Listening to Joe Rogan
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, “The Joe Rogan Experience” is free-form, runs around three hours, and can feel like the old midnight sprawl reborn online. It’s the most popular podcast in the world, and there are roughly four and a half million podcasts out there.
What sets Joe Rogan apart from his precursors, though, isn’t just his global reach. Nebel and Bell, despite their high ratings, were marginal performers in a secondary medium. Their political authority was precisely zero. No earnest editorialist ever described them as “influential.” No campaign strategist thought it advisable to park a Presidential candidate on their airwaves for several hours to talk about the possibility of life on Mars. Rogan, by contrast, has become a stop on the national political itinerary. The headline of a recent story in the Wall Street Journal calls him “America’s Most Important Swing Voter.”
Rogan is fifty-eight. A fitness fanatic, he works out constantly and ingests a great many supplements—some of them advertised on his show. He is of unremarkable height, a compact collection of bulges wrapped in tight T-shirts: all biceps, triceps, pecs, and traps, with a shaved head and eyes bugged with curiosity, outrage, or delight. His interviews are anything but predictable. When Bari Weiss was still an editor at the Times’ Opinion section, she was invited to Rogan’s studio, in Austin, Texas, to promote her book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Rogan’s style is to jump right in with barely an introduction, and with Weiss he leapt from one lily pad to the next. He did not seem especially concerned with antisemitism. Weiss raised Representative Ilhan Omar as bait. Rogan did not bite. She tried flattery, mentioning a recent trip she’d taken to New Hampshire to write about another Rogan guest, Andrew Yang, and the “Rogan effect” she’d encountered there. Yang was fascinating, she added, though she wasn’t sure about his support for universal basic income, or his opposition to circumcision.
Rogan perked up. Circumcision? He was firmly against “cutting baby dicks.” Children, he said, die “all the time” from the procedure. Also, “they lose their dicks.”
“And you don’t buy any of the studies about how it prevents S.T.D.s?” she offered gamely.
“No, I don’t,” Rogan said. “Wash your dick.”
It was well over an hour before Weiss had the chance to speak about the content of her book. Her host’s discursive, we’ve-got-all-night manner belonged squarely to the Nebel-Bell tradition.
Rogan was born in Newark. His father was a cop. His mother was, in his words, a hippie type, a “free spirit.” He has described himself, in an online post, as “3/4 Italian 1/4 Irish.” His parents divorced when he was young. His father stayed behind in New Jersey; Rogan and his mother moved first to San Francisco and later to a suburb of Boston. He has not seen his father since the divorce. “I don’t want to beat his ass,” Rogan told a reporter for Rolling Stone. “I just don’t want to be involved with him, and I don’t want to talk to him. He was very nice to me, loved me. But he was super, super violent, and he would have turned me into a fucking psychopath.” (Rogan’s father has said his son was “making up stories” about him.)
From the start, Rogan was a performer. When he was seven, he was doing magic tricks for tourists on Fisherman’s Wharf. His “No. 1 fear,” he has said, was of being a “loser.” As a teen-ager, he found his footing in martial arts. He began with karate, then took up Tae Kwon Do with obsessive seriousness, winning tournaments as a lightweight. In time, he added Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jujitsu, in which he eventually earned a black belt. He could kick like a mule. In his early twenties, after years of full-contact fighting, Rogan began to suffer from debilitating headaches. Fearing long-term neurological damage, he stepped away from competition.
Rogan no longer does interviews for print publications, but through nearly twenty-five hundred podcast episodes, and in old interviews scattered across the internet, he has supplied a considerable archive of self-reflection. He has said that as a kid he was “super A.D.D., whatever the fuck that means.” His curiosity was expansive, but it did not translate into academic success. He was distractible. “I wasn’t able to take my brain and make it focus on things that sucked,” he once said. “Why? Because the world was filled with tits, all right?”
