Why is the “Joe Rogan Experience” so popular among men?
Joe Rogan has a huge following and understanding his appeal is key to understanding the men who follow him/ his podcast
I know that posting something empathetic about how men (mostly white men) feel and cope with a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society (by often taking despised outlets) is against the conventional topics that people who care about society talk about these days (I assume, outside the right wing circles). I also know that it might not be socially wise to talk about the anxieties of a group of people, namely the white men, who are validly considered the most privileged group in most, if not all societies.
But therein lies the problem. The fact that I have to begin this blogpost with a defense of why I want to talk about men and a popular figure among them a.k.a. Joe Rogan, tells a large part about why Joe Rogan is so popular among men. It is because Joe Rogan is willing to discuss any idea that is interesting to him, regardless of it being considered ‘politically correct’ or not. It is because he does not shy away from talking about the lay man’s anxieties and concerns. It is because he portrays himself to hear the anxieties of men and offers them a path for hope and optimism about the future through relentlessly espousing an unsettling drive towards bettering own-selves.
When we shun conversations about men, given that they are a large part of the population and have a significant impact on society, it doesn’t serve any good purpose other than driving many of these men to flock to fringe groups and cult leaders like Trump, who also claim to hear them out. And no, talking about men does not always take away the platform for more marginalized groups; there’s plenty of online space to talk about all the other social justice issues.
Chances are, you have heard about Joe Rogan, even if you follow the podcast world sparsely. If you are a man and someone who listens to a lot of podcasts, it is also highly likely that you have listened to at least one of his podcast episodes out of thousands (the “Joe Rogan experience” podcast has an astonishing 1335 episodes as of August 19, 2019; even more amazing given that most episodes run for more than an hour). If you consider yourself a socially ‘progressive’ person, or ‘leftist’, or ‘liberal’; chances are that you do not find Joe Rogan particularly impressive and is puzzled by his popular appeal. Why is the “Joe Rogan Experience” so popular among men?
I am not a Joe Rogan fan. Joe Rogan’s popularity also puzzled me. I came to know about him last year from multiple friends (all of whom were men, no surprise) who I considered smart and curious. All of them had rave reviews about his podcast “Joe Rogan experience” and recommended me to listen to it. As a podcast fan, I did listen to three episodes. But before listening, my initial brief research on how Joe Rogan is portrayed in mainstream media, already gave me a negative impression of him. The most common talking point was- he hosts many radical right wing people with fringe ideas (like Alex Jones) and sometimes even endorses conspiracy theories. So, of course, I went in to listen to his podcast with a prior that Joe Rogan is no different from the ‘right-wing media personalities’ who provoke their audience with fringe but exciting ideas to garner a large number of audience, which is good business for them. The episodes I listened to didn’t particularly impress me (they are unnecessarily super long anyway), although parts of the long conversations were thought-provoking.
But over the past year, reading many other articles and listening to many other podcasts (including the Joe Rogan experience episodes with Bernie Sanders, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang), I have tried to understand the rise of the contemporary popular figures, such as Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan, particularly among men. As I have come to understand after more than a year of such deep-dive into the ‘men’s online world’, there is a lot to uncover. But the pre-requisite is to come with an open mind and humility, not with a pre-determined mindset disparaging men, their ‘shameful’ anxieties due to ‘decaying white male privileges’ and their ‘insignificant’ problems now that they cannot exercise their privilege without accountability. In order to understand anyone, you need to leave your presumptions at the door and try to empathize, to the best of your ability.
The Atlantic article titled “My Joe Rogan Experience” does a great job of explaining the Joe Rogan phenomenon. Here are parts of the article that I found interesting and revealing, but I encourage you to read it in its entirety.
This moment in American history is not rich with role models for men. Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye-rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets. Men have spent centuries earning this degree of suspicion, but if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to. So many of the skills and professions from which men have derived self-worth for centuries, and still do, are going obsolete in a hurry. Even Toy Story 4 is about an aging white man struggling to find purpose in a world that seems to have no use for him.
In the more progressive corners of culture, it’s become a familiar rallying cry to wonder out loud, “What are men even for now?” That’s an excellent question, but you can maybe understand why it rings a bit more ambivalently in the ears of men trying to find their footing in this new world. A brighter and more virtuous future? Wonderful! If you need anything from us, we’ll just be over here peering into the void. Meanwhile, the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to — they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention. Lots of these panicked men, as it happens, despise Trump every bit as much as they love Joe Rogan. But that’s just a healthier response to the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society. In 2019, men feeling thwarted and besieged is a bipartisan experience. This is the era of the Angry White Man, and it’s not just the MAGA army. It’s a description that also matches your garden-variety “Bernie bro,” the Biden guy who just wants to change the subject, and that walking man bun who charged the stage at a Kamala Harris campaign event and showed his “profound respect” for all the women present — for a conversation about equal pay — by grabbing the microphone to lecture her about animal rights. All kinds of men out there are pissed off and looking for someone to blame.
If all you know about Joe Rogan is his Wikipedia entry — Fear Factor, UFC, stand-up, podcasts with Elon Musk and Alex Jones — and if you make no effort to learn more, he might seem like this gang’s pied piper. And he does give them a platform with a massive audience, which is not just a programming choice but a moral one.
But that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that. I respond to that. The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization. A goal so hazy and unreachable that you never stop trying, until you realize with a kind of enviable Zen clarity that the trying is the whole point. If the world isn’t giving you much in the way of positive feedback, create your own. It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.
But the article doesn’t just portray Rogan as a saint, it also points out his weaknesses and negative consequences of sharing his platform with fringe figures.
One of the downsides of total human optimization is that you’re always coming up short, and in the wrong stew of testosterone and serotonin, it can turn into a poison of self-loathing and trigger-cocked rage. And a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.
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In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election….. that he is “almost a socialist”….. More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.
Rogan’s most recent Netflix special is often funny because Joe Rogan is a professional stand-up comedian, but if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies, sexism. Of all the things in the world for a comedian to joke about right now, why these? “I say shit I don’t mean because it’s funny,” he says during the special, which is something all comedians say, and is sort of true but also sort of not. People reveal their deepest selves in the subjects they keep revisiting, and the hills they choose to die on. With Rogan, you can often see and hear the tension between what he knows he’s supposed to believe and what he really thinks. Joe Rogan may be all about love, but beneath the surface he’s seething.
Joe’s choice of profession is a key to understanding why The Joe Rogan Experience can seem like a safe space for retrograde assholes: Among comics, radical free speech is a first principle. Every comedian believes that all people should be able to say pretty much whatever they want, whenever they want. This is partly because their careers depend on it, and not in some theoretical way.
Some caveats should be mentioned. In this article, like most social discussions are boiled down to, the “men” or the fans of Joe Rogan are talked about as a singular group (I assume, generalization is done for simplicity’s sake, as I also use the term “men” to mean a diverse group of people who share one or few common traits). But it is important to realize that it is not a homogeneous group. There is no such archetypal ‘man’. People who listen to “Joe Rogan experience” come from different backgrounds, have different interests and different political leanings. In fact, one of the unique features of “Joe Rogan experience” podcast is the wide variety of people interviewed on the show;- starting from political personalities with different leanings, to academic professors discussing complex stuff, to successful CEOs, to comedians and fighters. I assume that if there is one common intellectual trait that most of his regular listeners share, it is their curiosity and willingness to hear even fringe ideas to, as Joe Rogan puts it, challenge your mind.
The common thread (among many, but to me the major one) between Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and most popular figures among men these days is this- they want to motivate men to better themselves with a renewed commitment towards curiosity and discipline. They portray themselves to hear the concerns and anxieties of men, and offer them a path for hope about the future. Oh and yes, perhaps the biggest political issue all of them focus on a lot is the ills of ‘political correctness’. That says a lot about how this group of men feel about current society. Instead of shunning and shaming them for speaking out about their concerns and anxieties, we can make them feel heard and help them channel their energy in more positive ways. We can offer them more positive role models. At the end of the day, men are no different than others, they crave the same things- human dignity, self-worth, meaning of life, and most of all- the feeling that they are being heard.
