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The Roganification of the Male Mystique
Joe Rogan changed.
Not all at once. Not in some catastrophic fall from grace. But gradually — the way signals turn to noise when the frequency gets stuck.
And now, millions of men are trying to survive a collapsing world by bulking up their biceps and shrinking their imaginations.
I saw a YouTube comment last week from a user named @lenafelipe, highlighted on Threads by seyitaylor:
This is the part I don’t understand about Rogan fans. The moment I picked up on how his interests became a closed loop, repeating the same conversations over and over again with slightly different guests, the magic wore off. It became clear that the show wasn’t about curiosity anymore — it was about reinforcing an identity. And that identity is aggressively, almost performatively masculine.
There was a moment, a few years back, when listening to Joe Rogan felt like stepping into a strange kind of frontier saloon. MMA fighters and Silicon Valley founders. Astronauts and conspiracy theorists. Psychedelic evangelists and nutrition gurus. Political leaders and punk rockers. Everyone bellied up to the mic with something wild to say. And Rogan, playing the eternally curious everyman, gave them space to riff.
That was the appeal.
