Joe Rogan Is Still Hiding

The following story is co-published with Freddie deBoer’s Substack.

There’s something slippery about the concept of independence, especially in media. It’s a term that gets thrown around so often and so loosely that it has come to mean almost nothing at all, other than a vague sense of contrarianism, or the performance of open-mindedness. Independence can serve as a kind of rhetorical get-out-of-jail-free card, invoked to defend everything from sensible moderation to unhinged paranoia — and I say that as someone who owes his career to the perception that mine is an independent voice. I think we all know what we want independence to mean, something like a willingness to think for oneself, to hold positions that do not align perfectly with any party or tribe, the tendency to defy the opinions of those commonly thought of as our allies. Political independence is an important ideal. The trouble is that independence always gets read through the biases and presumptions of the beholder, leaving us in a position where one person’s independence can very easily look like another person’s conformity.

Nowhere is this dynamic more obvious than in the cult of Joe Rogan. His defenders often describe him as a kind of roving intellect — curious, flexible, ideologically unmoored. He’s just a guy asking questions, they say, a guy willing to talk to anyone, a guy who refuses to color inside the lines. And to be fair, that perception isn’t entirely false. Rogan has, on occasion, platformed voices from across the political spectrum, from Bernie Sanders to Alex Jones, from Cornel West to Ben Shapiro. That’s more range than you’ll find on most cable news networks. But there’s always a gap between what someone says they’re open to and the actual structure of the world they’ve built around themselves. And once you start looking closely at who gets invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience — and just as importantly, who doesn’t — the show’s reputation for open-mindedness starts to look a lot like brand management.

Rogan’s defenders typically argue that he’s in fact just a curious guy who wants to hear all kinds of opinions and ideas, and as such he gives everyone who appears on his show a fair hearing. And it’s certainly true that he’s willing to listen to what guests have to say, with a few exceptions. (Liberal uber-dork Adam Conover did not receive a friendly reception, for one.) I do think that Rogan at least tries to be open minded, and as many have said, sometimes his mind is so open, it feels like he believes whatever the last person to talk to him believes. But here’s the problem: if your guest list is heavily tilted toward the right and you’re the kind of interviewer to let your guest say whatever they want, then you end up with a right-wing show, regardless of whether you’re theoretically open-minded. And this is particularly true given that his conservative guests tend to fixate on politics while his left-leaning guests (academics and celebrities, primarily) are typically there to talk about something else. If a liberal movie star comes on and only talks about movies, you haven’t actually meaningful increased the liberal presence on the show.

Add in the fact that his platform is so large, few guests feel they can risk finding themselves on the outs, and you’ve got a recipe for a show that tends to reflect Rogan’s own underlying beliefs, which are famously idiosyncratic but still reflect an identifiable political tendency in the 21st century, what we might call Podcast Conservatism. As long as his guest roll is tilted the way it is, toward people who agree with him on his political priors and people who disagree but are there to talk about something else than politics, the show is anything but neutral. Rogan the interviewer may very well be as friendly and receptive as his fans still insist he is. But Rogan the booker renders that status irrelevant.

Now, having explicitly thrown his weight behind Donald Trump in 2024, with the vibe well and shifted, and with MAGA rampaging all over the American government, the illusion of Rogan’s nonpartisan openness has finally collapsed under its own weight. You can still find plenty of people (especially middle-aged guys going through a divorce who just got into psychedelics) who will tell you that Joe is “just asking questions.” But by now we should probably ask, who gets to be the ones answering those questions? And why are they always asked in the same direction? Why is it still so rare for Rogan to have on a guest who holds progressive social positions and is willing to argue with him about them? I say that as someone whose willingness to critique progressive social politics should not be in question.

It’s a funny thing: Rogan’s political heterodoxy was always a selling point, a way to say “see, not everything has to be tribal,” which, fine. It’s good and right to resist tribalism. But at some point, when you spend hundreds of hours platforming vaccine skeptics, election truthers, red-pill goons, and every manner of faux renegade conservative — all under the banner of open-minded inquiry — and almost none talking to anyone who forcefully represents the views you spend so much time mocking … well, it’s hard not to see that curiosity as a bit of a sham. If Rogan is indeed just a curious guy with no agenda, then we’re left with the awkward question of why his curiosity seems to break so consistently in one direction. I’m not saying he needs to agree with a leftist trans activist or a public health official who supported the more restrictive COVID protocols. I’m saying he should talk to some. About that stuff! Engage with people who are both willing and able to intelligently defend positions that are contrary to his on his pet issues. Bring on people who both will argue with Rogan and are skilled at arguing.

I made something like this point several years ago, and once again was in a position to chuckle at the real meaning of independence; a lot of readers who have praised me in the past for my independence got theatrically mad at me for criticizing Rogan … which of course was an expression of my independence. Either way, we’re now in an era where Rogan’s skepticism toward liberal piety could hardly be called countercyclical, let alone brave, which again prompts the question: how exactly can he be said to be independent at all, in 2025?

I’m afraid it’s hard to see any real pushing back happening, at least with any kind of consistency. The left-of-center voices on his show tend to be celebrities with vaguely liberal priors who aren’t there to argue politics. When he books an academic, it’s a physicist there to talk about quantum consciousness, or a nutritionist to talk about elk meat. When it’s somebody in a creative field, it’s someone who he won’t talk to about divisive social issues; when he has someone on who he will talk to about divisive social issues, they’re almost always someone who will dutifully nod along with Joe’s spiel about the corrupt media and pronouns and how good things used to be before wokeness. And if someone does disagree, they tend to do so politely, vaguely, abstractly — because they want to be invited back. Rogan’s show is still one of the biggest media platforms on Earth. It can spike a book into the bestseller list overnight. It can resurrect a flagging career. It can move serious cultural capital. And everyone knows that if you challenge Rogan too directly, too passionately, too confidently, you might just find yourself exiled from his little podcast kingdom, which houses not just his own show but this whole little solar system of satellite bro-casts that play to the same listener base in the same way.

This is the hidden machinery that makes Rogan’s performance of openness so effective: He doesn’t need to yell or dominate or steamroll his guests, because he doesn’t book the kinds of people who would try to go toe-to-toe with him on issues he cares about. When someone like Conover does show up and try to push back, it turns into a kind of one-off spectacle — look at the smug liberal getting owned, look at Joe defending common sense against the scolds — and then we’re right back to interviewing Jordan Peterson about lobster hierarchies. The fact that Conover stood out so starkly tells you how rarely that dynamic even has a chance to occur. And yes, Conover did a particularly bad job of defending his point of view. But that’s kind of the point, right? Most of Rogan’s guests don’t have to defend anything, because they agree with him. I’m glad that Eddie Izzard came on the show, and there was a little back-and-forth on some issues of controversy regarding trans rights. But you’ll find that the conversation is rather oblique and deferential on those issues, which makes sense because Izzard is an actor and a comedian, not a political advocate; he’s not someone whose comfort or experience is in tangling on the actual specific issues that Rogan will often engage with when he’s comfortably sitting across from an anti-woke comedian.

If Rogan really wanted to earn his reputation as a forum for open dialogue, he would seek out real ideological confrontation. Not the bizarro-world kind of “debate” where one side is represented by, say, Ben Shapiro and the other by Russell Brand shouting about chemtrails. I mean actual confrontation: a serious, knowledgeable trans activist who will directly challenge his rhetoric; a sharp critic of COVID misinformation who will walk him through exactly how and why he has gotten things wrong; a vegan animal rights activist passionately opposed to hunting; anyone who will, as the man likes to say, “push back.” But that rarely, if ever, happens. Rogan the interviewer may genuinely think he’s a champion of intellectual pluralism, but Rogan the booker? Rogan the executive producer, the showrunner, the gatekeeper? That guy has built a world in which dissent is safely contained, and the only real opposition is the kind you can dismiss with a shrug and an anecdote about DMT. The little world he has built in Austin is profoundly symbolic of the impregnable intellectual kingdom he has built for himself for years.

I don’t have any personal antipathy toward Rogan, nor do I doubt that a lot of his more voluble critics have often been unfair. This isn’t a general interest takedown. I’m talking about the persistent myth that he’s some neutral vessel for ideas, his show a curious blank slate just navigating the world with you, man. In reality, it’s more like a series of artfully placed mirrors: every reflection ultimately points back to the same worldview, the same assumptions, the same tired culture-war posturing. And if the show really was about discovery, about challenge, about being surprised … wouldn’t the guest list reflect that? You can believe that Joe Rogan is authentically himself on the mic, that he believes what he says, that he says what he thinks, and I suspect that you’d be right. But until he opens up his guest list to people who will meaningfully argue with him, on the topics where he actually has strong, divisive opinions, then we should stop pretending that his show is some bastion of free-thinking dialogue. It’s not. It’s a very large platform carefully constructed to create the appearance of confrontation while ensuring that no real challenge ever arrives.

You don’t need to be “triggered” by Joe Rogan to see the artifice at play here. You just have to pay attention to what he doesn’t want to talk about — and who he never seems to talk to.