would be performing in America’s stoner capital, not far from where I myself had been impaired by Helping Hands.
This felt kind of salient. The Joe Rogan Experience is likely the most listened-to podcast in the medium’s short history, but Rogan remains difficult to categorize. A workout obsessive and porn connoisseur who calls UFC bouts, he scans as a masculine caricature. His politics, however, are not conservative or even “fratty” but anti-establishment, often to the point of paranoia: he’s a skeptic of the U.S. intelligence community, of the pharmaceutical industry, of Big Ag, of the media, of whoever is pulling the strings at Davos, you name it. Even before the Denver show, I had been nursing various hypotheses about Rogan, one of which was that he started to make more sense when seen through the lens of all the weed and psychedelic drugs he took. I felt that if there was a place for me to see him, it was under a cloud of pot smoke in Colorado.
Doug, my friend from the bachelor party, was now living in Fort Collins, and he agreed to drive down to Denver for the show. Having not seen each other since before COVID, we could make a weekend out of it. A bachelor party will let a guy enjoy macho stuff like shooting guns, under the pretense that he is doing it for ritualistic purposes. Going to a Rogan show for “work” might function similarly, giving us cover in case we accidentally enjoyed it.
It was an interesting time to be seeing Rogan. The vaccines had been in circulation for about a year, and Rogan, following his homeopathic tendencies, was skeptical of them. He had been controversial before the pandemic, for hosting Alex Jones, or promoting off-kilter supplements, or being un-woke, or conversing with Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey in ways deemed insufficiently critical. But his COVID politics inflamed liberal antipathy toward him. A few months earlier, Neil Young and others had pulled their catalogs from Spotify, where Rogan had recently signed a nine-figure deal. To many on the left, Rogan was seen as a public-health menace unto himself, the trademark super-spreader of the misinformation era.
Denver’s downtown was still COVID-dead, yet the chain hotels near the theater were expensive, maybe because of Rogan. Doug and I ended up at a roach motel on the nightlight strip of East Colfax Avenue. We ate at a diner then Ubered to the show, which took place in a five-thousand-seat theater within the city’s convention center, a disappointingly pot-free environment. The crowd, obviously, was heavily male. At security you had to put your phone in a little sealed pouch that was impossible to open, to prevent you from checking your phone or filming the show—in theory a wonderful innovation, favored by many performers. But my trip would have been pointless if I couldn’t later listen back to what I heard, and I managed to press record. (If you think about it, it’s relatively easy to circumvent the system.)
Rogan appeared, following three openers, around 11 p.m., wearing tapered jeans and a pink sweatshirt with the name of a boxing club on it. (Like many American men, Rogan seemed to transition into tight pants the moment they went out of fashion.) The energy on The Joe Rogan Experience is famously weed-infused, laid-back and discursive. His stand-up set feels different: shouty and high-energy, as if it’s Red Bull that he pregames with backstage. He seemed to sense that the draw was not his comedy per se, but his public persona. “I got canceled so many times I had to find out by accident,” he began one bit, about turning on the TV and hearing Prince Harry denounce him for “giving out dangerous vaccine misinformation.” “My first thought was, fuck, did I? I might have! My position on that is, if you’re getting your vaccine advice from me, was that really my fault?” Who, he asked—ostensibly, some people here—was taking medical advice from “that dude who made people eat animals’ dicks on TV?”
Rogan leans into this bonehead persona. And while he’s smarter than he presents, it’s also true that his observational comedy probably falls within an average range of American opinions. On stage, his COVID material felt taboo not because it was so shocking on its own terms, but because he was frankly articulating what, in more sanitized media environments, had been judged off limits to say. “I was scared in March of 2020,” he began one bit. “I was fucking legitimately nervous. No bullshit. I’m not lying.” The crowd seemed wary. “I was like, what if the government is lying, what if it’s worse than they say? … You heard about people that got it. Who got it? Where’d they get it?” Then, the punchline. “By December of 2021, I was like, Was your grandpa fat?” The audience loved it, and on the recording, I’m pretty sure I heard myself and Doug laughing too. (Oops!) “He was 94, man! That’s older than you’re supposed to die. Are you sure COVID killed him? I could have killed him with a fucking balloon!”
I don’t know what people in Denver were expecting from the show, given Rogan’s ecumenical interests. Podcast guests from the past year include Dr. Phil, Sam Altman, the Rock, Bill Maher, Christopher Rufo, Tulsi Gabbard, Post Malone, Ice Cube, Oliver Stone, Hulk Hogan, Ray Kurzweil, Jonathan Haidt and Aaron Rodgers, plus the usual smattering of MMA fighters and minor comics, so you could envision people coming to the show based on any number of niche obsessions. One guy kept ripping Howard Dean-style yells at unpredictable moments, like he was seeking something primal. On the other end of the spectrum, a father and a too-young tween son were sitting near us, and I felt for them as they watched the vulgar bits in uncomfortable silence.
Rogan’s jokes followed a pattern, often starting with a provocation about sex or gender, meant to set up an unexpectedly “enlightened” punchline. “Men don’t really believe in gay women,” he began one bit. If a man’s girlfriend revealed she had recently exited a decade-long relationship with a woman, he’d think it was hot and shrug it off, whereas a woman whose boyfriend had only dated men would be suspicious. “You’re not as progressive as men, you’re not open-minded,” he chided whatever women might be in the audience. He used a similar setup in a bit about casual sex in retirement homes. Guys didn’t mind the idea of their horny grandpas getting a few final rolls in the hay, perhaps dying of glorious heart attacks in the process. Yet we were mortified at the image of our grandmothers’ geriatric hookups with virtual strangers—“not my nana!”—thereby implicating us in a sexist double standard. I silently applauded Joe Rogan for being a Trojan horse for sexual equality.
What were Doug and I expecting? I’m not exactly sure, but there was a subtext to Rogan’s act that was, I think, more appealing to us than any of the individual jokes. The performance seemed intended as a defense of comedy, or even just of talking out loud, which for Rogan couldn’t happen freely if people like me were publishing his jokes out of context on the internet, instead of chilling out and laughing at inappropriate stuff like normal people. “I was on a podcast, and I was high, which is normal. They were asking me who I was going to vote for for president,” he said at one point, referring to what had become another viral media cycle. “I was like, ah, I’ll probably vote for Bernie. That’s the kind of shit you say when you’re high. When you’re high, you’re like, Man… college should be free. Everyone should make fifty bucks an hour, minimum. That’s high talk! But then the people who thought that Bernie Sanders might actually get elected, they started finding shit that I said drunk, high as fuck, on podcasts. And they put it in quotes!”
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In 2005, Jonathan Lethem published an essay called “Defending The Searchers.” It was about his irrepressible need to rebut critics of the classic John Ford Western, wherever they appeared. He first defended The Searchers in 1982 while screening it for the film society of Bennington College, where he was a freshman. He’d never seen the film but, knowing its importance to the canon, approached it respectfully. His classmates, in all their “precocious cynicism,” began groaning almost immediately. Perhaps they were responding to the depiction of the Indians, or to the corny spectacle of a “melodrama in blazing Technicolor,” or maybe just to Wayne himself, that overdetermined emblem of American masculinity. When the projector broke down Lethem took the opportunity to yell at his classmates.
Strangely, at some point, I started to feel this way about Joe Rogan. The more controversial he grew in my social world, the more eager I was for him to come up in conversation, so that I could patiently explain that he wasn’t in fact the scourge he was made out to be. When the Neil Young fracas hit, I found myself texting friends about Young’s hypocrisy. Oh, so the guy who once organized something called The Freedom of Speech Tour suddenly wants to shut down discourse? Neil Young! One of my favorite artists! And here I was taking Joe Rogan’s side. Recently, I went back and watched Rogan’s 2016 and 2018 Netflix specials while my wife was in the room. They weren’t very funny. She looked pained. None of which stopped me from trying to defend the jokes that weren’t landing. Besides, I swore to her, Rogan was better live…
Why was I doing this? Even Rogan’s biggest fans probably don’t see him as a great stand-up comic, let alone an artist like John Ford. Aside from my own journalistic research into Rogan, I never listen to his podcast. Nor am I drawn to any of his fixations: not mixed-martial-arts fighting, not protein-heavy natural-diet stuff, not drugs, not conspiracy culture. I don’t own guns, I don’t lift weights, I’m fully vaccinated. I am a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes for a publication literally named New York. By any measure, I have more in common with Rogan’s antagonists than his typical listener. In fact, other liberal journalists like myself have occasionally written sympathetically about him—there was a pretty good piece in the Atlantic five whole years ago! Nobody’s begging for my defense, certainly not Rogan, who’s as popular as ever with the general public. Plus, as the pandemic waned, other manosphere villains emerged to eclipse him in notoriety. Everyone could agree it was worse for their sons or brothers to be listening to the alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate. As if to declare the matter resolved, Neil Young recently returned to Spotify.
Yet I remained fixated on him. Like Lethem, I instinctively felt I was defending something of value beyond the grasp of a certain type of know-it-all elite—but what? During the pandemic Rogan moved from California to Austin, Texas. Somehow a false memory was implanted in my mind that he showed up in Richard Linklater’s Austin masterpiece Slacker. The rambling conspiracists who populate that movie come across as romantic figures, bards or oracles. In fact, Rogan is not in it. I may have been transposing an image of a more malignant spiritual predecessor, Alex Jones, raving from a bullhorn in Linklater’s Waking Life. Still, this seemed like a clue.
Rogan embodies a curiosity that in recent years has eroded within the media, often replaced by a kind of haughty self-certainty. This curiosity can lead Rogan to weird places. Recently he’s been on a kick about whether artificial intelligence could be a vehicle for, or maybe a manifestation of, angel-like space aliens, whose arrival seems to have been prophesied by a passage in the Book of Ezekiel that in turn reminded him of tripping on drugs. “When you experience dimethyltryptamine, which we know is produced by the brain, which is the key component of ayahuasca, you experience entities,” he said in February, on an episode with Aaron Rodgers, the football star and infamous psychedelic-conspiracy theorist. “You experience exactly what they’re talking about there. So what is that? Do we just dismiss that as a hallucination?”
I can’t actually relate to this kind of open-endedness—I feel quite certain in my convictions about what is real and what isn’t. Yet I find myself sympathetic to people who aren’t, whether the QAnon devotees I once profiled for New York, or gnostic-seeker types like NBA star and anti-vaxxer/flat-earther Kyrie Irving, whom I also wrote about. They strike me, almost, as bizarro investigative journalists, armed with all the inquisitiveness and none of the rigor of the profession, motivated less by the prospect of finding the truth than by the endless Easter egg hunt for it.
By contrast, many liberals in the long Trump era have gotten less weird and more vigilant about policing outré content. This rigidity has inevitably caused journalists to make mistakes, hastily labeling as false what is merely contested or unknown. For instance: the “lab leak theory” on COVID’s origins, which was initially tagged as right-wing misinformation, is now generally accepted as plausible. But even when the vigilance was warranted, there was collateral damage: it was joyless, moralizing, and sapped already dwindling cultural reserves of eccentricity and adventure.
Rogan is frank about the opportunity this presented to comics, especially those who did not mind pissing off the reigning cultural arbiters. “Comedy didn’t used to be dangerous for a long time,” he observes. “There were a lot of shock comics that were kind of, they were saying things just to be shocking, you know, and I certainly did that earlier in my career. And now, like, you have a position to defend—if you’re going to go out on a limb, you’re going to make fun of something that’s dangerous, you’ve got to have that shit tight.” As a side note, compared to true shock jocks like Don Imus or Howard Stern in their 1990s heyday, Joe Rogan is practically Terry Gross. Or maybe it’s not a side note. Rogan’s ascension is probably impossible to fully understand without accounting for how few of the anti-institutionalists in his generational cohort survived the Trump presidency with their contrarian tendencies intact. In 2022 Stern, having reinvented himself as a progressive, admonished Rogan for spreading misinformation about COVID and encouraged him to publicly endorse the vaccines.
Rogan is so popular that it feels wrong to call him countercultural. But in liberal circles, he is certainly not somebody you’re supposed to like. Doug and I treated the trip to see him accordingly, as something of a gag. And yet the gag of doing meathead male bonding at a Rogan show also opened up space for a more earnest kind of connection. Doug and I had lost track of each other during the pandemic, and the day after the performance, tried to make up for lost time. We hiked the Flatirons, near Boulder, then I met his girlfriend, and the three of us drank wine and ate roast chicken at her place. I’m sure we tried to convince her that Rogan was in fact not as bad as people said. We had a great time. Doug dropped me off at the airport, and I haven’t seen him since.
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In a podcast conversation earlier this year with Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan, another popular cultural impresario spurned by critics, Rogan bemoaned the way that modern life, cities in particular, had eroded our connection to our physical selves and surroundings. “We lit the streets, but we cut off the majesty of the heavens,” Rogan mused. His rural romanticism dovetails with his critical perspective on pesticides, processed foods, sedentary lifestyles and other threats to what he sees as vigorous living. If you had to distill this aspect of his ideology, it’d probably be in his antipathy to a weight-loss drug like Ozempic—in his eyes, a corporate-backed shortcut to health and flourishing. (Despite Rogan’s flirtations with Bernie Sanders, it’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s environmentally inflected brand of alienation that tracks most closely with Rogan’s politics.)
Fixated on the “natural,” Rogan insists unfashionably on the biological imperative, against the modern idea that gender is a socialized phenomenon. Like his friend Dave Chappelle, Rogan is habitually criticized for being insensitive about transgender issues. With Sheridan, he expressed tolerance for trans people, but in a way that was, characteristically, guaranteed to offend. “If you want me to call you a girl, I’ll call you a girl! But this is confusing,” he said, about accidentally misgendering someone. “You’re a fucking guy in a dress and it’s confusing.” Elsewhere in the episode, he connected the majesty of the great outdoors to our sexual impulses. “I think nature has a way of getting us attracted to places that are fertile and places that would hold life … just like fertile people are beautiful to us,” he said. “You’re like, oh, narrow waist and big hips. You’re like, oh, she could give birth.”
An irony of Rogan’s retro presentation on gender is that his trademark conversational style is not conventionally “male” at all: he is, famously, a great listener. And for all his tough-guy looks, he’s not intellectually rigid or polemical but malleable, and relatively egoless about what he does and doesn’t know. Rogan has sometimes been lumped with figures from an ever-expanding cultural rogues’ gallery. Not just alpha male gurus like Andrew Tate and Andrew Huberman but other opponents of political correctness, like Bill Maher and Bari Weiss. Or to manhood-in-crisis thought-leaders like Jordan Peterson. But Rogan is not an ideologue or advice-giver; more than any of these figures, his appeal is rooted in his inquisitive, free-associative tendencies.
In an era in which Democrats continue to bleed less educated men from the party, you could do worse than a Rogan bro who inhales half-baked ideas about ChatGPT aliens while absorbing Lawrence Lessig’s spiel on campaign finance along the way. As the Atlantic piece put it, “Don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? … Don’t we want more Joes?” Even so, when I defend Rogan against his critics, real or imagined, I’m not motivated by political strategy, or by sympathy for the right of ordinary Americans to enjoy their podcasts in peace. (Though, yes, I suppose they should have that right.) Rather, I think, his digressive style reminds me of aspects of my own intellectual formation about which I’ve grown protective.
Rogan’s openness to unofficial knowledge, his unguarded vernacular, his naïve wonder at cool stuff, his desire to play devil’s advocate and mix it up with politically risqué commentators; whatever the “gender” of this mode of conversation, I associate it with a kind of male bonding I do less and less of the further I get from high school and college, notwithstanding the occasional bachelor party. Against the idea of the “shoulder-to-shoulder” male friendship, in which guys won’t hang unless they’re watching some event, I grew up on hours of boundary-testing banter in which various hormonal impulses were channeled into language. I can’t say this aimless banter left me with any essential knowledge, but that hardly means it was useless. As with Rogan’s comedy act, there was always a subtext: that trash talking or pretentiously theorizing or offloading our feelings, without fact-checks or intellectual guardrails, was good and right and one of the whole points of life.
After Aaron Rodgers and Rogan discussed alien life, they moved on to the notion of utopia. Maybe humans couldn’t achieve it, but hey actually, what if they could? Rogan remembered a story about a group of baboons eating garbage at a resort. The alpha males, being vicious, ate the food first, which wound up poisoning and killing them. “The only ones that survived were the beta males,” Rogan told Rodgers. “The beta males created this really peaceful society and it lasted for a long time.” Don’t read too much into this, though. He probably forgot he said it. It’s just guys talking.
Image credit: John Wayne in The Searchers, 1956. Cinematography by Winton C. Hoch. Allstar Picture Library Limited / Alamy Stock Photo, © Warner Brothers.
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