How Joe Rogan’s podcast came to represent America

For more on the culture that has shaped the last quarter century, check out The 25 pieces of culture that explain the last 25 years.

Joe Rogan is many things — a comedian, a commentator, and a contrarian; a reality TV star and martial artist-turned-host of the most listened to podcast in America: The Joe Rogan Experience. His fans say he’s just asking questions, calling out liberal hypocrisy, and defending free speech. His critics use other terms: a conspiracy theorist and peddler of misinformation and anti-trans rhetoric, who platforms not just off-the-wall ideas, but dangerous narratives that cause real-world harm.

There’s truth in all these labels. There’s another way to think of Rogan that may help put him in his rightful context for this decade: “Joe Rogan is the Walter Cronkite of Our Era,” declared British satirist Konstantin Kisin for Quilette in 2019. “Not one established newspaper or broadcaster can now compete with a popular YouTube host conducting a conversation from his self-funded studio,” he wrote at the time, reflecting on Rogan’s three-hour interrogation of Twitter executives.

Kisin’s declaration — before the global Covid-19 pandemic, before the 2020 election of Joe Biden or the 2024 reelection of Donald Trump — might have been a bit premature. But he effectively predicted what Rogan would yet become: not just one of the most influential voices in politics, popular culture, and social commentary, but also a harbinger for a new form of media, communications, trust, and truth in a post-pandemic world. There is no monoculture in 2025; but for a huge part of America, the realm Rogan pioneered and steers is as close as we might get.

He and his show have been at the crossroads of just about every major moment and societal change that defines the 2020s, from Covid misinformation and vaccine fearmongering to the expansion of the “manosphere” universe. His show is a mirror for a country that has grown more anxious, distrustful, and paranoid in the last decade.

Like a lot of America, the pandemic changed Rogan

When Kisin made his Cronkite comparison in 2019, Rogan’s mainstream crossover was just getting started. Back then, The Joe Rogan Experience was well on its way to being the most popular podcast show in America — the second most downloaded Apple podcast in 2017 and 2018, before topping the list the next year. His YouTube uploads regularly attracted a million views each (racking up more than 2 billion by mid-2020), and the show had become a must-stop destination for both traditional celebrities and a realm of alternative and conspiratorially minded pseudointellectuals (think: Alex Jones, Kanye West, Elon Musk).

He had achieved that by developing a space for curious-minded average joes and those folks Slate once described as “‘freethinkers’ who hate the left” to listen to his two-to-three-hourlong, anarchic episodes. In trying to understand what made Rogan’s show work, the writer Devin Gordon summarized his roster as being roughly divided into three categories: fellow comedians, fellow athletes and fighters, and “‘thinkers.’” The latter label, Gordon wrote in The Atlantic, “requires air quotes because it encompasses everyone from Oxford scholars…all the way across the known intellectual galaxy to conspiracy theorists like Rogan’s longtime buddy and Sandy Hook denier Alex Jones.” And gobbling up this content were millions of, primarily, American men, across every demographic.

Through it all, a handful of principles anchored the show. While he wasn’t overtly political, he described himself as having essentially libertarian views with strong socially liberal leanings. Free speech, and the platforming of those who had been canceled in the mainstream, were a foundational goal of the show. Skepticism of government, big tech, and corporate media were a corollary. And a pseudo-Socratic line of curiosity and skepticism were his modus operandi. That led him to take traditionally liberal positions on social issues and civil rights, to criticize interventionist foreign policy, and to embrace the policies of political figures like Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as well as populist movement headed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who Rogan backed during the 2020 Democratic primaries.

Yet with the dawn of the pandemic, a few things changed. While originally critical of Trump, the tone of his shows, and his guests, began to move in a rightward direction after Trump’s 2020 defeat. Rogan had been critical of pandemic shutdowns and mitigation efforts, questioned the efficacy of vaccines, and railed against what he called censorship and speech suppression on social media platforms. And once the “left,” and “woke” liberals became the establishment in the Biden administration, media, pop culture, and business, Rogan and his show had an easy foil to criticize and ask questions.

This post-2020 period was a time of growth and challenge for Rogan. He inked a reported $200 million multiyear deal with Spotify for the platform to exclusively host his podcast, but both he and Spotify faced intense calls by artists, liberal activists, journalists, and science communicators to either censor, deplatform or moderate his show to prevent the spread of conspiracy theories and misinformation. He has previously described this era between 2020 and 2022 as “terrifying” — for the threats to free speech he felt were being emboldened by the Biden administration, by popular culture, and by mainstream media. This period contextualizes his feuds during that time with Facebook and Twitter for allegedly suppressing right-wing opinions and speech, with the Biden White House for pressuring social media companies to regulate speech, and with the mainstream media.

Yet he survived this controversy, and his show only grew bigger since then, aligning with his eventual drift to not only interviewing but endorsing Trump in 2024.

His format, and style, has changed America and its relation to truth

Rogan and his show are now perfect avatars of America’s political and cultural revolution in the Trump era: The Joe Rogan Experience is now one of the key arbiters of truth and reality for scores of Americans who get informed from nontraditional and alternative media sources. His YouTube channel now boasts over 6 billion views across the episodes uploaded there; his episodes are rarely not the top shows across Apple, Spotify, and other podcast apps. He’s become the mainstream, popular enough to cause strife during the 2024 election when he declined to interview Kamala Harris but hosted Trump and Vice President JD Vance. He also interviews the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, various politicians and entrepreneurs, and many more celebrities, actors, and comedians. His format has been imitated or adapted across the internet — yielding a web of right-wing, testosterone-driven, trash-talking shows collectively known as the manosphere.

In this realm, pioneered by Rogan, inquiry and curiosity can easily give way to conspiratorial thinking and paranoia. There’s a sense that there are greater forces and powers trying to influence American minds, and thus requires radical skepticism.

In that way, Rogan’s show encompasses the crossroads of three defining forces of the 2020s: the anti-incumbent, change-the-status-quo energy that permeated American politics in the last years of the Biden administration; the silo-fication of news, media, and truth into echo chambers and algorithmically powered feeds; and the political awakening and radicalization of low-information, low-political engagement, and low-trust Americans.

Rogan has successfully helped to yoke together a particularly reactive, ill-informed, and even paranoid group; a group that is now accustomed to having their beliefs confirmed by increasingly powerful people.

Yet now that he’s the mainstream, Rogan finds his show in a potentially tenuous position: holding together a vast audience that could eventually come to question their loyalties and question him. His Trump endorsement, in particular, came with risks — opening him up to accusations of hypocrisy, flip-flopping, or misplaced trust should Trump end up walking back the policies and stance he promised. Those tensions are already playing out across the manosphere, as other hosts who endorsed Trump claim they were duped or regret their support.

Still, Rogan and the manosphere have come to represent the antithesis to liberal cosmopolitanism of the 2010s; and they now embody America’s age of distrust, skepticism, and rejection of the status quo.