All Roads Lead to Joe Rogan

I wrote this in what felt like a fever dream. A fugue of repeating, remixed Rogan clips swirling up like scum to the surface layer of the YouTube algorithm. I reserve the right to digress from music on occasion, but I promise this digression has something to do with everything...

“Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. There is a sense in which it simply is the case that the political elite are our servants; the miserable service they provide from us is to launder our libidos, to obligingly re-present for us our disavowed desires as if they had nothing to do with us.”

Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (p. 15)

Maybe it started with Amazon. Maybe it was Google. By the time of Facebook, it had surely begun. The Big Bang of human data capture, a silent seismic series of events that dawned the age of surveillance capitalism.

Some have built bigger fortunes, but no individual has built a personal brand and web of influence more clearly reliant on the algorithmic architecture of personal data markets than Joe Rogan.

A funny thing happened at the start of 2024. YouTube began serving me Rogan clips. I had never watched a clip of Rogan prior. Not that I can remember. Nor had I listened to the podcast. Or really done anything other than read an occasional article about him and wonder how the former host of Fear Factor and MMA commentator had become the most popular, divisive new media personality of the 2000s.

I had, however, watched a lot of Katt Williams’ viral, oracular Club Shay Shay interview, which landed like a cultural atom bomb three days into 2024. I’d also watched some Shane Gillis clips. And some old Dave Chapelle bits, dotted with the occasional recent monologue. That’s what I figured triggered the sudden Rogan onslaught. Algorithmic adjacency, as Rogan interviewed Williams a few weeks after the Club Shay Shay appearance. My consumption of his viral, scorched earth takes sucked me into the Rogan-verse.

I started getting Rogan clips about steak and diet in general. Perhaps because the majority of my YouTube viewing consists of cooking videos (if you’ve not treated yourself to the philosophical ASMR musings of Marco Pierre White as he chops garlic or makes a sandwich, you’re missing out), which inevitably lead you to this Brazilian guy Guga who dry ages steaks in almost any organic substance imaginable, which eventually leads you to Joe Rogan. I sometimes get a kick out of Guga. Turns out Joe does too.

I got clips of Rogan engaging with pro-Palestinians and Zionists alike. Clips of Rogan listening to conjecture about the technologies used to build the Great Pyramids and other massive, lithic structures. Clips of Rogan listening to some guy whose name I still don’t know (and may not as long as I live) talking about a massive anaconda in the Amazon. And, predictably, I eventually got clips of Rogan talking to Raekwon, an artist whose music and videos I have consumed digitally since I was old enough to illegally download music (13).

A friend called Joe Rogan the original large language model. A joke that contained the truth of an indiscriminate force culling information from every dark corner where it claims to hide, sucking in responses and “knowledge” like some sort of talk show host Kirby that hoovers up all information in its path, steaks of varying animal types and eggs (as mentioned, I have learned over the past year and a half that Joe Rogan eats a lot of steak and eggs).

Jamie, pull up that Marshall McLuhan. With social media, the medium surely is the message. As the New York Times’ Ezra Klein succinctly put it on a recent episode of Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, “Social media selects for high engagement and high controversy.” No concept explains Rogan’s mission more clearly. Through his show’s long, unedited format and the legion of clips cut from its fatty hind, he seeks to create a kind of tidal gravity through the sheer volume of different personas pulled into his orbit. (Perhaps the metaphor isn’t Kirby, but another video game: Katamari Damacy, in which the player controls a magnetic orb rolling around a landscape, getting bigger and bigger as it attracts every object it rolls into.) In viewing, you don’t necessarily start to agree, but you do listen. Or, at very least, I listen. There is a simple authority to the human voice that can make even the most outlandish takes sound convincing, calmly delivered. Clippable, shareable, hateable, but answering the gaping questions with cool confidence. “Jamie, pull up that clip” as if Jamie is the star witness in a never-ending court case against truth.

The truth. That’s something hotly pursued in Rogan clips, but seemingly never delivered (again, I’ve never listened to a full episode, so if someone can tell me whether he gets to the bottom of these Great Pyramid mysteries, please reach out). He traffics in a kind of questioning that performs expertise while quietly annulling it. For every scholar of Israel and Palestine he might bring on, for every archaeologist or nutritionist or transhumanist or bigfoot hunter, there’s the same gentle “why is that?” levied in response to a specious claim. It’s not a challenge. It’s a prompt. Soft validation masquerading as inquiry.

This is the danger of asking questions and not actually wanting answers. Or, rather, when the answer you want is the attention you seek. When context and framing fade away from the answer and all that’s left is the curious, high relief of a YouTube short.

Curiosity masquerades as neutrality. The two hardly stand as equals in the contextless slop of clipped Rogan. The posture of openness, the wide eyes, the head tilt, the “I’m just asking questions” energy forms a strategic affect that allows ideas to circulate without accountability. Critical distance collapses.

And it works. Not just for him, but for the entire shadow economy of clip channels like @rogcastt, jrebonus, @wealthteachers, anoncuriosity94, and countless others all feeding the same algorithmic trench, optimized for eyes over accuracy. Even channels that seem disconnected like one called @directorsdetails can generate millions of views and lead you into the funnel, hosting Quentin Tarantino’s unmistakable three-quarter against a red curtain that passive viewing will likely have clued you into knowing is a backdrop of the Joe Rogan Experience. (A cursory scroll of @directorsdetails also makes it seem like a thinly veiled feeder for Rogan, as the majority of shorts posted are from the Tarantino interview in question)

Rogan has perfected a new physics of knowledge, one defined not by rigor or authority, but by liquidity. Fluid attention. Content flows from source to source, from the fringes to the mainstream, back again. It isn’t that the truth is obscured, it’s that it’s irrelevant as anything other than a concept, a token in the hand of any given beholder.

Part of Rogan’s allure comes from the ability to project the notion of hearing, of deep listening, of openness. On a recent episode of The Daily’s “The Interview,” similarly popular and divisive comic, podcast host, and, as the interview posits, journalist Andrew Schulz mentioned one of the most appealing things about politician Pete Buttigieg being his willingness to listen, to not talk down, to really engage with people and their concerns. Schulz and Rogan offer up conversation as a palliative to the supposed condescension of expertise, the climax of a years long assault on American intellectualism as much as a welcome pressure release from a sense that one side of American citizenry was talking down to another.

After the 2024 election, there were many calls for the left to conjure its own Rogan. In its wake, he and figures like Schulz and comedian Theo Von have seemingly only grown in influence, further solidifying the efficacy of his method. While Rogan’s singular appeal carries a certain irreducible first mover advantage, his strategy could just as easily be applied by any number of left-leaning talkers and thinkers. New adopters would just have to live with building a content-vacuum wide enough to absorb contradiction, complexity, controversy, a dash of comfort with attitudes considered socially regressive (by some!, Rogan acolytes would likely be quick to point out) and a pinch of humor, spitting it all back out without judgment. The central question circles around the worth of trading ideological consistency or purity for influence, for the sheer ability to move minds and incite action. (Firebrand figures like New York City Democratic Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani further complicate this dialogue through the clarity and specificity of stated political goals. Perhaps the Occam’s razor answer here is that populist messaging from Democrats and Republicans alike resonates with people right now.)

Can a coherent worldview take shape when it is fed through the same infrastructure that rewards contradiction, false equivalence, and affect over analysis? Attention doesn’t care what it attends to. That’s the problem. In the course of listening to everything and conversing with everyone, the Rogans and Schulz’s of the world trade context for maximal contact.

Degradation of quality inevitably follows. Fears mount as the onslaught of convincing generative content populating social media feeds scrambles our capacity to discern real from fake. Rogan and those engaging in his tactics eroded our discernment long before Silicon Valley types laid the final blows on objectivity with the mad dash to win the artificial intelligence tooling race.

When Google CEO Sundar Pichai was asked at The New York Times’ 2024 DealBook summit about writer compensation, his response was stereotypically invisible hand-oriented, as The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner reports. “There’ll be a marketplace in the future, I think—there’ll be creators who will create for AI,” Pichai said. “People will figure it out.” He places the responsibility entirely on a populace with weakened tools for understanding, let alone thriving, in the new order thrust upon us.

At least we’ll have plenty of Rogan clips to keep us company. Maybe one day we’ll figure out who actually built the pyramids.

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While we’re here and on the subject of a less intelligible world, I highly recommend you write a letter to your elected officials (if you are a US citizen) urging swift action against the 10 year ban on state-level AI regulation in Donald Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. You can do so here. A letter will auto-populate for you, but you are able to tweak it as you please. I am directly copying Rosemary Michaud of the Music Manager’s Forum below (from an email sent to MMF-US members), whose strongly worded warning speaks directly to my own concerns:

“This provision directly threatens emerging state laws designed to protect creators and personal identity. For example, Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, signed into law in March 2024, created the nation’s strongest protections against AI-based impersonation of performers and public figures—criminalizing unauthorized voice and likeness cloning. Under this bill, enforcement of that law could be blocked for a full decade if Tennessee or any subdivision accepts broadband infrastructure funding. Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which empowers individuals to sue over unauthorized face and voice data collection, could also be challenged or preempted. Laws passed or proposed in California, New York, Texas, and Washington to govern generative AI, deepfakes, synthetic media labeling, and AI in employment and housing could all be frozen under this amendment.

We urge you—regardless of political affiliation—to contact your Senators and Representatives immediately and demand the removal of this harmful language.

Given Trump’s close alignment with major tech interests, meaningful federal AI regulation is already unlikely. A decade-long ban on state regulation would effectively mean no regulation at all—a disaster for our industry at large.”