What's the deal with Joe Rogan?
Taking a look into the media empire that is JRE and uncovering the problematic aspects
Joe Rogan is a staple in modern-day media circles. You may not listen to his podcast but you have certainly heard of him as he is hard to miss. A renaissance man of sorts, having gained notoriety through being the host of Fear Factor and then having success as the color commentator for the UFC, he is also a stand-up comedian and actor. The one commonality is he is an entertainer at heart and his latest endeavor in the podcast world has exemplified this. His podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” is widely regarded as the most popular podcast in the United States. Based on surveys conducted by Edison Research which range from 2020 through the end of 2024, Rogan has been the top podcast by weekly reach each quarter.1
Spotify does not release metrics for their podcasts but Rogan posts all his episodes on YouTube. Pulling all the episodes by date published, I grouped them by year to see if there were any trends. An additional note here is that there is a big drop off in viewership in 2021, this is because Rogan signed a deal with Spotify, that started in September of 2020. His viewership on YouTube went down because of this, previously the show had been exclusively on YouTube.
As can be seen, when looking at YouTube viewership, Rogan saw a big boost in popularity during the 2024 Presidential Election. Having previously supported Bernie Sanders in the 2020 Election, Rogan unabashedly endorsed Donald Trump in 2024. This came as a big shock to some but represented a movement within the electorate nationwide that seemed at the outset to hold incongruent ideas.
Rogan's appeal comes from the fact that he presents himself as someone just there to ask questions. Most of the time he isn’t knowledgeable on the subject at hand, he makes up for this by bringing on guests who are and demonstrates a child-like curiosity in his discussions. These podcasts can go into the three-hour mark and have the aura of listening to a conversation between two good friends. This style is appealing as Rogan demonstrates the curiosity everyone has and can entertain and engage through this appeal.
Demonstrating the wide range of subjects, below is the breakdown of the kinds of guests he has on his show, as well as the average viewership of each of the categories. This data ranges from 2020 to the beginning of 2025.
As to be expected with Rogan, he brings on entertainment figures the most. This is where he finds the most commonality between his guests. These episodes are probably more enjoyable for him to produce, and he has many connections in this field and is therefore most comfortable. However, he has much higher viewership when he brings political figures on. This gives him a monetary incentive to bring on political figures. Another interesting note is that Rogan has guests I couldn’t put into one of the main buckets. There is a large portion of guests whose only fame comes from talking about UFOs, conspiracies surrounding alternative histories, etc. Although this only makes up 3% of his total guests, the reception to these guests is high as the mean viewership for these episodes is just under 2 million people. This demonstrates a key characteristic of many of his listeners.
As previously mentioned Rogan although always mainstream saw a resurgence in average viewership in 2024 on YouTube. Many political pundits talked about his podcast and notably, he had both Donald Trump and J.D. Vance on the show leading up to the election on November 4th. This led me to do the same analysis but only look at 2024. Here are the results:
In 2024 we saw a 3% increase in political figures and conspiracy theorists appearing on the show, additionally, these categories saw huge increases in the average number of viewers. This shows Rogan adapting to his audience and catering to their interests. Rogan had become a source of political information in the 2024 election. Of his top five podcasts, three were with political figures, and four of the five were with conservative-leaning guests.
Following the election, Rogan said on his podcast, “They had me. I was on their side.”2 This was in reference to the Democratic Party. Rogan likes to play up his image of being open to any idea and taking all as they come; he has described himself as a libertarian. However, Rogan has shown that this may not be the case. This comes down to a couple of factors.
The first factor is that the data has never supported Rogan's siding with the Democratic party. Sure, he holds some liberal values but when you look at who he promotes on his show he highlights key Republican figures at a much higher rate. It is advantageous for him to play up his uncertainty, but if we judge him based on his actions the story becomes a little clearer. I went through each of his guests from 2020 through 2025 and labeled their current political alignment (For more detail on how this was done there is a Methodology section at the bottom). Here are the results:
Rogan has favored conservatives at a staggering rate, in 2024 80% of his guests were conservatives. Looking at the data 2024 is not a significant outlier, from 2020-2023 when he had proclaimed Sanders as his candidate of choice, 65% of his guests were conservatives and only 27% were liberal (It is important to note that over this combined period only 15% of total guests were outspoken about their political affiliations). Additionally, the most famous liberal figures he has had on were Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman.3 These are not your traditional liberals, they are outside the norm and have taken stances that are far from their democratic colleagues. Rogan also sees a monetary incentive in bringing on conservative figures. Here is the viewership breakdown by political affiliation:
As Rogan's shift toward a more right-leaning audience has culminated, we've also seen a surge in viewership for podcasts featuring conservative guests. This ties him financially to bringing on more conservatives and expressing more right-wing opinions.
Regardless of the data, Rogan’s philosophy aligns more closely with the current MAGA movement among conservatives. Rogan is an anti-intellectual at heart. An anti-intellectual is a person opposed to or hostile towards modern academics. People inclined to deny Rogan as an anti-intellectual point to the fact that he has respected experts on his podcast.
The problem is that Rogan treats everyone's theories and ideas with equal credulity. In the marketplace of ideas, he treats each idea worthy of equal consideration and presents his listeners with people who represent these opposing viewpoints. However, Rogan fails to hold to journalistic standards that ensure truth is prioritized, leading people to believe that it’s up to them to decide what is truthful. There is no fact-checking or pushback to most all of the ideas presented. This inadvertently leads to mistrust among people as they can cling to more far-fetched ideas that cater to their perceptions instead of reality.
This can be seen in his climate change denial or his newest obsession with people thinking the government is hiding information regarding UFOs. However, the example that is pinnacle to this understanding is when we look at vaccines.
Rogan has been a large driver in the spreading of misinformation regarding vaccines. He has been heavily criticized for this, and rightfully so. He has had Robert Kennedy Jr., who recycled false claims that autism is linked to vaccines, among various other lies about vaccines4. He also had on Dr. Pierre Kory, who was an advocate for the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, which has also been proved false5. But then he brings on Sanjay Gupta, a well-respected neurosurgeon who advocates for the vaccine. This is widely irresponsible. By holding these three competing views as equal, the truth is lost, and people are led to believe what they want.
This is a mindset embraced in the MAGA movement, we see it within Trump’s cabinet appointees Robert F. Kennedy (vaccine conspiracies), Tulsi Gabbard (US-funded bioweapons in Ukraine6), and Kash Patel (Linked to Q’anon Conspiracy movement7). With the flood of information in the modern era, this anti-intellectual movement has become rampant as people choose to live in the reality most convenient for them. JRE is certainly not solely to blame but is a leading example of this movement away from truth.
In a game of revisionism, Democrats scrambled by placing the loss partially on a) the lack of a Joe Rogan figure on the left and b) Kamala Harris not going on the podcast8. I find both of these claims to be lacking, the Democrats don’t need a Joe Rogan, Rogan exemplifies what Democrats are fighting to undermine. Democrats and people who prioritize the truth also shouldn’t play the game that Rogan wants you to play. Going on his podcast is a great opportunity to spread a message, but when this message gets flooded by counter-theories that are not fact-checked or called out for being untrue, the message will inevitably get lost. Instead of promoting truth you then are giving Rogan a mask to hide behind. Completely ignoring Rogan would be a mistake, the reality is there is a large swath of Americans who receive their information from his podcast. However, being aware of the game that is being played is vitally important in progressing through these uncertain times.
Methodology
Data for this project was collected using both the Spotify and YouTube APIs. Only traditional JRE episodes were pulled; this analysis does not include Rogan’s MMA shows. I then went through each of his guests and, based on credentials, picked the most pertinent category they fit into. For each guest from 2020-2025, I looked into their current (as of February 11, 2025) political affiliations if they had one, and categorized them as either Conservative, Liberal or Libertarian. Example: Tulsi Gabbard ran as a Democratic Candidate in 2020, and appeared on his show in 2020. She would be categorized as a conservative in this analysis as she is now Trump’s appointee for the Director of National Intelligence.
https://www.edisonresearch.com/edison-research-u-s-top-10-podcast-ranker-q1-2020/
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/john-fettermans-move-to-the-right-on-israel
https://www.factcheck.org/2023/08/scicheck-what-rfk-jr-gets-wrong-about-autism/
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/ivermectin-and-covid-19
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/tulsi-gabbards-views-russia-syria-trump-government-surveillance-118230149
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/30/politics/takeaways-kash-patel-fbi-confirmation-hearing/index.html
Kamala Harris was offered to go on the podcast, but this fell through when Rogan wouldn’t agree to reduce the time and travel to interview her. Rogan always does his podcasts in Austin and stuck to this.