Enter the Roganverse

Depending on who you asked in the early 2000s, Rogan was once the “Fear Factor guy” or “the UFC guy.”

The New Jersey native first landed minor acting roles in the 1990s on sitcoms like NBC’s NewsRadio while working as a color commentator for the fledgling Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC). In this era, Dana White’s company was still a lurid and violent sideshow — not the media empire and Trumpworld cultural tentpole it is today. UFC was banned in thirty-six states, and former senator John McCain tried to make that a national policy, arguing that the league was little more than “human cockfighting.”

Rogan’s first headlining gig came later in the early aughts as the host of the stunt reality competition Fear Factor. But he lost his job as the MC of gross-outs in 2006 after he pushed the limits of decency on network television a little far. “It got canceled because we made people drink donkey cum,” he quipped in his latest Netflix comedy special. Rogan then shifted his focus to stand-up comedy while launching his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in 2009. Those early days consisted of him and his comedian friends gathered in his California house “sitting in front of laptops bullshitting,” as Rogan has described it.

Some 2,500 podcast episodes and 6,676 hours later, the format of JRE hasn’t really changed, even as the type and caliber of the guests and the subject matter have shifted dramatically. During the show’s first decade, Rogan’s meandering three-hour-long chats that weren’t with fellow comics tended to revolve around his idiosyncratic personal interests in fighting, physical fitness, recreational drug use, and fringe theories about the universe.

He’d interview stars from UFC, scientists and astronomers, conspiracy theorists, and those on the cutting edge of tech and psychedelics. One episode could be bantering about the metaphysics of space travel with Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the next about lizard men with Alex Jones. In other words, a combination of smart talk from dumb guys or dumb talk from smart guys — or somewhere in between. Andrew Yang, whose quixotic presidential campaign went viral after a Rogan appearance in 2019, calls Rogan “the male Oprah” though only if Oprah loved to smoke joints and tell dick jokes.

“If you ejaculate in space, would it propel you backward?” was a bawdy question that opened an episode with Lex Fridman, the MIT computer scientist, professor, and podcaster.

The near-universal thread that JRE’s guests have in common is that they’re men — 90 percent of his 1,000+ interviewees — according to one count. Liberals say that’s proof of Rogan’s sexism, and perhaps there might be something to that, at least in the abstract. But it’s also true that JRE caught fire at a time in the mid-2010s when progressives and Democrats had the habit of reflexively attaching the modifier “toxic” to masculinity and banishing straight men to the nebulous purgatory of “allyship.” In the era of #MeToo, mansplaining, and using “bro” as an ironic slur, the bros retreated from the mainstream and set up shop in the blood-red countercultural manosphere of YouTube and Twitch shows, now often wielding the kind of toxicity they’d been accused of like a badge of honor.

To his credit, Rogan isn’t a propagandist, and his views defy easy categorization. He doesn’t espouse misogynist views and speaks highly of his wife, Jessica Ditzel, who he describes as “a strong woman.” There was also a time not very long ago when he described himself as a mainstream liberal, albeit with an antiestablishment streak. “I’ve never voted right-wing in my life. Never. Never. I voted Democrat,” he told comedian Jimmy Dore in 2020.

He once expressed fondness for Bernie Sanders’s political revolution and Tulsi Gabbard back when she ran as a renegade antiwar Leftist circa 2019 before her political 180 as Trump’s director of national intelligence. In 2022, Rogan even asked Jacobin columnist Ben Burgis to appear as a guest to talk about Sanders and democratic socialism.

What led Rogan toward the MAGA right and an even bigger audience — as he says it — was the excesses of the COVID era. He took a skeptical view of the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention and Anthony Fauci’s health regime and began hosting fellow travelers like the journalist Michael Shellenberger, who suggested the government was engaged in a series of cover-ups to exaggerate the dangers of the virus and obscure the vaccines’ safety and efficacy. That’s when the liberal media began to take notice of Rogan and began condemning him as a purveyor of “misinformation.” Pressure grew on Spotify and YouTube to censor Rogan for his contrarian COVID-19 views, especially among the liberal-left, but by this point, he was arguably Too Big to Censor.

“COVID was so strange,” Rogan later joked. “Before COVID, I would have told you that vaccines were the most important invention in human history; after COVID, I’m like — I don’t think we went to the moon . . . Pizzagate is real, and there are energy weapons in Antarctica.” So, like other wealthy Californians wary of overzealous lockdowns and liberal overreach, the podcaster fled to Texas’s capital in 2020 to toss his pandemic masks away and build a safe space away from safe spaces.

So it goes in the Comedy Mothership, the downtown Austin comedy club that Rogan opened in early 2023 that has become the new capital of anti-woke comedy. Roganite comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who became infamous with his RNC roast of America and who hosts the Kill Tony show at the Mothership, told Variety: “There is no victim mentality whatsoever in Texas. . . . It’s a different little island that we’ve created.”

Barstool Conservatism

Over the last two years, Rogan and his band of politically incorrect merry men in Texas, have grown more openly partisan and more explicitly right-wing. But their brand of politics looks nothing like the WASPy Chamber of Commerce conservatism of old that hates gays and loves austerity.

It’s a bit of a “Don’t Tread on Me,” Bro-style of Ron Paul–adjacent libertarianism that favors free markets, low taxes, and deregulated vices — everyone should be able to do drugs, gamble on sports, watch porn, and trade crypto on demand. They also agree with Democrats on gay marriage and abortions but can’t stand liberals’ sometimes shrill moralism when it comes to matters of top-down diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and what they consider the “woke” agenda. It’s what some have branded “Barstool Conservatism” after Barstool Sports and its obnoxious founder, Dave Portnoy. But Rogan’s politics are less Barstool than Portnoy and others in the Manosphere. He sometimes sounds more like a disaffected progressive. “Free health care? Yes!” Rogan once told his Mothership audience. “Education for all? Right on! Men can get pregnant — fuck! I didn’t realize it was a package deal.”

But that disaffection, plus the courting of his big audience among those in MAGAworld has led Rogan to become something during the 2024 election cycle that he wasn’t before — a quirky but relatively garden-variety Republican talking head, like a tattooed Tucker Carlson. Roughly a third of his shows now feature right-leaning pundits and tech CEOs to riff on, say, cancel culture and the joys of dismantling the federal government. Rogan’s now something like the court jester for Big Tech and MAGA’s counterrevolution.

“Joe is now this gullible, aggro, right-wing boomer when he used to be a dumb goofball who liked to hear cool, smart people talk like the rest of us,” wrote a Redditor who says he stopped listening to JRE recently. “Now he’s just a full-blown red pill dipshit, the loonball conspiracy nonsense has become a nonstop thing, and the guests generally suck.” Plenty of other listeners who are tired of national politics have cooled on Rogan as well. JRE has slipped to third in the rankings on the Spotify charts, its lowest position in years.

But there are still times when he sounds like his old self. In a February episode with actor Woody Harrelson, they pontificated on the evils of the American war machine that has killed countless people over the last century. “We’ve become masters of war, but toward what end? To help those rich people get richer,” Rogan concluded.

Now if only he would say that exact same thing to his new, powerful buds in complete control of that very same war machine.