Joe Rogan and Schrödinger's Podcast

What did you see on the Joe Rogan Experience? The reality we share and reference and see is caught up in the communal act of making sense.

After years of posting on X (I joined then Twitter in 2009) I only just realized this morning (Palm Sunday, 2025 for posterity’s sake) that I use the platform to get things out of my head and do some pre-formation idea-testing. Good friend

Steve Skojec

has regularly blasted me for my cryptic posting, often resorting to one of our favorite Gifs:

Fair critique to a point. I know that I have been guilty of not providing context, but sometimes I just need to see it before I can make full sense of it. Even if just one other person sees it and correctly perceives it or senses the underground well the spring sits atop, I feel emboldened to pursue the idea further. What I’m trying to do now is to make good on the cryptic posting and flesh out all these rough drafts that I’ve sent out into the world. Today, here is one:

Joe Rogan and Schrödinger’s Podcast

Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience is the big boy on the block, reaching an audience well over 15 million people with an average episode bringing in $100,000 of revenue. Famously, then candidate Trump went on to JRE reaching an audience of nearly 20 million on YouTube alone. It was an intimate window into a candidate that some think of as “Orange Hitler” and seeing him as a fully formed human talking about all manner of things really humanized him.

Add the various clips channels and Instagram and X and TikTok posts, and Rogan’s reach is unparalleled. There is simply no one else who even comes close. These conversations are pretty wide-ranging and often last beyond two hours. The spirit is usually laid back, humorous, and often irreverent. This is not your father’s Sunday morning news program.

But that is the feature, not the bug.

For those who like Rogan, he is seen as a fair dealer, a kind of ever-curious everyman. For his detractors he’s a no-nothing Neanderthal who platforms cranks and conspiracy theorists. To his fans he is a breath of fresh air. To his competitors he is dangerous and threatening. Given his consistent audience numbers he is a one-man mainstream media platform destroyer. And his show is consequential. Many cite candidate Kamala Harris’ refusal to go on the JRE as effectively her kill-shot. Can a modern-day candidate afford NOT to do podcasts now?

I have mixed feelings about Rogan, but in the end I think he is a net good. His refusal to kowtow to mainstream narratives on Covid, for instance, was actually quite important to breaking the stranglehold on government overreach. His willingness to host conversations that are considered verboten in polite company is a necessary outlet for “border patois”—the kinds of conversations where dangerous but necessary conversations are being had. Border patois is absolutely essential to a healthy public conversation and dialogue. What is “beyond the pale” or “exiled to the margins” or ideas “beneath contempt” or “obviously false” have a strange way of not only exposing blind spots and accepted positions, but become orthodoxies down the line. Many breakthroughs occur and insights fostered by the kinds of dissident conversations that are not institution friendly, but very necessary. The marginal can never be the center (as Jonathan Pageau has pointed out) but when a sclerosis infects the body, something has to be introduced to break the holds. Unsanctioned conversation serves this function, but only if there is some kind of mechanism by which it can “enter the chat” as my students might say.