Rogan and Trump: Who Gives a Fuck?

I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s reluctant critique of Joe Rogan’s approach to interviews yesterday when it occurred to me that Rogan and Trump both got where they are by not trying to get where they are.

When people like Gladwell criticize Joe for his lax preparation and flaccid push back on outrageous claims sometimes made by his guests, his response (one I’ve made on his behalf) is that his podcast was never meant to be a source of credible journalism; it’s just conversations — sometimes with lunatics who think the Earth is flat, Churchill was worse than Hitler, humans are like bonobos, or that intergalactic space pedophiles are running loose in DC. When I gave Joe some shit for having Alex Jones on his podcast, his response was, “But that guy is fucking hilarious!”

I suppose.

To be fair, when Joe started his podcast, nobody knew what the hell a podcast was. That was the point. It was new, formless, raw, under-the-radar, basically free to produce, unencumbered by corporate expectations or scoldy restrictions. The only difference between Joe hanging out with a few friends shooting the shit and “a podcast” was the presence of microphones. At a time when “Reality TV” had already revealed itself as scripted and edited far into unreality, his podcast felt like the real thing — because it was.

Wanna get high? Spark one up.

Wanna tell us about your last mushroom trip? Let’s hear it.

Got an embarrassing story about your first sexual experience? Let er rip!

Joe doesn’t give a fuck.

Joe’s podcast (and many others that followed, including my own) wasn’t made for an audience. The point was to just have an organic conversation that was available for anyone who wanted to listen, but that doesn’t make the conversation a performance. It’s just a conversation. The presence of an audience doesn’t change that — or shouldn’t, in theory.

The reason The Joe Rogan Experience has become so popular is precisely because it was not designed to be popular — which made it utterly different from every other media offering out there pathetically pleading for our attention.

Similarly, the story goes, when Trump first decided to run for president, it wasn’t because he actually wanted the job; it was to increase his name recognition, and thus gain leverage in negotiating a better deal for himself on The Apprentice, the popular TV show in which he pretended to be a sharp business tycoon. When Melania complained that she didn’t want to deal with the hassle of being first lady, Trump told her not to worry about it. He’d never win.

Not wanting to be president gave Trump a power none of the other candidates had. So he could demean “Little Marco Rubio” and call Ted Cruz’s wife ugly. He could break rules that limited everyone else because he had nothing to lose. Trump didn’t give a fuck.

And it turned out that in American society, there was a huge audience for someone who didn’t give a fuck. Who knew?

Joe Rogan knew.

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I didn’t write this to resolve the question of whether Joe Rogan should change the way he does his podcast in light of the fact that his “I’m just a dumb-ass comic shooting the shit” schtick hasn’t aged well in light of his courting of Elon Musk, Trump, Alex Jones, and other malevolent guests. Clearly, when millions of people are tuning in and you’re recording in a man-hangar, it’s no longer the low-key hang-out it once was. As a good friend of mine (and former pal of Joe’s) put it recently:

I don't buy that line from Joe. If that's what he wanted, he'd still have a podcast with his friends shooting the shit. And he could still have millions of listeners but it'd be seen as a happy, mindless hangout. But that's not what he has been doing for the past few years. He stopped having friends and quasi friends and instead he books politicians and power players. That's a completely different show with completely different rules. If Joe thinks the same rules apply when he talks to his buds and to interviewing Elon Musk or Trump, that doesn't speak well of his ability to understand reality.

Hard to argue with that.

I wrote this to explore the mysterious, creative power of ignoring one’s audience and the conundrum this presents. Many of the people clamoring for Rogan to adapt to what they see as the responsibilities that come with having a large audience would probably also agree with Rick Rubin’s postulate that, “Anything that allows the audience to access how you see the world is accurate, even if the information is wrong.” Or Christopher Hitchens’ advice to “always write posthumously.”

So we should write as if nobody’s reading, dance like nobody’s watching, but podcast in the shadow of our audience?

I don’t know. I don’t have an answer. I wrote this for myself. I’m glad you’ve read it, but that’s not why I wrote it.