How Do You Solve a Problem Like Joe Rogan?
It’s simple, you can’t
For the hey, I’m just asking questions crowd, he’s a bit of a hero. But, for a lot of people, he’s just that guy who hosted Fear Factor after he played a conspiracy-loving handyman on NewsRadio. Or maybe you know him better for his connection to the UFC. However you came to know Joe, you may have noticed his devil’s advocate approach to interviewing started attracting an awful lot of faces popular with the far-right.
He has invited Alex Jones on, a man a Connecticut jury levied an almost billion-dollar judgment against. He has entertained rambling former professor Jordan Peterson. Rogan even welcomed Stefan Molyneux on his show. Molyneux is an open white supremacist who spouts racial science beliefs. And Rogan went from calling Obama the best president of his lifetime to supporting Bernie Sanders before a complete about-face to endorse Ron DeSantis, a man who hasn’t met a political stunt he wouldn’t stump for.
It’s even harder to solve a problem like Joe Rogan when it’s impossible to figure out what he stands for. One could suggest that perhaps he stands for nothing, which is why he so easily falls for anything and everything. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when he started to turn, but 2020 started a particularly rough run.
It might feel like a billion years ago, but his exclusive $200 million Spotify deal was only announced in 2020. Certain episodes from the vault were removed before Spotify fully launched The Joe Rogan Experience, including interviews with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInness (have you ever looked up where they got the name Proud Boys?) and Milo Yiannopoulos (who is now an intern for Marjorie Taylor Greene).
Another 70+ videos were later removed, in which he made light of sexual assault, including racial slurs and ableist language. Rogan apologized, dismissing the controversy as a misunderstanding or as having been taken out of context. It all looks so bad, it sounds horrible, something that Rogan admitted to in his apology. But there were no consequences. So, does it really matter?
And while the backlash wasn’t enough for Spotify to drop him, he did receive pushback from health experts due to the misinformation he spread through the COVID-19 pandemic. It was followed by the compilation of Rogan using the n-word on his show. While Rogan may frequently host racists, we can’t simply put him into the same category and wash our hands of it. He has made anti-vax statements, and he has been homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic. He can try to play these off as jokes, but he isn’t funny enough for that to be believable. And, even if he was just joking… it isn’t funny.
Yet, despite all of this… or perhaps because of this, he has millions of listeners. While the OG members of the Joe Rogan subreddit may have turned on him, new users are finding him and embracing him because of those far-right faces he’s inviting on the show. As open-minded as Rogan claims to be, his bent for contrarianism has led him to invite people on who share dangerous ideas. Rogan isn’t a journalist, he’s a podcast host so there’s little to no pushback when they share those dangerous ideas.
He doesn’t often fact-check people, especially if they’re influential, and he rarely critiques. Giving guests an unchecked platform makes him complicit in the spreading of those ideas. He can claim it’s all about free speech if he wants, and he will tell you he’s simply working to preserve straight white male voices (and we all know how oppressed the straight white man is) but that doesn’t wash. What’s really happening is his show laundering toxic, extreme ideas that appeal to men across the US and beyond.
Joe Rogan has a massive audience, millions of dollars, and all of the attention anyone can handle. Unfortunately, it comes to no accountability. He can serve up bigotry, asshole behavior, and offensive views with little to no pushback. It’s free speech. The more he attracts men disillusioned by legacy media and traditional journalism (we can all agree there’s reason to be disappointed with both), the more dis and misinformation can spread.
Those people won’t listen to fact-checkers or journalists debunking the opinions they hear on Rogan because their distrust of those things is what drove them his way in the first place. We’re in a vicious cycle.
He’s a man who had adequate success in his TV career and got in on the ground floor of podcasting. It was his consistency in putting out regular episodes that garnered him an audience. At first, he would release a lengthy episode once a week, then it was twice a week, and eventually, he released multiple episodes each week.
He attracted major guests like Bill Burr, Anthony Bourdain, and even Neil deGrasse Tyson. His audience was from a variety of backgrounds, all drawn to the show for different reasons. It doesn’t matter whether you’re part of the audience that came for Neil deGrasse Tyson or Bill Burr because whatever you came for, you’ll find the Petersons, the Molyneuxs, and the Joneses.
The problem is he was also courting conspiracy theorists, like the paleontologist who swears dinosaurs never existed, the origins of COVID, and whether the moon landing was faked… or even if space is fake!
Rogan has spent over a decade building his audience, but if we were to admit that he has allowed his podcast to become part of the culture war, it would all come crashing down on his head. He has created a safe zone, unfortunately, he invited monsters in and he’s hidden them there in that safety.
The average Rogan listener is just 24, and 71% of his audience are men. While he openly shows his emotional side and will choke up in certain situations while being vulnerable about a wide range of topics, it’s the four-hour-long Jordan Peterson interviews that get eyeballs. And he has continued to entertain Alex Jones, even after Jones lied to his face and received no pushback.
He’s self-deprecating, he’s a regular guy (at least, too much of his audience), and it’s this permissive approach to manhood that endears him to his target audience. What sells it is that unlike a lot of right-wing talking heads, he seems to believe the things he says and appears more willing to entertain different ideas. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not, it’s their perception and in the end, that’s all that matters.
What Joe Rogan fails to understand is that hurt feelings and jokes simply engender the acceptance of damaging, persistent stereotypes. He’s influencing an entire generation, and he’s influencing their influencers. Could Andrew Tate have existed if Joe Rogan hadn’t come first?
If it feels like some people are simply too big to cancel, there are two reasons for this — the first is that some people are simply too big to cancel and that cancel culture isn’t real. At least, not in the way the conservatives would have you believe.
Ultimately, the cancel culture they’re whining about is accountability, and unfortunately, few people ever face true accountability. So, how do you solve a problem like Joe Rogan? It’s simple — you can’t.
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