Joe Rogan is a case study in voluntary indoctrination. Some context.

Out of the brain frying pan and into the brain fryer.

“I’m a fuckin’ moron. I’m not a respected source of information — even for me, but I at least try to be honest about what I’m saying.”

It was the promise of Joe Rogan’s new media revolution, simultaneously an admission and a assurance to his audience. The modern day revival of Socrates’ famous maxim. Long before it was so perfectly encapsulated in reference to Rogan’s vaccine skepticism, it had become the fundamental message of his brand. No script, no secret agenda. Just a guy talking about stuff, just people having conversations.

Rogan’s ignorance was, in many ways, our window into his world. He would sit back and listen as fascinating people shared fascinating stories and insights on fascinating topics (and a lot of martial arts stuff), and we would join him on the journey. He would ask the questions so many of us were thinking, get confused, frustrated, and have his mind blown in all the same places we would, and give topics room to breathe. So maybe he didn’t quite understand everything that was being said, so what? Who could expect him to keep up in a conversation about physics with someone who publishes research papers for a living?

It was a winning model, and while Rogan loves to remind people that his humble operation is run by a team of only three, size is not always an indicator of influence. The Joe Rogan Experience is a media empire, though perhaps a little more Vatican City than Mongol Horde. Much like the pope, in whose gloved hands lay the authority to crown a Holy Roman Emperor from among the many catholic monarchs of medieval Europe, so Rogan crowns, defends, and dethrones at his discretion, giving platforms to an increasingly outlandish cast of conspiracy theorists and right wing pundits without ever staining the spotless vestments or reputation of his office. After all, he reminds us, he’s just asking questions.

The original promise of free speech, that by giving each and every idea its opportunity to be heard our collective intelligence and fundamental desire for a better world would somehow inevitably bring us to the truth, is under strain like never before. We are now deluged with so much information that our brains, let alone our societies, are starting to buckle under the pressure. We barely have time to make a snap judgement, to pick a side, and we’re on to the next image, the next statistic, the next wild claim and or controversial opinion. It’s not just Rogan, of course; truth by vibe has now become the basis for everything from media coverage to political campaigning, and even online dating.

But Rogan does play an outsized role as a purveyor of personality-based messaging. His platform provides more than just a truly massive audience, with hundreds of millions of monthly listeners, but also an unparalleled level of cultural relevance and legitimacy. The Joe Rogan Experience Spotify roster includes everyone from global power players like Elon Musk, academic behemoths like Niel DeGrasse Tyson, esteemed philosophers like Cornel West, and… some guy who isn’t sure what a woman is?

That’s not to say that every episode has to be an intellectual deep dive, either. Rogan’s ‘yeah dude’ style romps through the meaning of life with his Friend Duncan Trussel, or the numerous comedians and athletes he counts among his regular guests are a more light-hearted, and equally valid, contribution to the podcast space, probably part of what keeps his audience so broad and enthusiastic. But when widely discredited and pseudointellectual ideas like HIV/AIDS denialism, climate change denial, or school shooting hoaxes make up such a disproportionately large part of the content, it can be a real problem.

Rogan doesn’t challenge most of these ideas, or can’t, leaving the audience to make up their own mind. The problem is that when 99% of experts agree on something, and are given the same amount of air time as the 1% who don’t, it suggests an equality of both evidence and opinion. In a world where ‘doing your own research’ rarely amounts to anything empirical, and where ‘alternative facts’ define so much of our media, a couple of hours with Joe Rogan can make the online marketplace of ideas look increasingly like a natural monopoly. Of course, majority opinion does not equal fact, but while Rogan is openly skeptical of many branches of contemporary science, it has proven itself time and again over the centuries. Unlike many of his guests, it does not provide answers, but merely a method for finding them based on questioning and self-correction. We get there in the end.

Rogan’s flair for the extravagant, freewheeling, fantastical, speculative and outright conspiratorial is easy enough to explain. A 70s kid who grew up on a diet of UFOs and JFK assassination fever, when the American intelligence agencies were at their most omnipotent and terrifying, questioning everything you were told was a cultural pastime, and helped birth the alternative realities which so many Americans now choose to inhabit. Add to this the US government’s genuinely shady activities surrounding everything from Area 51 to 9/11 to secret interrogation black sites, and it’s easy to plot a course towards conspiracy. Rogan’s conveyor belt of wacky and wonderful characters also includes loud-mouth comedians looking for a viral clip, couldn’t-be-more-serious truthers on everything from ancient aliens to the carnivore diet, and straight up grifters who know what people like to hear.

And we do like to hear it. It’s captivating content. Who wouldn’t want to speculate on the spiritual technologies of a hyperdiffuse ancient civilisation? Or imagine the horrifying brutality of life beyond the Korean DMZ? How about spending a few hours in the urine-soaked gutters of a bygone era, where NYC’s sleaze and squalor were a thing of legend? Sign me up. Some of the details might be a bit hard to believe, but that never ruined a good story. I also don’t think that Joe Rogan is responsible for fact-checking, or even interrogating his guests. He’s not qualified, and it would ruin the conversational charm that makes the podcast what it is. We, the audience, enter at our own risk. The point is that Rogan likes talking to interesting characters, and has surrounded himself with people who can wax lyrical for three hours on whatever pops into their head, rather than bore their audience to death with facts and figures. He likes talking to these guys (and, very occasionally, girls), and I love listening to them.

I get it.

But recently, I noticed that something has changed.

I have to admit I don’t obsessively watch every episode of JRE, not anymore. I’m not interested in his buddies’ opinions about the UFC, or their attempts at comedy, but when a particular guest catches my eye I will more than happily settle in for the whole three-hour session. It was a recent interview with Vice co-founder Shane Smith, an enigmatic, influential and occasionally controversial figure who you just know has got some stories to tell, where I found myself genuinely shocked by what I heard:

**Smith: **…and on immigration, [the truth] is almost impossible to find. Or maybe it is impossible to find.

*Rogan: Well, the bottom line is a lot of people are being brought into this country and then being shipped to swing states. That’s real. That’s undeniable.* The percentage of people that are in swing states, of illegal immigrants moving to swing states is off the hook. It’s crazy. It’s a bizarre number. That seems to be a strategy. It seems because they get,

Smith: But they can’t vote?

*Rogan: *Of course you can eventually. They’re trying to do that.

*Smith: *I mean, you can vote like in 10-20 years. Is that what you’re-

*Rogan: *Well, first of all you have no ID voting. Okay? Right. This is something that they’ve pushed in California and they pushed a lot of places. There’s only one reason to have no id. That’s to have people that can vote that shouldn’t be voting. That’s the only reason. If you only want the people to vote that should be voting. You ask for id just like you asked for id for everything else, for getting on an airplane, for everything.

*Smith: *I believe in, I look, I believe in ID. I’m just saying, I’m just saying if you’re not a citizen-

*Rogan: *The only reason to have no ID, and to push that, and it’s only being pushed by the Democrats. There’s only one reason that makes any logical sense. You want people to vote that probably shouldn’t be voting so you can get some extra votes. That’s the only thing that makes sense. So then if you have people like Nancy Pelosi who’s openly talked about giving amnesty to the people that already here, you have voters now. So you have voters in swing states that you brought into this country and you provided them an amazing life and the Democrats brought them there. They’re going to be loyal to the Democrats, especially if the Democrats continue to provide them with housing and money. And why would you vote that out? Why would you vote for a bunch of people that want to deport you? They’re talking about mass deportations. Imagine if you came here from Haiti. You lived a terribly poor life in Haiti. Now you have a good job in Springfield, Ohio, and you’re like, “I can’t fucking believe we’re in America. This is amazing!” And someone comes along and gives you the ability to vote and then another group is saying, we’re going to mass deportate [sic] you because you people are eating all the dogs and all the cats. Then there’s like this fucking… and of course you’re, you’re getting voters, you’re bringing in voters and you’re getting voters. You’re gonna get them to vote for you.

**Smith: *That’s something I haven’t seen. I’m not denying it or fighting. That’s something we haven’t* seen, like, personally.

Rogan: Right. We haven’t seen it, but it’s clearly a strategy that you could employ. And if you were gonna employ that, wouldn’t you move those people to swing states? You would. And if you find out that there’s an app that you can use, and you use this app, and they’ll let you in the country, you can schedule a way to illegally move to the country, and then you’re legally protected once you’ve done that. So it’s basically an open border.

Smith: Okay.

**Rogan: **You know what I’m saying?

What the fuck was that?

That was Joe Rogan, forceful, pushy, brow-beating his guest into submission with a combination of conjecture and conspiracy theory and not a shred of evidence. Not even an anecdote. I genuinely couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

I’m used to him entertaining the more fiery fringes of political discourse, nodding along in that way that we all do when we can’t really figure out how to respond until a topic came up that he was more comfortable with. I didn’t like a lot of his opinions, but that wasn’t why I was listening anyway. Agree to disagree.

But this was something else entirely. This was a Rogan telling his guest, a journalist who had just explained that he’d done an investigative ‘dive’ into the immigration issue, the culmination of 10 years spent reporting on the border, that actually he knew better. No agreeing to disagree, no careful consideration. No acknowledgement that Shane Smith not only might have more information on this particular issue, but also that he was the guest, the supposed expert. Rogan’s rant, on the other hand, seems like it might be based on a twitter post shared by his good buddy Elon Musk, a viral graphic entirely lacking any evidence whatsoever. The kind of information warfare conducted by members of the global elite that Rogan would once have railed against. Just saying.

It wasn’t just Rogan’s behaviour that was so disturbing, either. Shane Smith, the raconteur media mogul bold enough to hang out with cannibalistic African warlords and challenge Barack Obama’s questionable policy record to his face, was clearly panicking and struggling to find his words. He couldn’t quite bring himself to accept Rogan’s ridiculous analysis, to his credit, clinging desperately to a vestige of journalistic integrity, but he is very, very careful not to challenge or disagree, or even to question. It’s not an interview, but it’s the softest of softballs. Look, he’s got a new podcast of his own in need of an audience, and given the dire situation of the VICE Media Group, alienating Rogan’s tens of millions of fans would be promotional suicide. No one wants to be on bad terms with the undisputed King of the online conversation. Even so, he can’t hide his discomfort.

But it seems like the actual conversations are basically over. They’ve become something else. A platform, with an agenda, just like all the others. Rogan’s promise to us all, to represent our ignorance as moron in chief, to listen, to keep an open mind, has been broken, and I’m not sure he even realises. How exactly did we get here?

The fascinating thing about Joe Rogan in particular as a case study of rightwing radicalisation is that we can watch it happen over time, episode by episode. We can follow his evolving vocabulary, his roster of guests, and his occasional outbursts. His podcast is an archive that will be poured over by future generations of psychologists to analyse contemporary online discourse and its effect on society. And the process is pretty simple, when you think about it.

Surrounding himself with people whose extraordinary claims and clear enthusiasm provide ready-made content, Rogan is bombarded on a daily basis by a heady cocktail of intrigue and inference. His latent mistrust of authority forms a solid frame of reference on which to hang an increasingly convoluted narrative which builds up steadily over time, episode by episode, until it all starts to make sense. Yes, the government is lying to you, and getting worse and worse at doing it, an informational void into which can be poured pretty much anything you like, the more outlandish the better, at least as far as viral clips are concerned. Eventually all these fragmented ideas come together, like a cork board covered in intricate webs of red string. As Rogan references more and more of his previous guests’ wild assertions to a receptive audience. whoever it is who happens to be sitting across the famous hand-carved table from him, you can almost hear the confirmatory neurons firing in his brain.

At the same time, of course, those more mainstream voices, establishment figures with the boring task of elucidating common consensus, are driven away. Less inclined to feature on a podcast in which their content will be clipped and critiqued from every dark corner of the internet, and less enjoyable for Rogan himself, who will have to deal with their incessant fact-checking, nuance and balance. Human memory is a strange thing, and as research suggests that we only actually remember the last time we recalled things, happily changing details based on the response of our audience, its easy enough to understand how Rogan’s meteoric rise has simultaneously lead him down a slippery slope. He’ll be the first to admit, or even declare, that his COVID-era vaccine skepticism was what first took him down a rabbit hole which ultimately lead to questioning the moon landing.

And this is how indoctrination happens. It’s not a hook, line and sinker swallowing like some people might imagine. It’s a process, a slow and steady reconfiguration of our mental mechanics until the relationship between input and output is fundamentally altered. In this, Rogan is not unique, you can see the same phenomena at work all across the political spectrum, from ultra-fixated anti-trans activists to micro-aggression obsessed polyamorous progressives. All of them saturated in their own ideology, stewed for so long in their own juices that they didn’t even notice as the heat boiled their brains. Rogan is unique, though, in his profile and influence, with everyone from the world’s richest man to presidential candidates from both parties desperate for a slot on his show. He is a thought leader, as much as he might want to deny it, chasing his tail and dragging tens of millions of us along with him.

This won’t be news to him, though. He’s been around long enough to understand the complex relationship between our immediate social environment and inner psychological landscape that we all have to navigate. In fact, I couldn’t have put it better myself:

“Maybe if you live with crazy bitches long enough they fuckin’ turn you into one.” Rogan mused on an episode of his podcast back in 2020, “Maybe you go crazy. Maybe that too.”