02/13/2026
Joe Rogan is the man. Most people don't realize how many books he reads and how pristine his analytical abilities are.
When he first launched his podcast, Joe 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. From the start, he displayed a guileless curiosity, 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 sh*t!” or a chill “That’s so crazy, man.” He lives in a near-constant state of wonder. “We’re 99 per cent f**kin’ chimpanzee!” “We’re really just a complicated form of bacteria!”
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.
“The stakes are no longer flying saucers or pit bulls,” David Remnick writes. “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.” Remnick writes about how Joe Rogan became a political and cultural force: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/G88GU_