Go back to the mid-1990s and find the sweet, good-looking, 28-year-old actor on NewsRadio, a comforting sitcom of the kind that the decade produced in abundance.
His name was Joe Rogan. He played a character not dissimilar from Joey in Friends, sporting a good head of black hair and an action-man physique.
Now he is a White House kingmaker: Donald Trump will appear on his podcast, his campaign has announced. And Kamala Harris has been widely rumored to be considering the same move.
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Little wonder that Rogan is the signatory of a multi-year $250 million Spotify deal to stream his podcast, up from the $200 million deal he signed in 2020. (The latest deal doesn’t even offer Spotify exclusivity, unlike the earlier one.) His YouTube channel is followed by 17 million subscribers, and an interviewee on one of his freewheeling, hours-long episodes has underperformed if they attract fewer than a million YouTube views, on top of the podcast downloads.
His personal politics are, at the very least, eclectic: Rogan wanted Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee in 2020 and was at one point leaning towards Ron DeSantis this cycle. Then he swung behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before he dropped out. Like RFK Jr., Rogan became a leading voice in opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine and famously defended himself by saying, “I’m not a doctor, I’m a f---ing moron.”
More recently, he has twice praised Harris since she became the Democratic nominee, most notably after her debate with Trump.
Overall, Rogan seems to admire authenticity. Sanders, he said in 2020, has “been insanely consistent his entire life. He’s basically been saying the same thing, been for the same thing his whole life. And that in and of itself is a very powerful structure to operate from.”
Rogan too has always been consistent. Throughout his career he has come across as fun, open-minded, and good-humored, while just happening to be intensely interested in seeing men beat each other into submission, serving as the lead commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, since 2002.
You don’t become the biggest podcaster in the world by being unlikable.
Watch him on Conan in 1998, looking like Ricky Martin’s cousin, ripped to the nines, wearing a big loose dark shirt, and realizing life is too important to be taken seriously, as he wrote down in his 1985 high school yearbook. (He added: “Work hard, aim high and you’ll get where you want to be, but if you don’t know where you’re going you probably won’t get there.”)
He was the son of a father he didn’t know, a New Jersey cop. “He was very nice to me, loved me,” Rogan told Rolling Stone in 2015. “But he was super, super-violent, and he would have turned me into a f---ing psychopath… All I remember of my dad are these brief, violent flashes of domestic violence.” He moved with his mother to California, then Massachusetts, where he attended a public high school, Newton South.
Acting gave way to a brief stint as a post-match commentator on UFC—by way of a side-line career in stand-up comedy—before he spent five years hosting the gross-out reality show Fear Factor.
That won him some fame, but UFC remained his passion. He knew everything about it, would go on TV to evangelize about it, and caught the eye of Dana White, who ran it. They look like brothers. White convinced Rogan, a state taekwondo champion as a teenager, to become the sport’s color commentator in 2002.
The formative moment of Rogan’s youth had come at school when a boy put him in a headlock he couldn’t escape. He realized there are times when might is right. He has been (increasingly) jacked ever since. He micro-doses on testosterone and human growth hormone while remaining in great shape at 57. He claims a height of 5’8.
He started his podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, in 2009. Its original concept was simple: He gave a surprising range of guests a great deal of time. It was digital, there was no need to wrap things up fast. Let’s just talk, Rogan said, as he offered his interviewees a drink or a joint. He put notable people in settings no one had ever seen them in, as well as people no one had ever heard of who had something to say.
“Each episode would be a lottery and you’d end up finding out about something strange and fascinating that you might not have sought out otherwise,” as one longtime listener puts it.
He treated everyone the same. He’d talk “bro-speak” to Nobel-winning mathematicians, and genuinely try to understand the concepts they or any other guest expounded. He got his interviewees to relax, because he was relaxed, and no external force—a producer, a ticking clock, the strain of live TV—was giving them reason not to be.
An older generation, when they later discovered his existence, were bewildered by the length of his tapes. They were accustomed to highly produced audio, which is designed to hold your attention throughout. Rogan’s episodes never were. That was part of the appeal. They were “wallpaper” listening, ideal for men (they are mostly men) with lonely jobs who could put on a Rogan podcast in the background as they got through their day.
He spoke to these men directly, openly addressing their struggles in asides as part of his long conversations, saying things like: Look, if you’re out there listening to this and you feel like s--t and your life’s a mess, don’t give up, you can turn things around. He isn’t earnest in these moments, but he’s genuine, and he was an aspirational figure, who legitimized for many men the concepts and language of self-help. He had the everyman quality.
This is the audience both Trump and, possibly, Harris wants to reach.
Rogan responds well to people who can coherently describe what they believe, and expound at length on their ideas. Trump may appear more simpatico with that vibe, although in recent days he has frequently meandered far from the disciplined talking points his campaign aides would like to hear.
But Rogan’s style may jar with Harris, who has been trained for a different sort of encounter: the punches thrown by TV interviewers. Rogan doesn’t jab, let alone throw the cross punch that comes from a broadcaster who knows enough about their subject to skewer falsehoods.
Instead he gives you rope–its own form of danger.
As it has developed, The Joe Rogan Experience has become ever more of a home for a MAGA-friendly version of the right, featuring guests like Chamath Palihapitiya, Matt Walsh, Bret Weinstein, Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, and Christopher Rufo in recent months. Rogan’s own views are as eclectic as they have always been—he’s both pro-gun and pro-gay marriage—but his world skews to Trump, even if he doesn’t.
Trump, who has appeared at UFC events with Dana White, recently praised Rogan as a “good guy.”
Rogan has never reciprocated this recent and calculated warmth of Trump’s. “I’m not a Trump supporter in any way, shape or form,” he said in 2022. “I’ve had the opportunity to have him on my show more than once, I’ve said no every time. I don’t want to help him, I’m not interested in helping him.”
His change of heart and acceptance of Trump show that he’s the everyman who has become an accidental kingmaker—even if he insists he doesn’t want to appoint the king.
