For a long time, I stayed up through the night listening to tall-tale tellers, U.F.O. spotters, moon-landing deniers, Holy Rollers, and village explainers—the whole barbaric yawp of American talk. I could not get enough of it. I was a fairly ordinary kid, Jersey-born, but the house I lived in was shadowed by illness. My mother had been diagnosed with a debilitating neurological disease when she was in her early thirties. Every year, she got worse. During the day, I wanted nothing more than to please my mother, do well in school, lighten her load. At night, I wanted only to climb into the shelter of my bed and turn on the radio. I was hungry for elsewhere, for other lives—for what was being said down the street, over the bridge, beyond the horizon.
On clear nights, the signal was strong. You could hear the country expressing itself incessantly: everyone was phoning in, suggesting three-way trades, bitching about the mayor, speaking in tongues, raging, joking, climbing out on a ledge and threatening to jump. When I wanted a few hours of sleep before school, I tuned in to a ballgame on the West Coast. The staticky murmur of the crowd in Anaheim or Chavez Ravine was a sure slide to oblivion. Mostly, though, I wanted nothing to do with sleep. Mostly, I was tuned in, midnight to five-thirty, to "The Long John Nebel Show."
In the so-called golden age of radio, Americans gathered around hulks of mahogany with Bakelite knobs and vacuum tubes and listened to dramas and comedies. Tens of millions of people heard F.D.R.'s fireside chats; seventy million listened to Joe Louis clash with Max Schmeling. By the fifties, television had seized the mass audience. Bob Hope migrated to the screen. Radio became a medium for the road and the solitary listener: the long-haul trucker fighting off sleep, the commuter stuck in traffic.
Talk proliferated. Jean Shepherd spun his Indiana childhood into intoxicating monologues. Political call-in shows flourished. New York's graveyard shift offered everything from café liberals to right-wing ranters, with Alison (the Nightbird) Steele whispering incantations and Bob Fass talking with the "garbologist" A. J. Weberman, who rummaged through Bob Dylan's trash bins and found the meaning of the world in his coffee grounds.
But Long John was my main thing. A pitchman-entertainer, Nebel was born in Chicago in 1911 and washed up on the East Coast as an auctioneer, "Long John, the gab-and-gavel man." He sold razor-blade sharpeners, miracle pen points, juice extractors, and instructional booklets from the Pelham Health Institute of Sexology that warned against arousing "fires" in a woman that one could not extinguish. He was peculiar and self-possessed. He rode around the city in a limousine and washed his clothes in the sink. Late in life, he married a former model, Candy Jones, who claimed she had been a victim of the C.I.A.'s mind-control experiments; she became his co-host.
Nebel was hypnotic as both a hawker and a convener. His descriptions of the shrimp toast at Ho Ho's Chinese restaurant made me salivate at two in the morning. Jackie Gleason or Malcolm X might drift through now and then, but mainly he attracted no-name oddballs and self-proclaimed experts: a farmer from the Ozarks who said he'd been visited by Venusians; an inventor of an aura-reading meter and a radio to communicate with fish; a man with a device made of tubes, wires, and umbrella parts which, after five hours of discussion on the air, nobody on Nebel's panel could explain.
In the same way that Chuck Berry led to the Beatles, Long John Nebel led to Art Bell. Nebel died in 1978. That year, Bell—a knock-around rock d.j. based in Las Vegas—started a late-night call-in show that would take on the name "Coast to Coast AM." Bell described his politics as "libertarian," but, like Nebel, he didn't focus on public affairs, and, like Nebel, he was, above all, an entertainer. He roamed through psychic mysteries and conspiracy theories—U.F.O.s, crop circles, the afterlife, assassinations, the paranormal. His voice was weathered by countless Marlboro Lights, but he could carry on an all-night discussion about the Hale-Bopp comet and the possibility that it was being trailed by a flying saucer. Area 51 was a recurring obsession. Bell spent hours with a caller who claimed to have made contact with a human race from the constellation Andromeda. While his popularity was at its peak, Bell was living in a Nevada desert town called Pahrump. There, in self-imposed isolation, he worried about invaders. He ringed his property with chain-link fencing and kept a .40-calibre Glock in his desk drawer.
Years earlier, Stanley Elkin, a vastly underrated novelist, published his masterpiece "The Dick Gibson Show." He dedicated it to his wife, and to Nebel and eight other hosts who devoted their hours on the air to the American unreal. In the novel, Elkin, a comic maximalist, sets loose a floating dramatis personae of Gibson's on-air guests, "the range of the strange." The result is a nighttime portrait of the country and, as it happens, a portent of our own age of the podcast.
Long John Nebel and Art Bell are gone, but the tradition they embodied has a prominent inheritor. In an age of diminishing attention spans, "The Joe Rogan Experience" is free-form, runs around three hours, and can feel like the old midnight sprawl reborn online. It's the most popular podcast in the world, and there are roughly four and a half million podcasts out there.
What sets Joe Rogan apart from his precursors, though, isn't just his global reach. Nebel and Bell, despite their high ratings, were marginal performers in a secondary medium. Their political authority was precisely zero. No earnest editorialist ever described them as "influential." No campaign strategist thought it advisable to park a Presidential candidate on their airwaves for several hours to talk about the possibility of life on Mars. Rogan, by contrast, has become a stop on the national political itinerary. The headline of a recent story in the Wall Street Journal calls him "America's Most Important Swing Voter."
Rogan is fifty-eight. A fitness fanatic, he works out constantly and ingests a great many supplements—some of them advertised on his show. He is of unremarkable height, a compact collection of bulges wrapped in tight T-shirts: all biceps, triceps, pecs, and traps, with a shaved head and eyes bugged with curiosity, outrage, or delight.
His interviews are anything but predictable. When Bari Weiss was still an editor at the Times' Opinion section, she was invited to Rogan's studio, in Austin, Texas, to promote her book "How to Fight Anti-Semitism." Rogan's style is to jump right in with barely an introduction, and with Weiss he leapt from one lily pad to the next. He did not seem especially concerned with antisemitism. Weiss raised Representative Ilhan Omar as bait. Rogan did not bite. She tried flattery, mentioning a recent trip she'd taken to New Hampshire to write about another Rogan guest, Andrew Yang, and the "Rogan effect" she'd encountered there.
Rogan perked up. Circumcision? He was firmly against "cutting baby dicks." Children, he said, die "all the time" from the procedure. Also, "they lose their dicks."
"And you don't buy any of the studies about how it prevents S.T.D.s?" she offered gamely.
It was well over an hour before Weiss had the chance to speak about the content of her book. His host's discursive, we've-got-all-night manner belonged squarely to the Nebel-Bell tradition.
Rogan was born in Newark. His father was a cop. His mother was, in his words, a hippie type, a "free spirit." He has described himself, in an online post, as "3/4 Italian 1/4 Irish." His parents divorced when he was young. His father stayed behind in New Jersey; Rogan and his mother moved first to San Francisco and later to a suburb of Boston. He has not seen his father since the divorce.
From the start, Rogan was a performer. When he was seven, he was doing magic tricks for tourists on Fisherman's Wharf. His "No. 1 fear," he has said, was of being a "loser." As a teen-ager, he found his footing in martial arts. He began with karate, then took up Tae Kwon Do with obsessive seriousness, winning tournaments as a lightweight. In time, he added Thai kickboxing and Brazilian jujitsu, in which he eventually earned a black belt. He could kick like a mule. In his early twenties, after years of full-contact fighting, Rogan began to suffer from debilitating headaches. Fearing long-term neurological damage, he stepped away from competition.
Rogan no longer does interviews for print publications, but through nearly twenty-five hundred podcast episodes, and in old interviews scattered across the internet, he has supplied a considerable archive of self-reflection. He has said that as a kid he was "super A.D.D., whatever the fuck that means." His curiosity was expansive, but it did not translate into academic success. He was distractible. "I wasn't able to take my brain and make it focus on things that sucked," he once said. "Why? Because the world was filled with tits, all right?"
He enrolled briefly, and unhappily, at the University of Massachusetts, then dropped out. He delivered newspapers, worked stakeouts as an assistant to a private investigator, and began appearing at bars and bachelor parties as a neophyte standup comic. Onstage, Rogan was known as the Little Ball of Anger. In 1995, he caught a break, landing a role on the NBC sitcom "NewsRadio" as Joe Garrelli, a handyman who believed in extraterrestrials and thought that the federal judiciary was controlled by a secret society of Freemasons.
Rogan's career got another boost in the early two-thousands, when he was hired by NBC to host "Fear Factor," a reality show that asked contestants to eat live insects, lie in vats of snakes, or, in its more notorious moments, consume donkey semen and buffalo testicles for cash prizes. The show was a ratings hit and ran for several seasons, giving Rogan a level of financial independence rare among working comedians. At the same time, he became a fixture of Ultimate Fighting Championship broadcasts, providing excitable, technically fluent color commentary that helped translate the sport to a wider audience.
What marked Rogan in the comedy world, however, was not the originality of his material—he was a mediocre comedian—but a different kind of nerve. In 2007, video spread online of him at the Comedy Store, in Los Angeles, confronting a fellow-performer, Carlos Mencia, for stealing jokes from other comedians.
"The Joe Rogan Experience," which began in 2009, was a larkish next step in his show-business career. The earliest episodes—the "Mr. Watson, come here" phase—were ramshackle video live streams. They generally featured other male comedians, and the conversations had the loose, just-talking-shit coherence of a 2 A.M. dorm-room discussion convened over a bong and a plate of slowly congealing nachos.
The first episode, recorded with the comedian Brian Redban, opens with the two of them fumbling with their equipment on camera. It is Christmas Eve. After nearly twenty minutes of confusion and long silences, Rogan begins riffing crudely about late-night television. The conversation finally gathers momentum, with Rogan doing most of the talking, drifting from the rise of Jimi Hendrix and hallucinogens to Ultimate Fighting and false-flag operations, pausing only to contend with the comments scrolling past in real time.
After some two hours of this, Rogan makes what might be deemed the first political statement of "The Joe Rogan Experience." He pulls out a pistol and announces, "I believe in the Second Amendment," adding that it would be advisable not to sell guns to people who are crazy.
Not long afterward, Rogan notes that they are "up to three hundred and seventy-nine motherfuckers" and thanks them for tuning in and sending questions. "We're gonna do this much more often," he says—just as soon as he gets his "internet updated."
Hard to know. In the early months, Rogan largely steered clear of politics, returning instead to his core obsessions: space, large animals, supplements of a bewildering variety, sensory-deprivation tanks, and martial arts. It became common for Rogan and his almost invariably male guests to smoke weed or cigars while they talked. The tone was part Art Bell, part Opie and Anthony. Rogan's persona is old-school masculine—burly, profane, assertive—but seldom hostile. He is cocky, but not without finesse. He is the jock who skips the reading but says please, with a smile, when he asks to borrow your notes. A towel-snapper, yes, but one who can surprise you. He is as likely to insist on kindness as a virtue as he is to hold forth on the thrill of taking down a deer with a bow and arrow.
What was there from the start was Rogan's good humor and guileless curiosity, his habit of letting guests talk on, uninterrupted and unchallenged. His reflexive response to their flights of half-baked knowledge has always been grateful delight. He doesn't interrogate his guests; he rewards them, with a cheerful "Ho-leee shit!" or a chill "That's so crazy, man." He lives in a near-constant state of wonder. "We're ninety-nine per cent fuckin' chimpanzee!" "We're really just a complicated form of bacteria!"
Beneath all this runs a strain of nonreligious techno-spirituality. Not long ago, Rogan joined Jesse Michels on the podcast "American Alchemy" and provided, without a trace of irony, his vision of the coming singularity: a fusion of hardware and the Son of God.
By 2015, Rogan's podcast was a major success, and he happily accepted an invitation to go on the air with one of his heroes. Art Bell was now hosting an internet show called "Midnight in the Desert."
"Thanks for having me on, sir, it's a huge honor," Rogan began, telling Bell that he used to listen to him while driving home from the Comedy Store. Rogan was eager to establish their kinship. The two men shared an appetite for science and pseudoscience alike—for mysteries, conspiracies, the paranormal, psychedelics.
Bell and Rogan connected further over their fascination with hallucinogens. Rogan volunteered his enthusiasm for dimethyltryptamine, DMT, "the most intense psychedelic known to man," as he calls it. "When you take it, you experience something that knows everything." The user comes into "the presence of a higher power," gaining "contact with a divine entity." Rogan is always eager to catalogue what he ingests. Psychedelics, nootropics, extreme diets, game (there is a lot of elk meat), and punishing physical regimens are, for him, components of an ongoing experiment: the body as a laboratory, the mind as something to be unlocked, upgraded, or briefly dissolved altogether.
Two takeaways emerged from the hour with Art Bell. The first was that Rogan was disaffected with conventional politics. Asked whether he was interested in bringing politics onto his podcast, Rogan said that he was, but that "quite honestly, the game is so rigged." He admired figures like Ross Perot—mavericks "who stir things up." What about Donald Trump? Bell asked. Rogan was unimpressed. "He's a buffoon," he said, though he granted him a "bulldog determination."
The second was that Rogan had inherited from Bell a certain understanding of his role. Years later, hosting the comedian and podcaster Theo Von, one of his many imitators, Rogan spoke explicitly about his admiration for Bell's method. "He had a lot of interesting people, but then every now and then he would mix it up with a dude who says he's a werewolf. And Art would never go, 'Man, you ain't a werewolf!' He would go, 'Interesting, tell me more.' He let dudes talk. He let dudes say the most ridiculous shit."
That has always been Rogan's method, too—letting dudes say the most ridiculous shit. This is harmless fun when Bill Burr is cracking wise about marriage or Mark (the Undertaker) Calaway is reviewing his career as a pro wrestler. The complications began as the show widened in scope.
Rogan branched out early, talking to wellness gurus. Hip-hop artists soon became a regular presence, with guests like B-Real, Immortal Technique, Mix Master Mike, and Action Bronson. Six years ago, Kanye West rambled at length about his religious beliefs, his mental health, and his grievances with the music industry, without causing much offense. Then, in greater profusion, came big thinkers of various stripes: Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Debra Soh, Ben Shapiro.
Rogan's own politics are all over the place. He is pro-gay marriage, pro-universal basic income, pro-Second Amendment. He mixes a streak of anti-woke, anti-identity-politics comedy with a hairy-chested variety of broadmindedness. He was only grudgingly accepting when the subject turned to Caitlyn Jenner: "I'll call her a woman if she wants to be a woman. I'll call you whatever you want. I don't care. But you can't tell me she's beautiful and that, because I disagree, I'm a piece of shit." On one episode, he schooled Candace Owens about her dismissal of climate science. He has found common ground with Bernie Sanders on income inequality, foreign wars, and automated labor, though they clashed over Elon Musk. In 2020, Rogan said he would "probably" vote for Sanders for President, calling him "insanely consistent his entire life."
As Rogan's success grew—five years ago, he signed a licensing deal with Spotify that was reportedly worth more than two hundred million dollars over three and a half years—he began to attract more serious scrutiny. During and after the pandemic, Rogan emerged as a prominent convener of COVID-skeptical discussion. He hosted Suzanne Humphries, a nephrologist who left mainstream practice and became an ardent anti-vaccine activist. She told Rogan that tuberculosis was a "side effect of the smallpox vaccine," that the COVID vaccine contained snake genes, and that polio was caused by DDT. Robert Malone, a physician and biochemist, warned Rogan's listeners that COVID vaccines could be likened to Nazi medical experiments. Rogan repeatedly insisted that he was not an anti-vaxxer, but he did not receive a COVID vaccine himself. He refused to accept the authority of the medical establishment. Anthony Fauci, he said recently, "was driving me fucking crazy." When he tested positive in 2021, he took, among other things, the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, which is not a treatment that any major health organization would endorse.
In 2022, the singer India Arie Simpson shared a video montage of Rogan using the N-word dozens of times on his show over the years. Rogan said that he was "not a racist" but issued an apology, calling the incident the "most regretful and shameful" matter he had ever had to address publicly. Spotify removed dozens of old episodes from its platform, though Rogan maintained that his use of the word was by way of quotation and reference, not invective.
By then, Rogan had already become a broader symbol in the culture wars and a kind of spokesman for alienated young men. The two leading candidates for the upcoming Republican nomination dismissed the controversies that had briefly surrounded Rogan. Trump urged him to "stop apologizing to the Fake News and Radical Left maniacs and lunatics," while Ron DeSantis implored him, "Do not kowtow to the mob. Stand up and tell them to pound sand."
Where Rogan runs into trouble is in extending the same uncritical hospitality to pseudo-scholars and racists that he once did to moon-landing skeptics. Over the years, he has hosted a cavalcade of extreme right-wing provocateurs, including Stefan Molyneux, Gavin McInnes, Steven Crowder, and Milo Yiannopoulos, figures who traffic in white nationalism and conspiratorial grievance. Alex Jones, a particularly malevolent presence, has appeared several times.
😳Rogan was entranced by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who appeared on the show in 2023 and rehearsed his familiar arguments about vaccines while reviving a discredited theory that the deadly 1918 Spanish-flu pandemic was not viral in origin but, rather, the side effect of an experimental meningitis vaccine tested on soldiers in Kansas.
Rogan profits from his influence but disclaims responsibility for it when pressed. "I talk shit for a living," he said from the stage of a comedy club in Austin. "If you're taking vaccine advice from me, is that really my fault? What dumb shit were you about to do when my stupid idea sounded better? 'You know that dude who made people eat animal dicks on TV? How does he feel about medicine?' If you want my advice, don't take my advice."
And yet he does not hesitate to dispense it. In 2024, while Kennedy was still running as a third-party candidate, Rogan said that he was "the only one that makes sense to me." Trump, evidently miffed, posted, "It will be interesting to see how loudly Joe Rogan gets BOOED the next time he enters the UFC ring???" Rogan quickly retreated. "I'm not the guy to get political information from," he said.
After Kennedy dropped out and found a home in the MAGA movement, Trump turned his attention to winning over Rogan. In 2022, Rogan had called Trump "an existential threat to democracy," but his friend Dana White, the U.F.C. entrepreneur and a MAGA stalwart, had long encouraged him to invite Trump on the show.
Two weeks before the election, Trump left thousands of supporters languishing at a rally in Traverse City, Michigan, and spent three hours with Rogan in his warehouse studio in Austin. It was a lovefest. Unimpeded by challenging questions or even mild interruption, Trump launched into one of his digressive "weaves," touching on "the enemy from within," dead whales, Abraham Lincoln's melancholia, the halcyon days of "The Apprentice," and the possibility of ending the income tax. He deftly pandered to Rogan's enthusiasms, from mixed martial arts to the prospect of life on Mars.
Rogan even offered Trump an opening to air his favorite grievance about the 2020 election. "How do you think you were robbed? Everybody always cuts you off." He flattered Trump's performance skills. "One of the beautiful things about you is that you freeball," Rogan said. "It's standup. You have, like, comedic instincts. Like when you said to Hillary, 'You'd be in jail.' That's great timing!"
Judged by the standards of journalism, Rogan whiffed the interview. This was not Frost-Nixon, or Emily Maitlis with Prince Andrew. He regarded his guest with the rapt attention of a beagle pup. He admired Trump as a fellow-performer, his comic sense and stamina.
On the eve of the election, Rogan endorsed Trump. At the victory party, Trump briefly stepped away from the microphone and gave Dana White the floor to thank a roster of crucial supporters.
What followed was a prolonged bout of hand-wringing among Democrats, stunned by Kamala Harris's loss, over why she had never appeared on "The Joe Rogan Experience"—and why there seemed to be no equivalent figure on the left.
In the aftermath of Watergate, trust in the mass media stood at more than seventy per cent. Today, it has fallen to twenty-eight per cent. On average, two American newspapers now close every week; nearly three thousand have disappeared in the past two decades. Gen Z and millennials overwhelmingly get their news from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and other social platforms. And Trump, who both resents the legacy press and senses its weakness, has taken full advantage—denouncing journalists as enemies of the people, filing costly nuisance lawsuits, and manipulating mergers to bend major news organizations to his will.
In this chaotic media multiverse, Rogan has emerged as a singular figure. He has more than fourteen million followers on Spotify and more than twenty million on YouTube, many of them, in the language of contemporary campaigns, "low-propensity" male voters. Jordan Peterson has called Rogan "the most powerful journalist who's ever lived." This is a category error. Rogan is not a journalist—he does no reporting and asks no hard questions. And yet he can no longer pretend to be merely a modern incarnation of Nebel or Bell.
In 2018, Bari Weiss published an admiring collective portrait in the Times of anti-establishment media figures, including Rogan, under the banner "The Intellectual Dark Web." More recently, the conservative writer and editor Sohrab Ahmari has proposed a grimmer taxonomy—"the Barbarian Right"—to describe what he sees as the increasing toxicity on his side of the ideological spectrum, "the rise of a cohort of writers, pseudo-scholars, and shitposters dedicated to reviving some of the darkest tendencies in the history of thought." Rogan has not hesitated to host such provocateurs. The problem is that, when he does so, he doesn't challenge them. He tends to delight in their transgressions; the thrill of saying forbidden things appeals to him as a comedian. But he has neither the preparation nor the disposition to push back. His default posture is the improviser's "yes, and," not the journalist's "O.K., but."
Take Rogan's interviews last year with the self-styled "independent researcher" Ian Carroll and the similarly self-styled Darryl Cooper. Carroll and Rogan began their conversation batting around, like an old chew toy, the assassination of John F. Kennedy. With no resistance from Rogan, Carroll soon moved on to "Jewish billionaires that get together on behalf of global Judaism." Jeffrey Epstein, he claimed, was part of a "Jewish organization of Jewish people working on behalf of Israel and other groups," tied to the C.I.A., Mossad, and British intelligence. Israel, Carroll went on, had been founded by Jewish mobsters and "the Rothschild banking family." Responding to one of Carroll's arias on Israeli history and early paramilitary groups, Rogan remarked, "What's interesting is you can talk about this now, post-October 7th, post-Gaza."
Cooper, for his part, has a popular Substack newsletter called "Martyr Made." He is convinced that only the new independent media has both the will and the bravery to uncover corruption. His followers on X have included Vice-President J. D. Vance, who has also appeared on Rogan's show. On the subject of the Nazis and the Second World War, Cooper presents himself as an intrepid skeptic, challenging what he calls historical pieties. Hitler, he told Rogan, was a "prophet figure" who opposed, rather than initiated, Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom. The Führer's antisemitism, Cooper argues, was merely a way of expressing solidarity with the impoverished German people and justifying his nationalism. The death of millions of Jews in concentration camps was the result not of a deliberate policy of extermination, Cooper has claimed, but of regrettable logistical failures in the provision of food and supplies. Better to kill them swiftly than to let them slowly starve.
Rogan is quick to say that he is not antisemitic. After Ilhan Omar remarked that American political support for Israel was "all about the Benjamins," Rogan pushed back on the backlash. "That's not an antisemitic statement," he said, adding, "The idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza. It's fucking stupid."
Cooper's analysis struck Rogan as similarly unobjectionable. Why, he wondered, did Jews react so strongly to such claims? "You start thinking the way your paranoid Jewish friends think, that everybody's antisemitic, and you go, Well, now I kind of understand why they think that way," he told Cooper at one point. "I kind of understand the overreaction, but it is still an overreaction, and I think what you do is very valuable."⚠️
Not long after the Carroll and Cooper episodes, Rogan invited Dave Smith, a comedian and a scathing critic of Israel, to the studio, along with Douglas Murray, a British neoconservative who is fiercely supportive of Israel and fiercely opposed to immigration from Muslim countries. Smith was defiantly smug; Murray was exceedingly pompous. But Murray, at least, arrived with a clear aim: not only to take on Smith, Carroll, and Cooper but to put Rogan himself on notice.
Rogan is rarely challenged on his show, and his mood quickly darkened when Murray asked him why he would invite antisemites to expound on his program.
Murray kept at him. "There's some point at which 'I'm just raising questions' is not a valid thing," he said. "You're not asking questions—you're telling them something." He went on, "I feel you've opened the door to quite a lot of people who now have got a big platform, who have been throwing out counter-historical stuff of a very dangerous kind. . . . These guys are not historians. They're not knowledgeable about anything."
Rogan was unmoved. He retreated to first principles, defending Smith's prerogative to offer analysis of a history and a region he scarcely knew. His habit of letting dudes say the most ridiculous shit had hardened into doctrine.
Rogan is no less indulgent with the barons of technology. He listened with amused approval as Mark Zuckerberg waxed on eagerly about how corporate culture had been "neutered" and how he had taken up martial arts to revive his "masculine energy."
Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and, most of all, Elon Musk have also found a welcoming refuge in Rogan's studio. Last February, while Musk was leading the DOGE assault on the federal government, Rogan handed him the microphone for more than three hours, allowing him to tout Tesla and SpaceX and to explain how he had purged Twitter of the "woke mind virus." Rather than challenge Musk about his bizarre appearance at a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden, Rogan offered only that it was "strange" Musk had been accused of giving a Nazi salute after making a hand gesture that looked exactly like, well, a Nazi salute.
The two men also lingered, with evident fascination, on the subject of A.I.-powered sex robots. Rogan wondered how long it would be before such a machine reached the market.
"Probably not long," Musk said. "Less than five years probably."
"Really?" Rogan asked. "Will it be warm?"
I spent way too many hours this summer and fall listening to Rogan—on long walks through the park in the early morning, late at night in bed. In Don DeLillo's "Underworld," a character says, "I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power." Long John Nebel and Art Bell, and so many other radio-era voices, toyed with that power. The easing of loneliness—the voice in your ear—was the main thing. Rogan has stumbled into a different kind of power, less magical and less consoling. There is a reason politicians and billionaires now flock to him, and regret it when they miss their chance.
Rogan is likely to matter politically for the foreseeable future, though anyone assuming he will reliably line up behind Trump has not been listening lately. In fact, he has taken something of a turn against the President. He agreed with a recent guest who said that the President "is losing it." War with Venezuela, Rogan said, was "a terrible idea." He has expressed alarm at the behavior of ICE agents in Minneapolis, saying, "Are we really going to be the Gestapo? 'Where's your papers?' Is that what we've come to?" He has called the targeting of ordinary, non-criminal migrants "horrific" and "insane." He has criticized the price of the new White House ballroom and recoiled from Trump's post mocking Rob Reiner just hours after he was murdered.
Then, there was Rogan's recent conversation with James Talarico, a Democratic state representative from Texas who's now running for the Senate. The two spent nearly three hours circling church-state separation, partisan cynicism, and the possibility of empathy across divides. By the end, Rogan was urging Talarico to run for President. It was one of those episodes that remind you what the show can be when it is not auditioning for outrage. Rogan is genuinely interested in people, willing to let an earnest guest finish a thought. But he's also a wide-open door, welcoming transgression for its own sake, for stoner giggles.
Back in 2018, the Trump strategist Steve Bannon explained to Michael Lewis, "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
Rogan once had the luxury of letting people do some version of that in his presence—the way Art Bell or Long John Nebel did, salving a diffuse hunger for connection with a sprawl of sometimes fantastical talk. For a long time, liberal America had its own soothing and corrective ritual: Jon Stewart behind the desk on "The Daily Show," turning the day's lies and indignities into punch lines. (And, though his audience is a fraction of Rogan's, he's very much back.) But the old circuitry has been rewired.
The stakes are no longer flying saucers or pit bulls. Rogan has decided to matter, or, anyway, the country has decided that he does. His audience is large enough, and the people who covet it powerful enough, that he is no longer merely a genial impresario of talk. He is part of the machinery by which ideas—good, bad, and grotesque—move from the margins into the mainstream. His signature hospitality can look like decency. But it's the kind of decency that tends to judge indecency mainly by its entertainment value.
Near the end of the Gillis conversation, the two laughingly alighted on the fascist Nick Fuentes, who had recently undergone a chummy interview with Tucker Carlson. Rogan jokingly suggested that Fuentes, who says he finds Hitler "cool," might win the Presidency in a few years.
"Well, we'll see," Gillis said.
"I gotta pee so bad. We gotta wrap this up."
"We got that one at the buzzer," Gillis said.
"I will say this about it—it's fascinating to watch," Rogan said, by way of conclusion. "There's, like, a whole group of people that feel very unrepresented in the world. Especially, like, young men. And here you've got this young guy with a very high verbal I.Q. And he also does a lot of shitposting, a lot of talking shit, a lot of trolling, says women shouldn't be allowed to vote. This is wild shit!" ♦