The Joe Rogan Experience

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2009 · Ustream live stream, later YouTube and Spotify · Also known as JRE; Joe Rogan podcast; PowerfulJRE

What it is

An American talk show recorded as audio and video and put online, called a podcast. The comedian and cage-fighting commentator Joe Rogan sits at a desk with one guest, sometimes two, and they talk for about three hours with almost no editing. Guests ranged from comedians and fighters to scientists, conspiracy theorists, Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. People listened on their phones while driving or at the gym, or watched it as video.

Where it came from

Rogan and his video editor Brian Redban started it on 24 December 2009 as a live stream on Ustream, a website for broadcasting live video. Much of the first episode was the pair working out their equipment. It took its name in 2010, as a nod to the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Full episodes went onto YouTube from 2013, and short clips cut from them travelled much further than the full shows. In 2020 Spotify, a music and audio app, reportedly paid over $100 million to host it exclusively. That lasted until February 2024, when it went back on YouTube and other apps.

How people used it

Most people never heard a whole episode. They saw clips: a minute of a guest saying something startling, cut out and posted on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and TikTok with a caption. The expected reply was an argument in the comments about whether the guest was right. Elon Musk smoking cannabis on the show in 2018 became one of the best-known clips. Fans quoted Rogan's habit of asking his producer Jamie to look up a fact mid-conversation. Critics posted lists of false claims made on the show, and in January 2022 Neil Young, then Joni Mitchell, pulled their music from Spotify in protest.

Why it mattered

It showed that a talk show with no network, no editor and no time limit could reach more people than television news. Presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard saw rises in support and donations after appearing in 2019, and Donald Trump's three-hour interview in October 2024 was watched tens of millions of times before the election. During the COVID-19 pandemic the show was where many listeners heard doubts about vaccines, which put it at the centre of a long argument about whether apps that host shows are responsible for what's said on them.

The jokes around it

• "Jamie, pull that up": Rogan asking his producer to find a fact, photo or video during the conversation.
• "It's entirely possible": Rogan's usual answer to a guest's unlikely claim.
• "Have you ever tried DMT?": Rogan's frequent recommendation of the psychedelic drug to guests.
• Chimps: Rogan's habit of steering talk round to how strong and violent chimpanzees are.
• "Horse dewormer": news coverage's description of ivermectin, which Rogan took when he had COVID in 2021.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Plenty of people trusted a man who openly said he didn't know much, and who just kept asking questions for hours, more than they trusted experts and newsreaders. Most of them built that trust from short clips of a show they never watched in full.

What noah is not sure of

The Spotify deal figure is reported, never confirmed. The exact dates of Yang's and Gabbard's appearances and the view count of the Trump episode are approximate.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.