The mistakes people make about Joe Rogan

In vivid terms, podcaster Joe Rogan once again dumped on Connecticut this week.

He didn’t do this on his own massively popular podcast but while visiting a show called “2 Bears, 1 Cave.” The context was comedians having problems with live audiences, and Rogan called Connecticut “the dumbest place in the country. It’s not a real state. It’s a highway between Boston and New York, and it’s filled with people that have no hope. They’re just trapped.”

This is not a new riff for Rogan. (It’s also not original. The “Between Boston and New York” trope is so old that it was the title of a documentary about Connecticut in 1992. I’m so old that I appear in that film.) It’s so stale for Rogan that there’s a 2018 supercut nearly seven minutes long of all the times he has loosened his bowels (to paraphrase him) onto our fair state.

Before finding his current place atop the podcasting world, Rogan was a thirdtier comedian and a mixed martial arts commentator. So he’s just one of those guy who transcended his own mediocrity and limitations by finding a cushy spot behind a radio mic.

Wait a minute. There’s something wrong with the preceding paragraph. I’ve re-read it several times, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Mostly, Rogan is drawing on Connecticut’s possibly deserved reputation as a tough place for comedians. (In that 1992 documentary, there’s a guy with a mullet, no beard and a tragically chosen purple-striped shirt who says that the early Connecticut Puritans “were opposed to fun, and we’ve tried to keep that tradition alive.” Please do not use that clip at my memorial service.)

In 2013, first-tier comedian Dave Chapelle famously crashed on a Hartford stage, refusing to do his set for “suburban torturers” and “young white alcoholics” (the latter, ironically, a big part of Rogan’s core audience). It was a national story, possibly because Chapelle so rarely gets in trouble that he himself did not actually cause.

There are several mistakes people make with Rogan, and this is a good occasion to bring them up.

They judge him without listening to (or watching) him. I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s not right.

They discount his impact. In their otherwise worthy new book “When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People: How Philosophy Can Save Us from Ourselves,” Wisconsin philosophy professors Steven Nadler and Lawrence Shapiro track the growth of the oceanic garbage patch of crazy American thought, including anti-vax sentiment, QAnon adherence and crazy notions about 5G and COVID-19. They don’t deal with Rogan, who probably deserves his own chapter. Rogan’s audience is usually pegged at 11 million per episode, more than triple the size of Tucker Carlson’s.

They think he’s stupid. Fran Lebowitz said Donald Trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person. By that metric, Jordan Peterson (a regular Rogan guest) is a stupid person’s idea of a smart person. Rogan is a smart person’s idea of a stupid person. All of these ideas are wrong. Rogan may not be well-educated or well-read, but he has a ferocious and feral intelligence that serves him well. The broadcast personality he most resembles is Don Imus, who maintained a huge, politically diverse audience for decades by mixing lowest-common-denominator humor, antiauthority rants, thinly disguised bigotry and an incisive intellect.

2019 Pew study

They fail to woo his audience. There aren’t many persuadable voters left in America. A found that, although 38 percent of the electorate calls itself “independent,” 81 percent of those people have a hard “lean” toward one of the two major parties. The independents with no lean were far less likely to vote. Rogan positions himself as antiestablishment and open to all ideas. His audience is a good place to pan for the political gold of changeable minds. In 2020, presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders appeared on Rogan’s show. For Yang, it was a booster rocket, launching him into a place of visibility. Sanders attempted to exploit Rogan’s statement that he “would probably vote for” Bernie as proof of his wide appeal and took a lot of heat from the left, where Rogan is understood to be a racist, transphobic barbarian.

They may have missed that train. The pandemic was Rogan’s defining moment, and ivermectin was his ambrosia. Recently, Rogan has said that people upset with lockdowns and mandates should “vote Republican.” Bye, bye, Bernie. I’m going to miss you so.

They underestimate the power that the myth of concealment has over American minds. If you want to get the attention of a certain bloc of people, begin with “There’s something they’re not telling us.” There is a centurieslong tension between America’s status as a putative democracy and the undeniable existence of its ruling elite. The result is a potting soil in which almost any fabrication can sprout and bloom. Rogan gets that and gardens well.

On this last point I need to say a little more. If there were two auto mechanics who claimed that cars built after 2015 never need their oil changed and that existing maintenance standards are a fiction circulated by Big Oil, Rogan would book those two people as guests and revel in the discovery of a hidden truth, while squelching or resentfully acknowledging the 10,000 other car mechanics solidly in favor of oil changes.

There is something thrilling about the rejection of orthodoxy, especially when you feel armed with “information” you’re not supposed to have.

One book that does address the rise of Rogan is “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them,” by academics Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx. They’ve written that Rogan is “far from a neutral host of a new public sphere. His feigned naiveté is all too often a cover to promote edgy, offensive and irresponsible theories that appeal to his audience’s selfstyled suspicion of authority.”

Elections have been won — and will be won – by politicians who figure out how to harness this mentality.

But probably not in Connecticut, where we’re too dumb to realize we’re trapped and have no hope.