The Joe Rogan effect: how a libertarian pothead became podcasting’s $100m man

On Christmas Eve in 2009, Joe Rogan – then a fringe American celebrity, best known for presenting the TV show Fear Factor – sat in front of a camera and recorded his first podcast.

The result is on YouTube. For Roganologists like me, it’s essential viewing. Rogan peers into the camera in front of a lewd poster and answers questions sent to him by those watching the live feed online. The video is grainy, and computer-generated snowflakes drift inexplicably down the screen. “Hello, world,” Rogan says raffishly, once he knows the tech is up and running.

Few watching would have imagined that this marked the first step on a journey that would lead Rogan to fame, wealth and podcast superstardom. But since 2009, The Joe Rogan Experience has become one of the most popular podcasts ever made. Now, Spotify has signed him, for a reported $100m (£82m) and exclusive rights.

The format is simple. Around three times each week, Rogan invites a person of note to his studio in California, a dimly-lit man-cave where he keeps a samurai sword. They chat, sometimes smoking marijuana and drinking whisky. (When Rogan did both with Elon Musk in 2018, it caused Tesla shares to fall by nine per cent.) After three hours or so, Rogan draws proceedings to a close, but you get the impression that he could go on and on.

Rogan’s other job is commentating on fights for the UFC, the American martial arts league, and he often weaves sporting patter into his interviews. In general, podcasts are not usually filmed, but The Joe Rogan Experience is, and it pulls in huge audiences. Rogan’s YouTube channel has nearly 8 million subscribers, and some episodes have been watched in excess of 15 million times, despite their marathon length.

The show has become more sophisticated since it kicked off in 2009, long before most of us knew what a podcast was. But what’s remarkable about that first episode is how familiar it seems. Rogan still loves to gnaw on some of its topics, a full 11 years on. He waxes lyrical about isolation tanks: baths of warm, salty water designed to deprive those who float inside them of sensory stimuli. He rues the appeal of conspiracy theories, then wonders in the same breath whether the actress Brittany Murphy was killed by her husband. And he talks enthusiastically about guns, as he would always continue to do. “What if someone breaks into your house?” he asks, reaching for a pistol and waving it about. “S--- might get ugly.”

Recently, Rogan has taken coronavirus in his stride. Despite having long voiced suspicions about “the establishment”, he has adapted to the era of enforced social distancing with good grace. A recent photo on Instagram shows him toothily embracing the “new normal”, as he calls it, with his dog Marshall Mae (who, naturally, has her own hugely popular account). Rogan’s caption is a model of pandemic positivity. “I got a nice hike in and a nice refresh of perspective,” it reads. “Love to you all!”

On a recent podcast, too, he asked thoughtful and earnest questions about the illness of Peter Hotez, a prominent scientist and virology expert. And he has distanced himself from a bonkers scheme by the UFC president, who is trying, in the midst of the pandemic, to hire a private island on which to stage its fights. “I guess someone’s gonna commentate,” Rogan remarked last month. But he was firm. “It’s not gonna be me.”

The story of how Joe Rogan and his show went supernova isn’t dramatic in itself. Much of it boils down to consistent, hard work: he got on the podcast wagon early, and pushed out episode after episode, building up an army of devoted listeners. But Rogan himself makes for a fascinating study. He looks and sounds like a meaty MAGA type, but he’s more complicated than that. He has described himself as “f-----g leftwing” and “almost a socialist”.

In fact, in an era in which masculinity has become deeply contested, Rogan has quietly established himself as an everyman icon. His online fans, many of whom are blokey men, say that he “changed their life” and “saved” them; they call him a genius and insist the show is “the real deal” (whatever that exactly means).

For those tuning in for the first time, the evangelism of these acolytes might seem hard to unpick. At the core of the show’s appeal, as I see it, is that Rogan presents himself very much as your average Joe. It helps, no doubt, that he looks like one: he’s bald, not particularly good-looking, fairly short but very muscly. (As a teenager, he was an American taekwondo champion). He’s the sort of dude you’d expect to see grilling sausages in a suburb, or at a bar, flinging darts between swigs of beer. His magician’s trick is to seem normal.

Yet “normal”, Rogan is not. Mapping his interests is exhausting. He likes to hear from everyone, from actors and fetishists to neuroscientists and Sandy Hook deniers. Born in the state of New Jersey, he had an itinerant childhood, which might go some way to explaining his gadfly approach to ideas and people. His father, a police officer, abused his mother, and they divorced when Rogan was five.

Joe and his mother eventually moved to Massachusetts, where he took up martial arts. He has said that as a kid he was “terrified of being a loser”, and that he expected other children to turn on him “at any moment”. He went to university, dropped out, became a standup comedian and an actor.

In 2001, he began presenting Fear Factor, the gross-out show that made participants confront their phobias. Off the back of that, he was asked to commentate on martial-arts fights, which he did with the passion and intuition of a true connoisseur. He had two children, then married their mother, a former waitress. And finally, in 2009, he decided to turn his hand to podcasting. That decision changed everything.

Today, The Joe Rogan Experience is enormously influential, boosting the visibility of whoever appears as a guest, from comedians like Russell Brand to thinkers such as Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. The US presidential campaigns of Democrats Tulsi Gabbard and Andrew Yang were energised by their appearances on the show; then, when Rogan remarked idly in January that he would “probably vote for Bernie”, the Sanders team transformed the footage into an advert.

Rogan’s endorsement was a controversial move. Many on the Left were disgusted by it. But one of Rogan’s talents is baiting Left-leaning types, especially those on Twitter. He is amorphously libertarian, a free-speech advocate who’s suspicious of woke culture. “I’m part of the problem,” he admitted drolly on a recent episode. “Part of the ‘patriarchy’.” Since half-heartedly endorsing Bernie, he has said he “would rather vote for Trump” than Joe Biden, on the grounds of the candidates’ ages.

At the core of the podcast’s offering is its guarantee of uninhibited conversation; sometimes, in the eyes of his detractors, this veers close to bigotry. He has, for instance, been accused of transphobia; he likes to bait vegetarians, and spent January eating only meat. He was condemned for racism, after he compared visiting a black neighbourhood to being in Planet of the Apes.

Some of those, and other hair-raising comments, were slips. Others were possibly not. “People are starved for controversial opinions,” Rogan has said. They are also, he thinks, famished for “an actual conversation”. It’s true that while controversy swirls around him, it never seems to stick. He’s too big to fail, or doesn’t care enough.

In fact, the resolutely conversational nature of the podcast has often elicited the greatest ire. Rogan can be blunt and domineering but in the main, he plays nice. He’s humane, a tough-guy-soft-guy. In interviews, he’s not in the market for “gotcha” moments: he seems most interested in finding material to mull over.

This approach is fine when he’s interviewing entertainers, but it doesn’t always work. After Rogan sat down with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, he was lambasted for having given him such an easy ride. The same happened when he met Elon Musk, avoiding thorny questions and allowing Musk to bang on, between stoned puffs, about engineering. (Musk, it must be said, also spoke movingly about his childhood, revealing that he had feared being thrown into an asylum).

I’ve tried summoning the righteous fury that seems to possess people when they accuse Rogan of bigotry, or of giving cruel people a free pass. But, somehow, I can’t rustle up the energy. As is obvious from the very first episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the host never set out to become Andrew Neil. Rogan’s non-confrontational interview technique, however laddish and coarse it may be, clearly resonates with his listeners, and it often gets plenty out of his guests.

Nor, I think, should Rogan’s role in widening access to knowledge be understated. He isn’t the role model I would choose for the men in my life – he’s fitness-crazed, he loves a rant, he seems less interested in women than in men – but it’s hard to emerge from hours of this particular podcast anything less than better-informed.

One moment, in that 2009 debut episode, captures everything redemptive about Rogan’s style. He admits he’s been “guilty” in the past of dabbling in conspiracy theories. Then something changes in his voice. He turns the beam of his voracious curiosity onto himself. “I used to be really into UFOs and stuff like that,” he says. “Until I realised that what I’m into is... when there’s something unknown. And I figure it out... and I gain something from that.”

His listeners may be the archetypal “deplorables”. Or perhaps they’re people in search of purpose, and a model of masculinity that gives them dignity. A lot of them just like to listen to sports chat. But whoever they are, they’re benefiting from Rogan’s relentless quest to plumb the unknown, and to lay its jewels out where anyone can see them.

Leaf Arbuthnot’s debut novel, Looking for Eliza, is out now