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Episode 7 - Joe Rogan
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The world's most powerful manlet - Joe Rogan
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When I was a kid, in the evenings I used to watch the channels that brought in American TV. One of those shows on there was Fear Factor, where people had to do all kinds of stunts like eating insects alive for cash prizes. The host of that show was a large, though not quite tall and not yet bald, Joe Rogan. At the same time, he was apparently running something called The Man Show, targeted at young horny men. Fast forward a decade and a half, he's bald, and he's gone from making people eat scorpions to becoming the patron saint of young libertarian middle class men with poor judgment. Who also happened to be the target demographic of every podcast advertiser. In an absolutely hilarious article for The Guardian Australia, reporter Joe Hinschliff interviewed a man who would not reveal his name and instead went under the pseudonym Alexander for fear of persecution for listening to the Joe Rogan experience. Quote: I've literally seen this happen. It's like, oh, don't talk to him, he likes Joe Rogan. How did this bald gorilla scramble the brain of an Australian guy in his thirties to the point where he lives his life like there's a woke secret police out to get him? Welcome to the Reaction Podcast. Today's episode, Joe Rogan.
SPEAKER_05I remember like uh Joe Rogan mu might have done um uh might have been a bigger influence on my life than I would like to admit. Because every time I think about my fear of spiders, I have a kind of a snapshot of one of the Fear Factor episodes where uh he made them like put their hand in uh like a glass box filled with uh uh like crazy looking hairy ass, like very big spiders and shit. Uh funnily enough, until you mention this, I did not remember that Joe Rogan was on that. Yep. Fear Factor just existed in a in a bubble unrelated to the good old Rogan. And as you were talking, I Googled, and I can see why I didn't remember that Joe Rogan was in it. Because yeah.
SPEAKER_02He looks like a normal human being.
SPEAKER_05He looks very different, yes, yes.
SPEAKER_02He doesn't look like a fucking over tur overcooked, like honey glazed ham.
SPEAKER_05And I feel like they gave him platforms on that one as well. Like he somehow does not look as uh incredibly tall as now. And the and the gorilla-like yeah, lack of roids, God bless.
SPEAKER_02Well, uh speaking of fear factor, the one thing I remember about the show is how often he had people eat penises.
SPEAKER_05I mean, he loves us all eating a proverbial and literal dick, I guess. But uh uh speaking of speaking of uh wanting us to to consume stuff that we might not be sure we want to, Freder hit me up when we're starting uh to work on this episode and said, Yo, you gotta give me like a list of conspiracy theories. And I hit up my closest uh basic bro friend uh who's like a mega fan of the Joe Rogan experience and asked him, while faking genuine interest, what some of the most fascinating stuff he learned on the Joe Rogan show uh was. I um I had a hard time writing everything down, so I will try and hit you straight with a bullet point by bullet point. Number one, Hitler is alive and in South America, which is true by the way.
SPEAKER_11Yeah, that's true. What is finding Hitler all about? What's the thought process behind this? Is it is it legit? Because a lot of people are like, finding Hitler, get the fuck out of here. They found Hitler, he died.
SPEAKER_15Yeah, I mean not really? We don't know. They declassified a bunch of documents. Um they both the Israelis, um, the British, and the Germans and Americans in the past 20 years have been decl consistently declassifying documents. And there were a bunch of specifically FBI documents that we were spending millions and millions of dollars actively searching for Hitler after the war. So Hunting Hitler.
SPEAKER_11Are there any legitimate eyewitness accounts of Hitler in South America? Or are potentially legitimate? Absolutely potentially. Whoa.
SPEAKER_02Okay, guys, I'm sorry. I'm not letting you take that W away from the Soviets. I'm saying they got him, okay? I'm sorry, they got him.
SPEAKER_05No, he already took it away from the Soviets. He fucking got himself. But he got himself because of the potential threat. Yeah. You know when we tell Nazis, uh, follow your leader and they're like, You want me to move to South America?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. No, they died horrible, shameful deaths. They tend to do that though.
SPEAKER_05But how? How can you believe that the Eastern Hordes could ever defeat the superior Nordics? Okay, that was number one. Number two is a classic. January 6th was it inside job to make Trump look bad.
SPEAKER_11I was trying to explain to Jim Gaffigan one day. Jim Gaffgan was talking about what they did in January 6th. I go, Do you understand that there were paid people that were working for the federal government, there were employees of the federal government that were on that lawn trying to convince people to go in, and he was very incredulous.
SPEAKER_05Three, voting machine fraud helped lose Trump the twenty twenty election. This actually spread internationally. I think like everybody who's anybody in any country immediately goes like the machines, brother, the machines.
SPEAKER_13And it's like everyone talks about voter fraud.
SPEAKER_05Everyone. It all starts from from the mouth of the of the gorilla himself.
SPEAKER_11Let's talk about the potential vulnerabilities for elections and election fraud. One of them is mailing ballots, the other one is the uh if someone can break into voting machines, if someone can hack voting machines. Those are two huge ones. So Elon Bon Musk.
SPEAKER_01Elon Musk, I think he said it publicly. I hope he did because I I wouldn't want to be the winner, but he's a really smart guy. And he's a very good guy with computers, right? You'd say he's one of the smartest people alive. Anybody that can land that twenty-story building and perfect and board.
SPEAKER_11While he's doing Starlink, while he's talking to me about while he owns Twitter, and then he agrees to Starlink and tweets a hundred times a day.
SPEAKER_01He's an amazing guy.
SPEAKER_11Yeah.
SPEAKER_01He said to me that unless you have paper ballots, it can never be an honest election. That's a big statement.
SPEAKER_05Number four, ancient high-tech civilizations definitely existed. I I personally honestly love LARP discussions on this myself. It's it's too entertaining. Like, oh, like we reached a particular point and then annihilated ourselves uh uh and thousands of years passed, and because of the particular uh biome that exists on planet Earth.
SPEAKER_02I'm too on the spectrum for this shit. I just want to be like, well, actually, uh there's no evidence.
SPEAKER_13No, but I I I dude, I I'm gonna fucking one up you on that even. Because I I went into investigated some of this stuff because when I was a kid, I was like, oh dude, this ancient alien shit fucking owns because I watched way too much Stargate. And um on episode 2 to 15 of the Joe Rogan experience, he hosted a guy called Graham Hancock. Um I I know also a little bit about this because like I have uh friends who do like basically debunk like fake archaeology bullshit, but um he had this guy on called Graham Hancock, who is a massive conspiracy theorist who uh the theorist who um alleges that there the archaeological site um Gobleki Tepe in like Turkey, modern day Turkey, uh was built by a lost civilization that was wiped out by some sort of ice age apocalypse. So there was like this advanced civilization that existed long before like you know we had other cities and they built this shit. And uh um he's also hosted another guy like 15 episodes later, uh another pseudo-archaeologist by the name of Jimmy Corsetti, who um who's been on many times by the way. Like Joe Rogan loves this guy uh who also believes in this dumb shit. And one of the things they all believe here is that the archaeologists are digging this super slowly because they're they would then reveal their truth and would basically like uh discredit themselves and be out of a job. Which is like fucking stupid, but yeah. They're digging it solder because they're careful.
SPEAKER_02I mean, is he does he believe we landed on the moon? He seems to me like an anti-moon landing guy. Yeah, no.
SPEAKER_13He's gone big back and forth on that, actually. He uh he used to be like anti, like he used to be like, you know, I we didn't actually land on the moon, but then he was like, actually, no, we did. But he only walked it back halfway, where he was like, okay, so I had good reason to believe that we didn't because like NASA actually faked a bunch of other things. So he believes that the Gemini spacewalk like did actually happen, the one by Michael Collins. But he believes that NASA published a bunch of edited fake photographs based on like a training photo that was edited to look like it was in space. And therefore, he believes that NASA like inadvertently muddied the waters. Turns out that fucking photo was never published by NASA. There was never a photo taken during the space walk, and NASA's never claimed a photo was taken. It's actually a conspiracy theorist who spread that photograph to make it seem like NASA had faked the moon landing. And Joe Rogan bit that like hook, line, and sinker.
SPEAKER_02Well, no, he is he is a complete moron, but I I think the moon landing hoax thing is always the funniest to me because it's like, yeah, they they set up the the fake moon landing. The first thing they did, Apollo 1, is have a catastrophic failure where they cooked multiple astronauts on the launch pad. That's the way to get the American people behind it.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, you gotta make it look real, man. You gotta make it look real. You gotta sacrifice a few peons.
SPEAKER_02And the Soviets are in on it too, because they wanted to help America fake the moon landing, even though they had all incentive in the world to expose any kind of fraud.
SPEAKER_05Yep, but that that's exactly where I was gonna go. Like, how does this work with uh most Chud logic? Because like we landed on the moon, we owned the fucking Reds, they suck. The only thing they ever achieved is basically sending a traditional rocket in space for a guy to first man in space, for first woman in space, first woman in orbit, first animal in space, first exactly. But no, now I'm talking from a perspective of a Chud, right? Right? Yeah, yeah. So a Chud would really want to say that we did land on the moon because that's outplaying the Soviets, quote unquote.
SPEAKER_13Yeah, yeah. Why aren't they claiming that? Like fucking like the Soviets didn't get there first, like, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, like it works ideologically really well. So I never got it. Like if I was a right-wing propagandist, I would be like, no, we landed five times. We just uh are so secretive and base that we don't even need to flex about it anymore, motherfucker. I would go in that direction.
SPEAKER_13It's because like it's not really about like owning the Soviets, it's way more important that you hate the government. So like anything you can find to hate the government for, like, yeah, fuck it, they fake the main landing. Like, it doesn't matter if it's like it works for you.
SPEAKER_05And speaking of uh hating the government, one of his favorite ones is that the 1960s drug culture was created as a psyop against the anti-war movement, which honestly is like 30% true.
SPEAKER_02I don't know, I would give it higher than that. I would give it higher than that. Like the a lot of the compatible left stuff that happened during the 60s and 70s, the CIA was very active in trying to formulate like a counter-cultural left that was acceptable to the American empire and was skeptical of the Soviets, and so you know, the like tune in, tune out, drop out, that kind of energy certainly would help, you know, the the empire continue to operate without organized protest.
SPEAKER_05Absolutely. But because they refuse to like uh look at the class dynamic and look at how you know the this like uh quasi-revolutionary movements can very easily be co-opted when they hyper focus only on like resistance for resistance sake, brother. Uh, you know, you can, as you just did, you can give very decent analysis on why that gets co-opted relatively easy by by the status quo in the state. But it's not as fun, you know? What's more fun is like, bro, they sat in a lab and they like invented stuff that like gets you really high and then distributed it amongst the people, and the people like, man, fuck this like uh revolution thing. I just want to get high, man. That type shit. Like it it's it's always you'll see it as a pattern, dear listener, when we go through Joe Rogan. It's always about pulling you out of uh of a let's say more scientific understanding of uh of how systems impact people and so on, and throwing you over to a couple of people in a dark shady room thinking up ways to screw us all over and very often in extremely unpragmatic and unnecessarily the complex ways, which is exactly the sixth point that my boy completely believes. Like that's his unironic like ideology. And he sometimes even agrees with some takes that I have and so on, but he just doesn't like that I don't make it as let's say meta, which is that everything is a psyop, like like everything, all the bad shit that happens is not because of everything I mentioned, or like class dynamics, or you know, just nature being terrifying and uncontrollable. No, it's always like orchestrated by this or or that cabal. And that is one of the most powerful uh pitches that he has. Number seven is the theory that the first ape to evolve just got really, really fucking high. I like this one a lot. That is pretty sick, though.
SPEAKER_02I I love that so much, Joe Rogan. The Lamarkian, the Lamarckian mushroom tape.
SPEAKER_05But is there like I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna be the Joe Rogan of the reaction part. Is there like a 1% chance of that happened?
SPEAKER_02No, no. I don't wanna I don't want to natural selection plain you, but you don't have this um unlimited, what's that shitty movie where the guy takes a pill that unlocks 100% of his brain? Oh fuck. Uh I can't remember. Limitless. Limitless, yes. Yeah, I don't think there was a monkey that hit a mushroom in that movie.
SPEAKER_05Is the favorite movie of the friend? I asked about this.
SPEAKER_02Of course it is. That's basically the Joe Rogan experience, like understanding of biology. We just have like 90% of our brain not being used at all. We just need to take that one mushroom.
SPEAKER_13I need Joe Rogan to like publish like a reading list or like you know, top movies list or something. Like, I need to see those dudes like letterboxed. Because I want to see like what has like shaped his like like understanding of culture and everything.
SPEAKER_05If you take most of the shit, like the next one, number eight, is most diseases are caused by a lack of oxygen. So if you take all of this shit, and there's more, I'm gonna we're gonna read out.
SPEAKER_02Where's nine eleven in this list? Is it ninth?
SPEAKER_05I didn't even add it because it's cliche, it's yeah, it's whatever. It's assumed. It's so like uh like come on, nine eleven cliche, right? I had to limit it. But like uh uh Fred is really onto something. Uh you could write like a pretty decent like fiction book if you just like take all of this shit, you make it happen on a fictional planet, right, where the ecosystem is actually different, and you tell the story, you know, the Joe Rogan Dune, where you we follow a civilization from the first like uh seven-armed uh uh monkey gets uh gets very high and then develops uh cyber soldiers or something.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I like 2001. 2001 a space odyssey with the instead of having the obelisk, you find MDMA, you have a mushroom, yeah. Yeah, a gray that's in tie-dye, you know, sets down and uh and hands out some tabs.
SPEAKER_09Brother.
SPEAKER_05Brother, it's a fucking hippie. Oh okay. Number nine is all basically like all the COVID vaccine shit. Uh my friend that told me, of course, has never gotten vaxxed because of Joe. Uh, which is extra crazy because both of his grandparents died, but okay. Number ten.
SPEAKER_13Well, just adding on that, I want to say, of course, like one of the special specific ones with uh the COVID vaccine stuff is that Joe Rogan was one of the guys who like really fronted the ivermectin thing. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that this like horse dewormer can cure COVID. And he said when he got COVID himself, he like took everything and he made a point of he made a point of saying that, yeah, I also took ivermectin.
SPEAKER_05I I've like uh when my uh partner's dad was almost dying in hospital uh during COVID, the doctor unironically offered ivermectin. Like it became that that that like borderline mainstream, yeah, around the world globally, in certain places, etc. etc. That even uh certified medical personnel uh were considering it because there's a thing that happens to our minds, and this is for a whole episode of its own, where like you're like, okay, if everybody's talking about this, there has to be something to it, which uh children know there isn't.
SPEAKER_02Well, I mean, if your life is on the line, you might as well give it a shot, right? Like y'all away. I have pity, I have pity for that, right? Like, I do as well. Obviously, if if if you're facing like imminent death and somebody says, hey, this might work, you're gonna give it a shot, which is where these charlatans make their money and why it's so dangerous. And I gotta tell you, like, uh I remember the COVID pandemic and the anti-vaxxers very, very, very, very well because so many Americans fell down this rabbit hole. And you could actually see the life expectancy of like red counties and red states diverge significantly from blue states based on the vaccination rate differences. So, like, they probably killed, you know, a hundred thousand more Republicans than Democrats on net because of you know this vaccine skepticism that Joe Rogan was a key purveyor of it to many people.
SPEAKER_13But um one of the uh like reasons that we know that the early Ivermectin enthusiasm and everything was bullshit is that a biomedical student named Jack Lawrence spotted problems in one very influential study from Egypt that basically like blew up. And that's a whole reason that like Joe Rogan and all these guys lashed onto it. And one thing he noticed was that the study contained patients who had actually died before the trial even started. Like that's one of the issues. So it was fraudulent? It's yeah, it's basically fraud. Like the the so when he brought this up, the study was immediately retracted. But at that point, the you know, the damage had been done. He got the ball rolling on what would basically like eventually uh expose all of this. And I think for episodes or rather part two of our saga on Joe Rogan, I'm gonna have a chat with him because I do have a connection to him, and we're gonna try to get him on because one of the things that Joe Rogan does is that he talks about a lot of shit that he doesn't know anything about. And I think that if we're talking about Joe Rogan doing that, we probably should get someone who actually knows a little bit about what we're gonna be talking about.
SPEAKER_05We shouldn't Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan? That's crassy, man.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. I feel pretty I feel pretty confident I can uh I can wax poetically and and intelligently about cutting edge medical science with no medical background whatsoever. Yep.
SPEAKER_13But um, yeah, so so that's gonna be fun. But that is the thing that keeps happening with every single like Joe Rogan expert he brings on, or every person he brings on, they start talking about something and they always go, I'm not an expert, but and then you know it all fucking derails. We all do that, like that's very common.
SPEAKER_02Well, yeah. You know, the thing about Joe Rogan is it is about this like pseudo-intellectualizing of our culture, which is natural, with you know, kind of the the institutions and structures of our politics are obviously failing and not serving the needs of regular people. So if you can see that happening in your everyday life, the potholes aren't being filled, the infrastructure is collapsing, you're you know, your economic conditions are getting worse, and politicians are telling you everything's fine, it's just a vibe session, it's normal to also start to become skeptical of other institutions and other authorities, even in something like the medical profession, who are telling you, yeah, you know, take this vaccine, you know. And if you don't have the ability to recognize what you don't know, if everything is just being judged by what you kind of in the moment consider to be plausible based on your own intuition, we're gonna have more and more charlatanization of our discourse. And you know, that's the downside of the slaying of the mainstream media gatekeepers is well, you know, some of the gatekeeping was actually good. Yeah. Some of it's bad. And uh, you know, I I am one of the people that at worst improperly gatekeeped because of my radical views, right? But Joe Rogan, he should be gatekeeped from talking about medical science. Don't gatekeep us, gatekeep them. Exactly. They're the baddies.
SPEAKER_05That is the point of this entire show.
SPEAKER_02Well, no, I mean, unironically, though.
SPEAKER_05But yes, because the next one. I'll I'll say why they're the baddies. The next one is fucking insane. Even more insane than getting people not to protect themselves from a virus that's fucking killing everybody. And that, for example, is race and IQ, which probably we'll talk about later. But this is one of the key main pillars of modern quasi quasi-scientific race science as we know it, especially in quote unquote diverse countries, you know, usually post-imperialist or imperialist countries, you know, but not only, where race is discussed as an objective truth due to this uh absurdist correlation that isn't really a correlation that we probably again should have a whole fucking episode on. But the the the reason I brought it up shouting the way I did is because you see how it gradually piles the fuck on and it kind of goes from something that like okay, who who does it hurt to believe that there's like ancient fucking civilizations, except in of course racist uh context where you're like, oh, these Browns could never have made this. Uh but okay, who does it hurt to believe that the the first monkey got fucking high? Yeah, okay, like it's stupid, but okay. But then we get to a point where we're like, ah yeah, yeah, like uh bike over not sorry now, but I always use the word the name Mike to explain like a guy over there. Say Bob, John over there. You know, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna hire him because uh uh he's applying together with uh uh Timmy, and uh I just know that Timmy is of an ethnicity that has uh higher capacity to perform this type of task. But what the fuck? Like unironic.
SPEAKER_13Joe Rogan unironically believes like um like Asian people are like like the Ubermensch. Like he very often talks about like higher IQ among like Asian people and stuff like that constantly. And he thinks that there's like some sort of genetic thing there.
SPEAKER_05Joe Rogan, the Asian supremacist. Here we heard it.
SPEAKER_06Uh he's I this is gonna be a bad joke, but I don't go to it. Um he relates to Asians so much because whatever's they're a bit shorter, so he's like, those are my people. Deep in my soul, those are my people. Oh my god.
SPEAKER_05And uh 11 is uh the that's where I I cut off at 11 myself. Climate change is real, but it's not that bad.
SPEAKER_11I think the climate change issue is very complicated. And I think uh did you see the Washington Post uh piece that they wrote where they did this long-term view. First of all, the the reality is that the Earth's temperature has never been static, right? We could both agree on that. It's always been up and down, there's been ice ages and heat waves. And then the Washington Post looked at it, what was the time period that they looked at? That essentially they found that we're in a cooling period, that the Earth over the past X amount of years, and this was like a very inconvenient discovery, but they had to report the data and kudos to them for doing that.
SPEAKER_02By the way, this is libertarian, you know, climate change denial. And if you've been around the climate movement for a while, you've known that this is the pattern that was predicted and is now proceeding, which is the first is climate change isn't happening. The second was climate change is, you know, uh uh is a hoax or whatever, it's a conspiracy theory, right? Third is, well, you know, it might be happening, but it's actually good. And then the fourth is going to be eco-fascism, which is climate change is here and we have to build the wall and we have to exterminate outsiders because the world systems are failing. And so, you know, it's a it's a dog eat dog world. Hate to see it, but we have to save us, you know, from the limited resources. So that is it just is what it is. And you can kind of see three going into four right now, right? Which is Donald Trump is taking the mask off and bigfooting around the world grabbing on to various resources, oil, water, you know, threatening Greenland, threat threatening Canada. That's related to, you know, the Northwest Passage is gonna open, the Arctic areas are gonna melt. Yeah, and so this, you know, climate change is not that bad into we have to like exterminate the foreigner in order to save our superior culture. And so, like, it doesn't surprise me at all that he does this. And and of course, it's nonsense. Climate change is very, very, very bad. Very bad.
SPEAKER_13Yep. And and um But it also is uh confrontable in the sense that like it is it we can't stop it, but we can mitigate a lot of the effects. But of course, that requires a lot of changes to the way uh the the world economies run, the way like governments operate, etc. I mean Nobody cares enough to do nobody wants to do that, like in those positions.
SPEAKER_02I mean, I just I just have to say that you know, this is part of of what I talk about on my streams and and my other content is basically most of the problems that we are being confronted with as far as the the emergencies like climate change are eminently solvable with already existing technology. Yep. The one technology that we're falling behind in is political technology. And it is, you know, something like climate change. We have the engineering ability to both mitigate and to transition to uh substitutes that don't create this kind of escalating ecological catastrophe. It's not that hard to fix this problem or at least significantly reduce the amount of carbon that we are emitting into the atmosphere by you know making the highly pro-social shifts in things like electrical generation or transportation technology, et cetera. And we just have a political system that is so captured by the incumbent powers, especially in the energy sector, that they cannot countenance even a change that would be in the national interest, right? And so Joe Rogan serves an important function within that propaganda sphere, which is kind of distracting people from it, kind of dismissing it as a as a pressing concern. Hey, climate change, ecological catastrophe, a billion projected climate change refugees, not a big deal. Did you hear about that trans teenager playing high school softball in Utah? Yeah. That's what we need to have eight episodes about.
SPEAKER_13That's the conversation we need to have, yeah.
SPEAKER_05That that that's why he's so dangerous. He doesn't say it doesn't exist, he just says that it's not as concerning as you should think it's not as concerning as they're telling you it is. That's what allows this very, let's call it like uh it enlightens the interest uh to to to hang on. And that is uh that is why it has so much reach and so much potential, which then again snake eating its own ass renders it even more dangerous.
SPEAKER_13Jumping off of the transphobia stuff that you're talking about, Mike. Joe Rogan has like talked about the whole like transgender people in bathrooms type shit that like that like moral panic, hysteria, bullshit. And he's unironically on one show been like we actually have a clip of that happening where he showed um this person trying to get into a bathroom, being confronted by two other women, and those two women were like, You can't go here, and they like forced their way in. And then at the he doesn't show this, but if you show the whole clip that he found at the end of it, some guy there goes, This was a comedy skit. And your Rogan that entire time is like, This is real, this is scary, this is so concerning. The crazy fucking world.
SPEAKER_11You ever see this video? There's this lady in Chicago, and um uh this guy is trying to use the women's room, and she's going in there with her daughter, and this guy has a full beard, just a full beard, and she's yelling at him. She's like, You are our whole you are a whole man. And he's like, I am a woman, and like with a big deep breath, like deep voice, big husky guy with a fucking beard. What the fuck, man? Like what the fuck?
SPEAKER_01Don't get in my back. Do not get in my back. Don't get in my back. You need to vote after me. You need to vote after me.
SPEAKER_11When you see this guy, this guy's a big dude with a beard. So that that's a real thing. Now the people that want to deny that that's a real thing, you're doing a disservice for everyone. You're doing a disservice to all the innocent women that have to go into those bathrooms and don't feel safe, and you're doing a disservice to real trans people. There's a there's gonna be a bunch of people that game your system, and there's gonna be a bunch of perverts with fucking beards who want to go where the little girls are shitting. People have lost their fucking mind. And I think it's engineered. I think that China has been TikToking these fucking people into a coma. I think all those little videos where, you know, trans awareness and you know, and maybe you're trans and there are no genders, just a hundred and then psychos like that guy now think that the culture has moved to the point where they can kind of get away with it. Maybe the culture has changed their opinion on things. I think I can get away with this. I think I can wear my full beard with my dick out and and go around women. And there's gonna be guys like that, just like there's real trans people. There's gonna be guys that are crazy that take advantage of this thing that I think has been at least at least partially engineered by other countries.
SPEAKER_09I'm looking at their comments on this saying that this video we just watched is satire. Really? Yeah, I've seen other videos like this where there are people that there's a I don't know who they are, but there are groups of people that will make videos like this that make them seem real. And then putting it in the world. God, that lady's a great actress. I don't I'm not saying it is, but I'm looking at a lot of comments on TikTok saying this is staged, this is fake.
SPEAKER_11Well, they might be right. But that lady, if that's true, that lady's a fucking great actress.
SPEAKER_02Well, that reminds me of the Daily Wire. They had uh plans on doing a documentary about trans, you know, people in sports, and then because they couldn't find any examples nationwide of any abuses, they did they pivoted it to a comedy skit movie called Ladyballers, where they got a bunch of actors to like pretend to be women in order to win the local sports ball competition. You know what I mean? So conservatives couldn't find actual evidence of their assertions in reality. So what did they do? They played make believe. Yeah, yeah. And that's that's kind of how you know conservatives generally play the the culture war game. Yeah. And uh it's all in their in their minds. Joe Rogan is a key cog in that machine.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I've seen more white dudes in uh purple haired wigs than I've seen uh women uh with purple hair. But what do I mean by this? Reactionary dudes online, usually with digital platforms, trying to play an SJW character and put it like and it's usually dudes putting on a a purple uh like a purple haired or blue-haired wig and doing the whole 2016-2017 era SJW aesthetic. I've seen more guys doing skits of a person that looks like that than people that look like that. Yeah. Just to add to Mike's point, like like from my own personal experience, which is nothing wrong if you have purple or blue hair, actually, it's kind of cool, but my point is the the opposite. They the majority of wacky and over-the-top things that you've heard from uh everything they classify as these uh soyed up uh weak links is probably probably comes from a skit that a right winger did where they just fucking made up a character.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. Can't find the guy you're mad at, just make them up. Always works, always works.
SPEAKER_05But maybe give us a slight backstory on how he became what he became, okay? Mike, my brother.
SPEAKER_02A text from Joe Rogan has just made psychedelics a federal research priority. This happened just recently, where his influence in Washington is now so extensive that he has a direct line to the president. And now, with a wave of his Sharpie, Donald Trump just signed an executive order that directs over fifty million dollars of federal research agency funding to state-backed psychedelic research. And during the signing ceremony of the executive order, Joe Rogan stood tall, well, stood slightly below average, directly behind Trump and the resolute desk, uh, while practically holding hands with Maha leader Make America Healthy Again and podcast regular Robert Kennedy Jr. My favorite. I'm in love with that man. And and what's really crazy is that Bobby Kennedy Jr., he had predicted in 2023 that the 2024 election would be decided by podcasts. And ladies and gentlemen, which podcast? It was the Joe Rogan experience.
SPEAKER_13I have some extra context there. The number of monthly podcast listeners in general doubled between 2016 and 2024. Half the American population listens to podcasts at least once a month, and at least forty something percent listen to podcasts once a week.
SPEAKER_02That's why it's important that everybody recommend this podcast to your friends and family, and make sure you sign up to the Patreon. Exactly.
SPEAKER_05Send this one to all your friends and family that like Joe Rogan, unironically.
SPEAKER_13So true. A pure research study by Shearer et al. in 2023, et al. means more authors, but I'm not gonna list like 18 names, uh, in 2023 found that most people who got their news uh from podcasts trust that news either more than the regular news or hold it to the same regard. Advertisers salivate over podcast audiences because their data shows that podcasters influence their audiences to buy products more than other media does. Now, you know, transfer that advertising mindset, the marketing mindset, to politics, and there you go.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and so what we're saying is at least in this one instance, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s statement had merit. Oh God, you said that like him or loathe him, Joe Rogan frequently has tens of millions of unique listeners per month. And uh he's is considered to be the top podcast in most podcast ranking rankings. Yeah. And that the size of that audience that now dwarfs the sickly titans of mainstream media. Like a lot more people are listening to Joe Rogan than they are NBC, ABC, BBC. And in the final, so in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election, Donald J. Trump flew to Austin and he sat down for three hours with Joe Rogan.
SPEAKER_13That's yeah, Austin, Texas. That's where Joe Rogan has his like podcasting compound, which he moved from LA, I think, for tax reasons.
SPEAKER_02Well, he moved, yeah, he moved from LA supposedly for tax reasons during the COVID pandemic, you know, oh, okay, yeah. Shift. A bunch of people went to, you know, moved out of California to Austin, Texas, and they bought up the real estate and sent the prices soaring. And then people realized, oh fuck, this is Texas. And uh the flow is now negative out of Austin. I don't know if you guys are aware of this, but yeah, people are people are uh leaving uh leaving Austin, Texas for the first time in a long time. And it's not to say for any of our fans listening from Austin, I'm not saying that Austin is bad, okay? I'm just saying some demographic facts about how there was a big flood towards the state, and now, and Joe Rogan was one of those people. And now a lot of people are starting to flow out. And so think about that. It's like three weeks to the election, and Donald J. Trump, former president, Republican nominee, is flying to Austin, Texas to do a three-hour podcast with Joe Rogan. Yep. And let me tell you, chat, we're gonna get into it later, but it was so fawning, it was bordering on flirtatious. And it was very horny. Yeah, it was horny and and and and Rogan was extremely obsequious. He was extremely ingratiating with Trump. He treated him like a friend. It was conversational, it was vibes-based. There was absolutely no like journalistic or socratic uh dialogue here. It was, you know, it was uh Donald Trump says a talking point, Joe Rogan nods along like everybody accepts his ex common sense. That's crazy and then moves on. Yeah, right. And it's and you know, Joe Rogan's audience has a lot of low propensity voters, a lot of apolitical andes and young men, men that are highly impressionable, you know, somebody who would be influenced by that. And as you demonstrated, podcast influences are extremely powerful on their audiences, and so and and the from the point of view of organizing for Donald Trump, Joe Rogan was probably a key plank for his eventual victory. Um, so we are now living in a nation where intellects like Joe Rogan pick our leaders.
SPEAKER_13Yeah, because I mean how the fuck did we get here? One of the uh things with like American elections is that the the tiniest margins matter. So no matter what you point to, you will find something that pushed the ball across the finish line. And uh Joe Rogan definitely, I think, with the metrics we have and what we understand about like how this stuff influences people, definitely could have been like one of the things. If you remove another thing, maybe No, I don't think there's any doubt.
SPEAKER_02I I I don't think there's any now, I don't think it's Joe Rogan alone, yeah, yeah. But I think that there was a you know, I hate to say this, Gramscian, like uh counter hegemonic uh reality that was created, you know, right-wing Gramsciism surrounding surrounding Joe and the podcast ecosystem that dramatically shifted young men. Like young men shifted dramatically right from 2020. And that was a key element of Donald Trump's victory, and it was a rather comfortable victory for Trump. He won every single swing state and he won the popular vote. And he had that wasn't true of 20 uh 16. So Joe Rogan and the kind of culture warrior podcast bros, they gave Trump a milieu that really resonated with young men. And uh, you know, there's a variety of reasons why that happened, but I think without a doubt, as far as political outreach and persuasion, the podcast bros and the way the Trump administration or the Trump campaign was able to abuse and abuse them and turn them into fleshlights, that is um that was key towards his victory, no doubt. In my mind at least. Now, so we have this guy as one of the key political kingmakers in the most powerful country in the world. Where the fuck is this guy from? And Joe Rogan really got his start in show business as a stand-up comedian in Boston, Massachusetts, and his first set was at Stitches Comedy Club. You know, that where the where the grandest thinkers of our age congregate. Um and from 1988 to 1994, he scratched and grinded his way into the life of a full-time comedian in between various like blue-collar jobs. Construction worker, driving it, driving a limo, delivering newspapers, etc. etc. He was a guy struggling, you know, to become relevant. Um ultimately he got a big break in '94. He moved to Los Angeles and he signed an exclusive development deal with Disney. And he had this kind of traditional Hollywood career. I don't want to just regurgitate his Wikipedia page if you really give a shit about exactly which show or sitcom Joe Rogan was starring in. I urge you to go look. But ultimately it cultivated, uh, you know, it cultivated in him in 2009 starting a podcast. And in by 2010, August 2010, it was named the Joe Rogan Experience and had entered the top 100 podcasts on iTunes. So once he got that, you know, he was there early, just as the podcast wave was starting to explode.
SPEAKER_05That's impressive, though. Doing it all the way back then is impressive. Like seeing that potential wave coming uh shows, I guess, a certain level of not maybe not I can't use the word media literacy for it, but I can use the word uh like uh ability to uh guess what format is coming. Because nobody was predicting, I mean, nobody uh in mainstream was predicting it back then.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was necessarily like some grand insight of Joe's. It was just more like, hey, why don't we we can make our own radio show, right? We can make our own program, we can just get together with our friends, shoot the shit, throw it up on these platforms that were open. open and he found success and kept doing it. And ultimately, you know, the growth was pretty pretty consistent and then started to bend upward in kind of an exponential fashion. And then by 2019, he's he was the number one guy podcasting worldwide, which is that's an insanely success.
SPEAKER_13I mean, you can't get more successful in podcasting than Joe Rogan. And also I I want to say that when we talk when we think about like you know everyone has a podcast. Everyone thinks of like a couple of dudes with like shitty mics um recording off of laptops like in a room together or something like that. And that's basically what he did. Like that's how it began. Like he he was part of that like you know that early dog shit sort of thing. Nowadays podcasts are like massively produced like people have like expensive microphones like two of out of the three people of this podcast have.
SPEAKER_02And and uh patreon.com slash the reaction podcast by the way it it was like the that like dude corporations have every corporation every every movie that uh it took like half a billion dollars to make has a adjacent podcast that runs that I don't know for particular subscribers or for people that they have uh podcasts for like TV shows um yeah and they have like rewatch shows uh like podcasts like the TV show that's been cancelled for 10 years or 20 years now gets like a rewatch podcast with a cast again you have uh like even like actual news uh sites have a podcast you have podcasts about podcasts like this episode like this yeah yeah yeah I mean which takes us back to like the early years of Joe's podcast and as I was saying like it's better it's better understood as like an extension of Joe Rogan's like stand up friend group right and they would just have I think it would be best described as like a collegiate bull session. Now I don't know about how Europeans you know experience college but one of the things of of being a college student is you are away from your parents you know you're up all night and you you're expanding your mind for the first time you know you're you're encountering new ideas and sometimes you just stay up at night bullshitting with your friends in the dorm talking about some of these ideas right and Joe Rogan I feel like it was almost like a frat bull session where you could like listen in and you have a group of guys and sometimes you're doing fart jokes sometimes you're talking about women and sometimes you're you're talking about ideas or things in an unconventional fashion and that was the attraction that drew more and more people in. It's like a friend group on the go right you can listen in to a funny you know uh conversation with the guys that sound a lot like you and that's how the episodes were structured they were informal long but largely unfocused they would just you know ping around to various topics have fun have those kind of conversations that we've all had and it and I've got to be honest with you I can't tell you how many nights I've done something like that in real life I like having those kind of chill nights around a fire pit talking about ideas or whatever or politics or you name it. And so Joe Rogan's the Joe Rogan experience was like having that as a ready-made product that people could consume. Now as far as like politics in the early years um it was like a topic of conversation Joe Rogan was a libertarian guy right in the 2012 election that's the Mitt Romney Barack Obama election there was a candidate named Ron Paul and Ron Paul was this really old backbencher Republican from Texas the Gulf Coast and he was like the quintessential libertarian he wanted to put the United States back on the gold standard but he also had other more radical libertarian views that were out of step with the rest of the you know bipartisan consensus you know in favor of legalization of some drugs you know wanting America to be withdrawing from all the foreign wars not supporting Israel things like that you know attracted a uh a a group of like online supporters in places like Reddit and Joe Rogan's podcast right so there was this libertarian movement that was starting to build that was skeptical of the institutions of both parties and ultimately like the failed promise of Obama's like change hope and change that never arrived neither hope nor change and so there was this like growing anti-establishment uh energy and you know on the left it found places like Occupy Wall Street and on the right it was in this kind of like you know libertarian libertarian you know form right and Joe Rogan was somebody who pinged between both of those skepticisms of the status quo.
SPEAKER_13Yeah I I I've got a question is Ron Paul the guy who got booed at that libertarian um convention because uh he's not the guy where they like asked like about uh driver's licenses and then he was like well I think is that the Canadian one I'm thinking of Canadian libertarian no no uh you are you're thinking of the uh 2016 um okay okay Gary Johnson Gary Johnson you're thinking of Gary Johnson yeah yeah again he was honestly we need to throw a clip of that in Mr.
SPEAKER_04Peterson I have a feeling I know how this answer is going to be should someone have to have a government issued license to drive a car?
SPEAKER_11Hell no Dr.
SPEAKER_08Feldman A car is like a gun or anything else as long as you're using it right and not using it to hurt other people you should have a right to use it. A license and a permit is just another way to get some money and inconvenience to people Mr.
SPEAKER_00McAfee I don't think licenses are required. However if you are uh under 16 and your parents say you can drive and you haven't done it before you should put a flashing pink light on your roof at least so we can get out of your way but that at the most Mr.
SPEAKER_14Perry The government requires licenses for to for too many things. The government requires licenses for people to broadcast radio the government requires licenses to get married.
SPEAKER_12They require a license to drive what's next requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster absolutely not I think government has a basic responsibility to protect us against individuals, groups corporations, foreign governments that would do us harm.
SPEAKER_02In that context a license to drum you know I'd like to see some competency exhibited by people before they drum it's so fucking forget about the driver's licenses what do you want to have a license to toast toast in my toast so you know a few of the political guests he had early on was uh a law professor Lawrence Lessig who was trying to build a movement to reformulate American campaign finance basically do this like a political form of good governance this is a strategy that a lot of people have had especially more technocratic liberals where it'd be like hey listen I'm not trying to help one side or the other I just think it's bad for our government to have like unlimited money in our politics so we need to we need to do this I think everybody can agree we should get money out of politics right and he also had Abby Martin and this is where Joe Rogan was bringing on somebody who is a unbelievable journalist anti-imperialist fierce left winger you know so Joe Rogan had a lot of heterodox you know opinions and ideas on his show even early on in the political realm. And I would say that like the best way to understand this is it wasn't really like ideologically coherent but it had a flavor of being hey I'm gonna bring on these interesting individuals who have a unique critique of power in our society. And you know as I said before Joe Rogan at this point was a a Ron Paul uh supporter um he continued to gravitate toward guests who were skeptical of institutions and he was willing to listen to voices regardless of their ideological label. So it was almost like a platformist populism if that makes sense you know he'd have populist voices from the right from the libertarian you know center and from the left and so that made the show interesting but ultimately politically incoherent as far as you know it wasn't impacting like politics in a firm direction. He went he hadn't picked the side quite yet and you know ultimately that I would call it like a you know platformist populism vulgar populism that was the backbone of of everything that kind of followed as the show continued to grow the structure became ever more recognizable two distinct guest pipelines began to form and uh competed for Joe Rogan's attention on the left hand were the left adjacent figures like Kyle Kalinsky, Cornell West, and they brought forward early versions of populist critiques of the media and the Democratic Party from the left and on the right hand you had Ken Shapiro, Gavin McGuinness, Kyle Yannopoulos they all slithered their way onto the show. And the content was transphobic blathering about trans athletes in sport, campus culture, political correctness, quote free speech conflicts, that kind of garbage. And one of these stories in particular kind of uh demonstrates what made Joe Rogan so heterodox. So you would have Kyle Kalinsky on or he would have Cornell West on, but then he would fixate on these culture war stories that were ultimately cooked up by the right wing Fever swamps. They're very specifically I'm I could think of a story there was a trans woman who was an amateur MMA competitor which is mixed martial arts and her name was Fallon Fox. And Joe Rogan fixated on this story because Fox had won a few amateur bouts in MMA right and Joe Rogan basically made them an international pariah by saying look it's a man beating up women and trans, you know trans, you can be trans all you want, but women should not you know trans women should not be allowed to compete against cis women in sports, especially combat sports, because it'll just result in the entire sport being overrun by trans athletes that are just pretending to be trans in order to win these competitions. And he cooked up this hypothetical world that ultimately conflicted with reality because Fallon Fox eventually fought a professional cis woman MMA fighter and was defeated. And so this whole grand narrative of trans athletes dominating sports and threatening women ran into reality but Joe Rogan's opinion did not change and he had been used and manipulated to spread this like anti-trans hysteria using this example that would appeal to his base to his fans and that ultimately when reality came into conflict with his assertions he didn't change his views.
SPEAKER_11But you've have you been mobbed before you have oh yeah what's been the worst oh one of the big ones was uh about uh trans fighter I remember that yeah yeah that was a hilarious one yeah because I'm like you guys can kiss my fucking ass you're out of your mind you guys are out of your mind if you think that a man who has been a man for 30 years and has taken female hormones for two is the same. You put Brock Lesnar chop his dick off and put him in a dress that guy's gonna maul through the women's heavyweight division like nothing you've ever seen in your life. Yeah. Because we're built different and it's just a fact. You're always going to have people that are higher level skill and Ashley Evan Smith who's competed successfully in the UFC she's very tough and she beat Fallon Fox. Yeah and that's this isn't you know I'm not against Fallon Fox fighting women that want to fight her. I'm not against that if they want I I'm not against women fighting men. If you want to do I'm not a man I'm not against people riding bulls I'm not against people bungee jumping. Yeah you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want but don't pretend that you're exactly the same as a biological woman.
SPEAKER_02Yeah why the fuck do we have tests then why why what is a what is a chromosome what are genetics what are what is it is it all we're just gonna give it all away for ideology and what about women yeah and so you know that that to me is why you know Joe Rogan had this kind of aura about him for being transphobic right and it's a story that we're gonna you know so keep that MMA story in mind because he would oftentimes cite the threat of trans women in sports competitions as some sort of like existential threat to women and that kind of aura of transphobia now you're invading Iran unironically yeah and and and that because of that made up story we're invading Iran. And I just want to you know do a quick aside if you're a person who thinks that you know many people believe that trans women in sports is unfair they have a genetic advantage and there's a it's a big threat to women's competition I just want to you know draw your attention to the Republican governor of Utah which is one of the most conservative states in the country and that state legislature of Republicans passed a bill banning trans girls from competing in high school sports. And when the governor examined the athletic competitions at the high school level for trans athletes in the entire state he found six examples six kids who were trying to make friends and be part of something in high school and not one of them was a grand champion not one of them was a state champion so he vetoed the bill and and he said the reason why is because it's a completely made up hysteria that does not threaten girls. It does not threaten women's sports and highlighting some example of the one time a trans person wins some competition in the entire world to create a narrative of threat is a manipulation and it's a lie. Yeah and it hurts people.
SPEAKER_13I also uh want to bring something up uh because the thing I often bring up when people talk about this is the reason we separate uh sports like by gender isn't necessarily because of like uh the idea that there's uh an inherent advantage uh in one sport if that was the only reason we wouldn't have like separate women and men's chess or or like you know quote unquote regular chess and women's chess part of the reason we do this is because uh women have had a harder time getting into these sports because of like all these uh pervasive structures in our society that try to like you know it's a boys club once it's been a boys club for a while it's gonna take a while to change that so for example in chess you have the this you know competitions so that women are able to compete when they have a harder time getting into the the other competitions and even though they're just as good and on that uh note uh I don't think like if you're trying to ha have uh you know two different competitions to protect the interest of a marginalized group uh I don't necessarily know if like women's sports are for exclusively cis women uh I don't think those cis women are the most marginalized I think the trans women might be a little bit more marginalized than the cis women right I mean listen no I I mean I I totally get what you're saying but you know for me it is like we have these hysterias because these conservatives say imagine a hypothetical world where X, Y, and Z thing is happening and it's not happening.
SPEAKER_02Yeah yeah and it results in a panic. Yeah right and I think your chess example is very is a very good one because you know men overwhelmingly are at the top of competition. Yeah. But there is one glaring exception. I don't know if you know about Judith uh Palgar who was uh I think she was the youngest player to ever get into the feed a top 100 and she's a woman and when she was growing up her parents decided that they were gonna you know give her the same chess education as a boy would get and they were determined to prove that if a woman was given the same supportive environment and respected that they could compete with men in the men's competition and she demonstrated that completely. And nonetheless even with her parents' support ultimately she faced a lot of barriers and skepticism to her playing so Judith literally proves the point that like the reason why women are not as you know common in chess is a cultural barriers and skepticism and you know they're pushed away from these spaces that are overwhelmingly held to be for men.
SPEAKER_13Yeah and and what's what's like uh what feels like the conservatives are like the ones that actually like genuinely care about this they're trying to preemptively create that culture for any trans person to just keep them out of the sport entirely because like who are they going to compete against? Like they're not gonna stop at like you know no trans women in you know women's sports they're gonna be like well after that no trans people in sports in general because I mean obviously it's not about the sport.
SPEAKER_02We know that right no well yes it's about it's about preventing the normalization of transness. Exactly yeah it's about holding it as something dangerous contagious risky you know physically threatening to our families and our children and that's the emotional manipulation the conservatives are counting on so you don't actually pay attention to like the real shit that's going on around you. Yeah. And you know just to draw this back to Joe Rogan like this is where his kind of heterodox takes and his community and his intellectual curiosity has led him down a dark path because he's not equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge to challenge these you know pseudo intellectual positions. Yeah. But you know in his defense like there is a kind of emotional center of of his worldview which is a skepticism of a system that he believes is dishonest and corrupt and you know there was left wing and right wing populisms that were competing for his attention um they both had that kind of posture or facade of distrust of institutional power and that is what got Joe Rogan interested in them and ultimately you know he's ended up on the right and I think it's very important that we like you know we can be critical of Joe Rogan especially you know where he's ended up and the evil shit that he has ended up helping. But it's I want to like continue to trace the path of how he got there. How did he get to Donald Trump endorsing Donald Trump in 2024? And you know okay so right now we are just about 2016 election in its aftermath and each one of those pipelines we discussed earlier the left wing pipeline and the right wing pipeline they kept increasing in volume and intensity of their critique on Joe's program. On the left side the show really became a hub of what might be called Bernie era populism. You know, as we discussed Crystal Ball, Cordell West, Kyle Kalitzki, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Jimmy Dore, Bernie Sanders himself now some of these names you may recognize as having spun off and become right wing populists or or Trump supporters in the case of Tulsi Gabbard but at the time they were all generally considered to be in that like left-wing poll right you know Andrew Yang he was somebody who is trumpeting the risks of automation and calling for a uh you know his left wing conception of a uh you know which is a libertarian esque solution of a universal basic income tolsi Gabbard presented an anti-war critique of US foreign policy and all of these people were part of what you would call like a left populist ecosystem. Bernie Sanders himself ended up on the program in 2019 and during this interview you could see that Joe Rogan really considered Bernie Sanders to be a credible vehicle for this like anti-establishment politics and he subsequently had a subsequent statement that said he would vote for Bernie Sanders of all the choices in the twenty twenty primary according to Professors Matt Sinkwitz and Nick Marks uh Joe Rogan kept pushing politicians that he interviewed to support Medicare for all after this and he would push right wing politicians on the idea that healthcare must be considered a human right.
SPEAKER_13So Bernie Sanders definitely had an impact on him.
SPEAKER_02Oh no, definitely. And I and I think that impact still remains, although much, much, you know, attenuated because I think Joe Rogan did become much more of a right winger following the 2020 election. And this is where, you know, as we just said, you know, Joe Rogan said, Hey, I would vote for Bernie. He's my guy. And Bernie Sanders touted that endorsement. And he posted that clip on social media. And I gotta tell you, chat, the reaction to that was that mainstream media and the Democratic establishment launched a major attack against both Rogan and Bernie Sanders for accepting that endorsement. The Washington Post had a headline that blared, Bernie Sanders criticized for embracing support from Joe Rogan. The BBC reported that Bernie Sanders was facing ire over it. A New York Times hit piece on Bernie's Angry Bros hit newsstands the following Sunday. And the way it was reported was that Bernie Sanders was accepting the endorsement of a sexist, transphobic Joe Rogan who and it was going to split the Democratic Party. There was a phrase that you've probably heard before, but if you haven't, bless you, that was used to describe Bernie Sanders' enthusiastic young male supporters, which was the Bernie bro. It was a pejorative uh invented in the fever swamps of the inner beltway in Washington, D.C. And it was used to describe the widespread popularity of Bernie Sanders with young men as a means to attack his candidacy. So when Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie, it was a reflection of a growing environment that young men, especially those who were disenfranchised, previously apathetic, or felt disconnected from the mainstream political parties, the fact that they were flocking to Bernie Sanders, instead of that being considered to be a hopeful, positive sign, was actually a sign of how evil Bernie Sanders was, right? He's got these sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic young men supporting him. It didn't matter that Bernie Sanders' policies were far more supportive of women or far more supportive of young men or trans people than his competitors. The fact that he had young male supporters was enough to damn him. And Joe Rogan's endorsement, far from being considered a major advantage for a swing group of largely apolitical or low propensity voters, it was framed as a direct attack on the rights of marginalized groups. In fact, the human rights campaign, a nationally recognized pro-LGBT group, filed a formal complaint with Bernie Sanders' campaign for accepting that endorsement. And it was even rumored that AOC herself took a step back as a surrogate for a short while because she disapproved of that endorsement, which I gotta tell you, I think that is completely crazy. Now, I don't, you know, I don't consider Joe Rogan to be a reliable ally of the left by any means. But the fact that when Bernie Sanders seems to be persuading somebody who would be outside of the normal expected base of the Democratic Party, his reward was attacks and trying to limit the tent and throw those Joe Rogan supporters or fans out of the party in a competitive presidential election. That seems to be a pretty unwise choice.
SPEAKER_05But it is wise when you're protecting your particular interests that you feel like even somebody as mild as Bernie Sanders would uh interfere with, especially when you add to that uh that you know he was running at the end of the day against Hillary Clinton, and that you absolutely can, as we'll learn probably in future episodes for those who are a little bit new to anti-fascism, let's say it that way, that you can co-opt even the most uh progressive social uh concepts uh against uh progress, well if you know how to co-opt them uh properly. Uh when he was running against Hillary, obviously, that that particular pitch kind of spawned for them the second he got uh Joe Rogan's uh endorsement. At least that's how that's how I see it. It wasn't necessarily even uh I don't see it necessarily as a as a ideological move, just an extremely convenient move to paint him in the light of you know keeping a good woman down type shit, which at the end of the day was the main pitch against him, and as you beautifully put, the filthy Bernie Bros, which uh which supported him. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, you know, in 2020, he was his main competitor was a white man by the name of Joe Biden, who had committed horrible crimes both domestically and abroad, you know, supporting the school to prison pipeline, the disproportionate sentencing guidelines, the war on drugs, supported the Iraq war, you know, personal friends with segregationists. So Joe Biden had been actively one of the most damaging politicians in American history for marginalized groups in the Democratic Party, but that was considered less important than the fact that a podcaster had some, you know, obviously offensive and incorrect opinions about trans people, but was nonetheless interested in supporting the most pro-trans candidate, right? And is this really the iron law of institutions? Because it wasn't about trans people, exactly. Right, no, of course. It was about protecting the radical center of the Democratic Party, the neoliberal centrist corporate wing, keeping control of the Democratic Party. And they used whatever tools were at hand to throw shit on Bernie Sanders. And Joe Rogan, you know, those Democratic Party establishment liberals were easier to use and abuse, as we said, identity politics, security tests to attack that growing left populism within the Democratic Party. And Joe Rogan was a key plank for their attacks. They had no interest whatsoever in using him as a means to persuade voters or cultivate support. To them, alternative media podcasts like Joe Rogan were a threat to be contained because they were a threat to their personal institutional power. Now, think about this. If you've ever heard the question, should we have a who will be the Joe Rogan of the left? The first question you have to ask is why wasn't it Joe Rogan when he endorsed Bernie Sanders in 2020?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because, ladies and gentlemen, I'm gonna answer the question for you. The more important thing for the Democratic Party is that ideological centrism must win, no matter what the costs.
SPEAKER_05And for us outside of America, the ideological far right, but yes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What I'm trying to say. Well, no, we we call them centrists, but they are really neoliberal extremists, right? They are neoliberal extremists, and they they want no compromise whatsoever. And they would rather detonate the Democratic Party, detonate the country, than allow even the mild social democracy of a Bernie Sanders.
SPEAKER_06Detonate us, the rest of us. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that detonate the world. And you know, at the same time, they had you know, Joe Rogan was also building a right-wing pipeline, right? It continued to expand. He brought on Jordan Peterson during the heyday of his you know popularity. He had discussions with him about identity, hierarchy, meaning, and all sorts of pseudo-intellectual bullshit that nonetheless resonated with Rogan's audience. He had appearances with Candace Owens, he brought on Dan Crenshaw, and so that you know, right-wing pipeline became more explicitly partisan conservative perspectives. And, you know, during this time, the pipelines continue to exist side by side. And if you map them out, they look like parallel tracks. One is focused on economic inequality and anti-war politics, the other is focused on these dumb free speech, you know, culture con cultural conflicts, uh, free speech wars, uh, anti-political correctness, and other forms of right-wing culture war positioning. Ultimately, the two pipelines began to converge after Bernie Sanders was definitively defeated in the 2020 primary. And that coincided with the COVID pandemic. And so Joe Biden ultimately prevailed in the 2020 election. He became the avatar for you know what Joe Rogan considered to be government overreach. And his split from kind of like left-wing populism became more and more uh set in stone. And he had episodes featuring uh figures like Peter McCullough and Robert Malone, who are some of the country's biggest skeptics of the mRNA vaccines. His skepticism towards public health authorities began to grow. And both of those men were are well-documented promoters of COVID misinformation, and you know, they spent a lot of time on far-right sites like Alex Jones, and ultimately these conversations brought Joe Rogan into direct conflict with mainstream institutions that at the time were helmed by Joe Rogan and the Democratic Party.
SPEAKER_13There's a a lot of stuff that we're gonna have to cover when it comes to Joe Rogan, and more than we can fit into one episode. So we're going to be doing, as I mentioned before, a part two down the line, where we'll do like a deep dive into some of the weirder stuff that Joe Rogan believes and the people who kind of pushed it to him.
SPEAKER_02You know, look thinking about that pipeline, you know, metric or or or rubric of understanding Joe Rogan, the figures that, you know, still identified that had previously been identified with the left started to become captured, right? And voices like Kyle Kalinski were no longer welcome on Joe Rogan. You weren't seeing the Kyle Kalinski's, the Bernie Sanders, the Cornell West's, the Abby Martins anymore. You were only seeing a few of those people like Jimmy Dore, Glen Glenn Greenwald, or Matt Taibe, who had previously been considered part of the populist left, but were shifting more and more into kind of like a intensely negative toward the Democratic Party in general, including the left-wing populists. When Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibi came on, they focused on censorship, media bias, and the concentration of power in technology platforms. Earlier in their careers, both were strongly associated with left-wing investigative journalism. On Rogan's show during this period, both began to push various right-wing narratives of the day. Taibi, in particular, focused on advancing Elon Musk's Twitter files conspiracy. And he's basically now permanently aligned with the right. By the time you reach episodes with figures like Jimmy Dore and Russell Brand, the distinction between left and right is no longer doing any explanatory work. While both of those figures were once considered part of the populist left, now they are all participating in a shared critique of institutions that has a right-wing outlook and right wing frame and resonates with right-wing audiences. And at this point, you can say pretty definitively that the left-wing pipeline on Joe Rogan is dead. And there's no longer a balance of uh his guest ecosystem, and there's a new center of gravity, and that is Trump's MAGA Republican Party and their pseudo-populist arguments. This all came to a head in 2024 with the previously mentioned appearance of Donald Trump at the most critical period of the 2024 general election in October. Trump came on and he was his same incoherent, bombastic self. And it was almost like two friends talking. Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. Again, even at one point, as Donald Trump's energy was dipping, Joe Rogan quipped at him, yo, dude, your your weave is getting wide. Referring to Trump's like carefully constructed thatch of hair that covers up his balding.
SPEAKER_14Legendary.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And Trump filled the space with uh confidence, repetition, sweeping claims about media corruption. Basically, Donald Trump was able to deliver talking points that for hours in an uninterrupted conversational tone where Joe Rogan would raise questions, but they were merely a vehicle for Donald Trump to riff on and deliver his talking points without any kind of critical examination. Whether it was on immigration, the economy, foreign policy, they all passed the exact same pattern. And Trump would reframe the stories into issues about strength, victimhood, and play up all the greatest hits of Trumpian conspiracy. I would say that the best way to understand Joe Rogan's political discussion with Donald Trump is vibes. And there is a complete dearth of any journalistic examination. Ultimately, the talking points are just assumed to be common sense, and that chummy environment was used to humanize Trump for Rogan's audience. Ultimately, Rogan's endorsement of Trump during this period marks a clear shift in his public positioning, and he was fully on board with Donald Trump's MAGA agenda. What's funny is, you know, just to put an addendum, you know, bring it up to 2026, just recently Joe Rogan was working with Donald Trump to legalize, you know, federal research into psychedelic treatments and psychiatric dru uh psychedelic drugs, but he has been starting to express increasing criticism of Trump on several fronts. He has questioned aspects of the immigration enforcement and other policy directions. He's now started to describe himself as politically unaffiliated or politically homeless, and he's starting to distance himself from the Republicans and Trump again. And I don't know. It was weird to me to hear him say that, and then just very recently see him at the White House giggling and smiling as Trump signed that executive order that he wanted into law. One of the things that I think is actually really interesting and something everybody should notice is that when Donald Trump got criticized by Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or any other right-wing media figure, he was extremely vicious to his former allies and has pretty much excommunicated them hit them over even the mildest critique. But he continues to grant a major exception to Joe Rogan. And that's a sign that his political power and his role as a political force isn't underestimated, especially at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And I think for me, the conclusion that I have to take away from that is we are completely screwed.
SPEAKER_05I like to joke that it's you know, nobody would have given Bernie shit if he went on Fox News. He did. Exactly, but nobody was like, oh my god, how dare you go in Fox News? But when he went on Joe Rogan, the reaction was completely different. They give an almost metaphysical quality to everything that in their mind that they do not consider to be like mainstream or traditional news or traditional media, etc. etc. But there's not really any fucking difference. Difference in format, but there's no additional or lesser positive or negative value in one versus the other. It's just formats, bro. But God bless.
SPEAKER_02You know, when I look at this kind of political environment we live in, I kind of buy the idea that Rogue is just a fucking algorithm surfer. Now that I've like really thought about it, like, you know, being a a Ron Paul bro in 2012, that was like the Reddit opinion. And then becoming a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 to 2020, that was the Reddit opinion. And then being like anti-Joe Biden and pro-Trump in 2024, that was the Reddit bro for opinion. And now being like starting to become more skeptical and distancing yourself from Trump, that's the Reddit Bro 2026 opinion. Like he's just kind of floating along with whatever the skin of sentiment is. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_05100%. Just the question there, my friend, is whether it's proactive or whether he just is that basic that it just continuously like uh uh he continuously is in the zeitgeist, right? Like it is is he proactively trying to surf the algorithm or is he just like unironically like the the stock human, you know? So he just organically falls into the mainstream because he is the mainstream human. Thank you very much for the wonderful presentation, Mike and Freda.
SPEAKER_12Yeah, you're welcome. Yep.
SPEAKER_05The audience has now been given a kind of explanation of uh some of the most important events in uh Joe Rogan's, let's say, political influencer career. I would like to take you out for a second and look at all of this from a more, let's say, theoretical underpinning. To look at Joe as an aspect of a wider ecosystem and his particular position in it. So to start out, Joe has a very specific kind of power. He holds one of the world's largest algorithm fed megaphones. It has reshaped how millions of people hear and feel about politics in the states and as some of you might have learned today, abroad, especially among his proud, adopted family, the right. His real impact isn't in whether he officially endorses a candidate. It's in how he normalizes and repackages the language, paranoia, and framing of the contemporary right wing ecosystem. Over the last 15 years, he hasn't just reflected right wing culture, he has helped structure it, giving its most toxic ideas a more casual, we're just talking aesthetic that makes them palatable, shareable, and dangerously mainstream. Rogan's cultural weight is obvious. A once stand-up comic, an MMA commentator who now hosts one of the most listened to podcasts in the world with a direct line into the ears of working class men, young libertarians, wellness adjacent pseudoscientists, and the old and new alt-right. Don't make me mention it because Mike definitely has the motherfucking president. He is no longer a man, he is a platform in one, a Facebook, a Twitter, a CNN, but in podcast form. That's how I want you to look at him. Not only as the man, but as an institution, and what that institution represents. You know what kind of pitch, for example, CNN will give you. You know what Fox News is trying to sell you. You watch both of them with that in mind. The format of Joe Rogan lets your mind and everybody's guard down. We think we're interacting with a person on the other end, a bro. But my friends, it's everything but because he is an institution.
SPEAKER_13The um hosts of the podcast No Rogan, as in Knowing Joe Rogan, described him as a chameleon. Whenever there are guests on, he sort of adopts their positions and their identity. They described it as like him cosplaying as them. And they both didn't think it was a conscious or cynical thing. He just sort of goes with a flow. When another guest with polar opposite views comes on, he's then on their side. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02You know, I I think a chameleon is too nice of a way of describing that. I think he's just kind of a golden retriever that is immediately copying whatever is being said in front of him and doesn't have on object permanence. So maybe I'm insulting golden retrievers because I think they have object permanence and he doesn't seem to have it. He's too stupid to have cognitive dissonance because he forgets what his position was. That might be the case, yeah.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, and it's an adaptability. That's why I call him an institution. It's less of a compliment and more uh a proactive wish by us and by me to dehumanize him. Not to say that he does not deserve human rights, the way you know racists use the word dehumanize. Uh no, not the way they use dehumanize, the way we say racists dehumanize others, but more as a he is just a megaphone. He is an algorithm made in human form, but not to speedrun. The show's format is deceptively loose, long, meandering, pseudo-philosophical conversations where anybody can come as they are, quote unquote. But that looseness is also its very political mechanism. By refusing hard editorial lines, they created another type of editorial line. By rarely calling guests out in real time, they designed a new format, a new take on journalism, even. Rogan turns the podcast into a kind of neutral sounding forum where outright conspiracy theories, you know, white identity, adjacent rants, anti state paranoia, and medically unsound truths are all treated as valid options for thinking differently. The effect is that the audience doesn't feel like they're entering a partisan debate. They feel like they're opting. Into curiosity and just honest conversation. Remember, kids, the best propaganda is the one you don't recognize as such. And that is exactly where his role in the right wing ecosystem really crystallizes and even shines.
SPEAKER_13I want to quote the historian E. H. Carr, who says that, quote, every journalist knows today that the most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriate facts. It used to be said that the facts speak for themselves, but that is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when a person calls on them. It is he who decides to which facts to give the floor and in what order or context. This is how Rogan can pre-select his so-called facts by giving the floor to certain guests and not others. By giving air to certain ideas and not others. The propaganda happens long before they even hit record.
SPEAKER_05Rogan doesn't function as an ideological operative. To an untrained eye, he doesn't look like one. He doesn't sound like one. Fuck he sounds like half your short, very short, very, very short bros, or your chill ass short, very, very short uncle, or your favorite short guy, very, very short guy at the deli. He functions though as a gatekeeper of tone and plausibility. Figures who outside his orbit would be dismissed as cranks or extremists, anti-vax doctors, conspiracy adjacent intellectual dark web types, militia adjacent podcasters, and overtly reactionary commentators get two crucial things on his show. Time and credibility.
SPEAKER_13And by the way, them being these insane cranks is almost a precondition for Joe Rogan to take an interest in them. The host of the aforementioned No Rogan found a very clear trend of almost every single guest offering some sort of sensational or revolutionary idea that's going to upend everything. To Joe Rogan, it might just be sexy because it sells. To guests like fascist Milo Yanopoulos or the Nazi adjacent Stefan Molyneux, Rogan offers a different service in return.
SPEAKER_02I do think that it's a little bit of the sensationalism is what draws attention, right? We live in the attention economy. Yes. And so if you're offering some sort of like extreme or hyperbolic or potentially revolutionary idea or perspective, that's going to draw a bunch of curious onlookers. So basically, Joe Rogan creates an intellectual car crash and then you know monetizes everybody that comes to rubber neck the cleanup. And now it's our entire society that has been smashed.
SPEAKER_05Exactly. And but he does at the end of the day the same thing that any large media conglomerate does as an institution. But the difference is that those we look at and we call them institutions. We call them biased, we call them ideologically motivated, we call them financially motivated. We understand that they do clickbait because they are not our bro. But Joe's our bro. Joe is not an institution, and because we believe that, he becomes a new type of institution. And that is why so fucking insanely revolutionary it is. A four-hour shot on the Joe Rogan experience is treated by the audience as a kind of seal of seriousness. Even when Rogan disagrees mildly, the fact he's hosting the person, letting them explain their worldview without interruption, and rarely shutting them down tells the audience that this line of thinking is at least, at the very least, worth considering. And one of the clearest ways this plays out is the mainstreaming of conspiracy thinking. Rogan has repeatedly floated or amplified some of the dumbest and most dangerous and sometimes very fun conspiracy adjacent ideas, some of which we've all obviously already covered. He rarely stakes hard claims. He mostly says, you know, think about it, bro, or people are saying this, or we're not sure. But in online communities, especially reactionary spaces, those phrases are treated as go ahead to treat the claims as real. The ecosystem then does, the ecosystem then does the heavy lifting, turning Rogan's maybe into properly and then a fact in a meme format, clipping an X-thread dogma. This is where Joe Rogan's relationship to right-wing radicalization becomes visible. He doesn't recruit people into a party or even a movement. He recruits them into a template, an ideological template. The template is the state is not trustworthy, the media is lying, the expert class is compromised, real information is hidden in the in-betweens, podcasts, YouTube channels, niche forums, all of which he, just by accident, by the way, happens to profit most from. When he pairs this with a constant emphasis on questioning everything, without the discipline to actually model how to evaluate evidence, he hands his audience a tool that can be turned in any direction.
SPEAKER_13Professors Matt Sinkovitz and Nick Marks compare the right-wing media ecosystem to a nightlife district where all the different establishments do their own thing, but function as a part of a collective whole. You go for drinks, then you go for kebabs, and then you go to the taxi stand. That's exactly what Hugo does.
SPEAKER_05That's Hugo's weekend. Did you get that, Mike? Because he was like Hugo, and that was like my name. It's hilarious. I am 12 years old. Fire me from this show. I deserve it for that one.
SPEAKER_06He was so quiet that I had to like be like, Mike, please laugh. Please laugh.
SPEAKER_05I I had a I had a senior um Bush Senior moment.
SPEAKER_10I think the next president needs to be a lot quieter, but send a signal that we're prepared to act in the national security interests of this country to get back in the business of creating a more peaceful world. Please clap.
SPEAKER_02Where everybody assumes a certain type of set of beliefs around the human condition or or you know society structures or the way things are. And that all those structures or those ideas built are building blocks that lead you to, you know, inexorably be believe and support right wing political positions. So you have this pre-political space that Joe Rogan is a part of, and then you know, his fans or viewers get sucked into it. They absorb these kind of assumptions about the world, these views about the world. And then when they go in the political space, they're already primed for right-wing radicalization, right wing beliefs, and and the right-wing political realm. So the the there's no there's no debate to be had because to them it'll be intuitively right.
SPEAKER_05Yes. Yes, yes, yes. All this like anti-wokeness, anti-bureaucracy, anti-big government, pro-guns. You might like any of these individually. Skepticism of corporate media, Jesus Christ. It is a you go in uh encapsulated, like uh hostility to what he calls cancel culture, like all of this stuff that that uh that Mike gave an overview on. None of that is like, I don't know, in isolation, fascist, but it overlaps heavily with the aesthetic and frustration of fascist adjacent milieus and the things that they tap into. You're kind of pre-cooked, as Mike said. Rogan's mistake and his real political impact is that he treats these overlaps as purely cultural or generational, not as actual political structures. He doesn't see that when he frames everything as a deep-seated organized conspiracy by baddies that are bad because they're bad. He turns attention away from real structural societal problems into this never-defined fog that hangs over all our heads, a permanent evil we to an extent just have to deal with on the go, never fully destroy. But that's not all. He also has a very specific media effect. Rogan's show has become a career launcher and career saver for a whole tier of right-wing or JSON personalities. Thinkers and commentators who are pushed out of mainstream media or de-amplified by platforms always land on the Joe Rogan experience as a kind of rehabilitation gig. The appearance functions as a reset instead of being a controversial commentator, they become a guy Joe talks to four hours. That shift in framing doesn't just change how they are perceived, it changes how they're perceived by the broader right, not only mainstream individuals, because the broader right is constantly looking for their own megaphones. And they're not fucking stupid, sometimes proactively, sometimes organically. They don't want to attach themselves to either somebody who lacks popularity or who is too niche. But if you've been on Joe Rogan, you're not too niche and you definitely don't lack popularity. Okay? The podcast becomes less a conversation and more an ideological uh clearinghouse, is that how you Americans say it? Where the line between free speech absolutism and reactionary bandwidth enlargement is almost impossible to distinguish. Then there is the question of net impact. Has Rogan been a net negative, neutral, or even positive force for spreading reactionary thought? In terms of pure politics, he's clearly a net negative for the left. He has helped normalize the idea that the state is fundamentally untrustworthy, that experts are either foolish or corrupt, and that the most real political insights come from wacky guys. He's so fucking wacky. And that's exactly the framing which serves as the air that right-wing radicalization breeds. They don't just coexist with fascism, they incubate it. At the same time, it's also fair to note that Rogan's intention isn't to build a movement or something. Institutions don't have intentions. He's an entertainer who wants to be seen as, you know, a free-thinking outsider, not necessarily a foot soldier of a particular cause, at least not yet. This is part of what makes his effect so slippery. He can always point to his own chaotic mix of guests, his own pro science moments, and his own I'm not political act as proof that he's not doing harm. And in some narrow sense, I guess he's right. He's not drafting legislation, he's not organizing rallies, and he's not giving speeches at some sort of white supremacist conference. But politics in the 21st century is increasingly about infrastructure, create the mimetic conditions, normalize the conspiratorial tone, erode trust in everything, and the hard right projects would and the hard right projects will follow on their own. That's what the three of us are trying to really hammer into your beautiful heads. Rogan doesn't need to be a fascist for a show to be a powerful accelerating force in the right wing ecosystem. He just needs to be a high volume, low guardrails, conversational arena that pretends to be neutral, as if there even is such a thing.
SPEAKER_02I will say, you know, one thing about Joe that I think we all should keep in mind is that he is actively being groomed by the right as well. You know, I talked about how Donald Trump was quick to rush to do the psychedelic drug trial with $50 million of U.S. federal money. What conservative president was ever willing to throw $50 million into a psychedelic drug trial? That is a sign of Joe Rogan's influence. And the reason why they're doing it is because they want to groom him. You know, he's spending time at the White House, he's spending time with the world's richest people. You know, there is an attempt to try to draw him into a right-wing social uh sphere and, you know, kind of connect him personally and professionally with the right in a long-lasting way. And let's not forget, and I didn't even mention it in the history of Joe Rogan's podcast, which was a huge uh blunder on my part, which is he was just offered $200 million for podcast exclusivity on Spotify. And then he just recently signed another $250 million deal uh that didn't include exclusivity. So Joe Rogan, you know, he is now one of America's ultra wealthy. His class position has fundamentally shifted from blue-collar stand-up comedian, where he started this podcast, and now he is officially a member of the ultra-rich. And so his social, political, and economic milieu has aligned him with the right. That is his class position, that is his class interest. Absolutely, yeah. Even if he was, you know, attempting to be neutral, these factors would inexorably draw him to the right unless he was spending extra effort to go back to the left.
SPEAKER_13And speaking of that, I think there's a common conception that Joe Rogan used to be better and has sort of gotten radicalized to fallen into these like weird rabbit holes. But at least in my opinion, that's not really the case. We know he kick comes from like UFC and you know, these like this misogynistic show that he ran called The Man Show, all this stuff. Like, he's always been this sort of like I guess normal, a little chuddy kind of guy to begin with. That like that was his baseline. And I noticed that among his fans, a lot of people seem to still hold on to this idea that like he was actually better before. There's um on Reddit, for example, like the community has split into two. So the old JRE subreddit is now exclusively haters. And it's very funny to like go check it out. I looked at the like top posts of the week. One post there refers to Donald Trump as quote, an obese friend of the show. Another post is a clip of Rogan claiming his friends got cancer from the COVID vaccine, where one user commented, if World War III would happen, he would still talk about COVID. And there's also AI generated images of Epstein embracing Trump over there. Then contrast that to the offshoot subreddit for more loyal fans, that's called Powerful JRE. Their top hosts of the week include a picture of Homelander and the caption when you can't enjoy movies anymore because you know they're all leftist propaganda. It's like the cringe, like boomer right wing. Like it's literally like the image macro type shit. Oh terrible. It's it's ass. It's pure ass. But in 2018, Joe Rogan had his like IQ and race arc. This is before all the Bernie stuff, this is before like the Trump thing, where he had Sam Harris on his podcast. Now, Sam Harris has done and said a lot of things recently, I think, in regards to Israel, but we're gonna focus on this part for now. I consider Sam Harris an extreme peddler of pseudoscience. He was condemned as such by behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer and Catherine Page, as well as social psychologist Richard Nespit.
SPEAKER_11There's obviously a lot of factors that lead to IQ, to high IQ, but to ignore what those are, to ignore it completely, to display. In the name of ideology, right? Yes, exactly, only ideology. And this idea that you cannot look at statistics, you cannot look at facts. And in your conversation with Ezra Charles, that's what or Ezra Klein rather, that's what I got, is that this is this is an ideological issue, and that you you are it's almost like an impossible subject to breach. Like you can't even discuss the fact that certain races demonstrate low IQ, and then let's look at what could be the cause of those. Even discussing that somehow or another is so inherently racist that it must be ignored or must be silenced, and that you you must first concentrate on all the various injustices that have been done to those people who have this lower IQ.
SPEAKER_13Joe Rogan and many others speak with a sort of confidence on these topics that you can only really get by knowing absolutely nothing. Intelligence as a concept is very nebulous and doesn't have a common definition, nor any consensus on how to measure it. There's numerous different attempts at measuring intelligence, but it stands to reason that if we don't actually know what intelligence is, then we can't really measure it. If these scientists say biologically distinct human races aren't a thing, then Joe Rogan, the everyman, questions that and brings on a person like Sam Harris to shill Charles Murray's Bell Curve, a very notorious book. Most of the book is used to argue that IQ has more predictive power for your success than your parents' socioeconomic status. On release, the book had a bunch of knee-jerk reactions from people unprepared to criticize it, and support from people who aren't really experts in the field. Part of the reason for this was that the book wasn't circulated to reviewers prior to release, so it took a year or more before experts actually started addressing it. So think about that, like it's a book that tries to be like a big heavy hitter on a very contentious scientific topic, and the only people who would actually dig into it and tear it apart if it's wrong, are the kind of people who would do so carefully, so they spend a lot of time. It wasn't circulated to any of these people so they could prepare. It was only, therefore, consumed, digested, and regurgitated by people who have no idea what they're talking about. Yeah. Like Sam Harris. Among other things, the book makes the unsourced assertion that the quote median IQ of all black Africans is 75. Which is something I think that ties back to an old study, which it was made by like a pro like a massive proponent of race science, which had it's complete garbage.
SPEAKER_02I mean, mismeasure of a man, mismeasure of man, like by Siva J. Ghoul, a book from 1981, completely debunked this shit. Like, this is literally decades old slop, and none of it is true. Yes. And it's still being circulated on Rogan. Yeah. And it's insane that it's still even talked of. Like you anybody who pushes this type of shit is a fucking moron. Yes. Like that's period.
SPEAKER_05Or intentionally a bad actor, yep.
SPEAKER_13Yeah, exactly, yeah. Quoting academic Nicholas Lehman in Slate, the bell curve actually reflects the blinkered vision of one part of the American elite. It constantly tells these people that they are naturally superior, and offers lurid descriptions of aspects of national life that they know about only by rumor. Readers who accept the bell curve as tough-minded and realistic, and who assume that all criticism of it is ignorant and ideologically motivated, are not as far removed from Plato's cave as they might think. What Joe Rogan does is that he gorilla walks into a laboratory full of ambiguities, where he sidesteps the scientists that are warning him that this stuff needs more time to cook, and says, You're too afraid to talk about this because you'll get cancelled. And in reality, the ca the scientists would get cancelled, because publishing junk science tends to get a scientist discredited. So then he finds someone, a pseudoscientist, masquerading as an expert, to deliver some outrageous claim that virtually every scientist on the planet disagrees with, and he uses this to great effect. Get a guy to say something outrageous, everyone gets outraged, you get tons of publicity, and you get to say to your audience, see, people out there don't respect the free flow of ideas, they'll cancel you.
SPEAKER_02That's so tiring how boring that shit is. Like it's it's so it's so banal and so predictable and so uh, you know, I I don't understand what people get out of this kind of stuff. It's like you want to be tricked by a charlatan. Come on, have some self-respect.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. I I don't know why, but all of these like pseudoscience arcs tend to happen around like episode 2200 to like 2300. But in episode 2279, Joe Rogan had another peddler of pseudoscience on. This one is quite insane, by the way. Like I think she's crazy, called Kai Dickens. I know this episode. Go on, go on. Okay, yeah. She she's a a hack fraud who runs a podcast called Telepathy Tapes, which to nobody's surprise became huge after Joe Rogan had her on. On the podcast, she entertains the notion that nonverbal autistic kids have telepathy. And can communicate with ghosts.
SPEAKER_07These people are in there. Spelling is a valid form of communication. And yes, many of them ha say they have spiritual gifts, which I think we can pretty much validate at this point.
SPEAKER_11When you say spiritual gifts, what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_07Yeah. So when I first stumbled into this, um, which we can talk about later if you want, when I first kind of stumbled into this, I thought this was just about telepathy, right? And that there were these individuals and their parents and teachers were claiming they could read minds. And as I start meeting more and more and more of these families, and again, like I said, teachers is not limited to just families. Um one thing that they started telling me was telepathy is to the tip of the iceberg. And I didn't know what that meant. You know, what do you mean telepathy is to the tip of the iceberg iceberg? And and it's true because I think whether or not it's ability to see disease or illness in someone and be able to diagnose it before this person knows that there's something wrong, reading an aura and you know, saying that they can see a color around not just animals and humans, but plants, um uh being able to speak multiple languages even though you haven't been taught them, or playing instruments and knowing music, or being able to access almost any song and having perfect pitch, um, being able to visit people in dreams. Um uh and then you know I think some of the more just like mind-altering, shocking things for me was how many non-speaking individuals have said that they are able to s speak with people from the other side. And yeah, so so it didn't just start with telepathy or end with telepathy. It's a plethora of things.
SPEAKER_02If you want to know why we can't fill in potholes, this is this is the the leading light of the right.
SPEAKER_13Yeah. But more interestingly, their conversation veers into vaguely anti-capitalist directions.
SPEAKER_11This is the problem with financial institutions, because they're like if all you're doing is trying to acquire more money, well that's your game. And your game is just do that. And then as you get bigger, you eventually reach a point where like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, you kind of control everything. Like you control natural resources, you control land, you control building, you housing, transportation. You have everything? This is not good for everybody else. It's not good for everybody else to for one entity to have so much power.
SPEAKER_13Two episodes later, sitting in the same chair, his guest is Elon Musk. I am become meme. We've kind of sketched a narrative of a guy open to all sides, albeit being stupid enough to be open to some of the more insane ideas like biological race and IQ, but I don't think that's really what happened to Rogan. Professors Matt Zinkovitz and Nick Marks in their book That's Not Funny about the right-wing comedy phenomenon say, quote, When Joe Rogan takes a political position, he's really deploying the logic of the podcast industry to attract and appease his key demographic. What first looked like a series of political endorsements from Rogan turned out instead to be a great strategy for selling boxes of raw meat and pubic hair trimmers to his target of young men. Joe Rogan and perhaps much of the larger right-wing podcasting sphere aren't part of any sort of disciplined political movement. There is overlap between them, and they all share the same sort of fake anti-establishment vibe, all while pushing politics in a general rightward direction, of course. They'll jump ship whenever the going gets bad, and the money stops flowing. They'll pivot to whatever is profitable and whatever works at the time. But out of all these people, Joe Rogan wields tremendously outsized influence. He to some extent decides what the next big conspiracy theory on the right is going to be. Not because he had some well thought out plan to push it, but because he allowed someone with a very obvious agenda to utilize his megaphone to speak to the world. Joe Rogan is, as Hugo put it, basically a platform. He's a tool, in both senses of the word. A tool for capital owners, billionaires, to apply to serve their agenda. He's at Peter Thielon, who's the co-founder of Palantir, a company that has a $10 billion contract with the US military, and whose AI powered targeting technology was likely used to designate an elementary school in Iran for bombing by the American military. The technology has also likely been utilized in Israel's genocide in Gaza. Another guest is Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Facebook is implicated as being complicit in the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar. And of course he's had the world's richest man, Elon Musk, on multiple times. On November 5th, 2024, he had him on for episode 2223. Rogan had the following to say about the episode on Twitter. Quote The great and powerful Elon Musk. If it wasn't for him, we'd be fucked. Keep reading, and I'll make that sound in the back. He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you'll hear. And I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that's an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast.
SPEAKER_05I mean, at least pit on it.
SPEAKER_02I mean, Elon, Elon, it's like the guy who figured out you can be the richest man in the world just by telling Reddit nerds that their their sci-fi fantasy is gonna come true in ten years.
SPEAKER_01I'ma make a rocket!
SPEAKER_13We're gonna get to Mars soon, promise.
SPEAKER_02It's like this this motherfucker, this motherfucker can't even get the starship into orbit. It's supposed to be right now shuttling colonists to Mars or whatever the fuck he said. That's like next year or something, yeah. Yeah, and you know, Tesla's trading at 300 times earnings per share, you know, 300 years of earnings per share.
SPEAKER_05The world's biggest welfare queen, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, biggest welfare queen, and you know, the Teslas are fucking garbage. And the only reason that company has not at zero dollars a share is that the Republicans and Democrats slapped a hundred percent tariff on Chinese electric vehicles. Otherwise, you wouldn't see a Tesla on the road. Fucking save us, my ass. Get the hell out of here.
SPEAKER_13All of this is Joe Rogan in a nutshell. But this isn't the end of our story about Joe Rogan. There's a lot more to delve into, and with your support, we'll cover him in a future part two, delving deeper into his conspiracy theories and some of his more insane guests. So please support us at patreon.com slash the reaction podcast, or use the link in the podcast description. We're always incredibly grateful to all of our supporters. Thank you for listening.
