How should skeptics treat Joe Rogan? Should we ignore him? Should we engage with him? Should we write long articles about him? If invited, should we go on his podcast?
I first met Joe Rogan in May 2013. He was filming a TV show called Joe Rogan Questions Everything. It was a kind of fringe-science show where Rogan and friends would travel around the country meeting people with unusual beliefs and then having contrasting discussions with experts. Perhaps surprisingly, he played the role of a scientific skeptic, and the show was described at the time as “comedy/reality/debunking.”
I say surprisingly, because when people in the skeptical community think of Rogan now, they probably think of him as a purveyor of misinformation. He achieved notoriety in 2020 and 2021 for amplifying false, misleading, or controversial claims regarding COVID-19. This came both from the guests on his podcast (the most popular podcast of all time) and his own statements. He has continually expressed suspicion regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and encouraged “young, healthy” people not to get vaccinated (Rogan 2021). After a bout with COVID-19 himself, he took the anti-parasitic medicine ivermectin, which is not indicated for COVID-19 but is popular among anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists.
More recently, the increasing scrutiny on Rogan has unearthed inexcusable remarks from the not-too-distant early days of his podcast. Most egregious were his frequent usages of the N-word, but also many other remarks that come across as racist, insensitive, and sexist. Rogan critics—including, rather bizarrely, conspiracist Alex Jones—have trawled Rogan’s extensive back catalog of podcast episodes and created compilations that reflect badly on him.
None of this was apparent to me back in 2013. I’d been approached to appear on the show a few months before filming, and the producer told me that the host was “a celebrity.” A few days before the shoot, I was told: “It’s Joe Rogan.”
I recognized the name but only because I’d watched Fear Factor—a stunt challenge game show that he hosted from 2001 to 2006 and from 2011 to 2012. Unbeknownst to me, he was also well known as a former comedic actor, having appeared on News Radio in the 1990s, as well as being a successful stand-up comedian and mixed-martial-arts commentator.
The show Joe Rogan Questions Everything actually grew out of the popularity of his podcast, the Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan has long had an interest in fringe topics, such as Bigfoot, moon landing conspiracies, 9/11 conspiracies, and weird encounters. The TV show was meant to be an extension of this type of discussion and leverage his audience.
I filmed two segments. In one I simply explained the science of contrails, why they persist sometimes behind planes, and why that does not mean they are so-called chemtrails. The second segment was in the workshop of a local pseudoscientist who claimed he could modify the weather with a special device. To show this, he put the device (a “therapeutic” electric field generator with a bit of tape over the label) in a perspex box filled with fog. When he switched it on, the fog moved around.
I poked around, looking for a fan, but it was Rogan who figured it out. “Is it hot?” he asked. I put my hand on the box; it was indeed hot. The fog was simply moving around from rising hot air. The pseudoscientist complained, “It’s not that hot.” Rogan put his hand on the box and replied, “I wouldn’t want to put my balls on it.” That line made the final edit.
A few weeks after the episode aired, Rogan emailed me, saying he was unhappy with how little time the contrail science had been given on the episode. He invited me on his podcast to give a more detailed explanation. I accepted. Back then (September 2013) he was recording in a small office in Woodland Hills, California, not too far from where I was living. There was another guest, actor/comedian Bryan Callen. Rogan told me we’d go for three hours, which seemed inconceivably long, but it went by very quickly. The conversation was very free-form, almost random. Rogan and Callen riffed about things, we looked at YouTube clips, and we talked about chemtrails and other topics. It was fun.
We exchanged a few emails after that. He always came across as polite and thoughtful. Around 2017, the topic of flat earth started getting a little attention, and Rogan invited me back for another episode in May to discuss that. This time it was just me and him. We continued exchanging occasional emails, and I appeared on his show for the third and final time in December 2017.
The Rogan Effect
Rogan has the most popular podcast in the world. Even back in 2013 he was getting 500,000 listeners for each episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. When I came back in 2017, it was over a million, and now he has eleven million listeners/viewers per episode. A popular or controversial episode can now get over forty million listens/views.
This is huge. To give some perspective, the most popular news discussion shows on cable TV do less than a quarter of those numbers—and often far less. CNN’s average audience is only 8 percent the size of Rogan’s average audience.
Those massive numbers give him two things: money and influence. The money part was apparent the last time I was on the show. He’d moved the studio from his small Woodland Hills office to a cavernous 11,000-square-foot space with a gym, a bar, and an archery range. The influence came in the publicity boost for his guests. With me this translated to a lot more people following me on Twitter and YouTube in 2017, and then the next year I got a book deal. The publisher had seen me on the Joe Rogan Experience, and that was good enough for them. The book and my increased social media audience led to other things: talking-head roles on TV shows, news appearances, and invitations to write op-eds and columns. A portion of my success as a skeptic comes down to Joe Rogan.
Divergence
Unfortunately for my publisher, I was not going to get on the Joe Rogan Experience again. In 2017 I did a lot of flat earth debunking, prompted by Rogan’s interest in talking about it on the podcast. But by the end of the year, my interests were shifting into something else again, something that would put me at odds with Rogan: I started debunking UFOs.
The years 2017 and 2018 saw the start of a PR campaign by UFO enthusiasts to pressure the Pentagon to disclose what they knew about alien visitors. This was kicked off by a New York Times story, “Glowing Auras and Black Money,” and accompanied by the release of three grainy videos of UFOs shot by military pilots. I analyzed the videos and suggested some mundane explanations. This heralded a shift in focus of my debunking efforts over the next few years from chemtrails, 9/11, and flat earth to UFOs, coronavirus, and election fraud.
Over the same years, Rogan was also diving back into UFOs but in a far less critical manner than his interest in chemtrails. The guests he invited on his show to discuss UFOs were often strong believers with dubious stories. There was Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on reverse-engineering flying saucers. There was Jeremy Corbell, who made all kinds of fallacious claims about a variety of UFO videos. Rogan lapped it up.
Sometimes my name would come up, because I’d become well known for the analysis of the U.S. Navy footage. But Rogan would quickly dismiss me as someone who “just debunks everything” and critiqued my video analysis as being “mental gymnastics.” The last time he emailed me, in 2020, was to send me a video titled “Why Mick West Is Wrong about His Glare Theory on the Gimbal Video.”
Dubious Directions
While we were diverging on the topic of UFOs, it was also becoming apparent to me that Rogan was problematic for other reasons. While the bulk of his guests used to be comedians and interesting people, I started to notice he was increasingly giving a platform to people I felt did not deserve one.
He often talked about gender and transgender issues, particularly the problem of transgender athletes—focusing on transgender women in women’s sports. It became almost like a bit he would do on his show. I started to notice other people describing him as anti-trans. Jordan Peterson became famous because of Joe Rogan. Peterson was an obscure Canadian academic who had some issues with legislation regarding gender pronouns. He also had a weird sexist theory that appealed mostly to young men—an ideal fit for Rogan’s audience. I thought Peterson was ridiculous and said so publicly. Rogan had him as a guest six times, and Peterson’s audience grew exponentially.
Rogan gave weight more broadly to what is loosely referred to as the Intellectual Dark Web—a diverse group of commentators and intellectuals who complain about the chilling effects of identity politics and political correctness. People such as Sam Harris, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, and others (Weiss 2018).
The Intellectual Dark Web’s central thesis is that no conversation should be off limits; they simultaneously rail against restrictions on speech and then attempt to have boundary-pushing discussions. So they talk about race, religion, gender, transgender issues, and more, all in the context of freedom of speech.
The question any outsider has for a member of the Intellectual Dark Web is if they are doing it because of their stated reasons (restrictions on thought and speech are bad) or if they are simply framing it that way to allow their own somewhat racist, sexist, Islamophobic, or transphobic inclinations to surface. That ultimately is the problem with Rogan. He, and his numerous fans, can obviously make the case that he can have hours-long intelligent, thoughtful, even sensitive conversations on these topics (watch his interview with Eddie Izzard, for example). But his focus on certain topics, and his choice of guests naturally makes people suspicious (at the very least) of his underlying motives.
Would I go back on to discuss UFOs? I may be a sucker, but I am ultimately a believer in redemption. Rogan seems to recognize some of his past failings and be willing to apologize and change with some of the issues. He will continue to have guests who promote misinformation, but hopefully now with a little more balance. So yes, I’d probably go back and tell him, and his audience, what I think he got wrong about UFOs—and other things.
References
Rogan, Joe. 2021. The Joe Rogan Experience (Podcast). April 23. Video clip available online at https://twitter.com/i/status/1387077145156063234.
Weiss, Bari. 2018. Meet the renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web. The New York Times (May 8). Available online at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/opinion/intellectual-dark-web.html.