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Superstar
Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular?
He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.
very morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.
It’s a pour-and-stir powder made from lion’s mane and chaga—“two rock-star mushrooms,” according to Joe—and it’s made by a company called Four Sigmatic, a regular advertiser on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. As a coffee lover, the mere existence of mushroom coffee offends me. (“I’ll have your most delicious thing, made from your least delicious things, please,” a friend said, scornfully.) But it tastes fine, and even better after another cup of actual coffee.
Next, I took several vitamin supplements from a company called Onnit, whose core philosophy is “total human optimization” and whose website sells all kinds of wicked-cool fitness gear—a Darth Vader kettlebell ($199.95); a 50-foot roll of two-and-a-half-inch-thick battle rope ($249.95); a 25-pound quad mace ($147.95), which according to one fitness-equipment site is a weapon dating back to 11th-century Persia. I stuck to the health products, though, because you know how it goes—you buy one quad mace and soon your apartment is filled with them. I stirred a packet of Onnit Gut Health powder into my mushroom coffee, then downed an enormous pair of Alpha Brain pills, filled with nootropics to help with “memory and focus.”
For my breakfast on the go, I would eat an Onnit Oatmega brownie crisp protein bar, “crisp” being less a description and more a warning. After that, I brushed my teeth with the only toothpaste Joe Rogan will let near his teeth, Onnit’s MCT Oil toothpaste, which is made of “bentonite clay and a touch of theobromine.” It promises “a completely new approach to oral care,” which I can confirm. It tastes like wet sand and looks like loose stool, and it’s hard to think of anything worse you might deliberately put in your mouth at 7 a.m.
Then I would go to the gym and crush it for about 18 to 20 minutes. Joe Rogan used to be a tae kwon do state champion. He enjoys grilling elk that he shot with a bow, and he works out with the maniacal zeal you’d expect from someone who has favorite mushrooms. Aside from weed, which he very much enjoys and whose legalization he supports, and whiskey, which he enjoys maybe even more, and that awful brown toothpaste, Joe Rogan’s body is a temple.
Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience has been the No. 2 most-downloaded podcast on iTunes for two years running. Rogan’s second Netflix comedy special, Strange Times, dropped last year. His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views. So many people in the content business right now are trying, and failing, to get the attention of these men, and yet somehow Joe Rogan has managed to recruit a following the size of Florida.
Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,” which requires air quotes because it encompasses everyone from Oxford scholars and MIT bioengineers to culture drivers such as the marketing entrepreneur Hotep Jesus and the rapper turned radio co-host Charlamagne tha God all the way across the known intellectual galaxy to conspiracy theorists like Rogan’s longtime buddy and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones. Also Dr. Phil. And David Lee Roth. And B-Real from Cypress Hill.
It’s impossible to be a Joe Rogan completist, so most of his fans pick a few tributaries. The rest may as well not exist. Who can keep track? Rogan is a key figure in the rise of MMA—Dana White once called him “the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting”—but I don’t care about fighting, so I didn’t listen to any of Joe’s podcasts with fighters. I also didn’t listen to Dr. Phil, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who skipped it, which is just another way of saying there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
The podcast is where Joe Rogan graduates from the guy you think you know (Fear Factor, UFC, comedy clubs) to someone who makes you think, “Wait—Joe Rogan?” Yes, Joe Rogan. The guy you forgot was on NewsRadio 20 years ago—he played a conspiracy theorist!—has somehow become a generational voice for men, and I couldn’t fathom why, and that bothered me. Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
As popular as he seems to be with quote-unquote regular guys, that’s how unpopular Joe Rogan is with the quote-unquote prestige wing of popular culture—Emmy voters, HBO subscribers, comedy nerds. Thought leaders. Thought followers. There are plenty of Joe Rogan fans among them, too, but they tend not to bring it up. In this corner of the cultural discourse, Joe is seen as a pop intellectual with some fringe-y views and a platform big enough to spread them. There is valid evidence to support this belief, in particular Joe’s habit of granting an audience to cruel opportunists like Jones, who’s been on the show twice, most recently a much-hyped “return” to the podcast in February after the two had fallen out over Jones’s Sandy Hook lies—the ones that prompted some of his listeners to harass the parents of murdered first graders, according to some of these parents.
The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys, and his affection has none of the condescension and ironic distance many people fall back on in order to get comfortable with them. He shares their passions and enthusiasms at a moment when the public dialogue has branded them childish or problematic or a slippery slope to Trumpism. Like many of these men, Joe grumbles a lot about “political correctness.” He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet. And like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic.
Most of Rogan’s critics don’t really grasp the breadth and depth of the community he has built, and they act as though trying is pointless. If they decide they want to write off his podcast as a parade of alt-right idiots and incels (as opposed to a handful of cretins out of about 1,400 guests) they will turn up sufficient evidence. And his podcast is a parade of men. So many men. Talking so (so, so, so) much about the things men talk about in 2019 when they think no one’s listening.
Rogan declined my multiple interview requests—he does not lack for places to speak unfiltered—so instead I attempted to live like him, trying on parts of his life, the ones that seem to engage and motivate his core listeners. It seemed like the next best way to get into the head of a type of man who is very different from me, but whose concept of masculinity is far more prevailing than mine. The podcast was my gateway drug. It’s how I learned about the mushroom coffee, and the memory pills, and the toothpaste, and also the Onnit Academy in Austin, Texas, an actual school where men put their entire lives on hold in order to focus on fitness and being more productive, and an online “master class” platform called Skillshare, where I used my Rogan-supplied discount code to get two months of unlimited free classes on stuff like improving my workflow, my social-media branding, and my ink drawing.
I experienced Joe Rogan, in some form or fashion, every day for six weeks. Let’s call it six weeks. I did it for as long as I could.
If you’ve only listened to one episode of The Joe Rogan Experience—if you’ve only heard about one episode—it’s probably his interview in September with Elon Musk, during which the Tesla baron graciously accepted Rogan’s offer to join him in smoking a spliff. Pandemonium ensued. Even though this is all perfectly legal and borderline encouraged in California, it was seen as further evidence that Musk had gone wobbly. He’d already been musing on Twitter about taking Tesla private at $420 (heh) per share, and now he was getting high on camera with Joe Rogan and musing about what happens when AI takes over. Nevermind that Musk was careful to note, post-spliff, that marijuana is lousy for productivity, and that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more to Elon Musk than productivity. You could feel corporate America freaking out.
It was awesome.
He understands men in America better than most people do. The rest of the country should start paying attention.
very morning of my Joe Rogan experience began the same way Joe Rogan begins his: with the mushroom coffee.
It’s a pour-and-stir powder made from lion’s mane and chaga—“two rock-star mushrooms,” according to Joe—and it’s made by a company called Four Sigmatic, a regular advertiser on Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast. As a coffee lover, the mere existence of mushroom coffee offends me. (“I’ll have your most delicious thing, made from your least delicious things, please,” a friend said, scornfully.) But it tastes fine, and even better after another cup of actual coffee.
Next, I took several vitamin supplements from a company called Onnit, whose core philosophy is “total human optimization” and whose website sells all kinds of wicked-cool fitness gear—a Darth Vader kettlebell ($199.95); a 50-foot roll of two-and-a-half-inch-thick battle rope ($249.95); a 25-pound quad mace ($147.95), which according to one fitness-equipment site is a weapon dating back to 11th-century Persia. I stuck to the health products, though, because you know how it goes—you buy one quad mace and soon your apartment is filled with them. I stirred a packet of Onnit Gut Health powder into my mushroom coffee, then downed an enormous pair of Alpha Brain pills, filled with nootropics to help with “memory and focus.”
For my breakfast on the go, I would eat an Onnit Oatmega brownie crisp protein bar, “crisp” being less a description and more a warning. After that, I brushed my teeth with the only toothpaste Joe Rogan will let near his teeth, Onnit’s MCT Oil toothpaste, which is made of “bentonite clay and a touch of theobromine.” It promises “a completely new approach to oral care,” which I can confirm. It tastes like wet sand and looks like loose stool, and it’s hard to think of anything worse you might deliberately put in your mouth at 7 a.m.
Then I would go to the gym and crush it for about 18 to 20 minutes. Joe Rogan used to be a tae kwon do state champion. He enjoys grilling elk that he shot with a bow, and he works out with the maniacal zeal you’d expect from someone who has favorite mushrooms. Aside from weed, which he very much enjoys and whose legalization he supports, and whiskey, which he enjoys maybe even more, and that awful brown toothpaste, Joe Rogan’s body is a temple.
Few men in America are as popular among American men as Joe Rogan. It’s a massive group congregating in plain sight, and it’s made up of people you know from high school, guys who work three cubicles down, who are still paying off student loans, who forward jealous-girlfriend memes, who spot you at the gym. Single guys. Married guys. White guys, black guys, Dominican guys. Two South Asian friends of mine swear by him. My college roommate. My little brother. Normal guys. American guys.
The Joe Rogan Experience has been the No. 2 most-downloaded podcast on iTunes for two years running. Rogan’s second Netflix comedy special, Strange Times, dropped last year. His interview last fall with Elon Musk has been viewed more than 24 million times on YouTube, and his YouTube channel, PowerfulJRE, has 6 million subscribers. An indifferently received episode will tend to get somewhere around 1 million views. So many people in the content business right now are trying, and failing, to get the attention of these men, and yet somehow Joe Rogan has managed to recruit a following the size of Florida.
Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,” which requires air quotes because it encompasses everyone from Oxford scholars and MIT bioengineers to culture drivers such as the marketing entrepreneur Hotep Jesus and the rapper turned radio co-host Charlamagne tha God all the way across the known intellectual galaxy to conspiracy theorists like Rogan’s longtime buddy and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones. Also Dr. Phil. And David Lee Roth. And B-Real from Cypress Hill.
It’s impossible to be a Joe Rogan completist, so most of his fans pick a few tributaries. The rest may as well not exist. Who can keep track? Rogan is a key figure in the rise of MMA—Dana White once called him “the best fight announcer who has ever called a fight in the history of fighting”—but I don’t care about fighting, so I didn’t listen to any of Joe’s podcasts with fighters. I also didn’t listen to Dr. Phil, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who skipped it, which is just another way of saying there’s no real way to describe “Joe Rogan fans.” They’re not aligned around any narrow set of curiosities or politics. They’re aligned around Joe.
The podcast is where Joe Rogan graduates from the guy you think you know (Fear Factor, UFC, comedy clubs) to someone who makes you think, “Wait—Joe Rogan?” Yes, Joe Rogan. The guy you forgot was on NewsRadio 20 years ago—he played a conspiracy theorist!—has somehow become a generational voice for men, and I couldn’t fathom why, and that bothered me. Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?
As popular as he seems to be with quote-unquote regular guys, that’s how unpopular Joe Rogan is with the quote-unquote prestige wing of popular culture—Emmy voters, HBO subscribers, comedy nerds. Thought leaders. Thought followers. There are plenty of Joe Rogan fans among them, too, but they tend not to bring it up. In this corner of the cultural discourse, Joe is seen as a pop intellectual with some fringe-y views and a platform big enough to spread them. There is valid evidence to support this belief, in particular Joe’s habit of granting an audience to cruel opportunists like Jones, who’s been on the show twice, most recently a much-hyped “return” to the podcast in February after the two had fallen out over Jones’s Sandy Hook lies—the ones that prompted some of his listeners to harass the parents of murdered first graders, according to some of these parents.
The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys, and his affection has none of the condescension and ironic distance many people fall back on in order to get comfortable with them. He shares their passions and enthusiasms at a moment when the public dialogue has branded them childish or problematic or a slippery slope to Trumpism. Like many of these men, Joe grumbles a lot about “political correctness.” He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet. And like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic.
Most of Rogan’s critics don’t really grasp the breadth and depth of the community he has built, and they act as though trying is pointless. If they decide they want to write off his podcast as a parade of alt-right idiots and incels (as opposed to a handful of cretins out of about 1,400 guests) they will turn up sufficient evidence. And his podcast is a parade of men. So many men. Talking so (so, so, so) much about the things men talk about in 2019 when they think no one’s listening.
Rogan declined my multiple interview requests—he does not lack for places to speak unfiltered—so instead I attempted to live like him, trying on parts of his life, the ones that seem to engage and motivate his core listeners. It seemed like the next best way to get into the head of a type of man who is very different from me, but whose concept of masculinity is far more prevailing than mine. The podcast was my gateway drug. It’s how I learned about the mushroom coffee, and the memory pills, and the toothpaste, and also the Onnit Academy in Austin, Texas, an actual school where men put their entire lives on hold in order to focus on fitness and being more productive, and an online “master class” platform called Skillshare, where I used my Rogan-supplied discount code to get two months of unlimited free classes on stuff like improving my workflow, my social-media branding, and my ink drawing.
I experienced Joe Rogan, in some form or fashion, every day for six weeks. Let’s call it six weeks. I did it for as long as I could.
If you’ve only listened to one episode of The Joe Rogan Experience—if you’ve only heard about one episode—it’s probably his interview in September with Elon Musk, during which the Tesla baron graciously accepted Rogan’s offer to join him in smoking a spliff. Pandemonium ensued. Even though this is all perfectly legal and borderline encouraged in California, it was seen as further evidence that Musk had gone wobbly. He’d already been musing on Twitter about taking Tesla private at $420 (heh) per share, and now he was getting high on camera with Joe Rogan and musing about what happens when AI takes over. Nevermind that Musk was careful to note, post-spliff, that marijuana is lousy for productivity, and that nothing, nothing, nothing matters more to Elon Musk than productivity. You could feel corporate America freaking out.
It was awesome.
NEGGED
