How Joe Rogan’s podcast got here to signify America

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Joe Rogan is many issues — a comic, a commentator, and a contrarian; a actuality TV star and martial artist-turned-host of the most listened to podcast in America: The Joe Rogan Expertise . His followers say he’s simply asking questions, calling out liberal hypocrisy, and defending free speech. His critics use different phrases: a conspiracy theorist and peddler of misinformation and anti-trans rhetoric, who platforms not simply off-the-wall concepts, however dangerous narratives that trigger real-world hurt.

There’s fact in all these labels. There’s one other method to think about Rogan which will assist put him in his rightful context for this decade: “Joe Rogan is the Walter Cronkite of Our Period,” declared British satirist Konstantin Kisin for Quilette in 2019. “Not one established newspaper or broadcaster can now compete with a well-liked YouTube host conducting a dialog from his self-funded studio,” he wrote on the time, reflecting on Rogan’s three-hour interrogation of Twitter executives.

Kisin’s declaration — earlier than the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, earlier than the 2020 election of Joe Biden or the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump — may need been a bit untimely. However he successfully predicted what Rogan would but turn into: not simply one of the vital influential voices in politics, widespread tradition, and social commentary, but additionally a harbinger for a brand new type of media, communications, belief, and fact in a post-pandemic world. There is no such thing as a monoculture in 2025; however for an enormous a part of America, the realm Rogan pioneered and steers is as shut as we would get.

He and his present have been on the crossroads of nearly each main second and societal change that defines the 2020s, from Covid misinformation and vaccine fearmongering to the growth of the “manosphere” universe. His present is a mirror for a rustic that has grown extra anxious, distrustful, and paranoid within the final decade.

Like plenty of America, the pandemic modified Rogan

When Kisin made his Cronkite comparability in 2019, Rogan’s mainstream crossover was simply getting began. Again then, The Joe Rogan Expertise was nicely on its method to being the preferred podcast present in America — the second most downloaded Apple podcast in 2017 and 2018 , earlier than topping the listing the next year . His YouTube uploads often attracted 1,000,000 views every (racking up greater than 2 billion by mid-2020), and the present had turn into a must-stop vacation spot for each conventional celebrities and a realm of different and conspiratorially minded pseudointellectuals (suppose: Alex Jones , Kanye West , Elon Musk ).

There is no such thing as a monoculture in 2025; however for an enormous a part of America, the realm Rogan pioneered and steers is as shut as we would get.

He had achieved that by creating an area for curious-minded common joes and people of us Slate as soon as described as “‘ freethinkers’ who hate the left ” to hearken to his two-to-three-hourlong, anarchic episodes. In attempting to grasp what made Rogan’s present work, the author Devin Gordon summarized his roster as being roughly divided into three classes: fellow comedians, fellow athletes and fighters, and “‘thinkers.’” The latter label, Gordon wrote in The Atlantic, “requires air quotes as a result of it encompasses everybody from Oxford students…all the way in which throughout the recognized mental galaxy to conspiracy theorists like Rogan’s longtime buddy and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones.” And gobbling up this content material had been hundreds of thousands of, primarily, American males, throughout each demographic.

By all of it, a handful of ideas anchored the present. Whereas he wasn’t overtly political, he described himself as having basically libertarian views with sturdy socially liberal leanings. Free speech, and the platforming of those that had been canceled within the mainstream, had been a foundational objective of the present. Skepticism of presidency, huge tech, and company media had been a corollary. And a pseudo-Socratic line of curiosity and skepticism had been his modus operandi. That led him to take historically liberal positions on social points and civil rights, to criticize interventionist international coverage, and to embrace the insurance policies of political figures like Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in addition to populist motion headed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who Rogan backed through the 2020 Democratic primaries.

But with the daybreak of the pandemic, just a few issues modified. Whereas initially important of Trump, the tone of his exhibits, and his visitors, started to maneuver in a rightward course after Trump’s 2020 defeat. Rogan had been important of pandemic shutdowns and mitigation efforts, questioned the efficacy of vaccines, and railed towards what he known as censorship and speech suppression on social media platforms. And as soon as the “left,” and “woke” liberals grew to become the institution within the Biden administration, media, popular culture, and enterprise, Rogan and his present had a simple foil to criticize and ask questions.

This post-2020 interval was a time of progress and problem for Rogan. He inked a reported $200 million multiyear deal with Spotify for the platform to solely host his podcast, however each he and Spotify confronted intense calls by artists, liberal activists , journalists , and science communicators to both censor, deplatform or reasonable his present to stop the unfold of conspiracy theories and misinformation. He has beforehand described this period between 2020 and 2022 as “terrifying” — for the threats to free speech he felt had been being emboldened by the Biden administration, by widespread tradition, and by mainstream media. This era contextualizes his feuds throughout that point with Fb and Twitter for allegedly suppressing right-wing opinions and speech, with the Biden White Home for pressuring social media corporations to manage speech, and with the mainstream media.

But he survived this controversy, and his present solely grew larger since then, aligning along with his eventual drift to not solely interviewing however endorsing Trump in 2024.

His format, and magnificence, has modified America and its relation to fact

Rogan and his present are actually good avatars of America’s political and cultural revolution within the Trump period: The Joe Rogan Expertise is now one of many key arbiters of fact and actuality for scores of Americans who get informed from nontraditional and different media sources. His YouTube channel now boasts over 6 billion views throughout the episodes uploaded there; his episodes are hardly ever not the highest exhibits throughout Apple, Spotify, and different podcast apps. He’s turn into the mainstream, widespread sufficient to trigger strife through the 2024 election when he declined to interview Kamala Harris however hosted Trump and Vice President JD Vance. He additionally interviews the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, numerous politicians and entrepreneurs, and plenty of extra celebrities, actors, and comedians. His format has been imitated or tailored throughout the web — yielding an online of right-wing, testosterone-driven, trash-talking shows collectively referred to as the manosphere.

On this realm, pioneered by Rogan, inquiry and curiosity can simply give method to conspiratorial considering and paranoia. There’s a way that there are better forces and powers attempting to affect American minds, and thus requires radical skepticism.

On this realm, pioneered by Rogan, inquiry and curiosity can simply give method to conspiratorial considering and paranoia.

In that method, Rogan’s present encompasses the crossroads of three defining forces of the 2020s: the anti-incumbent, change-the-status-quo power that permeated American politics within the final years of the Biden administration; the silo-fication of stories, media, and fact into echo chambers and algorithmically powered feeds; and the political awakening and radicalization of low-information, low-political engagement, and low-trust Individuals.

Rogan has efficiently helped to yoke collectively a very reactive, ill-informed, and even paranoid group; a bunch that's now accustomed to having their beliefs confirmed by more and more highly effective folks.

But now that he’s the mainstream, Rogan finds his present in a doubtlessly tenuous place: holding collectively an unlimited viewers that would ultimately come to query their loyalties and query him. His Trump endorsement, specifically, got here with dangers — opening him as much as accusations of hypocrisy, flip-flopping, or misplaced belief ought to Trump find yourself strolling again the insurance policies and stance he promised. These tensions are already enjoying out throughout the manosphere, as different hosts who endorsed Trump declare they had been duped or remorse their assist.

Nonetheless, Rogan and the manosphere have come to signify the antithesis to liberal cosmopolitanism of the 2010s; and so they now embody America’s age of mistrust, skepticism, and rejection of the established order.